Question 3: What do you see as the concerns of young Filipino-American women today, and how would you address them?

Karin: I see this question as a gesture toward the issues I’d like young Filipino-American women to think about and understand more fully. Maybe I’ll break this question down into two parts. The first part is about my relationship to young Filipino-American women today. I ask myself: Do you even know what are the concerns of young Fil-Am women today? How do you know? What, if any, do you think are your obligations to them? And the second part is about feminism as it relates to young Filipino-American women. I ask: Does the feminism that mattered to you as you were growing up still matter to young women today? In other words, how has the world changed for Filipino-American women since the 1970s and 80s when you were “young”?

OK. So for the first question, I will have to frankly assess my relationship to young Filipino-American women—indeed, to young women of any nationality, race, or ethnicity—as sociological rather than direct, as a theoretical matter of shared experience, mostly imagined, not based on everyday occurrences. Sometimes, I think this is sad; it is a tribute to my assimilation both as a hyphenated American and as a second-generation academic. I have moved away from anything that looks like “roots.” But I think it is important to be honest, to reflect and acknowledge my “flotation” position in this regard because there is always someone out there who wants me to “represent” a category I may not fully understand or relate to. I think we all know too well what it means to be tokenized, and sometimes I have no choice but to play the role I have been given by dominant society. In being frank and transparent, I hope I raise some questions about what it means to be “authentic.”

The easiest way for me to find out something about Filipino-American women, given my estranged and alienated relationship to almost any kind of Filipino-American group, is to “google” them. But what do I discover by typing in “Filipina women” into an internet search? Same thing you’ll find. Lots and lots of sites for sex and marriage: single women seeking foreign men, pen pals, pornography featuring “cherry blossoms,” and mail-order brides. Sick to my stomach, I scroll down hoping to find something more empowering, political, community-oriented, or, at the very least, just plain angry. The first informational site I see is a 1995 article about Filipino women campaigning against sex tourism in Australia. The second: a scientific article about breast cancer among Filipino-American women. The third: a United Nations document about trafficking of Filipino women to Japan. So far, not uplifting.

A few more pages of scrolling and I find the Filipino Women’s Network based in the Philippines and learn about a conference to discuss, among other things, the Filipino-American community in 2013…(good marketing idea for this book, right?). Another site reminds me of the anthology of writings by Filipino and Filipino-American women—but these are not young people or youth. Eventually I find newfilipina.com and Botika Babae (www.babaegear.com) where I learn about Urduja, a legendary tribal warrior princess. Of course, it is not long before I find the site for FAWN, an organization dedicated to Filipino-American women that is based in Minnesota so close to me that it is in the same zip code! (I am friendly with at least one member of FAWN; I don’t have any principled reason for being out of touch with them.) Several hours later, I discover myself bleary-eyed from web surfing, having visited everything from a Filipino youth group to Jim Zwick’s on-line anti-imperialist history lesson and bookstore.

There are other ways that I have a sense of what is going on for my younger counterparts. I teach Asian American Studies, and I have met Filipino-American students on many campuses and in many different communities. A few years ago, I was asked to deliver the keynote address for an organization representing Filipino-Americans in the Midwest. I got a feeling then, for some of the things young Filipino-American women care about. Recently through my action/research projects, I have gotten to know teenage activists of color in Detroit and the Twin Cities. They are not Filipinos, and some of them are boys, but they are all “youth who are becoming politically aware and engaged in social movement building. Through them I am learning about the world through young eyes and getting in touch with a new generation of leaders for social change.

What do I think I know about today’s Fil-Am women? I know that some things have not changed since I was younger. They are bombarded with contradictory messages about their beauty and desirability (from the perspective of white European men), their exotic culture (eminently saleable in the form of jewelry, clothing, and music but somehow not distinct enough to merit recognition in mainstream U.S. venues), their history of resistance to colonization in the Philippines, their struggle for survival as migrant workers throughout the Filipino diaspora. Certain things have definitely changed for the better since I was young: professional narratives about our history and current-day experience as Filipino Americans are more comprehensive and complex than they were 30 years ago. I believe this is largely the result of decades of grassroots activism among students and faculty who demanded that education at public universities serve the needs of the surrounding communities. Out of these struggles for Ethnic Studies and Filipino-American Studies in particular have emerged a population of Filipino-Americans scholars and teachers who help us all to articulate our own sociological condition.

Although these past few years seem to promise troubled times in the future, the possibilities for radical social change are all very exciting. This is not to downplay the very horrible conditions that face many young Filipino and Filipino- American women, particularly the domestic workers in the U.S., Canada, and around the globe who are so far from home and family, trapped in lives of virtual slavery. Their voices—among others—are what remind me that oppression is real, that for many people “being a Filipino woman” is not an imaginary state of existence but a completely real and tangible state of struggle for survival and connection to home and family.

I see great hope not so much in my ability, or my mother’s, to make these conceptual connections between our lived realities and the collective history of the Filipino people. After all, the point is not simply to liberate ourselves as individuals, to feel good about where we have been and who we have become. I would say that Mom and I have done a lot of “cognitive liberation” for ourselves. Besides, if all I expected from feminism was my own personal freedom, I might as well have become a right-wing Christian fundamentalist. At least then I would feel more victorious at this particular historical moment—a moment I believe must soon pass.

I see hope, instead, in the possibility that the younger generation, Filipino-American women included, will create a new synthesis of radical thought and action that draws constructive lessons from the 1960s, 70s, 80s, and onward. Perhaps in the 21st century, “pinay feminism” will have a role in these changes.

So what can be done to improve the condition of Filipino-American women? EDUCATE! ORGANIZE! The same work that must be done to free all humanity from the deadening cycles of mass consumption: the food that we eat is deadly, the news that we read is censored, the taxes that we pay go to fund war, the schools that our children attend teach them compliance, the homes that we live in tie us into life-time contracts of debt…All of this we justify by striving toward an “American Dream” of fitting in, of being accepted, of having “equal access” (to consumer goods and services), of preserving our cultural icons (in their most innocuous forms). These are not issues that only Filipino-American women face, of course, but they are ultimately the issues that we ALL face.

Delia: I would like to begin by saying that I came to the United States at age 22, more or less already a fully-formed adult. My sense of myself as a Filipino was firm; there was nothing about it to be either doubted or confirmed. Consequently, in bringing up my children, all I could teach them was what I knew, which was how to be a Filipino in the United States. It was much later when they had developed their own separate selves that I gleaned from them what it meant to have this other identity, “Filipino-American.” Now I cannot say how my insistence on “Filipinoness” inoculated them against the warping effects of U.S. consumerist culture (which was my hope), or whether this insistence constrained their development in ways I did not wish. In any event, one always is relieved when things turn out just fine in the end in spite of one’s worst failings. And when your offspring surpass and exceed your wildest dreams and expectations, what can you do except bless your stars?

Having admitted my shortcomings thus, let me now try to answer the question. I suspect that Filipino-American youth are forced to confront their identity as “other” by the racism that they encounter. From what I’ve observed, those whose parents are immigrants may not find much help because many immigrant Filipinos tend to negate or deny their racialized experiences, attributing these, instead, to their own insufficient enculturation or their individual failures. Filipino-American women may experience racialization not as outright derogation of their person, but in terms of being exotified. On the other hand, for better or for ill, there are now many more Filipinos in the United States than 30 years ago, and we live in closer proximity to one other and in large enough numbers to establish a distinct community. It is possible now to produce movies about Filipino-American life, for example, and to have an audience for these. As a result, racism and the alienation it gives rise to may be mitigated by living in the presence of an organized community.

I think that there are two general topics that young Filipino-Americans should educate themselves about, whether or not they ever visit the Philippines with their parents. They should study the history of the United States and learn about what’s called internal colonies. In doing so they will be able to locate themselves alongside other racialized “minorities” whose labor in cities and in farms has been appropriated to build this country and to create wealth that they have no access to. Today no one–certainly not Filipinos–can afford to remain ignorant about the nature of the society we live in. They should study the history of the Philippines, in particular that written by Renato Constantino, and learn about how our history is tightly bound up with that of the United States. It is through educating themselves about these matters that they can begin to comprehend the current diaspora of Filipinos, over 70 percent of whom are women, to over 162 different countries—as mail-order brides, overseas contract workers, and entertainers. Whether they like it or not, it is this diaspora that sustains the public perception of Filipino women as patient, docile, well-equipped to please men, and all those other qualities that “liberated” white women are presumed to have forsworn. They need to understand why the country of their parents has been declared as “the second front of the war against terrorism” and what ramifications this has for them.

If there is an opportunity to visit the Philippines, young Filipino Americans should seize it, less to frolic in megamalls and to be impressed by the luxurious accommodations offered by local tourist spots, than to learn how the majority of Filipinos actually live and how they organize for change. For instance, I have sent three students (alas, they were not Filipinos) to study in the intensive women’s studies “intercultural program” of St. Scholastica’s College. Although it is commonplace to say that students’ lives get turned around by practically any study-abroad stint, I can say that this experience is singular. Another student (a Latina, this time) attended the Philippine Studies summer program and she, too, underwent a profound political transformation. I think what these young people acquired from their visits is a kind of awareness that has been out of fashion in this country for a while now. Egyptian feminist Nawal El Saadawi expressed this about feminists in her country today: “They are unaware of the connection between the liberation of women on the one hand and of the economy and country on the other. Many consider only patriarchy as their enemy and ignore corporate capitalism.” This lack of political awareness has led to a return to essentialism, notwithstanding postmodern endeavors to eradicate it, as witness the popularity on campuses worldwide of Eve Ensler’s V-Day. In the Philippines, the ban on Vagina Monologues in Ateneo was met with vigorous protests by both faculty and students, all in the name of artistic freedom and freedom of expression. No one thought to question the patently upper-middle-class, “made-in-U.S.A” stamp of the play, nor its condescending gaze on Third-World female populations it is determined to “save.” No one even thought to consider the ramifications of the landing in Southern Philippines at that very same time of US Navy Seals and Green Berets, and to connect these concurrent events.

If I speak with what might appear like a curious presumption that Filipino-American youth could actually have an interest in these weighty issues, it is because I’ve been at conferences set up by young people (yes, Filipino Americans) where these have been the main themes. A couple of decades back, there were too few young Filipino Americans in universities to make such conferences possible. Moreover, a decade ago the political quiescence of US society as a whole lent itself easily only to cultural events accentuated by adobo, pancit, and tinikling-type offerings in a bid for “ethnics” to simultaneously assimilate and to celebrate their “diversity.” But events are fast transpiring–the recent summary deportations of Filipinos, among them–that force a recognition of a radically different geopolitics. That young Filipino Americans are holding conferences of the kind that I attended is very encouraging. I have no doubt that gatherings like this will soon become more widespread. Also full of promise is the fact that, unlike in the 70s, Filipino Americans now have become a fairly visible contingent in mass mobilizations like anti-war and anti-globalization rallies. All of these are hopeful signs of a coming to political cognizance of a new generation of Filipino Americans.

Go to Part I Go to Part II

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