the invisible minority
Growing up, my culture was a significant part of my identity. Both of my parents immigrated from the Philippines, and there was never a shortage of Filipino practices and traditions within the home. Once I graduated high school, I found myself caught up in the novelty of college and my culture became background noise to the rest of my life. Although I transferred to Santa Barbara as a junior, I found that I was able to reconnect to my culture through my academics. I changed my secondary course of study to Asian-American Studies and was selected to participate in the Arnhold Undergraduate Research Fellowship through the UCSB English Department, where I conducted personal research about the notion of Filipino-American invisibility and how it has been shaped through literature. The following essay is the final product.
(Written between December 2021-May 2022)
My siblings are not normally jealous of me. As they often like to joke over FaceTime, “Why would I be jealous of somebody that has to start paying off their student debt starting next year?” Admittedly, they have a point.
However, there are a few times when I catch their eyes flash green with envy as they bore through me with beams of desire and said, I want what you have. When I finally got my license, when I stopped having curfews, when I moved away for college and sent pictures of my Isla Vista adventures into the family group chat—three pairs of eyes on me at all times, wishing for the same freedom.
But the times that my siblings are the most vulnerable to the feeling of jealousy are when they watch my mother and I ramble aimlessly to one another in Tagalog, clicking and clacking over syllables they can’t begin to rearrange and make sense of.
I see it on their faces as they look between us, back and forth as if they’ll be able to snatch a clue, a hint as to what it is we could be talking about. They starve for the meaning of the words, but none of my siblings can understand or speak Tagalog, and as they grow older, the chances of them learning it fluently are growing slimmer.
Though we wish we could teach them, my mother and I cannot. Unfortunately, neither one of us knows how to solve a problem that goes deeper than my siblings not knowing how to speak the language.
The world evolves everyday, and with its advancements and discoveries, recent and current generations of Filipino-Americans have begun to realize the importance of Philippine-American history in the disconnect that they have with their culture, background, and heritage. This disconnect is tied specifically to the erasure and misrepresentation of Filipino history and culture from literature, which has created a void that has widened over time with each incoming generation of Filipinos. In both American and Filipino society, Filipinos have been subject to disinformation and erasure that created our current identity: the invisible minority, purged from the history books and still affected today by the censorship imposed upon us.
In this essay, I will discuss significant events in which Philippine and Philippine-American history were misconstrued and erased, contributing to the idea of “invisibility” that the Filipino-American community endures as current generations try to piece together the shrapnel of the past.
Like many other marginalized groups, Filipinos were disadvantaged in controlling their own narrative from the beginning.
The Philippine-American War, which began in 1899, was a battle riddled with mystery and corruption as the American government and troops imposed their control over the Filipino people, despite American assurance that troops would only be used to assist the islanders in receiving their independence and alleviating them from Spanish rule. The American government viewed the Philippines as an opportunity to advance military, political, and economic power on the other side of the world, prompting them to elude and infiltrate the Philippine government and take the country and its people by force.
The United States was determined to maintain a quiet narrative about the war that was happening overseas during the time, hiding the horrors that were unfolding in trying to submit the people to American rule. The excessive killing and brutalization that the Filipino people were subject to during the war years was left out of the public eye, until little by little, the crimes came to light.
However, to combat the stories, the U.S. War Department denied them. According to scholar Luzviminda Francisco in her article, “The First Vietnam: The Philippine-American War (1899-1902)”, the U.S. War Department “minimized and countered with examples of Filipino ‘barbarity.’ A standard response was that ‘harsh’ methods had to be employed against ‘savages’” (Francisco 6). Because Filipinos were looked at by the rest of the world through the lens of their colonizer, their narrative of independence and freedom were misrepresented as an insurgence that reeked of incapability to civilly live and govern among one another. This misconstruction gathered American support for the war and solidified the colonial narrative that would establish itself in history.
Towards the end of the same article, Francisco also emphasizes that “Records of the killing were not kept and the Americans were anxious to suppress true awareness of the extent of the slaughter… in order to avoid fueling domestic anti-imperialist protest” (Francisco 14). The lack of documentation of the war puts Filipinos at a large disposition to learn their own history, since it was intentionally never recorded with the intent to sweep its severity under the rug. After all, history is written by the victors.
Where the War Department’s answers no longer sufficed, large international media outlets fed into the narrative of Filipino savagery that instilled fear, distrust, and hatred in the hearts of Americans back home. In February of 1899, the poem, “The White Man’s Burden”, was published in McClure’s Magazine by Rudyard Kipling, an English journalist. In the first stanza of the poem, Kipling writes, “Take up the White Man’s burden… To wait, in heavy harness / On fluttered folk and wild / Your new-caught sullen peoples / Half-devil and half child” (Stanza 1). The portrayal of Filipinos in the mainstream media from other world powers at the time fed into the narrative that continued throughout the duration of the war: Filipinos were not to be considered human, and their rebellion was justification of their need for government intervention. This poem specifically describes colonization and the efforts of the American troops as a “kindness” towards people that didn’t fall under the Western view of civility, furthering the delusion of white superiority that was exemplified during the fighting of the war.
Even after the war ended, Filipinos continued to be erased from history as they forged new lives in America.
When Filipinos began immigrating to the U.S. beginning in the 1920’s, they began to settle and build a physical community outside of the Philippines in Stockton, California, fondly dubbing it “Little Manila”, a safe haven outside of their mother country.
Dawn Mabalon, famous American author and resident of Stockton, described the establishment in her book, Little Manila is in the Heart, rejoicing that “the Little Manila district became famous nationwide among immigrant and second-generation Filpina/o Americans for its concentration of Filipinas/os and their businesses and institutions” (Mabalon 113). Little Manila, which used to be located in the West End area of Downtown Stockton, was demolished in an effort made by the Stockton elites who wanted to remove slums, poverty, and alcoholism from the city, which was ultimately a guise that would displace impoverished minorities, specifically the Filipino community, and benefit the wealthy. As a crossroads of unity and Filipino culture, the impact that Little Manila had on the Filipino community’s origins in America was immense, and its loss marked a displacement of an entire group of inhabitants, as well as erasing any physical trace of the bustling cultural center that provided Filipinos with a connection to their homeland from history.
Filipinos continued to be erased and unheard even as their second home was finally demolished in the 1950s. In 'Little Manila is in the Heart', Mabalon recounts an interview with Ted Lapuz, a resident of the area at the time who explained the lack of organization and protest against the destruction of the block, stating that older Filipinos “‘... are not educated, they cannot stand up for themselves… You know, they just said, ‘You’re a good boy, we’ll give you a little money, you go ahead and move out’” (Mabalon 295). Due to a lack of rights, government knowledge, institutionalized discrimination, and economic disadvantages, Filipinos were unprepared to receive the prejudice they experienced in the U.S. The scattered cultural history that Filipinos were exposed to during the war and fight for their independence was furthered by American discrimination and racism in Stockton, erasing the truth behind another significant event in Filipino-American history.
In conjunction with the effects of the war and the events in Stockton, one of the most significant and complex events in contemporary Filipino history that impacts Filipinos in the United States and abroad is the Ferdinand Marcos dictatorship beginning in 1965, and the impact that such a regime had on the cultural foundation of the country. Under Ferdinand Marcos, the tenth president of the Philippines who ruled for over two decades, a large population of the Filipino people experienced a nationwide split over the political tactics that the dictator employed to progress the country towards a “Golden Age”.
Today, there is a great disconnect between generations of Filipinos, across lines of religion and class, skin color and gender, because of the Marcos dictatorship. Ferdinand Marcos did in fact usher in something along the lines of a “Golden Age” for the Philippines, but only for a portion of the Filipino population that benefit from the tyrannical laws that he used to maintain his control or remember the regime in a positive light.
According to an article titled “Five Things to Know About Martial Law in the Philippines” written by Amnesty International, between 1972 and 1975, over 50,000 people were imprisoned under President Marcos. Among the people imprisoned were journalists, artists, humanitarian workers, church members, lawyers, and movement leaders–all crucial to the literary preservation of the Philippines’ history during this time.
Under the Marcos regime, it was prohibited from speaking out against the efforts that the President was implementing in order to bring the country to an era of prosperity. Propaganda and mass media pushed a favorable narrative for the dictator, maintaining his control for decades, while the cries for help by the Filipino people went unnoticed, as President Reagan supported Marcos as a means to expand the United States’ reach in Asia after losing the Philippines as an established American colony.
The modern phenomenon of invisibility in Filipino-American history–the misrepresentation, eradication, and neglect of the Filipino people and our culture–is largely rooted within the era of Ferdinand Marcos as our country experienced his policies in the aftermath of American colonization and the fight to be recognized as an independent, sovereign country. With a ruler bent on destroying how his country remembered their history, Filipino writers during this time were expected to uphold the narrative of the dictatorship, to combat this looming phenomenon of invisibility in the form of eradication of the Philippines’ history under the dictatorship.
According to an article published in Esquire Magazine Philippines titled “The Marcos-era Resistance Poem That Smuggled a Hidden Message into State Media”, an author under the name Ruben Cuevas wrote the poem, “Prometheus Unbound”. In 1973, this poem was published in a government sponsored magazine called Focus that supported President Marcos, gaining popularity because of its elements of heroism and triumph, both of which were thought to represent the Marcos legacy.
The beginning of “Prometheus Unbound” opens with an excerpt from the famous poem, “Prometheus Bound”, in which Cuevas includes the line “‘Tis better to be chained to the rock than bound to the service of Zeus.” The significance of this excerpt to the true meaning of the poem was soon to be revealed as editors and publishers of Focus came to the understanding that a secret message was written in an acrostic style. As its read downwards, the poem’s true message is “Marcos Hitler Diktador Tuta”, a slogan that quickly became a rally cry for citizens who were greatly affected by the torture and force that Marcos used to advance his agenda. Victims of torture and unjust incarceration understood the excerpt from the original poem as inspiration for the rebellion against Marcos that eventually overthrew him and his family from power, and continue to keep this sentiment alive today.
Even when faced with a dictatorship that was focused on destroying the Philippines’ history and culture, Filipino writers attempted to salvage their history for future generations, which is what I, along with the future generations of Filipino-Americans, will have to do, too. From the early misrepresentations of the Philippine-American War, to the discrimination of Filipinos in Stockton, California, to the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos and his attempt to rewrite Filipino history, the Filipino community preserved itself as its members continue to fight to reclaim their identity.
With the impact of these historical events, it is no wonder that my siblings and I, as well as so many other Filipino-American youth, struggle with identity crises and estrangement from our heritage due to this constant phenomenon of invisibility that can transform itself in society.
As stated in the beginning of my paper, my mother and I don’t know how to correct over a hundred years’ worth of erasure of our culture, history, and people. My siblings will try their best, but the Tagalog that I was lucky enough to make sense of will never be their native language. They, along with many other Filipino-Americans, speak our colonizer’s language better than they will ever know our own.
While people believe that we can pass down the traditions, stories, and language, the solution is not so simple for the Filipino community. Our history is riddled with confusion and mystery, even to our elders who struggle to agree on the truth of our country’s history. In order for anything to change, it is important that we spend time re-learning a history that was purposefully hidden and swept under the rug by external forces. The task at hand for scholars like me is to redefine the narrative in a more accurate light.
Though my siblings will never be able to converse with me the way they want to so badly, I believe that recognizing the truth that we’ve been denied is the first step towards progress. Instead of a world where younger generations look up to their elders with jealousy for the culture they were deprived of, I hope that more discoveries of the phenomenon of Filipino invisibility allow the older generations to look upon us with pride, eyes alight with pride as they realize that we found our way home.
Works Cited
“The First Vietnam: The U.S.-Philippine War of 1899.” Taylor & Francis, https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14672715.1973.10406345.
“Five Things to Know about Martial Law in the Philippines.” Amnesty International, 17 May 2022, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/04/five-things-to-know-about-martial-law-in-the-philippines/.
Kipling, Rudyard. “The White Man's Burden.” The Kipling Society, 13 Feb. 2022, https://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poem/poems_burden.htm.
Mabalon, Dawn Bohulano. Little Manila Is in the Heart: The Making of the Filipina/O American Community in Stockton, California. Duke University Press, 2013.
Melendez, Paolo Enrico. “The Marcos-Era Resistance Poem That Smuggled a Hidden Message into State Media.” Esquiremag.ph, Esquire Philippines, 1 Jan. 1970, https://www.esquiremag.ph/long-reads/features/the-marcos-era-resistance-poem-that-smuggled-a-hidden-message-into-state-media-a1508-20180911-lfrm2.
