1. Announcements Midterms back at end of class Presentation W 2/13
April, Daniel, Stephani, Isaac Hong, & Sith
No class M 2/18
Final paper prompts on M 3/4

2. Filipino/American Literature
Moving on from complexities and contradictions of Commonwealth Philippine nationalism to the complex and contradictory position of Filipino immigrants in US
Race, Gender, Sexuality & the Invisible Empire

3. Commonwealth Ambiguities
: Philippines = unincorporated territory
: Philippine Commonwealth = preparation for independence
1940 Commonwealth Literary Awards
Literature and culture used to imagine Philippine nation. Ex. Philippines – (Spain + America) = Molave
Pitfalls of nationalism:
Patriarchal divide between masculine public and feminine private
Nationalism enables neocolonialism

4. Jose Garcia Villa
Most accomplished Filipino writer in English of the period
1929 – immigrated to US
Filipino writer?
American writer?
Filipino American?
Colonialist or critic?  Do his writings challenge US benevolent assimilation? Philippine nationalism?
First, who was Villa?
Epitome of pensionado  “Untitled Story”
Mention that Villa circulated amongst notable modernist poets like ee cummings and WH Auden

5. Divine Play with God McKinley’s “Address to a Methodist Delegation”
America = white masculine father = closest to God
Philippines = emasculated dark child = most like an animal
Divine Poem 76
Divine Poem 77

6. Trans-national Laborers
Large influx of immigrants – almost 150,000 nationally (including HI) by 1920; 30,470 in CA alone
“pensionados”
Laborers in Hawaiian plantations – 110,00
“Alaskeros” – about 3,500
Domestic help/Service labor – about 10,000
Mainland stoop and migrant farm labor – about 30,000
Trans-national Laborers

7. The Manong Generation 1902-1934 = “manong” generation
“manong” – Ilocano term of respect for elder male relatives
94% male, agricultural peasant class and under the age of 30
Factors of immigration:
Increased land dispossession due to transition from Spanish to American governance
Agricultural depression due to drought – particularly in Ilocos
Ilocano tradition of inter-regional cultivation
Contract-labor system and sojourner mentality
Spanish Catholic gender norms
American educational system
Irony of American educational system  teaches Filipinos to identify with US, an identification that highly contrasts actual experience of immigration
The Manong Generation

8. Embodied Contradictions
“The arrival of Filipino immigrants in the imperial metropole rendered visible the colonialism that Americans had tried to make invisible through the myths of historical accident and benevolence. Filipino migration lay bare contradictions between the insular policy of benevolent assimilation and the immigration policy of Asiatic exclusion which had fully matured by the 1920s, and domestic racism generally” (97)
Filipino immigrant  materializes contradictions of US-Phil relations and racism underlying benevolent assimiliation
Embodied Contradictions

9. Life & Death of a Filipino in America
Precedents of anti-Asian exclusion:
Naturalization Law of 1790
Page Act of 1875
Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882
Gentlemen’s Agreement 1907
CA Alien Land Law of 1913
Anti-miscegenation Laws of 1920
“If nativists believed Chinese and Japanese were unassimilable because they were radically different from Euro-Americans, both racially and culturally, they were discomfited precisely by the extent of Filipinos’ Americanization.” (109)
Life & Death of a Filipino in America

10. Solution = independence (1934)
Taxi dance halls  sites of racial mixing, class alliances, violation of gender norms
“You can realize, with the declared preference of the Filipino for white women and the willingness on the part of some white females to yield to that preference, the situation which arises… California in this matter is seeking to protect the nation, as well as itself, against the peaceful penetration of another colored race” (V.S. McClatchy)
Bulosan’s Miss O’Reilly
“Thus anti-Filipino hostility was a site where ideas about gender, sexuality, class, colonialism intersected in violent ways and, moreover, informed the construction of the racial identity of both European and Filipino immigrants” (115)
Solution = independence (1934)

11. Bulosan’s America
In “Story of the Letter,” what does the letter come to signify to the narrator and his family? Why does he only reveal what the letter said at the end of the story? Why does he both laugh and cry while reading it? (65)
In Consorcio’s story, what does it mean to “be American”? If it is not defined by citizenship papers, then what defines being American in the story? (72)