Jose Rizal Traversing the United States of America

RIZAL IN THE USA: ESCAPING THE ANGLO QUARANTINE, RE-INVENTING “LOS INDIOS BRAVOS” by E. SAN JUAN, Jr.

Rizal is both Ibarra and Elias…. Rizal himself is the spirit of contradiction, a soul that dreads the revolution, although deep within himself he consummately desires it…. Rizal is a man who constantly pivots between fear and hope, between faith and despair. All these contradictions are merged together in that love, his dreamlike and poetic love for his adored country, the beloved region of the sun, pearl of the Orient, his lost Eden.

–MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO, “Rizal: The Tagalog Hamlet”*

The only justification for national self-government is the restoration of the dignity of the people. And this dignity will continue to elude us as long as abject poverty, rampant corruption, oligarchs, and landlords remain stark realities of our society. These evils will not be defeated until we liberate ourselves from the chains of mental incarceration. Only upon such release can we recover our own virtues and be, in the words of Rizal, “once more free, like the bird that leaves the cage, like the flower that opens to the air.”

–ANWAR IBRAHIM, former deputy prime minister of Malaysia**

Last July 26, concurrent resolution No. 218 was filed at the 109th session of the U.S. House of Representatives and passed on December 13. It mandated the government to celebrate the centennial of Filipino “sustained immigration” to the U.S. since 1906. About sixty-thousand Filipinos arrive here every year, adding to about three million Filipino residents who have now supposedly crossed all barriers to earn their “well-deserved place” in the Homeland Security State. The inaugural event was the 1906 arrival of 15 contracted laborers for the Hawaii sugar plantations, together with 200 pensionados sent to earn assimilationist credentials in order to serve the colonial bureaucracy.

Actually, after the subjugation of the revolutionary forces of Aguinaldo’s Republic in the war of 1899-1902; after the slaughter of 1.4 million Filipinos and the hanging of Sakay and other “bandits” who resisted U.S. aggression; after the genocidal massacre of thousands of Moros in the first two decades of U.S. rule, Filipinos were colonized subjects, or “nationals,” not immigrants of a sovereign nation. Filipinos were not immigrants, strictly speaking, until 1934 when, after the passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act, entry of Filipinos to the U.S. was restricted to a quota of fifty a year—until 1946.

We need to correct the stereotyped impression of would-be “model minority” Pinays/Pinoys. Despite the survival in Louisiana of a few descendants of “Indio” fugitives from the Spanish galleons that visited Mexico, Filipinos had no real, effective presence in the consciousness of U.S. citizens until 1899, the outbreak of the Filipino-American War. The name “Filipino” refered to Spaniards born in the Philippines, superior to the brown-skinned “indios.” It was not until the U.S., having “bought” the Philippines after the defeat of Spain in the Spanish-American War of 1898, had to send at least seventy thousand troops to “pacify” the islands, suffered over 8,000 dead and killed over a million natives, that Filipinos will appear in the public mind in various guises. Taft’s patronized “brown brothers” soon became the new contingent of recruited cheap labor for the Hawaiian plantations, the Alasakan canneries, and West Coast agribusiness. They replaced the excluded Chinese and other “barred” “Orientals.” The orientalized “immigrant story” of which Filipinos would be one of the characters will not begin until the sixties, with the change in the immigration laws and the demise of the “Manongs,” among them Philip Vera Cruz, one of the leaders in the resurgent labor movement that led to the founding of the United Farm Workers of America.

Other articles by E San Juan Jr

• Overseas Filipino Workers: The Emergence of an Asian-Pacific Diaspora - November 10, 2009
• Jose Garcia Villa, Filipino Poet in the "New World" - February 27, 2009
• Filipinos Writing in English / Through English: Reconaissance and Revaluation - December 18, 2008
• Returning from the Diaspora, Re-discovering the Homeland - December 10, 2008

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