Announcements

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 Race, Gender, Sexuality & the Invisible Empire

3. Commonwealth Ambiguities • 1898-1934: Philippines = unincorporated territory • 1934-1946: 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?

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

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

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)

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)

10. 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)