Content provided in partnership with
Up from benevolent assimilation: at home with the Manongs of Bienvenido Santos
MELUS, Spring, 2004 by Victor Bascara
It should not be possible to read Filipino American literature without understanding that "Filipino American" is a concept at the intersection of the immigrant and the colonized, and at the overlap of the waning of territorial empire and the waxing of neocolonialism. This article specifically examines stories by Bienvenido Santos (1911-1996) as critical expressions of the transition from the older practice of colonization to an emergent neocolonialism. Broadly speaking, neocolonialism arose as "informal empire" (McCormick), a new formation designed to take "world order" (Hardt and Negri) from "the age of empire" (Hobsbawn) into the "long twentieth century" (Arrighi) of "globalization and its discontents" (Sassen). (1)
- Most Popular Articles in Arts
- Art since 1900: Modernism, Antimodernism, Postmodernism
- Free-standing cardboard sculpture
- What makes a successful business person? Business people who are tops in ...
- Take advantage of local advertising: TV, newspaper or magazines? If your ...
- Tino Sehgal at the ICA
- More »
Filipino American literature tracks this transition through animating the ambivalent desires that travel across this historical shift. After a generation of historical revisionism, the famously "forgotten Filipinos" (Campomanes, "The New Empire's" 159-60) can now be remembered. Filipino American literature provides not only the satisfactions of Filipino American inclusion in a multicultural melting pot, but also a reminder of how United States modernity was fundamentally built upon both the dynamics of capitalist development and gendered racialization and the failed project of American colonialism in the Pacific. A newly self-critical American literature came back to Santos for multiculturalism and stayed for insights into the meaning and history of its empire today.
Accidental Immigrant Acts
In 1945, as the war in the Pacific finally came to an end with a pair of thermonuclear detonations, a Filipino man and a white woman in Washington DC end their relationship in Bienvenido Santos's short story, "Quicker With Arrows." More precisely, the Filipino man, Valentin Rustia, finally musters the courage to propose to his girlfriend, Fay Price. And she promptly turns him down: "Thank you for all the fine times, Val, thank you for this gesture, but sorry, I'm not buying. Good night" (167). Rejected and dejected, Val returns to the impromptu celebrations still going on at his apartment. "In the hall, the party still waited for the final word from the White House about the surrender" (167). So ends the penultimate story in Santos's collection, Scent of Apples.
The story closes by paralleling different endings: World War II, Japanese wartime occupation of the Philippines, United States colonial occupation of the Philippines, an exilic community of Filipinos in the United States, and an interracial romance. With these parallels, "Quicker With Arrows" uses a companionate relationship between individuals as both a realist depiction and as an allegory. Realism is the mode of representation usually associated with Santos, a writer who was openly committed to chronicling the lives of forgotten Filipinos: manongs (first a term of respect for an elder male, here, it refers to the early wave of Filipino laborers who came to the United States), pensionados (brief wave of Filipino immigrants to the United States who came to study at American universities with the intention--often not realized--of returning to the Philippines to occupy civil service positions in colonial administration), exiles: "accidental immigrants," as he has called them. Despite being a professional writer and teacher, Santos characteristically remarked that "in a special sense I, too, am an old timer" (qtd. in Campomanes, "Filipinos" 169) Santos feels a kinship with these pre-1965 sojourners from the Philippines who never manage to get "back home." (1)
But "Quicker With Arrows" is a different kind of Santos story. At its center is a figure who is not as sympathetic as the beleaguered manongs. Val is a first-world-loving, upperclass dandy who was handed a sinecure for the duration of the war. To call Val a member of the "burgis" (a term of satirical ridicule for the sanctimonious and self-interested Filipino middle class), would probably be an insult, as he is clearly of the indigenous elite who presumably collaborated with the colonizers. Now, as Philippine independence looms, he is threatened with losing the perks of that formal connection. He therefore seeks to make official a bond that had been unofficial, namely his relationship with Fay. But that matrimonial bond is denied him. And this happens precisely at the moment when the official bonds that kept him in the United States--and kept the United States as official colonial master of the Philippines (2)--are also evaporating.
It is hard not to read this story about the ending of a romance as an allegory for the ending of the special relationship between the United States and the Philippines. A figure like Val is not exactly the sort of aggrieved, mourned, and defiant subject championed by multiculturalism. He is more Uncle Tom than Bigger Thomas. Yet his subjectivity is emblematic of the colonial mentality that lived on after the end of official colonialism. The work of the United States was successfully done and it could officially leave the archipelago as it was now indubitably aligned with American interests. "Benevolent assimilation," the euphemism for the US project in the Philippines, had indeed set in, for Val at least.
