Up from benevolent assimilation: at home with the Manongs of Bienvenido Santos

(4.) This forgetfulness is far and away the most emblematic feature associated with Filipinos and Filipino Americans. And this amnesia is due to the more general amnesia around American colonialism in the Pacific. See Campomanes, "The New Empire's," esp. 146-47, 159-60.

(5.) Along with "important" and "widely read," "beloved" is the adjective used in the biographical note on Santos in Hagedorn (422). The avuncular Santos apparently cultivated this persona in his lifetime.

(6.) The other obvious example of this type of Santos's story is "Immigration Blues," which is also included in Scent of Apples as well as Hagedorn's anthology, among other places. This story is Santos's most widely anthologized piece.

(7.) Kaplan explains how the anomalous status of the US's new possessions in the wake of the triumphs of the Spanish American War led to crises over the meaning of foreign and domestic, particularly with the Supreme Court decision in Dowries v. Bidwell (1902).

(8.) This selective visibility reached a conspicuous moment with the eviction of manongs from the International Hotel in the 1970s. They were vestiges of an older yet persistent economic order, migrant stoop labor, unwittingly in the way of a new one, urban redevelopment. This tragic episode is ably documented by Choy.

(9.) In 1992, director Dan Tirtawinata adapted Santos' story into a fine short film, but curiously opted to move the couple to San Francisco. This geographic shift would probably have lessened the sense of isolation that Tony and Fil would feel, as manongs were plentiful in San Francisco.

(10.) Tinikling, a dance in which two kneeling persons hold sticks and a third person steps between them, is customarily described as a metaphor for the cultural hybridity of Filipinos, who have continually had to negotiate between different and competing worldviews. See Roces.

(11.) The self-reflexivity fed into the American New Criticism and its adaptation of deconstructive methods. See Norris 166.

(12.) Self-congratulatory autocritique is perhaps the dominant and double-edged feature of postmodernism. Spivak famously critiqued Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze for this tendency to ironically "inaugurate the West-as-subject" through disavowing the legitimacy of its subjectivity.

Works Cited

Arrighi, Giovanni. The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times. London: Verso, 1994.

Benjamin, Walter. "Theses on the Philosophy of History." Illuminations. New York: Schocken, 1968.

Campomanes, Oscar. "Filipinos in the United States and Their Literature of Exile." Discrepant Histories: Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures. Ed. Vicente Rafael. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1995. 159-92. Originally published in Reading the Literatures of Asian America. Ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1992.49-78.

--. "The New Empire's Forgetful and Forgotten Citizens: Unrepresentability and Unassimilability in Filipino-American Postcolonialities." Critical Mass 2.2 (1995): 145-99.