The politics of relation: Creole languages in Dogeaters and Rolling the R's

(6.) See Rafael's Contracting Colonialism and White Love for a history of language and culture in the Philippines during Spanish and American colonialism, respectively.

(7.) From my reading of Gaerlan's work on the history of Philippine nationalist language debates from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to 1994-95 at the University of the Philippines, there have been at least three (related) levels of language debate in the Philippines that provide important background to my study: the first is the contest between Tagalog/Filipino and English as the language of nationalism; the second is the contest between competing notions of what the "native" national language should be (Pilipino, Filipino); and the third is the challenge raised by other Philippine languages to the use of Tagalog largely as the basis for this native national language. In light of these interconnected debates, I qualify my own use of the terms Tagalog, Filipino, and Tagalog/Filipino thus: Tagalog refers to the regional language of Tagalogs; Filipino (and Pilipino) refers to the national language that is still in the process of being created; and Tagalog/Filipino also refers to the national language, but with the awareness that the regional dialect Tagalog has been used largely as the basis for the in-process national language, Filipino. My preference for this last "hybrid" term therefore points to the historical dominance of Tagalog over other Philippine languages in national political and cultural arenas. And one of the ramifications of this dominance includes the widespread use of Taglish in the Filipina/o diaspora.

(8.) See Junker's discussions of the trading practices of pre-colonial Philippine chiefdoms. I'd also like to note here that the island economies during the Spanish and American eras, respectively, were quite different from each other; however, both periods of colonization changed trading practices in the Philippines to provide greatest benefit to the colonizing country. It is the lack of capital in the independent Philippines in spite of transnational trade and as a result of its neocolonial relationship to the United States that causes the tensions in Dogeaters.

(9.) By interpellation, I mean of course the Althusserian model, whereby a subject is hailed or called into being--or, more specifically, hailed into a subject position--by an arm of the state apparatus, whether ideological or repressive.

(10.) Indeed, we might comment here about the current state of the division of labor in the global economy vis-a-vis the Philippines. While in the early twentieth century the Filipino migrants recruited to work in the plantations and farms of Hawai'i and California were mostly male, today a considerable number of Filipina women have become overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) all over the world because of the Philippines' poor economy and inability to support its labor force. According to San Juan, the weakness of the consumption-oriented Philippine economy necessitates the remittance economy made possible by the OFWs, for even though they labor mostly as domestic servants, nannies, entertainers, and sex workers, they are still able to remit large sums of money to the Philippines each year. But this dependence on remittances, rather than promoting an independent national economy, intensifies a culture of consumption. Thus, the diasporic sensibility deployed by the use of Taglish in Dogeaters and even Pidgin in Rolling the R's is in dialogue with this developing and changing global division of labor, where the word "Filipina" is practically synonymous with "maid," "domestic," "nanny," or "mail-order bride" in many countries around the globe.