"Pointing to the Heart": Transpacific Filipinas and the Question of Cold-War Philippine-U.S. Relations

This article examines a recurring fascination with the transpacific Filipina in Bienvenido N. Santos's "Scent of Apples," "Brown Coterie," and "So Many Things" (from the 1955 collection of short stories, You Lovely People), and the nonfiction work of two Filipina feminists, María Paz Mendoza-Guazón's Development and Progress of the Filipino Woman (revised and extended in 1951) and Trinidad Tarrosa Subido's The Feminist Movement in the Philippines, 1905–1955 (1961). Published in the Philippines during the cold war, these texts document responses to broader concerns about the role of transpacific Filipinas in the postwar climate, the years in which Filipina/o authors assessed the past and projected the future of U.S. influence in the Philippines. In an analysis that rethinks the dynamics of postwar and cold war discursive productions, I contend that these writers stage a drama in which questions about transpacific Filipinas—and their fraught answers—are necessary to the narrative reformation of Filipina/o identities and communities, and to the imagining of Philippine-U.S. relations.