Building Diaspora: Filipino Cultural Community Formation on the Internet

6. E Pluribus or E Pluribus Unum? Can There Be Unity in Diversity?

134 B U I L D I N G D I A S P O R A 6 E Pluribus or E Pluribus Unum? Can There Be Unity in Diversity? 134 The jokes that I analyzed in the previous chapter temporarily quelled the debates on soc.culture. filipino. However, because real life goes on and because new people drop into the newsgroup all the time, the debates started again only a few weeks after the last jokes were posted. This does not mean that the list of jokes did not have some impact on the participants, however . For the rest of my stay at soc.culture.filipino, whenever someone lamented that Filipinos were too divisive and could not form a unified front, participants would refer to the “You might be Filipino if” jokes. But questions of unity and diversity continued. One of these debates parallels scholarly debates on identity politics and the politics of identity (Rajchman 1995). In particular, the debate on identity concerns the “death of the Subject” (Laclau 1995). Some scholars, in acknowledging the constructedness of traditional social groups like “gender,” “race,” “nation,” and “culture,” have proclaimed the death of the Subject. However, their opponents contend that celebrating the death of the subject is dangerous, as it calls for a suppression of subjects ’ voices and thus perpetuates the status quo (Benhabib 1989). Instead , scholars and activists must acknowledge that, although these entities are constructed and although there are multiple identities within a group, identity matters. Therefore, as long as people of cer- E P L U R I B U S O R E P L U R I B U S U N U M ? 135 tain groups are marginalized, scholars and activists must continue to theorize and refer to identities (Hall 1996). How we describe identity, however, is much debated. Some want to refer to a common history to find out who we are and where we came from (San Juan 1992). However, others argue that we should study how history, language, and culture affect the “process of becoming, not of being” (Hall 1996; see also Gilroy 1993). That is, we should study history to examine how we have been represented so we can better decide how we want to represent ourselves in the future. I will refer to this particular strand of the scholarly debate on identity as I analyze the debate that participants on soc.culture.filipino had about Filipino identity. In this exchange, this first participant (prsn) responds to a Filipino American’s request for information about his “roots”: What roots?? To make a long story short, a Philippines does not have a single root. The country was essentially a bunch of tribes in different regions before the Muslims exerted their influence. Then came the Spanish. Then came the Americans. So there was no single “Philippine Culture” before colonial influence. So divided among those lines. The North is very different culturally from the South. Then on each island, one must consider the smaller regionalistic differences. The Philippines is much like an onion. Lots of layers, but when you peel them all away, there is no single core. By pointing out that, prior to Muslim, Spanish, and American influence , the Philippines was comprised of many tribes, this participant indirectly addresses the fact that nations are constructed. To solidify this, the poster refers to the regional divisions to which Filipinos still adhere. Almirol has found that Filipinos are Tagalog, Ilocano, and Bisayan in an “all Filipino audience”; and Filipinos only “act as Filipinos” when they have to define themselves to non-Filipinos (1985, 241). While this is not the only type of diversity found in the Filipino community, it is one that diasporic Filipinos acknowledge as very real and potentially debilitating. This participant appears to lament the lack of roots and the tremendous diversity of Filipino identity. Because of various colonial influences and regional differences, the poster argues, it is impossible to find an authentic Filipino culture. The participant alludes to scholars’ proclamation of the “death of the Subject” 136 B U I L D I N G D I A S P O R A when declaring that Filipino identity has “lots of layers, but when you peel them away there is no single core.” Rick, another regular Filipino American, concurs, yet he states that it is possible to find unity in diversity: “While it is indeed true that the Philippine population...