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ELIZABETH H. PISARES 11 Do You Mis(recognize) Me Filipina Americans in Popular Music and the Problem of Invisibility IN THE SUMMER OF 1997, a crowd of several hundred, mostly young and mostly Filipino American, packed onto an expanse of dry grass before an outdoor stage at the Santa Clara Fairgrounds in San Jose. The audience had grown slowly during the hot and windless Saturday afternoon for Summer Fest ’97, a “veritable Filipinopalooza” (noted the local music press in a front-page feature) thatcelebratedthearrivalofFilipinoAmericansinpopularmusic(Jam).Thealmost two-dozen performances of fashion, comedy, martial arts, hip-hop breaking, and different genres of popular music were more than enough—Kai, the R&B group that would taste its own stardom the following summer, performed one boy-man short, and Shortkut of the Invisibl Skratch Piklz and KYLD-FM’s Rich Laxamana supplied their turntable skills—but what the masses had gathered for was the headliner and closing act, Jocelyn Enriquez. The dance-music artist had briefly left a nationwide tour to grace an event that celebrated, as well, her growing celebrity and that of a handful of other Filipino American music artists. What had started in the 1980s with mobile DJs in Filipino American neighborhoods, a scene compared by some to the early days of hip-hop in New York City (Cook), flourished. Filipino American DJs were soon winning DJ showcases and mixing at clubs and local radio stations (Wang). Some of these mobile DJ crews would become “turntablists” and move on to dominate international hip-hop DJ competitions and collaborate with some of the biggest-selling rap artists of the day. Others founded indie record labels that by the early 1990s were producing Billboard-charted hits by more than a dozen Filipino American solo artists and groups, including their most spectacular, Jocelyn Enriquez. That summer evening on the stage, four male dancers—black, white, Latino, and Filipino—surrounded Enriquez in visible acknowledgment of her crossing the racial boundaries that define Latin freestyle, house, and R&B and claiming these genres as a Filipina American. I watched Enriquez from the center of the third row; to my immediate left were three teenage Filipina Americans. They had arrived mid-afternoon and watched the various acts with alert but casual interest. But once Jocelyn took the stage, rapture overtook them: it wasn’t possible for anything human to scream louder. The girls’ total identification—eyes wide open and fixed on Enriquez, hands clasped at their throats—was astonishing. They had ELIZABETH H. PISARES 173 waited to experience live and surrounded by hundreds like them, if only for an hour, what until then had been private listening before suburban bedroom radios, a quick dance on a high-school gym floor, or a garage-party get-together: Enriquez’s intimate confessions of love promised forever, then abandoned in the next track, with the loss forgotten momentarily amidst thumping shouts of joy about family and dancing. Perhaps after the show, hundreds of Filipino Americans would return to their car CD players or bedroom boom boxes and engage the repeat function to reimagine the physical thrill of her voice, the audience’s communal roars of adoration. These moments of identification before Filipino American music artists and amidst overwhelmingly Filipino American audiences would be replicated dozens of times across the country that summer: at various stops on Enriquez’s “Dance across America” tour; at DJ battles in the San Francisco Bay Area and New York City; at Filipina Fiestas—annual talent showcases held around Philippine Independence Day. The slew of Filipino American events and the provisional communities in the form of concert audiences during the summer of 1997 were unprecedented . And that summer, for most Filipino Americans the catalyst for community was the Northern Cali–born-and-bred Enriquez. She may have been welcomed as kababayan (countrywoman) on her tour of the Philippines later that summer, but the india Enriquez could never have emerged as a pop star in a country where popular culture idolizes anemic, light-skinned, thin-nosed mestizas. Jocelyn was absolutely Pinay. But accompanying the mass adulation were the doubts and tsismis (gossip) that seem to plague any Filipino American who gains a bit of public visibility. Amidst herpopularitywithyoungFilipinoAmericans,Enriquezcontendedwithskepticism over her racial authenticity and loyalty. She was accused of passing herself off first as Latina, then as black to attract listeners who would not accept someone identified as Asian American performing Latin freestyle, house, or R&B. She never denied her Filipina American identity or her loyalty...

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