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T he tension between the desire to demonstrate immigrant achievement and the need for political awareness may be directed “forward” to the United States or, more importantly, “back” to the Philippines. I argue that the call to remembrance, to a kind of nationalism outside of the country’s borders, is integral to understanding the Filipino community. The call for more active, concerned participation in the affairs of the homeland, demanding sacrifice, was most acute during the Marcos regime, and it still is potent today. But Philippine nationalism was not only at cross-purposes with a new life in America, it was also contradictory to the demands of immigrant success and, at least initially, to an upwardly mobile immigrant middle class. At the same time, what was portrayed as the exemplar of nationalism—the anti-Marcos movement—was itself riven with conflicts revolving precisely around differences in class ideology. These ideological disparities could be mapped onto generational and native-born/foreignborn differences as well. The play between these contradictions was perhaps most clearly manifested in the pages of Philippine News. The differences showed up in public discourse—in this case, a feud between two newspapers. Both were against the Marcos regime but took different approaches, for extremely different reasons . The Philippine News, with a more conservative political outlook and from an earlier generation, allied itself squarely with the so-called oligarchy in exile. Ang Katipunan, the official organ of the Kilusang Demokratikong Pilipino (Filipino Democratic Movement), or KDP, in the United States, was 5 LOOKING BACK  Indifference, Responsibility, and the Anti-Marcos Movement in the United States 110 CHAPTER 5 the resolutely radical newspaper, calling for an overthrow of the Marcos dictatorship.1 The newspapers had in common, however, a fervent and, I might add, courageous opposition to the Marcos regime. Both newspapers (the Philippine News in particular) appealed to their readers for support in protesting against the martial law regime, strategically using a discourse of guilt. That is, in looking back toward the homeland, immigrants also risked being looked at as well, subject to the (supposedly) accusing gaze of their fellow Filipinos. As one editorial put it, how were Pinoys in the United States supposed to face “[their] relatives . . . friends . . . countrymen, with the knowledge and realization that in their hour of need [they] kept silent?” (Philippine News, 1975a: 4). In consequence, Filipino immigrants, especially those in the United States, seem to feel they must adopt a defensive position. An undercurrent of guilt and remembrance pervades discourse by first-generation Filipino immigrants .2 This sentiment of guilt—whether manifest in feeling guilty or making other people feel guilty—shows the ambiguity of status of Filipinos in the United States. The reason for guilt does not necessarily have anything to do with colonialism, but it can be attributed to a combination of class status , increased purchasing power, and the need for pakikisama, or what Agoncillo and Guerrero define as “the intensive signification of camaraderie or 1 President Ferdinand Marcos’ reelection to office in 1968 presented a grand opportunity to consolidate his power over the institutions of the ostensibly democratic Philippine state. By the mid-1970s the Philippines would be enjoying economic success in terms of gross national product—but a success limited to Marcos’s family and friends, and at the expense of state coffers and Filipinos perpetually living in poverty. Marcos, in this decade and the next, relied chiefly on military force to prop up his dictatorship: the mass rounding up of political prisoners, constant extrajudicial killings, and a protracted war against both Communists and Muslim separatists (13,000 of the latter dying in the ’70s alone). As a consequence of disastrous economic policies (abetted by the Marcoses’ profligate spending habits), high unemployment rates, and an increasing official dependence on the export of labor and on dollar remittances—one that shows no sign of abating—middle-class professionals left for the United States and Saudi Arabia, among other places; women, typically from the lower middle class, would leave by the thousands a decade later to work as domestic helpers and entertainers. See Abinales and Amoroso (2005) for a comprehensive historical and political analysis of the Philippines. I must add that, the few applicants for political asylum notwithstanding, the vast majority of the 300,000 Filipinos who immigrated to the United States during the Marcos era (1965–1986) did not necessarily do so for explicitly political reasons. By this, I mean that these mostly middle-class professionals (and their relatives petitioned for...

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