Working-Class Filipino Masculinities

Since the 1980s women of color feminist theorists, writers, and cultural workers have collectively called for an intersectional approach to race, class, gender, sexuality, and citizenship.¹ This body of work speaks to how different social formations and axes of identity are mutually constitutive, inspiring cultural analysts to examine these social phenomena and related power dynamics in a holistic, interconnected way, rather than in isolation. More recently, in 1990s cultural studies, instead of privileging settled communities (e.g., the rural village, in anthropology) as sites of culture par excellence, scholars have explored movement as an important part of how cultural meanings are produced. James Clifford, for example, argues that "travel is constitutive of culture."² That is, the embodied act of moving or traveling from one place to another—the journey, not the destination—informs and is an integral part of cultural productions and meanings. While Clifford's work significantly focuses on bourgeois traveling histories and practices, the general premise of his argument can be extended to include different and specific kinds of movement, for example, migration, immigration, refugee displacement, and seafaring, and how these different kinds of mobility play a role in the creation of culture.

Linda España-Maram's Creating Masculinities in Los Angeles's Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s–1950s is a compelling and well-argued example of scholarly analysis that practices an intersectional cultural and historical approach to the creation of Filipino masculinity through place as well as movement.³ España-Maram argues that "Filipinos were simultaneously immigrants, gendered subjects, members of an aggrieved population and consumers" (7, her emphasis). Subsequently, she addresses how these complex formations and experiences were mutually constitutive and analyzes how working-class men of color—Filipino men—used popular culture to "negotiate viable ethnic identities and create a male, working-class culture in Los Angeles's Little Manila from the 1920s to 1950s" (2). Key sites of analysis for España-Maram, which also shape the organization of the book, include different forms and places of employment—domestic work, hotel and restaurant work, the Hollywood film industry, migrant farming, and the military—as well as the different forms and locations of leisure and sport—gambling houses, taxi-dance halls, street fashion, and boxing. Through a close analysis of these sites and cultural activities, España-Maram illustrates the resiliency and creativity of the working-class Filipino men in her study. Although in the first half of the twentieth century, Filipino manongs⁴ experienced institutionalized racism, for example, racist immigration policies and employment practices, as well as antimiscegenation laws, plus U.S. colonialism in the Philippines, España-Maram documents how working-class Filipino men resisted and survived, indeed even thrived, in a "racist host society."

España-Maram also successfully attends to the specificity and impact of place and geography (Little Manila), while also addressing in several sections how seasonal migrant agricultural work (movement and travel) affected what she calls the "portable communities" of working-class Filipino migrant male workers in California, the U.S. West Coast, and Alaska. The book clearly leans toward a study of place, but when appropriate and relevant, the author also addresses the significance of migratory or traveling practices. España-Maram writes, "[80 percent] of Filipino immigrants on the Pacific Coast became migratory laborers. During the growing season, they traveled in groups to agricultural centers in California . . . Delano . . . Fresno . . . Salinas . . . Stockton . . . [and] Alaska."

These migration patterns primarily account for the "fluctuating, seasonal population of Filipinos in California" (20). In other words, working-class Filipino men were regularly on the move, depending on the agricultural and fishing seasons. Their desire for a sense of Filipino community and brotherhood was also so strong they traveled for hundreds of miles, at a time when transportation was challenging, to be with each other to watch a boxing match or attend a dance. Not losing sight of mobility and the role...