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  • When the Walls Speak a Nation: Comtemporary Murals and The Narration of Filipina/o America
  • Theodore S. Gonzalves

. . . you are many things behind red brick yes teaching me so much in a short sleepy summer as much as i know/ only as much as i know/ as much as we all should know . . .

(from “Belly Talk,” George Leong) 1

For history teaches this lesson well, that the monuments of man’s hands which have remained alive and endure are those which were built as sanctuaries of the soul, which despite all the winds of change and adversity, keep eternal vigil in the halls of Time.

(from the speech delivered at the dedication of the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Imelda R. Marcos) 2

The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living.

(from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Karl Marx) [End Page 31] 3

This essay examines the mural work of three artists in California. I develop interpretations of these works which call into question the contemporary narration of Filipina/o and Filipina/o American history and culture. Interviews with the artists also extend the conversation of how discourses of nationalism continue to resonate in the imagination of this ethnic community. This essay is part of a larger project in which expressive forms of culture are situated against their social and political contexts. I wish to take advantage of the juxtaposition of community mural-making against the larger reference to this era of transnational capitalism. Part of this task is to attend to the various manners in which local acts of mural-making oppose the fetish for information-technology. Expressive forms of culture may teach us about the nature of contemporary subject-formation, how we hold on to identities at a time when technology and capital afford us opportunities to dissolve such identities into digital media. Murals are, to stretch a point, forerunners of the “terminals” of the cyber age — gateways to mass communication from convenient locales, terminals whose premise is inverted. They are site-specific communiqués whose meanings are circulated by visitors who access it by bus, car, or on foot. 4

“Where’s My Little Manila?” Ethnic Cultural Production Under Late Capitalism

Throughout the twentieth century, variations of nationalism have preoccupied the imaginations of Filipina/os and Filipina/o Americans. As critic E. San Juan, Jr. puts it:

Of all the Asian American groups, the Filipino community is perhaps the only one obsessed with the impossible desire of returning to the homeland, whether in reality or fantasy. It is impossible because, given the break in our history . . . the authentic homeland doesn’t exist except as a simulacrum of Hollywood, or a nascent dream of jouissance still to be won by a national-democratic struggle. Its presence . . . is deferred, postponed, the climax of a trajectory of collective and personal transformative projects. 5

This is an argument not founded in any sort of genetic or biologic predisposition to “returns” to “primordial” roots. History is no more precious [End Page 32] to Filipina/os than it is to any other racialized minority. San Juan’s statement attempts to foreground history as a crucial problem for the Filipina/o imagination generally, and — more particularly — expressive forms of culture as that site upon which creative works have been crafted for its address.

Some would argue that to speak of nations in this day is to speak anachronistically. The dominant logics of transnational capital privilege, a bold and seemingly inevitable world without borders, the thinning of blood ties, and the need for locality to fade away. Advances in telecommunications and transportation such as wireless communication, and the marketing, distribution, and production of commodities to virtually anywhere in the world, tempt upwardly mobile aspirations for economic gain (or security) despite looming threats posed by working-class structural unemployment and middle-class underemployment. More generally, these late capital logics of commodity fetishism posit the reconfiguring of our cultural sensibilities at the end of a millennium — sensibilities which entertain the promise of being anywhere at anytime, assuming new subjectivities. The future shocks prophesied by Toffler and others are tempered by the possibility of assuming new or concealing...

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