Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire by Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns (review)

Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns’s incisive scholarly text positions Filipino/a performance within discourses of transnationalism and globalization. The author considers a wide breadth of historical and cultural material, ranging from the display of natives from the Philippines at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, to agit-prop plays by anti–Martial Law activists between the years 1973 and 1981, to the employment of numerous Filipino/a performers in the musical Miss Saigon, which premiered in London in 1989 before it was produced in theatres worldwide.

While Burns proceeds chronologically, she avoids making an argument that depends upon the idea that circumstances improve over time. Rather, she interweaves similar thematic concerns into each chapter, probing the historical relationship between the United States’s imperial project and representations of the Filipino/a performing body. She is ultimately less interested in reaching definitive conclusions about this relationship and more concerned with identifying critical sites for its expression and leaving “room for contradictions, interruptions, and continuities” (145) that can be subject to further exploration and interpretation.

Puro arte is loosely translated from Spanish to English as “pure art,” but Burns also acknowledges the nuances the phrase takes on for Filipino/as both in the Philippines and in the United States. She tells us that it “performs a much more ironic function, gesturing rather to the labor of overacting, histrionics, playfulness, and purely over-the-top dramatics” (2). Burns foregrounds both race and embodiment as she interrogates the workings of power at key historical moments between the United States and the Philippines. She views puro arte as both an object of study and a means to theorize this fraught interaction.

This technique is ably demonstrated by Burns in her close look at Filipino patrons of taxi dance halls in the US during the 1920s and 1930s. In these establishments, men purchased tickets for the chance to dance with young women employed there, who were called “taxi dancers” because customers paid per “ride” and were also expected to tip. The halls catered primarily to immigrants of various ethnicities, who doled out 10 cents a dance (lasting the length of a single song) to move to the music with one of the female taxi dancers, whom Burns identifies as “largely white, occasionally Mexican and very rarely Filipina” (51). Puro arte signals an aesthetic of excess, with the skill of the Filipino dancing body remarked upon not only by these women, but also sociologist Paul Cressey, who penned a landmark 1932 study of the taxi dance hall scene. Yet, while Burns acknowledges prior readings of this phenomenon that are more celebratory in nature, she points out that the exceptional dancing ability of Filipinos made them a sexual threat to white patrons who saw them as preferred partners to the taxi dancers. This attitude in turn fed into racial tensions resulting from the economic threat the Filipinos posed to white laborers. This can be clearly seen in the circumstances surrounding the Watsonville Riot of 1930, started by a mob of white men who purportedly wished to save the honor of the white women who worked at a taxi dance hall with a largely Filipino clientele. Moreover, Burns argues that the different modes of mobility performed by the Filipino dancer and the Filipino migrant worker — who were, of course, one and the same — are evidence of a corporeal colonization process (a phrase she borrows from ethnic studies scholar Catherine Ceniza Choy) that must be read within the context of US imperialism.

Burns simultaneously embraces discursive readings that challenge the status quo while also revealing their limitations and contextualizing the constraints surrounding certain modes of cultural production. For example, in her analysis of Filipino/a performers in Miss Saigon, Burns recognizes her own pleasure in seeing these Filipino/a bodies onstage. At the same time, however, she situates the training school set...