Pinoy Capital: The Filipino Nation in Daly City

Chapter 6. Betrayal and Belonging

Michael Santos (MS): How about you, if you were given the chance—you’ve already worked here, you’re already earning a big salary, and then you’re offered [a job] there . . . maybe, I don’t know, if there’s anything that loyalty or being nationalistic can do. Anyway, all of us, we’re all thinking of—materialism is what we—we’re materialistic. BV: Is that what you think, that’s how we are, the Filipinos who are here? MS: Maybe. However much you love your country, you don’t want to leave it, but you see that your life is not improving, then what are you going to do there, right? Many scholars have used the push-pull model of migration, but it has been criticized for its neo-functionalism and assumption of discrete, autonomous receiving and sending states (Rouse 1992). Rouse adds that “the emphasis on a bipolar framework has obscured the ways in which many settlers . . . have managed to maintain active involvements with the people and places they have left behind and . . . have often helped create new kinds of communities that span the international border” (1992, 25).1 His reconcep1 Indeed, the bipolar framework (and the easy separability of “here” and “there”) has its echoes as well in the semi-racist conceptualizations of immigrant or ethnic identity as either/or, e.g., either Asian or American, and not both. 6 BETRAYAL AND BELONGING  BETRAYAL AN D BELON G IN G 135 tualization is a valuable reminder that places like Daly City (and the people who reside in them) perhaps inevitably derive their identities from at least two different places. The conceptualization of a more unified framework has its effects on anthropological fieldwork and writing as well: George Marcus, in an attempt to represent the larger systemic context of his subjects, has suggested a focus on multiple locales in ethnographic writing rather than on an artificially bounded community (1986, 1992). In the two preceding chapters, I looked at the contradictory obligations of Pinoy immigrants. In simplified terms, these responsibilities can be seen as looking back to their homeland and looking forward to their adopted country simultaneously. In this chapter, I will explore how Filipinos in the United States are perceived outside, in the Philippines, as manifest in popular discourse. Class intersects with Filipino national belonging in a variety of ways—in this specific case, materialism is used as proof of immigrant betrayal . These notions of Filipino identity and belonging are evoked to regulate the class and national inclusion or exclusion of middle-class individuals outside the country. I will highlight the points of comparison and contrast between discourses from different locales, partly to emphasize the “global” quality of discourse by and about Pinoys in general. One chapter cannot exhaust the particularities of an unstable, heterogeneous mass here conveniently called “middle-class Filipinos.” I will examine only the homogeneities it presents for inspection. It seems difficult to discuss identity—particularly when national identity is concerned—as being relational when on the ground it is perceived by many as essentialized and timeless , despite efforts to uncover the ideological trickery engendering it. But, in this case, distinctive identity formations are produced in the intersections of conceptions of class and nation. I will look at Daly City—or rather, a fictive “Daly City”—from the outside . By fictive I do not mean a Daly City that exists in literature, but a place that is created in discourse and fashioned by sentiment. Certainly the reality of living in the United States also exists, if to a lesser degree, in the social imagination of Filipinos in the Philippines. The image of Filipino immigrant life in America, as held by Filipinos in the Philippines, is a relevant social fact, as it both informs, and is informed by, the actual conditions in the United States. This constant act of looking back, of turning and re-turning, is, I believe, integral to any analysis that involves a transnational framework. And so to begin, I leave Daly City for a moment to take a detour and focus on its origins back home. 136 CHAPTER 6 Departure as Betrayal of the Nation In 1993, a book edited by Isagani Cruz and Lydia Echauz appeared in Manila bookstores. Titled 1001 Reasons to Stay in the Philippines, the monograph, presented in a format admittedly cribbed from U.S. self-help guides like Life’s Little Instruction Book and...