Pinoy Capital: The Filipino Nation in Daly City

Chapter 7. Citizenship and Nostalgia

I f the immigrant predicament requires the careful balancing of obligations to homeland and new home—as manifested in the acts of turning and turning back—then it is made all the more difficult by perceptions of betrayal. Citizenship, or the act of naturalization, is one of the more definitive acts that can foreclose the possibility of “turning back.” To become an American citizen is to accept that state’s protective guidance and, most important , to uphold that country’s practices and beliefs and ostensibly renounce another’s. This characterization is, of course, not entirely accurate, as such a scenario is not encouraged in today’s self-avowed multiculturalist society . Nor is it likely to happen in real life. Culture is not a zero-sum game, but citizenship is still seen as casting one’s lot in another place, deciding to belong somewhere else, and forgoing the possibility of return—and therefore seen as a lack of pakikisama. Filipinos are said to covet American citizenship highly; anecdotes abound of pregnant women in their third trimesters attempting to enter the United States and deliver a child there to “guarantee” an immigration petition in the future. Filipinos from the Philippines who enter the U.S. Navy, for instance, are generally understood to be doing so to gain a foothold in applying for a green card and later citizenship. My interviewees from Daly City reveal a wide range of attitudes toward naturalization, from ambivalence and rejection to a strategic practicality. They are able, however, to “return” another way, through nostalgia, homesickness , and the simple assertion of ethnic identity. Such a turning back is in 7 CITIZENSHIP AND NOSTALGIA  162 CHAPTER 7 itself socially generative, but not in any conventional manner; it is, perhaps, what characterizes Daly City and the Pinoy immigrant community. Although both processes figure in the emotional lives of my interviewees, they occupy a larger role in the public sphere in the form of commercialization and consumption. Citizenship and homesickness/nostalgia can be seen as turns in opposite directions, as different manifestations of a longing to belong: one, to the place of origin, and the other, to the place of arrival. But what looks like nostalgia on the surface may be its opposite. What appears to be an eagerness to gain U.S. citizenship is not always what it seems, either. Is it still possible, or even desirable, to go back? Going Back “Are you going back?” is not the most politic of questions.1 The notion that one could be merely a temporary American has been offensive to many (politicized ) Asian Americans. Though the significance of sojourning has long been established in Asian American history, particularly among Chinese American laborers in the late nineteenth century, contemporary scholars and activists have taken great pains to stress the transition from sojourners to settlers . The idea that Asian Americans, some of whose families have been in the United States for generations, are somehow less rooted (or committed)—or, to stretch the implication further, less American—is misleading and sometimes fatally wrongheaded, as the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II demonstrates. But insistence on the permanence of Americanness obscures a kind of flexibility seen among immigrants in a more globalized age—a fluidity, if not in identity, then at the very least, in life options. People do go back and forth; some people, like Teddy Encinas’s father (who is retired and a U.S. citizen), want to spend their retirement in the Philippines. Some people can afford to spend half the year in the United States and half the year in the Philippines. Aihwa Ong’s work (1999) on Hong Kong businessmen2 —who travel back and forth between the United States and Asia, leaving their wives and children in 1 A corollary is “Where are you from?” Asian American Studies classes (like political speeches by Asian Americans, I might add) I have attended or audited, particularly at the undergraduate level, invariably begin with prodding the Asian American audience to recognize how they are seen by the mainstream as “not belonging.” As a discursive strategy, it is employed largely successfully because it keenly resonates with its listeners. But the Filipino respondent—or rather, the immigrant Filipino respondent—will not necessarily take offense. 2 Or “astronauts,” so called because they are said to spend more time in the air than on the ground. CITIZ EN SHIP AN D N OSTALGIA 163...