Desire and Loathing in Carlos Bulosan’s America Is in the Heart and Bienvenido Santos’s The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor

DANILO VICTORINO MANARPAAC

OMPARED TO THE OTHER WARS that the USA fought in the twentieth century, the Spanish–American War of 1898, also known C as America’s ‘splendid little war’, was shorter and had many fewer American casualties. This war also resulted in the extension of American suzerainty to the Philippine Islands, several thousand miles away from the American mainland across the vast Pacific Ocean. To be sure, it was not easy to decide to annex the archipelago, which came with a price tag of twenty million US dollars. The loosely formed anti-imperialist league, for instance, actively opposed any plans to take the islands. But eventually the expansionist politics of the McKinley administration, which was encapsulated in the slogan ‘manifest destiny’, won out over whatever misgivings Americans had. Declar- ing the Filipinos unfit for anything but perhaps the barbarity of guerrilla warfare, the American colonizers promptly embarked on their own brand of civilizing mission, as they violently quenched Filipino resistance to American occupation, which continued well into the twentieth century. The USA sent, among others, some 600 teachers to the Philippines in 1901 to implement an overhaul of the colony’s educational system. Through the Pensionado Act of 1903, the USA also provided government-sponsored education of specially qualified Filipinos at American universities, a short-lived programme that served as a model for various other scholarships that existed until the end of American colonial rule of the islands in 1946. Meanwhile, an acute shortage of labourers on American farms in Hawai’i, also a newly acquired territory, and on the West Coast opened another avenue for Filipinos to go to the colo- 72 DANILO VICTORINO MANARPAAC ¸ nizer’s country. Coming mostly from the arid Ilocos region in the northern Philippines and consisting mostly of unmarried young men, the first wave of Filipino migrant workers in the USA came to be known as the manongs, from the Ilocano honorific for ‘elder brother’. It is estimated that some 125,000 Filipinos entered the USA during the colonial period, forming the pioneer generation of what is now referred to as the Filipino American community.1 From this sociohistorical milieu emerged the Filipino writers Carlos Bulosan and Bienvenido Santos, who painstakingly recorded the travails and minor triumphs of their contemporaries.2 They were born in the Philippines roughly a decade after the Americans usurped control of the archipelago, Santos in 1911, Bulosan two years later in 1913. The two grew up in a country that was undergoing not only political tutelage but also a systematic americanization of social institutions. Formal education in particular was instrumentalized to generate colonial subjects who would assist the colonizers in the quotidian affairs of government and were willing to emulate the values of American society and thereby preserve the colonial status quo. Thus Bulosan, although he received little formal educa- tion in the Philippines, was immersed in American culture and owed his ideas about democracy and social equity to American intellectual tradition. He joined his brother in Seattle in 1930 to labour on the farms and in the canneries of the West Coast, carrying with him this American brand of ideal- ism. But the harsh conditions on the so-called ‘harvest trail’ made him an even more dedicated labour organizer and a socially critical writer, who de- cided “to give a literate voice to the voiceless one hundred thousand Filipinos in the United States, Hawaii, and Alaska.”3 This lifelong mission was evident in the modest corpus of poetry, fiction, essays, and letters that he left behind when he died in 1956. Santos “found [himself] deeply in love with the sound of the English language”4 as early as grade school. In 1941, with nothing more

1 E. Jr. San Juan, Allegories of Resistance: The Philippines at the Threshold of the Twen- ty-First Century (Quezon City: U of the Philippines P, 1994): 18. 2 For a comprehensive history of Filipino immigration to the United States, see H. Brett Melendy, Asians in America: Filipinos, Koreans, and East Indians (New York: Hippocrene, 1977); Ronald Takaki, Strangers From a Different Shore: A History of Asian Americans (Boston MA: Little, Brown, 1989); and Sucheng Chan, Asian Americans: An Interpretive History (Boston MA: Twayne, 1991). Renato Constantino, The Philippines: A Past Re- visited (Quezon City: Tala, 1975) and Teodoro A. Agoncillo, History of the Filipino People (1960; Quezon City: Garotech, 1990) are good references on Philippine history, despite their nationalist bias. 3 Quoted in E. Jr. San Juan, “Introduction,” Amerasia Journal 6 (1979): 26. 4 Bienvenido Santos, “The Filipino Writer in English as Storyteller and Translator,” in Asian Voices in English, ed. Mimi Chan & Roy Harris (Hong Kong: Hong Kong UP, 1991): 45.