While reading Yay Panlilio’s “My Filipino Mother,” I continued to come back to the notion of the “invisible” that Ngai brings up in Impossible Subjects. The entrance of Filipino laborers into the United States in the 1920s and 30s marked a historical moment in which Americans had to confront their colonial subjects as one might confront repressed memories (Ngai 97). While American colonial exploits were traditionally rendered invisible in the national imaginary through myths of benevolent assimilation and manifest destiny, Filipino migration insisted on making visible the contradictions inherent in those myths (97). I am interested in the ways in which Filipino immigrants oscillated between visibility and invisibility in the eyes of the American government and its citizens. Ngai notes that “throughout the twenties most white Americans had barely noticed Filipinos” (105). Issues of Filipino migration were not taken up in popular periodicals, and were not integrated into social welfare policy (105). Linda Maram, in “‘White Trash’ and ‘Brown Hordes,’” argues that Filipinos did not enjoy the benefits of New Deal relief programs because the government viewed them as both alien and temporary residents (Maram 121). Eventually, the increase of Filipino immigrants, the organization of groups like the Filipino Federation of America, and demands for wage equality among Filipino laborers would increase the visibility of this community and prompt a period of anti-Filipino violence (Ngai 107). Increasing fears over the influx of Filipino immigration would lead to repatriation programs that would ensure a “return to invisibility” (120). However, what I am most intrigued by in relation to “My Filipino Mother” is (1) the relative invisibility of the Filipino immigrant in the eyes of government policy, (2) how that invisibility may also be understood as reflecting the Filipino immigrant’s liminal status as U.S. nationals, and (3) how Valentina/Dolores is a liminal character incapable of being named, nor of being grounded in spatial or temporal terms.
In Panlilio’s short story, the Filipino mother constantly resists definition. For example, the narrator’s anxieties about her mother result from the fact that the latter cannot be fixed to a specific racial, spatial or even temporal identity: Valentina/Dolores is “wise as the Ages, neither black nor white nor yellow, and still obviously non-American, and peculiarly reserved and unconquerable and pleased to be what she was, whatever she was” (10-11). The narrator establishes her mother’s timelessness, and later observes that the latter does not know when she was born. Spatial markers, like temporal markers, prove insufficient in defining the Filipino mother: “Herself already years in America, my mother at last knew the name of the state to which a missionary benefactor had taken her: Montana. She did not know exactly where it was in relation to her port of origin” (17). The mother is also anchored in a space that is constantly portrayed as negative: the narrator remarks that once her mother is in America she is “there, halfway nowhere, and she could not return” (20). She comes to embody that negative space when she tells her daughter that “‘I am the nothing from which you came. Yet, without me, you would be nothing’” (40). The mother’s sense of nothingness is a reference to her lack of connection to a stable place or identity, her sense that she is both nowhere and incapable of returning to her origins. The mother’s move to the United States is representative of the temporal and spatial rupture that occurs in any type of migration. Yet, as Ngai argues, Filipino migration was unique in its initial invisibility in public discourse and social policy. I would argue that Panlilio deals with the mother’s uncertain status (as a U.S. national, as an illegal, as a non-citizen), by metaphorically unhinging her from time and space. I wonder whether her lack of definition is also an act of resistance.
“My Filipino Mother” explores the U.S Immigration Service in order to unhinge facile notions about its power to define the immigrant. The American government virtually ignores Valentina/Dolores since it cannot register her physical landing in America in 1906. The San Francisco earthquake of that year causes the mother's ship to dock in Vancouver. She is therefore absent from official government records that note define 1911, rather than 1906, as the year in which "the first three female Filipinos arrived in America" (Panlilio 17). Importantly, the earthquake that allows the Filipino mother to absent herself from documentation and definition is the same earthquake that leads the Chinese to claim citizenship rights by constructing paper histories of their families and origins. Out of the rubble and chaos of lost records comes new immigrant narratives, new immigrant efforts to reinscribe their identities as naturalized citizens into an official (however inaccurate) narrative of history.
Though the government of Panlilio's short story eventually discovers her to be illegal, it ultimately “had other things to do. It left her as she was” (Panlilio 16). The narrator points to the irony of the fact that her mother “had cunningly offered her fate to have it hurriedly handed back” (17). She makes herself vulnerable to government policies of Asiatic exclusion, only to be deemed too unimportant for repatriation. In fact, the narrator subverts the government’s power to define its subjects as legal or illegal, alien or citizen, by transferring such power to the mother, who is herself “a taste of government to last anybody a lifetime” and a “first person-in-power to hate” (9). The conflation of maternal and governmental power is an interesting move, since it allows Valentina/Dolores to embark on a journey of self-definition that does not take into account her status as a state subject.
Obviously this is a very rough teasing-out of complex ideas. I’d encourage anyone to add onto this by thinking about what Panlilio is saying about the Filipino immigrant experience and status.
No comments:
Post a Comment