For me, “mobility” emerged as one of the primary themes of Maram’s article, “‘White Trash’ and ‘Brown Hordes.’” Maram outlines the anxieties generated among the California elite by the migration of poor southerners to the state during the Great Depression, and she suggests that similar fears of social decay surrounded the “Taxi Dance Hall,” a space where Filipino men mingled with white women. I was struck by Maram’s portrayal of a remarkably "mobile" Filipino labor force; she notes that “car payments” typically made up the largest monthly expenditure of a Filipino worker (113), and she recounts how Filipinos forged and maintained social ties over great distances (for example, “Escalona and his friends thought nothing of driving 300 miles round trip, in the middle of the workweek, to watch a boxing match with fellow Filipinos”) (111). The very name of the dance clubs---“Taxi” Dance Halls---suggests an act of travel; customers pay to take a “ride” across the floor. Just as the elites feared the ability of “white trash” to invade their cities, they seem to have resented the cultural and racial boundary-crossing and freedom of movement the Filipino laborers asserted. Maram characterizes these working-class recreational activities as sites of resistance: “workers, marginalized by class, race, age, or gender, took back what they felt was rightfully theirs: their bodies, their time, and the freedom to construct, affirm, or reject identities in their own fashion among their peers” (126).
However, even while elites feared the unrestricted movement of male Filipino bodies, they also seem to have criticized these Filipino men for not being “socially-mobile” enough. In particular, members of the Filipino community opposed to dances halls seem to have argued that the recreation represented a waste of time, energy, and money; the dance halls drained young men of the resources they might have used to “properly” advance and climb the “social ladder” of American society. In fact, geographic and class mobility represent key elements of the myth of the “American dream”; a Filipino graduate student held up as a Filipino “success story” also recounts a tale of extraordinary physical and social mobility, but in a way that did not violate dominant cultural norms: “[The student] presented himself as a Filipino Horatio Alger who came to California with no money but with a burning desire for advanced education…Corpus told the FWP interviewer, ‘I think it is wonderful that a Filipino boy can come to this country without funds and work his way to both an A.B. and M.A. degree’” (127).
It seems that there are “good” and “bad” kinds of social mobility at play here, and perhaps what upset elites (especially those within the Filipino community) the most about Filipinos who attended the dance halls was not their mobility but rather their refusal to “work their way up”---they circled the dance floor rather than striving for social advancement by adopting the social mores and pastimes of middle- and upper-class white society. Of course, what the “Horatio Alger myth” of the hardworking individual’s limitless potential for success in America ignores is the country's systematic barring of certain groups from social resources; elite Californians seems to have demanded a settled middle-class domesticity from a workforce they preferred to maintain in the form of “migrant” labor.
Maram portrays the taxi dance hall as a site of resistance in almost uniformly positive terms, stressing the idea that these halls represented spaces of empowerment for the Filipino working-class. However, I think that the poem that opens this chapter expresses a more ambivalent and complicated experience of simultaneous mobility and stasis, empowerment and disempowerment; while the poet suggests, “I forgot my labor for awhile at the taxi dance,” the end of the poem registers frustration and a sense of almost violent physical regimentation---the dance represents an ultimately unconsummated movement: “but the goddamn tickets for you went so fast into three minutes ten-cent squeezes” (107).
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