straight-up pinay forever
Actually, while we're on the subject of ambiguities, I'd like to give a shout-out to the Pin@ys out there in the audience.
Despite the bumper sticker on my truck, I am not a straight-up Pinay, any more than I am a straight-up anything. My father's family have been in the U.S. for a few decades longer than my mother's, and they come from Central and Eastern Europe. There be redheads, there, truth be told.
And my mother's family? As she's constantly reminding me, they're not straight-up anything, either. We can call them "Filipino" or whatever we like--dig a little deeper and we're a lot Spanish, some Fujian Chinese, some Malaysian, some Pacific Islander of the flavor that generally has "-nesian" attached at the end, along with whatever portion is actually indigenous. My relatives on that side of the family vary widely, with names in Tagalog, Spanish, Chinese; broad Malay noses and long Andalusian ones, nut-brown skin and pale olive. There's racism from the whiter ones toward the more Asian-Pacific-Islander ones. There's issues with who's from the northern islands, and who's from further south.
To be Pinay or Pinoy is to be mestiz@. Period. It's a country that's been colonized over and over, with mixing every time. My ancestors were multiracial long before I was.
And it's one of those things I've been thinking about, with all this organizing around antiracism and so on: where does a Pinay fit? In North America, our status in terms of "race" gets very strange. Depending on what city you live in, what's the makeup of your local Filipino community, it seems like nobody's sure who claims us or which box we're supposed to check.
Lots of us--most of us, even--are Spanish-speaking, or at least partially descended from Spanish speakers. We come out brownish. My cousins in one branch of the family are generally read as Latin@s, and that's fine with them; that's where their community is. Spanish-speaking brown mestiz@s with ancestors who were colonizers from Iberia. So do we--with all that in common--count as Latin@? Not really, not quite. For one, the "indigenous" in the mix is Asian/Pacific-Islander. So is that what we count as? Well, sort of--except for the language barriers, and the fact that for many of my relatives, countries like China and Japan sent colonizers and occupiers, too. Where's the sense of pan-Asian identity for those of my family who lived under the Japanese occupation during World War II? You'd be hard-pressed to find it. I identify as Asian-American, in part, but people often blink when I tell them so. They read me as Latina, or as Arab, or maybe as Andalusiana.
Filipin@s are everywhere in the world, from Honolulu to Los Angeles to Dubai to Jerusalem, largely doing crap jobs for other people. In the US, the Philippine Scouts don't even get veterans' benefits. It seems like in these big sweeps of identity-based organizing, Pinoys and Pinays get left out to dry--we don't really fit in with our Latin American cousins, and we don't seem to fit in with our mainland Asian cousins, either. Those of our greater family who left for the south and east across the Pacific left us behind, even if we caught up with them to do yard work on Kaua'i. What organizing do we do and around what rallying points? Maybe I'm just cut off from my community, in that way, and I missed the bus. I know I can work under the greater, umbrella People of Color banner, but when it gets down to nuts and bolts, I'm usually the only Filipina in the room.
There's missing pieces, here. I think there's also a lot of interesting conversations to be had--some ongoing, some years old, some yet to come.
Straight up.
Despite the bumper sticker on my truck, I am not a straight-up Pinay, any more than I am a straight-up anything. My father's family have been in the U.S. for a few decades longer than my mother's, and they come from Central and Eastern Europe. There be redheads, there, truth be told.
And my mother's family? As she's constantly reminding me, they're not straight-up anything, either. We can call them "Filipino" or whatever we like--dig a little deeper and we're a lot Spanish, some Fujian Chinese, some Malaysian, some Pacific Islander of the flavor that generally has "-nesian" attached at the end, along with whatever portion is actually indigenous. My relatives on that side of the family vary widely, with names in Tagalog, Spanish, Chinese; broad Malay noses and long Andalusian ones, nut-brown skin and pale olive. There's racism from the whiter ones toward the more Asian-Pacific-Islander ones. There's issues with who's from the northern islands, and who's from further south.
To be Pinay or Pinoy is to be mestiz@. Period. It's a country that's been colonized over and over, with mixing every time. My ancestors were multiracial long before I was.
And it's one of those things I've been thinking about, with all this organizing around antiracism and so on: where does a Pinay fit? In North America, our status in terms of "race" gets very strange. Depending on what city you live in, what's the makeup of your local Filipino community, it seems like nobody's sure who claims us or which box we're supposed to check.
Lots of us--most of us, even--are Spanish-speaking, or at least partially descended from Spanish speakers. We come out brownish. My cousins in one branch of the family are generally read as Latin@s, and that's fine with them; that's where their community is. Spanish-speaking brown mestiz@s with ancestors who were colonizers from Iberia. So do we--with all that in common--count as Latin@? Not really, not quite. For one, the "indigenous" in the mix is Asian/Pacific-Islander. So is that what we count as? Well, sort of--except for the language barriers, and the fact that for many of my relatives, countries like China and Japan sent colonizers and occupiers, too. Where's the sense of pan-Asian identity for those of my family who lived under the Japanese occupation during World War II? You'd be hard-pressed to find it. I identify as Asian-American, in part, but people often blink when I tell them so. They read me as Latina, or as Arab, or maybe as Andalusiana.
Filipin@s are everywhere in the world, from Honolulu to Los Angeles to Dubai to Jerusalem, largely doing crap jobs for other people. In the US, the Philippine Scouts don't even get veterans' benefits. It seems like in these big sweeps of identity-based organizing, Pinoys and Pinays get left out to dry--we don't really fit in with our Latin American cousins, and we don't seem to fit in with our mainland Asian cousins, either. Those of our greater family who left for the south and east across the Pacific left us behind, even if we caught up with them to do yard work on Kaua'i. What organizing do we do and around what rallying points? Maybe I'm just cut off from my community, in that way, and I missed the bus. I know I can work under the greater, umbrella People of Color banner, but when it gets down to nuts and bolts, I'm usually the only Filipina in the room.
There's missing pieces, here. I think there's also a lot of interesting conversations to be had--some ongoing, some years old, some yet to come.
Straight up.
Labels: postcolonial, race
posted by little light | 3:42 PM
11 Comments:
Damn two posts in one day, and both are awesome. When will we be so lucky again?
I actually had a conversation with a (Chinese American) friend of mine a while back where he said the recent movement among Filipino/as to identify as Pacific Islander rather than Asian was "stupid." While I disagreed with his point of view, it kind of got me thinking. Because you make some pretty good points, the Phillipines has more in common with other mestiz@ communities than it does with East Asia. Or even South East Asia, which also has a colonial history (hell who doesn't) but still pretty different.
You make a really good point about the social status that Filipin@s have in the US today, I think. Since just looking at the way Hawaii works today, Japanese and Chinese Americans clearly feel some kind of kinship, but that definitely does not always extend, particularly in our grandparents' generations, and our parents' to Filipin@s. They're generally seen as much lower on the racial totem pole. (Well, according to the way my grandparents see the world anyway)
I think there was actually even a court case where a Filipino man argued he was eligible to marry a white woman because while Mongolian was listed as one of the races which were listed in anti-miscegenation laws, he was not in fact Mongolian, but rather Malay. (I believe the govt then added Malay to the restricted race category.)
So despite the problematic nature of placing the Phillipines in the category of Asian, do you still identify as Asian American?
Anyway, clearly I have a lot to say on the subject, but I'll stop nerding out at this point.
Great post.
It's a sketchy question, you know? I do identify as Asian American or Southeast Asian American, and I'm very proud to do so. Per above, I'm not just Filipina on that side, I'm also Chinese and Malaysian. And I do identify as Pacific Islander, as well, with possibly even more of a cultural connection; because my mother spent a good chunk of her childhood in Hawai'i and I'm very attached to the place and have had family there, and so on, a lot of ties got built.
At the same time, I also have to recognize that I'm not immediately recognizable as a member of these groups. When I showed up for Asian student meetings back in school, for instance, everyone looked at me funny. And some of what race is--as a fictive cultural construct--is how everyone else is seeing you. I think this is an important component in what I'm talking about with Filipino American identity--that a lot of what we "count as" is what the communities around us think we are, just as much as our own self-identifications sometimes.
If you're living in an APIA-heavy community, speaking Tagalog, and eating adobo and lumpia with rice, maybe you're identifiable as Asian American to outsiders, and treated accordingly, with all attendant stereotypes about rice-rockets and exoticism and passive womenfolk. If you're living in a Latin@-heavy community, speaking Spanish, and eating adobo and longasina and paella, maybe you're identified by outsiders as difficult to distinguish from your Chicano or Salvadoran neighbors, with, again, all attendant assumptions. Is the surname Canseco? Rodriguez? Garcia? Tan? Is your dinner focused on rice, yams, or potatoes? What about Filipinos who are of Mexican descent, not just Spanish?
That said, I have to take into account that I'm often read as Latina, and that Latinos are a lot of who my family always associated with. My grandfather always claimed to be the first man of color in the US Navy's nuclear school, but the rest of us aren't so distinguished, and--as most of my relatives are Spanish speakers from Luzon--miss getting marked as Asian.
My mother was in the Latin@ Brownout Marches in southern California, once upon a time. And when I got shit about race as a kid, it was often for being "Mexican." (It's funny. Right around 2001, they stopped calling my little brother "spic" and "beaner" and started in with "camel-jockey" and "rock-chucker." Pick a Brown, any Brown. Vilify. Lather, rinse, repeat.) So there's also the issue of solidarity.
I see it, in a lot of cases, as a sort of marriage of convenience, like the inclusion of transgender advocacy along with the rest of the GLBQ alphabet soup. It's not because all of us necessarily have queer orientations, or that generally, say, gay people are gender-non-conforming. But when people go after us, it's often because we're conflated; because assumptions are made both about gender role and who we have sex with, when one or the other isn't relevant; we often share communities, and have a lot of community overlap; and in the public's eyes, we tend to go together like peanut butter and jelly, even when it's not true. Banding together and having each others' backs is just sort of a pragmatism. I see very similar dynamics in Pin@y identities and associations.
If someone's going to mess with me and my family because the surrounding community sees us as Latin@, to a certain degree our solidarity isn't even a matter of choice, it's just the reality of the situation.
(You make a really interesting point about Hawai'i, too, you know? It's also about who else offers us solidarity. If our Korean- and Chinese- and Japanese-American neighbors are treating us as cousins, we often are, but that often doesn't happen. My uncle strongly identifies with Japanese culture. My grandfather and great-grandfather roll in their graves about it.)
So, yeah. The short answer is I identify as Asian American, as Southeast Asian American, as Pacific Islander American, as mestiza, and, in some ways, as a sort of mutant Latina. That is, it's a mess.
Interesting stuff, I always felt that the Filipino community was sort of distant from the "rest" of the Asian American community in a way that Vietnamese and Cambodian people aren't. Perhaps the spanish speaking contributes to this. I also feel that Indonesia and Malaysia are similarly distant.
Although as you point out, it is ultimately a kind of hybrid community, with East Asian who immigrated there as well as many other types of people as well. So it's as Asian as any other country that's categorized as such, and quite a bit more Asian than some other places that are supposedly Asian, like Iran or Turkey. (The jury's still out on Turkey though since they joined the EU).
Anyway, it's pretty interesting to explore the borders of Asian America, since they're not really as clear as people think. South Asians, Asian or not? If rice is the great unifier than yeah. But religion, culture, and appearance-wise maybe not so much.
I know that some Pacific Islanders have expressed dissatisfaction with being subsumed under the API umbrella. A similar marriage of convenience, as you put it, but I think one in which the "A" part of API is clearly dominant over the "PI" and really when are native Hawaiian concerns for example truly given more than lip service by the Asian American people or even academia?
the "A" part of API is clearly dominant over the "PI" and really when are native Hawaiian concerns for example truly given more than lip service by the Asian American people or even academia?
Yes yes yes yes. Oh man, yes. Thank you for articulating this. I see plenty about "APIA" organizing or whatever that mentions nothing about Pacific Islander concerns. Hawai'ian indigenous rights/nationalism/whatever? Shrug. Samoan sovereignty? Shrug. Extreme poverty in Polynesia? US nuclear testing in the South Pacific? The fate of Bikini Islanders? Maori-community gang violence? Massive influx of missionaries wiping out local culture? Shrug shrug shrug. And there's a real hierarchy to it.
You are absolutely spot-on.
On a slightly less raving note, the distance you see with Malaysians and Indonesians from other Asian communities is worth looking at, I think. Do you think the large Muslim populations there have something to do with it? I know that might be a distinguishing factor, at least as comes to mind for me, seeing as the rest of "East Asia" only has very small Muslim minorities (excepting Xinjiang, anyhow, and that's another damn thing to talk about), while Indonesia, the southern Philippines, and Malaysia all range from having a large minority to a majority.
Hmmmmm.
Aren't people's brains peculiar when it comes to stereotyping? Even folk who fall into the same category can still tag you as a fellow transgendered kid and lose other important parts of you in the shuffle. I myself now refuse to admit my S.E.S. due to the phenominally obnoxious stereotyping I've had to put up with; as soon as people know my background, they dont care about my education, my personal history, or much of anything else; I become, to them, what they can identify me as. Of course, I have the luxury of of simply not admitting certain parts my past. You are in a rather different position.
Which brings us to the meat of my comment: I can't even articulate my respect for the determination you show to have all your qualities -- trans., queer, WOC, occultist -- recognized. I sort of resent it when people do nothing but blithely support stereotypes; it does nothing to make people think more about the prejudices they hold, the assumptions they've made, and how they could be more enlightened about how they view the world.
Good on ya.
A side note: why the crap are there so many "@" symbols in the latest post? Are we supposed to be seeing an accent? Is this an interblag convention I haven't met yet?
'Stove, before I respond to the rest of it: the @ symbols, you'll note, are only placed strategically. It's a typographical convention common mostly among people dealing with Spanish but of a particular bent, because it looks like an 'a' and an 'o' superimposed on each other: that is, "Latin@" fills the same purpose as "Latino/a" without prioritizing one gendering of the word over the other, using only one, or putting one first. Same for "Pinoy/Pinay" and "Chican@" and so on.
...
I'm mildly embarrased that I didn't figure that out on my own. Dang.
Thanks for clearing that one up.
I haven't even finished my longer comment on your last post, but I wanted to add one here too. Damn, so true. Especially about the hierarchy, and the invisibility, and the weird looks. Even in relatively smart, progressive circles, I have seen Filipino Americans met with looks of confusion and "wait what is uh is he huh oh..." kind of reactions. I have one friend and colleague who is Pinoy and trans, and he has definitely talked in similar ways about "people of color" as a banner to stand under, mixture of Latino and Filipino identity and the problems that has caused, etc. I'll write more about the erasure of intersecting identities later, there's so much to say.
I am so in favor of multiple identities, like you name: Asian-American, Southeast-Asian-American, Pacific Islander, API, people of color. Why not have lots of hats? It doesn't dilute anything. And a lot of people's insistence on categories is so fucking semantic and myopic. I have had some conversations about this recently with South Asian friends too -- that people are confused when they talk about being asian, because somehow "indian" or "desi" if you're cool, must be a different category, because asians aren't "supposed" to have darker skin in people's dumbass 80s "Rainbow Connection" coloring books, we're supposed to be yellow. But in the UK, on the other hand, I keep hearing that it's more common for "asian" to refer to desi people, and then east asians get qualified. SE asians, probably still marginalized... sigh. It's all just facets of ancient racist dissections of people into arbitrary groups with attached stereotypes...
LOVE, LOVE this post.
Oh, thank God. I knew you'd read this, Sudy, and I was terrified you'd drop by to say, "Look, hermana, that's some bullshit, there, and you don't know nothin' about being Pinay." Or something. I dunno. I'm glad that the other Pilipina out there who I know about thought well of this discussion. I'd love to hear if you have anything to add.
Holly: please feel free to add anything you like to this discussion. Hell, if you want to make it a guest post or something, I'm happy to host you if you don't have another space to put it.
This post has given me a lot to think about. I'm half-Filipina and half-white, though I was raised away from my extended Filipino family and as a result am pretty whitewashed. It's only recently that I've even begun to consider what it means to be Filipina.
So yeah. Lots of thoughts over here. Thanks for sharing yours :)
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