Inventing ourselves as Filipinos

Despite myth and ideology, the US of A is a multicultural society that, because of its segregationist tendencies, nurtures 'primordial' identity feelings. As one of the biggest Spanish-speaking countries, this is obvious enough among the Chicanos and variant Latinos, but also other second and third generation descendants of original immigrants are somehow stimulated to keep their ethnic identity alive. Over time, such identity is increasingly rooted in group- and generation specific rituals and other invented traditions. In other words, identities evolve over the years and, at the personal level, even over one's life time.

Nostalgic desire

Gonzalves paraphrased his book's title from "The Day the Dancers Came" by the Filipino American writer Bienvenido Santos. In that story, an old-time 'indentured' labourer eagerly anticipates to revive his youth, his nation, his origin, through watching a Philippine cultural show that has come to town—and that does not evoke any recognition. He has outlived his roots as it were, and so he realises that he is an outcast, without identity, and no better than refuse.

The audience of the performances the author describes is as different from our pariah as the other face of the moon. It consists of the children (and grandchildren) of post-war, meanwhile mainly middle-class immigrants who currently study at colleges and universities and who organize, for their own benefit, the yearly Philippine Cultural Nights that are the proper subject of the monograph.

In order to trace the evolution of the shows' contents, the author takes us back to the 1930s, when contemporary cultural expressions were taking after the example of American popular culture. At that time, educators Jorge Bocobo and Francisca Reyes Aquino felt that the country, on the eve of commonwealth status and impending independence, needed to develop a cultural repertoire rooted in the pre-Spanish past. In order to do so, they sought inspiration in the folklore (costumes, music, dances) of the groups that had withstood the Iberian intrusion and retained much of their own. Subsequently, they invented and developed a national repertoire that, in the 1950s, culminated in the internationally acclaimed pageant of the Bayanihan Philippine Dance Company. According to a foreign critic, this troupe presents 'an ethnic dance culture which has gone beyond simple preservation and into creative growth', while becoming the government's Official Cultural Mission to the Americas and Europe (72).

Whereas it may be expected that, in the course of its adaptation to theatre and stage, and in its development as a world-class dance company, the original sources of inspiration 'there up in the hills' get distorted or even become unrecognizable, the rise of Bayanihan (and similar groups) coincided with a time of a deep cultural crisis in which the nation seemed to be deprived of identity and purpose. In this way, Bayanihan filled a void and became a primary icon of 'Philippine culture.'

This iconisation of folklore-derived 'culture' that exists as it were without identifiable culture bearers moulded the yearly Philippine Cultural Nights at a variety of campuses. Then, the second and third generation student-children of Filipino immigrants celebrate an idealized origin in dance and display à la Bayanihan, interspersed with a standard repertoire of historical skits. Whereas the participants commit much effort and pride to the perfection of these shows, they have, from the 1970s and into the present, acquired such a rigidity as to become standardized 'rites of passage' that, of course, with each following generation of students will be understood in different ways. Be this as it may, as a staple ritual the PCNs have become an easy target for satire (ch. 5) that has, however, not made a dent in the programming.

The crux is the performance

The author is a musician, composer and theatre performer who, as an academic, focuses on Filipino American and performance studies, and so it is not strange that 'performance' takes the centre of the stage. This results in straightforward descriptions of shows, countless names, and a collage of dates and historical titbits that fail to evoke the forest that has gone lost for the trees. What has become clear, however, is that the PCNs are there to stay as a ritual marker of belonging to the Filipino community in America, comparable to celebrations of those of Irish, Italian, Mexican, or Chinese descent. In this context, the author has used the idea that participation in a PCN serves as a rite of passage, presumably on the way to becoming a fully fledged Filipino American [?], with the rite itself evoking nostalgia, or the desire to obliterate history and to turn it into a private or collective [presumably identity-confirming] mythology (142-3).

Whereas this interpretation sounds plausible, I dearly miss the subjective experience of the audience and, largely, of the performers, too. By stating that the PCNs are an expression of diasporic identification, we still remain in the dark about what the performances trigger off at the individual level. What are the images and illusions of the Philippines evoked? Do these play any role in one's identity feelings or in the way one shapes one's life? How are these things being talked about? Etc. But perhaps, in this day and age, simulacra à la Baudrillard substitute, or 'surrogate' as Gonzalves calls it, the real thing without question and render research into the personal moment superfluous.