Filipino Americans remain underrepresented — even during AAPI Heritage Month

During the 2018 Emmy Awards, co-host Michael Che cracked jokes about their lack of representation. “TV has always had a diversity problem,” he said. “I mean, can you believe they did 15 seasons of ‘ER’ without one Filipino nurse? Have you been to a hospital?” It was a potent comment, given that the Philippines is the largest sender of professional nurses to the United States; a third of foreign-born nurses are Filipino. They dominate in the health-care sector today because U.S. imperialism led to the establishment of U.S.-style nursing schools in the Philippines.

More broadly, Filipinos actually constitute the fourth-largest immigrant group in the country following those from Mexico, China and India, numbering around 4 million. According to the Migration Policy Institute, “Filipinos are more likely than other immigrants to have strong English skills and have much higher college education rates than the overall foreign and U.S.-born populations. They are also more likely to be naturalized U.S. citizens than other immigrant groups, have higher incomes and lower poverty rates.” Given the growing numbers and relative success of Filipinos, why the glaring and persistent underrepresentation of Filipino Americans in politics, business, high technology and culture (Bruno Mars aside)?

The main reason that Filipino Americans are less visible in American life is because of the erasure of U.S. imperialism from American life.

The starting point of relations between the United States and the Philippines was a bloodshed unknown to many Americans today: the Philippine-American War from 1899 to 1902. A cloud of historical amnesia still envelops this bloody conflict, despite the war’s higher U.S. casualty rate and longer duration than the preceding (and better-known) Spanish-American War.

This elision may be rooted in American actions during that conflict that today we recognize as war crimes: torture, killing of prisoners of war, forced relocation of peasants into concentration camps, scorched earth policies and indiscriminate killing of noncombatants. The U.S. justification for war was couched as an act of benevolence: the “pacification” of defiant natives unwilling to accept the gift of democracy owing to their putative state of savagery.

The reality, however, was that the war was an act of unbridled imperialism. Indeed, six scores and three years after America declared its independence from the British empire in 1776, the United States ironically found itself an empire sending its imperial troops across the Pacific to subjugate a country yearning for national self-determination.

Once conquered, America’s new colony would eventually become an important, and at times exceptional, source of Asian immigrant labor to America.

And yet despite their official status as U.S. colonial subjects, invisibility followed Filipino immigrants as they journeyed to America and contributed to its economic development. Filipino agricultural laborers on the West Coast made significant contributions to the development of Western agribusiness over many decades, but they were rarely acknowledged.

The presence of Filipino colonial laborers in America put in sharp relief a fundamental tension in U.S. immigration history: the contradiction between the nation’s economic needs — cheap labor, often found overseas — and its nativism and anti-Asian bigotry. What’s more, they were stark reminders of an uneasy coexistence between our imperial present and our anti-colonial past. Filipino workers were needed yet not wanted, and thus relegated to the peripheral spaces of their mother country, hidden from sight.

They also remain hidden in how we remember U.S. history. As a precondition for Philippine independence in 1946, the United States demanded not only the rent-free preservation of its military bases upon sovereign Philippine soil but also the continuation of Filipino recruitment into the U.S. Navy, though now they would join not as imperial subjects but as Philippine citizens.

By the early 1950s, up to 2,000 Philippine men per year enlisted as navy “stewards.” Stewards performed servant labor for naval officers: cleaning their quarters, cooking and serving their food, taking care of their wardrobe and being at their beck and call. It was widely considered to be the most menial of Navy jobs, located at the bottommost rung of the naval occupational hierarchy. And it was racialized — sailors of color tended to serve as stewards.

The sharp increase in Filipino steward recruitment in the 1950s came as African American sailors began to resist their spatial and occupational segregation aboard naval ships and within offshore bases. Recruitment and reenlistment rates of Black sailors plummeted. The Navy regarded Filipinos as viable replacements for defiant Black sailors — both due to long-standing colonial ties, and because of stereotypes about Asian passivity.

Yet Filipino sailors dashed those expectations. Filipino stewards forged a culture of resistance, with tactics paralleling those practiced by enslaved people, indentured servants and other unfree workers of the past. Forms of “passive resistance” included foot-dragging, cooking distasteful meals, feigning illness and others. Some acts were not so passive. To protest their working conditions, Filipino stewards issued direct complaints to the Bureau of Naval Personnel, destroyed naval property and even at times banded together in collective refusal to work. For the most defiant Filipinos, the punishment for their insolence was months spent in the Navy brig and subsequent discharge.

By the 1960s, these acts of resistance forced the U.S. Navy to realize its race problem encompassed not just Black sailors, but Filipinos as well. Eventually the Navy ended the antiquated tradition of racialized servant labor while reversing its problem of racial underrepresentation by the 1970s. Filipino stewards were thus significant actors in the racial desegregation of the Navy — but their contribution has not been acknowledged until now (in my book, “Lured by the American Dream.”)

Filipino worker resistance extended beyond the military. By the 1960s, Filipino and Mexican farmworkers united to form a coalition — the United Farm Workers — despite the racial divide-and-conquer tactics of agribusiness growers. And yet, like the unsung activism of Filipino stewards, prominent Filipino labor leaders such as Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz are rarely mentioned alongside figures like Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, despite their equally critical role in galvanizing union solidarity.

What explains this recurring invisibility? U.S. colonialism is the main reason because imperial histories in the past were not written from the perspective of the colonized. Ignoring Filipino voices extended to those who moved to the United States. Erasure probably remains insofar as the cognitive dissonance between imperialism and democracy is repressed within national memory.

And yet you can’t tell the story of the United States without acknowledging the place of Filipino Americans. We’ve been here all along. This AAPI Heritage Month, let’s lift up these stories and tell richer histories that center both U.S. empire and the contributions and presence of Filipinos.