This has been written: The Filipinos walked out to protest and the Mexicans followed. It was called the Delano grape strike. Filipinos—a big number of them illiterate—rose against the capitalists to fight for just wage and better labor practices.
The labor strike, which was organized by the Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee, a predominantly Filipino organization of farm workers, led to the creation of the United Farm Workers.
It is 1965. A number of Filipinos in a grape plantation in California are working under difficult situations and meager pay. They are part of the early Filipino diaspora. Theirs is a story always of success in the land of plenty. We know them as grandfathers and granduncles. They remained single because of anti-miscegenation law. With their savings they vacation as old men in their homes of ancient childhood. But we never think of them as heroes, as liberators of other wage laborers. We cannot imagine them as old men whose memories are not found in the promised land of USA but in those distant towns to which they would forever send their dollars.
Histories have banished them. In the place of their stories are woven the tale of the vigilant Chicanos led by Cesar Chavez. A film would be made about him by the Mexican actor Diego Luna in 2014.
On record, the Filipino American National Historical Society called out the producers of the film for inaccurate portrayal of that dramatic moment in labor history where Filipinos figured prominently.
This year, in Daang Dokyu, the first Philippine festival of documentaries recovered the lost histories of the laborers in The Delano Manongs: The Forgotten Heroes. Their achievements, however, are not the only victim of historical erasures.
Women are generally unseen in the many historical accounts of the country. When one goes through accounts of the Second World War, the heroes are generally male, their stories reeking of toxic masculinity. No one talks of those women who helped wounded soldiers or carried intelligence reports to the guerillas. It is only now that the stories of women in the war are being told, with documentarians beating the historians to the storytelling.
In the so-called proletariat uprising, the women seem not be in existence. If and when the role of women in the peasant movement is articulated, it is through the image of victims of militarization. The human agency is missing and the women are there because of personal accidents or of more hapless situation—battery by husband, widowhood, etc.
In anniversary celebrations of historical milestones, nothing has really changed.
Our mainstream histories have remained Eurocentric, their data tied to archives that are pilgrimage sites in colonial capitals, written in the language of conquistadores, the original parchments and fragments consulted like mighty oracles, their citations designed to create awe in readers.
We thus have heroes—and the heroines—created in the likeness of the white male conquerors.
Look at how Lapu-Lapu has disappeared under the star presences of those who composed the expedition from the West in the 14th century. The otherwise mythical imagination of the chieftain has been diminished by a “discovery” that he was an old man during that famous Battle in Mactan. These insights are developed from the field reports filed by the conquering forces. No benefit of the doubt is given (after a few months, posters came out and Lapu-Lapu is once more a virile young man. We are lost).
In other areas, the struggles for liberation against the wave of colonizers are still placed under “rebellion,” with the Filipinos marked as “bad” for rising against the Spanish, first, and the Americans, later.
Look at how we treat the nativistic or millenarian movements as amusing. The bad academic would call the fight for freedom of the Pulajanes and even the Huk as “folk” in nature. As if any people’s movement is inferior because its leaders are “not educated.” The other side of that is the over-articulation of the country’s intelligentsia in the 19th and 20th centuries, respectively. Look at museums and be impressed by local heroes who had gone to Spain to study or whose acumen as a leader is supported by his or her knowledge of the Spanish and American language.
For all the theories of deconstruction and our fancy for post-modernist perspective, we do not have the guts to call the Christianization of the country as colonization. We feel awkward to condemn friars, finding in archives (again) glorious examples of their benevolence. Never mind the forced labor to build houses for their gods, never mind their abuses, our capacity to forgive is equal to our ability to forget. The path to historical erasures is paved and gilded by missionaries and Catholic historians.
In Sorsogon, a Roman Catholic Church, in a town called Barcelona, underwent massive renovation. Let me ask this: will the National Historical Museum also raise funds to repair the sagging roofs and weakened walls of any church of Iglesia Independiente de Filipinas?
We honor Bishop Barlin but who remembers Obispo Vicente Ramirez who stood for the real Filipino Church against the Roman Catholic Church? That dispute is found in that famous Barlin versus Ramirez case that has become part of Philippine jurisprudence? Barlin would win the legal tussle, the lands that were by the Filipinos remaining in the hands of the colonial church. The wise Americans knowing the church was a taming force in the land, found the day good, and the case rested.
Like any disenfranchised group, the Philippine Independent Church today remains poor while the Roman Catholic Church holds sway over most of the nation, a bastion of wealth and privilege.
Many, including some friends, will be laughing upon reading my position. They will call my faith in this small church exotic and odd. I will look at them, wondering at their age-old innocence, as I hail them Grand Erasers.
E-mail: titovaliente@yahoo.com