Many Filipino migrants and their second-generation offspring usually resist usage of the term 'Filipino American', which tends to occlude the historical and power differentials engendered by the Philippine-American colonial experience. The colonial legacy is significantly embodies in an 'indigenous' Philippine literature in English and in its convergences or contiguities with Filipino writings 'nurtured on American shores'. Marked by chronic and multiple displacements, Filipino American cultures/texts were and continue to be created under material, historical, and political conditions that are better described by the (post)colonial analogy of world literature rather than the 'immigrant analogy' of US multiculturalism.
Spanish era (1521-1898?):
▪ Expression only through orality
▪ The native talent hid in anonymity - if we give meaning to Fr. Blancas de San José's use of the first-known poem in his Memorial de la Vida Cristiana en la Lingua Tagala, published in 1605. in that instance, th enative imagination learned about the virtue of self-abnegation. Fulfillment seemed possible only in folklore and in the domain of metrical romances; immagination was afforded an experience in the use of the literary form.
▪ Tagalog poetry: José de la Cruz and Balagtas.
▪ José Rizal; Noli Mi Tangere (1886) - a picture of the life and immorality of the friars and the insolent Filipino chiefs and caciques (bosses?).
US colonialism (1898-1946/1902-40):
▪ US broughts with itself the English language.
▪ Immigration to Hawai'i in the 20s and 30s; after the WWII to the USA.
Neocolonial dependency (1946-91).
José Garcia Villa:
▪ Footnote to Youth (1933) - a collection of short stories.
▪ Have Come, Am Here (1942), Selected Poems and New (1958) - collections of poetry.
Bienvenido Santos:
▪ What the Hell You Left Your Heart in San Fransisco (1989) - the seting is American, so are the characters and the attidues and values that they cling to or pervert in the course of their lives. It is among the young generation of students that the society's hapless state is most evident, specifically in how they shirt any serious encounter with books and how they prefer much that is pointless and fivolous.
Carlos Bulosan:
▪ America Is in the Heart: A Personal History (1946).
Four formative moments in 'Filipino American' literature:
▪ The republication of Carlos Bulosan's now classic America Is in the Heart (1946) by university press in 1973
▪ The contemporaneous emergence of 'Flip' (and a a half- and second-generation) writers in the early 1970s
▪ The international publishing breakthrough acieved by nNinotchka Rosca's Monsoon Collection (1982)
▪ The phenomenal critical success of Jessica Hagedorn's Dogeaters in the 1990s.
Colonialism:
The twentieth-century Filipino 'fusion of migrancy and exile' - a historic consequence of US colonial dispossession and as the defining condition for the globally itinerant and indeterminate production of a Filipino nationality or national culture.
▪ Filipino texts, like all literary efforts emerging out of the colonial condition, are colonially dismissible as 'nonliterary' or not 'transcendentally universal' enough to escape their 'ethnic-specific' conditions.
