The Deafening Silence of American Life

For the past nineteen years, Stephen De La Cruz has lived in the United States. When he was just ten years old, Stephen and his two young sisters boarded their very first airplane at Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila and said their goodbyes to the Philippines, their country of birth. Accompanied by a family friend, the De La Cruz siblings eventually made their way to Eagle Rock, a suburban neighborhood in northeast Los Angeles, which during the late 1990s was emerging as a primary destination for Filipino immigrants and their families. Having been separated from their parents for a few years, Stephen and his sisters were excited to rejoin their parents, who at the time were living in the house of a close relative and saving up money to lease a place of their own.

            Stephen had his preconceived notions about the United States based on all of the American television shows and movies that his father would record on VHS and send him every few months through large cardboard care packages, known as balikbayan boxes (the word “balikbayan” literally translates to “homecoming”). To him, America was the land of prosperity and money. In the months leading up to his move, he could hardly contain his excitement. However, for as much as he had valorized American life, he vividly remembered the transition being much rougher than he had anticipated. Life in Eagle Rock did not compare to the hustle and bustle of the Manila subdivision that Stephen called home the first decade of his life. In poetic fashion, he eloquently captured the differences between Philippine urban life and Filipino American suburban living:

            “My first impression was how quiet it was. There’s an isolation from interactions with other people. In the Philippines, where I was growing up, there’s interaction between people right when you step outside of the house. Whether it’s someone selling street food or your next-door-neighbors greeting you, you already have interactions.

            When we moved to Eagle Rock, I knew my boundaries. At first, we lived with my uncle, and in that way, it felt like it was the Philippines—living with relatives. That was an easy transition. But stepping outside their house, you have borders, you have fences, you have your own space. This is America. The streets are relatively empty, and you have perfectly maintained lawns. It’s not the Philippines, walking in the crowded, busy, trash-filled streets.

I think silence was the best word for it. That silence was really deafening.”

Living in a growing Filipino community did not entirely assuage Stephen of his anxieties either. Prior to his migration, he had had much angst about moving to a neighborhood that he had envisioned would resemble the one in ET: Extra Terrestrial, his favorite movie as a child. But before Stephen boarded the plane, his father informed him that Eagle Rock was becoming home to many more Filipinos, which calmed his worries about living around all white people. The nominal presence of Filipinos, however, provided him little protection against the backdrop of suburban silence.

“To my surprise, America was not so white after all. At first, I thought I could feel comfortable being surrounded by Filipinos in Eagle Rock. But being around familiar faces wasn’t the same comfort. It was still unlike the Philippines because everyone here seemed to lead their own private lives.”

Junot Diaz & Filipino-Latino Connections

Pulitzer Prize winning author Junot Diaz, who is of Dominican descent, spoke in an interview about the feelings of cultural closeness he felt with Filipinos—both those he grew up with in Jersey City and those he encountered when touring the Philippines (My favorite line from the interview: "I grew up with Filipinos. Fucking pinoys are crazy!"). Anyway, he did the interview when taking a trip to the Philippines to promote his widely beloved novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. 

The Spanish were in the Philippines for more than 300 years--actually longer than the time they were in most Latin American colonies, including Mexico. So no doubt, the remnants of Spanish colonialism were immediate to Diaz immediately. When walking the streets of Intramuros, the preserved centerpiece of the Spanish colonial government in the Philippines, Díaz said, “It felt like we were talking about another chapter of Dominican history—fundamentally traumatic, fundamentally terrible. Speaks of how difficult it’s been for us to survive.” In a later interview, Díaz elaborated about the depth of Filipino-Latino connections:

You should come to the Dominican Republic, because from what I’ve seen so far, Filipinos would have no problem over there. You wouldn’t even notice you’d left…. Do you think that if Santo Domingo snuck up as an island and parked itself off the coast, people here would be surprised? Filipinos can fit anywhere…. We have certain strong similarities. Our countries have been colonized by both the Spanish and the [Americans]. I feel the similarities very strongly.

While there is no denying the violent atrocities of both the Spanish and American colonial periods, Díaz points out a silver lining about the cultural bond shared by Filipinos and Latinos all over the world. There is this unspoken acceptance that there exists an "us" and "we" between Filipinos and Latinos in the US. His experiences breathe life into the words of William Faulkner in his classic work Requiem for a Nun: “The past is not even dead. It’s not even past.” What Diaz is hinting at is that the ghosts of Filipinos’ colonial pasts live on in the culture they maintain in contemporary American life, whether or not colonialism is explicitly acknowledged. And this is pretty hard to ignore when your Filipino grandma in Jersey City is swapping recipes for empanadas with her Dominican comadre living across the street on Manila Avenue.

An Introduction

At about three and a half million people, Filipinos are the second-largest Asian population in the United States behind the Chinese. In California, the state with the highest population of U.S. immigrants, the Filipino population is second only to Mexican Americans. Despite their numbers, Filipinos fly well below the radar of most Americans, who have little to no knowledge of neither the group nor their home country of the Philippines. The invisibility of Filipinos has largely to do with the confusion they bring to the American system of race. Though classified as Asian by the U.S. Census, Filipinos have Spanish last names, are predominantly Catholic, and frequently encounter racial miscategorization. In other words, Filipinos do not map onto the American racial landscape very neatly, which in turn affects how they experience race in everyday life.

In response to their invisibility, Filipinos have jokingly dubbed themselves the “Mexicans of Asia.” Joking aside, this racial descriptor signals a major departure from the black-white racial binary that was once commonplace in American history. Rather than seeing themselves in relation to African Americans and whites—a practice that was once standard among immigrant groups—Filipinos negotiate their race along a Latino-Asian racial spectrum, a demographic backdrop firmly established in states like California and slowly emerging in other parts of the country. Inspired by cultural capital theory, an analytic framework made famous by French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, the narratives of Filipinos demonstrate how race is commodity and culture is currency. Racial identification with Latinos and Asians are symbolic commodities that facilitate important social and educational outcomes for Filipinos, and given the colonial influence on their ethnic culture (from Spain and the United States), they have access to both racial groups.

Do Filipinos align themselves to Latinos, who are quickly emerging as a dominant population in the United States? Or do they assert themselves to be Asian American, considering the rapid upward mobility of this group as a whole? The answer is not so straightforward, especially for Filipinos themselves, who navigate between both Latino and Asian identity, and do so differently depending on their social and institutional environment.

In the end, the narratives of Filipinos in Los Angeles illustrate important lessons about the changing dynamics of race relations in an increasingly multiethnic society, how racial barriers persist, and most importantly, how we can break barriers if we more deeply understand the rules of race in everyday life.

Class Matters

“So where ya from?”

“I’d consider myself more Eagle Rock than Highland Park,” Jayson responded, in such a way that one might describe being closer to one side of the family more than the other. When I interviewed Jayson, he was 25 years old, meaning that he was old enough to remember the “gang problem” that plagued the Eagle Rock-Highland Park area through the early to mid-1990s. Some Filipinos, especially the men I interviewed, remember this period as a time when Eagle Rock was “more ghetto”—a stark contrast to the utopic hipster, mom-and-pop’s neighborhood that most described it as today. Some said that Eagle Rock wasn’t actually ghetto, but more so just another middle class neighborhood whose young people were mesmerized by the emerging popularity of rappers like Snoop Dogg, Tupac Shakur, and Dr. Dre, who brought gangsta rap—and gangsta fashion—from the inner city all the way to the American mainstream. Regardless of how Jayson remembered it, it seemed that my usual opening interview question triggered old memories of a time when “Where ya from?” actually meant “What gang do you belong to?” Such was a common occurrence for many young Filipino men I interviewed, even if they themselves grew up in a nice house in the upper middle class side of the neighborhood.

“When you say Eagle Rock, you think of Filipinos,” Jayson explained, “You think of the Eagle Rock Plaza and all the things that you can associate with being Filipino. I lived on the border of Eagle Rock and Highland Park, but I was always in Eagle Rock. I went to school in Eagle Rock, my life is in Eagle Rock, and my friends are here too.”

To Jayson, Eagle Rock’s “Filipinoness” was typified by the neighborhood’s local mall, the Eagle Rock Plaza. At the center of this mall was a Seafood City, a popular U.S.-based Filipino grocery chain that sold everything one might need to prepare an authentic Philippine cuisine. Right outside of the grocery were small kiosks owned and operated by Filipino immigrant entrepreneurs, who vended everything from karaoke machines, to Filipino DVDs and CDs, to t-shirts donning the Philippine flag. Along the first floor of the mall were sit-down Filipino restaurants like Goldilock’s Restaurant, as well as fast food joints like Jollibee’s, the Philippines’ equivalent of McDonald’s.

“What’s so different about Highland Park?” I asked.

“The population, for sure. You associate Highland Park with more of the Latino crowd,” he said. It was interesting how Jayson qualified the “Latinoness” of Highland Park, given how he had just talked about Eagle Rock. I had expected him to point out the plethora of Mexican stores, restaurants, and businesses that lined Figueroa Boulevard—the main street linking Eagle Rock and Highland Park. But instead, Jayson instead segued into talking about crime and safety.

“Going up on the street that I grew up on, it’s a very Latino neighborhood. It’s not as well kept as say the other parts of Eagle Rock. Safety is an issue. There’s more gang activity in my area, and I’d hear gunshots every now and then when I was a kid. It’s not really in my area, per se, but I live on a hill that overlooks all of Highland Park, so all that stuff that goes on there, I can easily hear from up where I lived.”

Jayson had a different set of rules when he hung out around his Highland Park friends versus when he spent time with his friends who lived a few miles away in Eagle Rock. His said his parents were not particularly overprotective, especially in comparison with how they were with his sister, but he would have a different curfew if they knew he was hanging out in Highland Park.

“They’d always check up on me if I was at a homie’s house in Highland Park. I’d always have to be home earlier, but if I were at a friend’s place on Hill Drive, they wouldn’t set a time when I had to be home. I could always stay out longer.” Hill Drive was what some folks described as the “Beverly Hills” part of Eagle Rock. Also known as the place “where all the white folks and rich Filipinos live.”

Jayson said that neither he nor his parents had ever seen any crimes happen firsthand in Highland Park, even if he, on occasion, had heard some raucous while growing up on a hill adjacent to that neighborhood. I wondered what crystallized this association between crime and Highland Park, beyond the “one or two times” Jayson had heard gunshots growing up.

“The news,” Jayson was quick to answer. “I hate to say it, but it’s when my parents see the news. When they think of crime, they think of the Latino population. They’re old fashioned. They see bald heads, and they think something is up. They overgeneralize to the larger population in the neighborhood, which is mostly Latino. Technically, I should have gone to high school at Franklin right around the corner from us. But they were overprotective, so they sent me away to private school all the way near downtown LA.”

The irony was that Eagle Rock was not immune to gang violence anymore than Highland Park was. Many of the Filipino men, especially the one’s who attended the local high school, remembered gangs—both Filipino and Latino ones—as part of the scenery loitering around Eagle Rock High School. In fact, the only times that Jayson and other Filipinos reported having actual gang encounters was with other Filipinos, never Latino gang members. The main difference was that the Filipino gang members that respondents encountered never seemed newsworthy enough to make the mainstream media, which conveniently framed gang violence as a social problem lurking only in Latino and black communities.

The Church Carnival

Every fall in October, St. Matthew’s Catholic Church throws its annual parish carnival to kickoff the school year. The local streets are closed down and the church and elementary school parking lots are converted into a makeshift neighborhood theme park complete with carnival rides and food vendors. In the main lot are the Ferris wheel, bumper cars, and every carnival game you would find in your local children’s arcade. There’s a even a dunk tank where carnival goers line up for the chance to see Father Andrew, the parish pastor, and some of their favorite elementary school teachers plunge into an icy tub of water. In the smaller adjacent lot, the parents of the school children, most of whom are Filipino and Latino, have set up booths to showcase some of the traditional dishes and delicacies of their home countries. One of the booths is selling Philippine-style pancit noodles and chicken adobo, while the stand next to it has prepared several giant pots of pozole as well as carne asada tacos. Of course, no carnival could be complete without hot dogs, hamburgers, and funnel cake, all of which are being prepared on the spot at the stand selling “American Food,” as a large sign so prominently displays. Looking around, it seems that most of the attendees are members of the parish, but the event also draws families from the local community and surrounding neighborhoods. When I first walked in, I ran into the little brother of an old childhood friend, who said that the St. Andrew’s carnival has functioned as an annual reunion for him and his elementary school classmates the past ten years. Some of them have even come as far as San Diego just to be here.

            Early Saturday afternoon of the carnival, I met up with Antonio, a Mexican American who was born in the United States, but grew up most of his young life in a small rural town in Michoacan. Promising him his first taste of authentic Filipino cuisine, Antonio agreed to meet up me that Saturday all the way from his home in Pacoima in the San Fernando Valley. His neighborhood being predominantly Latino, Antonio expressed his initial angst about going to the carnival since he had never really been to Northeast LA. However, once he got there, the familiarity of the scene calmed his nerves a bit. “There are lots of Filipinos here, but this reminds me of your typical Latino carnival in Pacoima.” Admittedly relieved by his relief, I told Antonio to make himself at home. I gave him some tickets to trade in for some of that authentic Filipino food and waited for him by a set of benches near the parish recreation room where a silent auction and bingo were going on. After about twenty minutes, Antonio had not come back with any food. I became slightly worried that Antonio had gotten lost, but upon scanning the crowds a bit, I found him engaged in friendly conversation with an older Filipino man by the Ferris wheel. A few moments after I spotted Antonio and his new Filipino buddy, a Latina woman in her forties walked over and joined them. From my angle, they all seemed to be having a pretty extended discussion about these two cactus-like stems that Antonio was holding in his right hand.

            “They have pitayas here!” Antonio shared excitedly as he walked back to me. “Dragonfruit, in English, “ he clarified.

            “Is that what y’all were talking about over there?”

            “Yeah. I saw a Latino guy over there carrying the leaves and I asked him if they were pitayas. I assumed he was selling them,” Antonio said laughingly, catching himself making a stereotype about his own people. “Then the Filipino guy overheard us and said, ‘Yeah, they are pitayas.’ He pointed to a white guy around the corner who was selling them. The white guy saw me and the Filipino guy eyeing him, approached us, and sold me some. Then some Mexican woman came up to me and asked me if I was selling them. I told her no, and she walked away.”

            “But then she came back to you guys again? Was that the same lady?”

            “Yeah. She started telling me how much she loves pitayas, and that she has one in her yard but it has no fruit. She told me she had been waiting for them to bloom. Richard, the Filipino guy, jumped in and told her that she had to grow them about fifteen inches apart so that they can grow fruit. In my mind, I was like, ‘How does this guy know what pitayas were. I thought only Latinos ate them.’ When I asked him how he knew how pitayas were grown, he said that they grow them in the Philippines. He said to me that five-star hotels there serve them in their fruit cocktails.”

            “Are those nopales?” An elderly Filipina immigrant woman interrupted us, referring to the stems in Antonio’s hand. Antonio, looking a little confused at the Filipina woman’s seamless use of the Spanish term for cactus, replied that they were not. Slightly disappointed, the woman hiked up her long dress about an inch or two and showed us her swollen ankles. “Oh, kasi [because] nopales are good for uric acid,” she said, pointing out to us her recent flare-up of gout, “I’m gonna go get some pozole.” She smiled goodbye and walked away.

            “How does she know that?” Antonio asked, somewhat puzzled, “That’s something my mom or my grandma would say! Maybe she heard it from one of the Latina ladies.” He seemed pretty content with his hypothesis.

I shrugged my shoulders. Even I had never heard of such a home remedy.

After spending a couple of hours at the carnival, Antonio and I were stuffed from making our second round with the food vendors and a few dollars short from trying our luck with some of the carnival games. Before we said our goodbyes, I asked Antonio whether he had a good time.

“You know, at first, I felt like an outsider because I’m not from the church or the neighborhood. But at the same time, I felt like I was in a familiar place because of the setting, the food, the people. The majority was Filipino, but there were pitayas, pozole. They were selling guavas. At some point, I saw people whose ethnic background was questionable. I wasn’t sure if they were Latinos or Filipinos.”            

Dating Anxieties

 

Before we were about to part ways, Marlon, visibly anxious, asked me at the last minute to join him for a beer at a bar next to the coffee shop where we had just finished our interview. After ordering our drinks from the bartender, we posted up in the bar’s front patio so that Marlon could smoke a cigarette and quell some of his nerves. Once we sat down, Marlon took a few quick swigs of his beer, lit up a cigarette, and then asked if he could solicit some friendly dating advice. At first, I found his demeanor somewhat surprising because of how confident I came to see him through the course of our conversation earlier.

From hearing his life stories, it was pretty clear that Marlon was a social butterfly. Marlon was working at a local mortgage brokering company in Carson. The company’s staff closely mirrored the demographic of the surrounding neighborhood—a mix of mostly Filipinos and Mexicans, both American-born and immigrant. Marlon was quick to make friends beyond his immediate set of friends and within a few months found himself in a mixed group of both Filipino and Latino guys that he would regularly grab drinks with after work.

“Working there was cool. There were a lot of girls, man,” Marlon had said earlier in our interview. I asked him if he had dated any of them.

“Yeah, a couple actually. And even sometimes within the same group of friends. It was kind of dramatic,” he shared, in a more matter-of-fact, rather than bragging fashion. While in the coffee shop, Marlon mentioned three women he had dated. The first, Hazel, was Filipina, and they dated for a few weeks. The two women he dated later, Jennifer and Graciela, were both Mexican American. Interestingly, during our formal interview, Marlon had not mentioned that he was currently dating a woman he had met at his new job, and for whatever reason, first brought her up once we were at the bar. Her name was Sara, and she was a Vietnamese American girl from Westminster in Orange County.

“I’m kinda nervous about the girl I’m dating,” Marlon confessed, appearing slightly relieved to get the nerves off his chest, “This is the first time I’m dating someone of a different race.”

At this point, I was slightly confused, but more so intrigued. Marlon had spent more than half an hour in the latter part of our interview talking about Jennifer and Graciela, who again were both Mexican American. He recounted his dating experiences with them in the same way anyone would talk about an old boyfriend or girlfriend—how they first met, what sorts of activities they did, the things they would fight about, how they broke up—but at no point did Marlon belabor the fact that he was Filipino and they were Latina. Why did the idea of “race” come up now?

“Wait a second. Didn’t you just say the last two girlfriends you had were Mexican? What about them?” I called him out, hoping to tap more deeply into Marlon’s own conceptions of racial difference.

Marlon laughed. He laughed in the way you laugh when someone asks a question with an obvious answer they expect you to already know. Nerves about his new girlfriend aside, Marlon’s confidence resurfaced in his rebuttal to me: 

“That doesn’t count. Mexicans are the same as Filipinos.”