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.
