A Newsletter

September 26, 2022

I’ve maintained an arts and culture newsletter, Eulipion Outpost on Substack for 82 issues, publishing them weekly. With this experience behind me–and knowing now that weekly newsletter writing is enjoyable and keeps me productive–I’ve decided to start a newsletter offshoot of this website (with the same name), Commonwealthcafe, on Substack.

I intend to use the newsletter to share excerpts from various FilAm as well as other (mostly AAPI) historic (late 19th through 20th c.) newspapers and related print culture. But I also want to explore the relationship between these earlier “historical” examples and the state of ethnic print culture today. 

Subscription, for now, is free; I’m not currently sure how often I’ll publish, but I suspect that in the beginning, it will be bi-weekly (?). And I don’t expect the issues to be very long. Likely, each one will contain an historical newspaper or pamphlet excerpt, and a list of interesting historical print culture article links.

The Commonwealth Cafe website will remain up, and perhaps will undergo a few changes.

I hope you’ll subscribe to receive issues in your email!

Commonwealth Cafe flyer showing a cartoon of a kicking carabao

First issue of the Commonwealth Cafe newsletter.

Filed Under: Filipino American History, Newspapers Tagged With: , , ,

Nobel Prize Winner: Maria Ressa

December 31, 2021

Journalist Maria Ressa 2021
Maria Ressa, 2021 (Photo: Rappler
CC BY-SA 4.0)

I can’t let the year pass without mentioning that Philippine journalist Maria Ressa won the Nobel Prize, and gave a powerful acceptance speech.

It’s not by accident that she mentions CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Pres. Rodrigo Duterte in the same breath. Exponential technology’s role in the rise of fascism around the world was her special focus (and also of Nobel prize winner, Dmitry Muratov, editor-in-chief of the independent Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta). And some of her statements remind me of her talk for the Center for Humane Technology, where she was interviewed by Tristan Harris in “Your Undivided Attention” (podcast), 2019 and 2020. I think the CHT has been very much influenced by Ressa. Their projects and messages are converging. See also Frank Langfitt’s article, “Nobel Peace laureates blast tech giants and warn against rising authoritarianism.”

Filed Under: Newspapers, Philippine History Tagged With: ,

Open Letter from the Rafu Shimpo newspaper

May 2, 2016

Ethnic newspapers in the U.S. have always had to struggle to survive. I have to admire any ethnic periodical that can stay afloat for 100 years or more. That’s amazing! Rafu Shimpo is a Los Angeles Japanese daily newspaper published in the U.S. since 1903. After 113 years of serving their community, they are reaching a crisis point and are calling upon supporters to subscribe. Read this open letter from publisher and president, Michael Komai.

Rafu-staff-Circa-1920s

Filed Under: Newspapers

Philippine Star

February 8, 2016

Just posting this for my notes: reference to a newspaper I didn’t know about: The Philippine Star, from Los Angeles, edited (1930s-50s) by Frank Perez, who also wrote for the Philippines Mail (Salinas) in the 1960s-70s. Frank Perez was pointed out to me by Thomas Esmeralda, who teaches at San Jose State U., and I found Perez’s articles in the print copies of the Mail donated to ACE by the daughter of Delfin Cruz, Jenny Cruz Rosa.

Perez’s lengthy, retrospective articles in the Philippines Mail of the late 1960s-70s documented what he saw as troubling changes in the activism and political environment of Filipinos in the Salinas Valley when Filipino urban professionals began migrating into the area. I observed that this change was strongly reflected in the content of the articles in the Mail during that period, in articles that focused increasingly on Philippine issues, and especially in the advertising, which was virtually taken over by full page airline and travel agency ads. The Philippine Star and Frank Perez were mentioned by Dillon Delvo and Ron Perez in an article in online magazine, The FilAm L.A.: Descendants document contributions of ‘manongs’ to the history of Filipino America, Aug. 15, 2014.

Filed Under: Collections, History, Newspapers Tagged With: , , , ,

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and “The Deed of the Six Manila Men”

February 6, 2016

Deed of the Manila Men

While browsing through various online archives, I occasionally come upon evidence of how Filipinos figured into 19th century Western print culture, usually in the form of the mysterious “Manilla Men.” They are mentioned in novels and essays by Melville, William Dean Howells, and Mark Twain; and Nathaniel Hawthorne briefly mentions sharing a picnic lunch with two Manila Men in a diary entry from 1868. As the Philippine American war heated up, American newspapers employed various writers–such as Lafcadio Hearn–to tell their tales about Filipinos and what they perceived as Filipino culture. This morning, while looking for references to Filipino newspapers in the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America site, I stumbled across a “true” story about a mutiny by Arthur Conan Doyle in — of all places — the Omaha Daily Bee, March 29, 1899: a short story entitled “The Deed of the Six Manila Men.” It was also published in the San Francisco Call, same month and year, with the title “Mutiny of the Flowery Land.” As usual, for those times, the characterization of the Manila Men is pretty unflattering and racist, and also underlines the idea that they were considered untrustworthy:

“The Manila Men appeared to submit to discipline, but there were lowering brows and sidelong glances that warned their officers not to trust them too far. Grumbles came from the forecastle as to the food and water–and the grumbling was perhaps not altogether unreasonable.”

The whole story can be read in one of the two links above, and you can read a Times news report (1864) about it here. A much more detailed and lengthy report of the execution was also published in The Age (Melbourne, Australia), April 15, 1864.

 

 

 

 

 

Filed Under: History, Newspapers

Reading List

February 3, 2016

Adding a reading list (see under “Pages”) in the sidebar. It’s a work in progress, and new categories will be added. At this time I’m interested in finding/adding books that provide information on the material production: printing presses, spirit duplicators, and other modes of production used by ethnic presses and publishers; business/community relations and advertising; subscription drives; and the economics of producing ethnic (and especially Filipina/o American and Asian American) periodicals, pamphlets, and ephemera in the early to mid- 20th century.

Filed Under: History, Newspapers Tagged With:

Reconsidering Filipina/o American Periodicals

January 25, 2016

Happy to announce that Abraham Ignacio is now collaborating with me on The Commonwealth Cafe project to promote the collection and study of Filipina/o periodicals and writing in the early to mid 20th c. Abe is the author (w/Enrique de la Cruz, Jorge Emmanuel, & Helen Toribio) of The Forbidden Book: The Philippine American War in Political Cartoons. I’m in the process of updating information and articles on the site. Glad to have Abe on board!

This change has prompted me to reconsider and perhaps broaden the scope of this website. I’ve rewritten the introduction, especially in relation to how Filipina/o print media of the early 20th century is relevant to the changing ethnic media of the 21st century. Let me know what you think…

The materials posted about here raise any number of cross-disciplinary and transnational/local questions, for example:

  • What was the relationship between the Philippine press–its editors, publishers, and writers–and the Filipina/o American press pre-WWII?
  • How does the study of advertising in early print media contribute to our understanding of Filipina/o American communities and their allies – then, and now?
  • What has been the relationship between Filipina/o reportage and literature?
  • What was/is the role of testimonio in Filipina/o periodicals?
  • What role did early 20th century ethnic newspapers and journals play in stimulating and supporting literary production among minority writers?
  • What can we learn from examining the modes of material production (e.g. types of presses, staffing, promotion and subscription drives, relationships between local printers and publishers) of early ethnic newspapers?
  • How did gender figure in determining whose writing appeared, and in what context and form, in the periodicals?

The relevance of these materials to our 21st century experience should also be explored: How can the study of 20th century Filipina/o American periodicals contribute to our understanding of the more fluid production, dissemination, and content of diasporic Filipina/o reportage and digital media in the 21st century? To what extent is there continuity between the activism of Filipina/o American newspapers of the past and today’s digital media? What has been gained, and what has been lost?

Filed Under: Newspapers Tagged With: ,

Pamphlets: Filipino American History in THE TORCH

February 2, 2015

A pdf copy of The Torch (1930) published by the Philippines Mail (Salinas), is now available for download on the Pamphlets page of this website. This special issue presents a frank discussion about racial conflicts experienced by Filipinos in the Monterey Bay Area and Salinas Valleys during the Great Depression era.

Filed Under: History, Newspapers Tagged With: , ,
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