A Newsletter

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.

Filipino Newspaper Presentation

I haven’t posted here for awhile, since January 2020. So much has happened since the pandemic began. I’m posting now to let you know I will be giving a talk at the Salinas Valley Ethnic Studies Conference on Saturday, Sept. 18, 11:00 a.m. – 12:15 pm, at the Hartnell College Alisal Campus (1752 E Alisal St., Salinas, Ca 93905).

My talk will focus on Filipino newspapers published in Salinas Chinatown during the1920s-30s: the Philippine Independent, and the Philippines Mail. Also presenting with me will be members of Asian Cultural Experience (ACE) of Salinas Chinatown. They include Jason Agpaoa presenting on Filipino waves of immigration, Richard Villegas on the 1st and 2nd Filipino Army Regiment, and Alex Fabros on Filipinos in Salinas Valley. Thanks to Jason Agpaoa for arranging this talk and supporting Filipinx and AAPI contributions to Ethnic Studies.

Delfin Cruz (top left), editor of Philippines Mail, mid-1930s to 1983, with friends and family who helped put together the newspaper and distribute it.

Maria Ressa

When I think of all the newspapers published by Filipinos in the U.S. before WWII, writers and editors like Luis Agudo, Helen Rillera, D. L. Marcuelo, Carlos and Aurelio Bulosan, Pablo Manlapit, and many more whose aim was to do a good job of communicating the news, while struggling to keep their newspapers going, and often speaking up to challenge mainstream thought, I realize how important it is to support today’s journalists and publishers, especially those who do it with courage, like Maria Ressa. She is now in jail, and denied bail for daring to speak the truth. https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/13/opinions/maria-ressa-arrest-press-freedom-steven-butler/index.html

The “Modern Maria Clara in America”: 1964

Excerpt from “Search for Modern Maria Clara” application (1964)

I’ve mentioned elsewhere that Filipinas in the pre-WWII U.S. often helped to support the existence of Filipino newspapers in this country by participating in subscription drives, and running in beauty contests to help raise subscriptions for the newspapers. For decades, the image of Maria Clara, the eurocentric ideal of the chaste, subservient, feminine, not to mention long-suffering Filipina, has been held up as a role-model for pinays. Filipinas who migrated  to the U.S. in the 1920s and 1930s found themselves held up to scrutiny against this image, as Helen Rillera has written in “The Filipina in Filipino Society” (Aug. 1934). They found their dreams of independence in this country harder to realize than they expected.

Helen Rillera, writer for the Philippines Mail, 1930s.

Helen Rillera. Photo from the Cacdac family collection.

In 1964, the Philippine News (based in San Francisco) and the Philippine-based Manila Chronicle co-sponsored a contest declared as a “SEARCH for the MODERN MARIA CLARA IN AMERICA.” In this way, the Maria Clara ideal continued to be upheld, even as immigration policies toward Filipinos relaxed (see 1965 Immigration Act), and a new wave of Filipinos in the professions began to enter the U.S. (For more on Maria Clara see also Denise Cruz, “Transpacific Femininities”).

In the application materials, “beauty” and “personality” comprised 60% of the basis of selection, while both “stage presence” and “talent” were worth 20% each. The grand prize was a free, two-week vacation to the Philippines, and the winner would be crowned the “MODERN MARIA CLARA IN AMERICA” in a spectacle on live television in Manila, and receive “appropriate plaques and trophies.” I found the application forms in some of my mother’s old papers (I suspect she hoped to enter me into the contest).

Philippine-mestiza women dressed in “traditional” Maria Clara gowns, late 19th c. Photo from Wikipedia.

The contest was announced during an era when tourism to the Philippines, aimed partly at Filipino U.S. immigrants, was increasingly touted in full-page ads in U.S. Filipino newspapers. While I have no materials on hand stating explicitly  how the candidates for the Modern Maria Clara in America would benefit the Philippine News/Manila Chronicle, my guess is that the contest would help to increase Philippine tourism, and to forge, through the Maria Clara narrative, a growing transnational readership for both newspapers.

As a former teenage (barely — I was 13) Filipina queen contest winner (for the Dimas-Alang lodge) in the 1960s, I ran headlong into prescriptives for modern Filipina womanhood that came straight out of the Maria Clara playbook. I had little awareness of their origins, or even how they were affecting my life. I only knew they were sometimes constricting, infuriating, and polarizing (creating a sniping competitiveness among the other young contestants, their parents, and organizations); nevertheless, the contest, culminating in a coronation at the Hollywood Roosevelt hotel, also injected a bit of hard-won* “glamour” and excitement into my otherwise mundane life as a teen.

Over the decades, some Filipinas went against the grain of the Maria Clara role, and were not well-recognized or appreciated until recently. Nowadays, I’m grateful to see that many pinays — scientists, activists, artists, writers, musicians (for example, Ruby Ibarra) — are working hard, often successfully, to change the narrative; but it’s a complex issue, and there’s more work to be done.

——————

*I’m serious about “hard-won.” Winning the contest required participating in countless “social-box” dances at lodge-sponsored Filipino community events, as well as countless trips to Filipino labor-camps up and down the central California coast, selling tickets to Filipino dances and other events, and taking the time (while chaperoned by my mom and aunties) to schmooze with and charm my mostly male lodge-member constituents. Schmoozing, by the way, did not involve cocktails and jazz; it meant sitting down to meals of fried fish (sometimes fresh-caught from the surf near Davenport) or adobo, lumpia, and rice, cooked by laborers at the camp for their guests.

 

 

 

Pamphlets: Filipino American History in THE TORCH

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.

Abe Ignacio’s Discovery

Just found this great article in the Philippine Inquirer.net, which describes how Abe Ignacio, one of the founding authors of The Forbidden Book, became interested in the representation of Filipina/os in American newspapers. Abe’s discovery helps us to reconstruct how Filipina/os were perceived in San Francisco during the early 20th century. Check out the article: “Filipinos in San Francisco a Century Ago.”

Filipina/o students in Berkeley and San Francisco were painfully aware of how they were perceived in the U.S., and they were moved to write about it in The Filipino Student magazine, especially after the 1906 earthquake, when they realized that Filipino victims of the quake were not going to receive any help. General Frederick Funston was in charge of bringing order to the City after the quake and restoring communications infrastructure. Funston was made Brigadier General for his leadership in capturing General Emilio Aguinaldo during the Philippine-American War. Read more about that in the Editorials & Essays section of this website.