Organizer: Oona Thommes Paredes, Arizona State University

Chair: Benito M. Vergara Jr., San Francisco State University

Discussant: Patricio N. Abinales, Kyoto University, Japan

This panel opens a discussion of Philippine identity in different contexts and periods as expressed through the narratives and histories of four populations that are uniquely marginal to mainstream Filipino society. Showcasing a rich combination of anthropological and historical research, the panelists cross religious, historical, and class boundaries to examine a diverse range of Philippine peoples and outline how they have dealt with the historical and present-day realities of the Philippine state.

Using examples from Lumad and Muslim peoples of Mindanao, Spanish Creoles of Manila, and overseas contract musicians, they focus on the range of responses that these groups have improvised within the constraints of particular state realities. Being peripheral to mainstream Filipinos due to distinctions of ethnicity, class, and even place, these populations typically have, in terms of national historiography, been diminished with regard to what P.N. Abinales would call their "contributions to the national story," and devalued as well in terms of social, legal, or other agendas.

While dealing with issues particular to their individual circumstances, all four populations have had to reconsider their roles or identities within the larger context of the Philippines as a colonial and post-colonial state. They each express a unique understanding of who they are supposed to be and the peculiar societal niches they are supposed to occupy, folding the margins of Philippine identity on itself, and in doing so, allow us to encompass a more complete conception and narrative of the nation.

Paul A. Rodell, Georgia Southern University

Throughout much of their history, the Muslim peoples of Mindanao lived an autonomous cultural and political existence. That autonomy, maintained throughout the Spanish period, was curbed with the advent of American colonial occupation and the later independent Philippine Republic. The imposed ideology of the nation-state held that the Muslim peoples would be integrated into the larger whole as equal parts of a greater Philippine society. This myth of national integration disintegrated thanks to two distinct, but related, developments in the 1960s. The first was an increased influence on region’s previously lax religiosity of reform Islam coming from the Middle East, which engendered a more conscious differentiation from the dominant Christian Philippines. The second development was the Jabidah massacre of 1968 that sparked the creation of an Islamic "imagined community" and led to the armed secession movement that survives to the present day.

By 2004 a number of factors provided the opportunity to initiate peace talks between Muslim secessionists and the government. Beyond specific political and economic issues, the peace talks represent something more profound for the Muslims of Mindanao: the abandonment of aspirations for a separate independent state and identity. Now, they must again reconsider their identity and role within the context of a largely Christian state to which they will be committed. The larger challenge for all Filipinos is how they will be integrated into the national whole such that the events of the past thirty years will not be repeated.

Ruth De Llobet, University of Wisconsin, Madison

This paper explores the formation of a Filipino political consciousness among Creoles in Manila in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This early Creole discourse of nation and nation-state was shaped between 1750 and 1840, with their nationalist awakening notably marked by two attempts to obtain independence in the 1820s—the Novales revolt of 1821, and the Palmero revolt of 1828. Creole political upheaval was in turn framed by two developments: first, the Bourbon reforms of the late 1700s, which encouraged both the evolution of an internal market and the increased presence of the Spanish Crown; and second, the Spanish Liberal Constitution of 1812, which was subsequently banished by Ferdinand VII.

The early groundwork of Creole nationalism has been ignored in Philippine historiography, which has generally regarded this group as Spaniards rather than Filipino. This, despite the fact that Filipino Creoles, unlike Latin American Creoles, were not necessarily of Spanish ethnic origin but belonged to a construct of class and culture that also admitted mestizos and foreigners. Not surprisingly, their insurrections in the 1820s have been dismissed as minor political uprisings, and, in the midst of their ultimate failure and political inconsequence, particularly in comparison to the Latin American independence wars, the fact that they were fighting for independence has been either ignored, diminished, or denied. However, it was these very Creoles who originally configured what would become the basis of mainstream political discourse over nation, nation-state, ethnicity, and modernity in the late nineteenth century.

Benito M. Vergara Jr., San Francisco State University

In this paper, I explore performance and improvisation among Filipino overseas musicians. In 2003, over 58,000 Filipinos were scattered worldwide in nightclubs and hotel lounges; however, the majority of people who migrate as Overseas Performing Artists (OPAs) travel to work in Japan. OPA is, in this instance, a euphemistic, bureaucratic category that denotes the sex trade, and comprises the crucial distinction between Filipinos working in Japan and those elsewhere working as more "professional" musicians.

Despite such differences, I argue that the practices of performance and improvisation, both as musical activities and as metaphors for everyday migrant life, link both kinds of OPAs. In my interviews, OPA returnees constantly spoke of a "spontaneous" and "naturally Filipino" ability to "imitate." This imitative performance, however, did not allow for musical improvisation; they were limited to learning and mimicking particular idioms from a globally shared musical repertoire. Such practices, I argue, parallel the relationship between state and individual. One can see performance and improvisation as strategies utilized to compete with restrictive migration policies, to evade state surveillance, or, more ordinarily, to resist drunken customers. As an economic strategy, migration also exemplifies a kind of adaptability, also directly related to improvisation or imitation.

My paper is also a critique of government policies that enable, if not facilitate, the exploitation of migrant labor. Simultaneously, through emphasis of migrant practices, I treat OPAs as rational and creative actors, incessantly performing and improvising, even if constrained by the regulations of the state and the demands of capital.

Oona Thommes Paredes, Arizona State University

Since the American colonial period, a recurring pan-ethnic millenarianism has been reported for Manobo-speaking Lumad groups in northern Mindanao, one that appears patterned after elements of a shared epic called the Ulaging. These movements have always been described as a form of anti-colonial resistance and, with the prominent leadership of shamans, an assertion of traditional religion. However, an important element of these movements is an explicit rejection of such traditional religious practices as harvest rituals and sacrifices. With its "rapture"-like resolution, the Ulaging plot shares many structural emphases of evangelical Protestant fundamentalism, which in turn has become a wildly popular alternative to Catholic conversion.

Millenarian movements are a standard example of indigenous resistance; new religious forms appear to demonstrate a localizing impulse to counter both the imposition of colonial and national state ideologies and the hegemonic advance of world religions. But studies from other regions show that such movements may be neither a reaffirmation of traditional culture or a rejection of modern state realities. For South Asia, Viswanathan recognizes religious conversion both as an indictment of secular ideologies and as fundamental to embracing radical social change. Millenarianism and conversion therefore signify a culturally meaningful attempt to address its more worldly challenges. In the case of Lumad peoples, the fact that most of these movements have been pan-ethnic tells us that they have not been rejecting larger colonial and national realities but have been trying to improvise an appropriate mode of belonging.