…one of my man objectives in this book has been to carefully attend to the varied, creative potential of subjective practices that socially oriented and social movement literatures attempt to figuratively capture and yet tend to diminish in the fabulation of proper historical subjects. Often viewed a atavistic and mystified habits and therefore as forms of weaknesses and self-oppression that need to be overcome, these devalued, supplemental experiential practices nevertheless importantly create and transform the very material, social structures in which feminists, urban activists, and revolutionary forces actively seek to intervene…. Such diminished experiences have helped to bring about broad social changed in ways that these groups could not foresee. (p 8., emphasis mine)

Tadiar labels these diminished experiences as things that “fall away” from capitalism, activities that are productive but not in the ways that are prescribed and recognized by neoliberal capitalism. Like performance. Art. Indigenous women’s labor collectives and seedbanks. Movement, and being outside.

But I’m struck too at how she includes activists, feminists, revolutionary forces among those who diminish such “fall away” experiences, especially when they’re not easy to reconcile with what is seen as the “proper” historical subject. Because it is easy for someone like me to speak for masa in solidarity, to find that a peasant community’s struggle for for a health clinic and the struggle for land reform are equally important. They might not be, for the peasants who are still without healthcare.

I’m reminded of an argument with a friend, who patiently listened to me rant about Catholicism and false consciousness, opium, etc. She then reminded me that Liberation Theology could not have been foreseen by non-Catholics, or even by former Catholics like me. It’s a theology of faith, love, freedom, and revolution that could only have been nurtured in this specific community, a community that I had arrogantly dismissed.

I’m still struggling through Things Fall Away, and with questions of how to conduct ethical dialogues and coalitional research. Especially since I will soon be embarking on ethnographic research, and its easy to fall into the trap of thinking of oneself as an ally who could speak for people in a marginalized community. The researcher who does that will never even be aware of the experiences that she will miss, of the great possibilities that could just fall away as a result.

photo from mondoweiss.net

Noah Mae (second from left) and her friends are not Jewish either, though they were born in Israel and have lived there all their lives:

photo from BBC News

Noah Mae speaks and dreams in Hebrew. She is one of the more than 1,000 children of migrant workers who are scheduled for deportation this year.

The eight-year-old was born to Filipino migrant workers. Israel increased the number of work permits for Southeast Asian workers, to replace Palestinian workers. Many Filipinos work as caregivers for the elderly, but are officially barred from caring for their own family. According to Rotem Ilan, founder of Israeli Children, an NGO campaigning against the deportation of migrant children:

It’s written as a regulation that migrant workers cannot be in relationships…They’re not allowed to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend, and they cannot come with their spouses or bring their children. If they have children, they need to send them to the Philippines or bring them in person and after three months they can return to work.

The official reason is that migrant workers are in Israel to work, and not to be distracted by their familial concerns.

Rotem Ilam continues:

For 20 years Israeli governments have turned a blind eye to these children. They are now part of the fabric of this country. They go to school here. They celebrate the same holidays as us. If there is something we [Jews] have learned from our history is that you must not, you cannot deport children.

How would Noah Mae feel if she was sent away? “Bad,” she says. “I love Israel.”

She may have something there. After a year of riding, it’s still a nice surprise every time I see other people of color on the trail. There’s a Pinoy group, and a few Pinoy friends and family who ride with me when they can, but mountain biking (and trail running, I think) still seems pretty whitestream. And the less I dwell on the mountainbike boards, where a post asking “Any Pinoy riders in SoCal?” was met with a flurry of “I’m forming a whites-only riding group” posts and charges of “reverse racism,” the better for my sanity.

I snicker at  claims that modern mountain biking was born in the 1970s, when a bunch of NorCal dudes started downhilling Mt. Tam and when road bike companies started manufacturing mountain-specific bikes. As a kid in the Philippines, my partner M used to ride his bike in the fields behind his house. It wasn’t called mountain biking then, of course. Just a bunch of kids riding their bikes where they could, like countless kids have been doing since bikes were invented. But that probably doesn’t count as modern mountain biking. Or as mountain biking, for that matter.

Neither was it called mountain biking in 1896, when 20 Buffalo Soldiers from the 25th Infantry rode from Fort Missoula, rode to St. Louis, Missouri.   This wonderful picture makes me happy:

US 25th Infantry on bicycles. Photo from Wikimedia Commons

More pics here.

And they rode wagon trails through the Rockies on steel singlespeeds that weighed about 70 lbs (including gear). Damn. POCs on mountain bikes rule.

photo from New York Theatre Wire website

The following quote is from Dylan Rodriguez’s article “The Condition of Filipino Americanism: Global Americana as a Relation of Death”: [pdf]

At the nexus of a prevailing Filipino American discourse that celebrates the Filipino-American as a cooperative participant in the United States nation-building project sits an “unnamable violence” that masks the genocidal preconditions of “multiculturalist white supremacy to which this discourse unwittingly subscribes…It is as if being empowered through, and therefore more actively participating in the structures of U.S. state violence, white supremacy, and global economic and military dominance is something to be desired by Filipinos.

How could these acts of desiring what is in the colonizer’s economic and military interests, specifically on the part of Filipino elite, be explained? Especially when these colonizer interests run counter to their own?

In The Wretched of the Earth, Frantz Fanon noted that aims of colonialism were nothing less than:

“to convince the indigenous population it would save them from darkness. The result was to hammer into the heads of the indigenous population that if the colonist were to leave they would regress into barbarism, degradation, and bestiality.”

Through the use of regulatory tools such as maps, museums, and the census, have ordered the colonial world into what Fanon described as a “compartmentalized world.” On one side is the colonist’s sector, “a sated, sluggish sector, its belly permanently full of good things. The colonist’s sector is a white folk’s sector, a sector of foreigners.” On the other side is famished colonized sector, “hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light. The colonized’s sector is a sector that crouches and cowers, a sector on its knees, a sector that is prostrate.”

During Spanish colonialism, the illustrados enjoyed provisional residence in the colonized sector. It was in their interests to maintain this compartmentalization, even to the point of acting as official, legitimate agents or spokespersons for Fanon’s “the colonizer and the regime of oppression.” This collusion of Filipino elites’ would later be repeated during the American colonial period. (via fiesta politics, for example).

Fanon’s insights regarding the collusion of capitalism and colonialism also offers insights into how Filipino Americans get co-opted into U.S. empire-building in an age of transnational flows of labor and capital. The trope of good citizenship prescribes that aspiring Filipino Americans must legible as productive and therefore meritorious enough to participate in America’s neoliberal capitalist empire. It is thus a discourse that gestures towards what Rodriguez describes [pdf] as a “cultural legitimation of a civic presence that is empowered through a valorized, patriotic collective passage into the fraudulent pluralistic accommodations of American governing and social structures.”

photo from Vallejo Naval and Historical Museum website

Viewing U.S. society through a Filipino American lens shows Fanon’s compartmentalized world also exists in the metropole. On one side is the United States as a multicultural paradise, which includes those who fulfill the tropes of good citizenship. Those who are unable to do so are relegated to another sector, composed of shadow spaces and carceral spaces, like post-Katrina New Orleans or ICE detention centers.

The acceptance and presentation of Filipino Americans as a prescriptive, economically legitimate civic presence serves as a barrier to full citizenship for immigrants are cast as the Other.

Those who are unwilling or unable to fulfill the requirements of this good citizenship are relegated to shadow spaces/carceral spaces, where they are subjected to various forms of racialized violence including surveillance, racial profiling, detention, and deportation. They are rendered as “Other” because of borders, both spatial and epistemic, borders drawn to exclude people by race, religion, Muslim-ness, or perceived Arab-ness.

Filipino Americans who were once relegated to shadow spaces now enjoy membership in the more privileged spaces of a multicultural United States. It is a provisional status that many in the Filipino American community are understandably invested in keeping.

But in doing so, the Filipino America community tacitly endorses racialized violence against those who are exiled to the marginal and carceral spaces–the very spaces where Filipino Americans used to be relegated.

Last week’s Philippine elections are making me reflect on Benitez Rojo’s metaphor of the plantation machine. The new president, Noynoy Aquino, is part of a powerful political landlord family whose collective hands are still bloody from the Hacienda Luisita massacre. The Marcos family–yes, including Imelda–have been re-elected back into office. And so has former president and incoming congressional representative Gloria Arroyo, who has just appointed her lapdog as the new Supreme Court Chief Justice to preside over her impending graft cases.

The most surprising thing about the elections, in fact, is reflected in Inquirer headline the day after: “Fast count stuns nation”.

So what are the plantation machines working here?

Well, there are the plantations themselves of course, colonial machines that to this day bind local elites to the interests of their colonizers. The insidious ways in which these systems reproduce themselves in the lives of peasants and workers. The ways in which imperialism and neoliberal policies remain firmly in place, regardless of who is (not) elected into power. The various displacements engendered by these said neoliberal policies, and the terrible choices that Filipinas are forced into by these processes.

Benitez Rojo was hopeful that both Western and Caribbean paradigms can co-exist in his repeating islands, in the form of polyrhythms. The Caribbean is not simply a postcolony forever defined by its relationship to an imperial center. For him, “the Caribbean text…is a text that speaks of a critical coexistence of rhythms.” In this way, the Caribbean is a repeating island. There is a polyrhythm that proliferates, so “one can sense the features of an island that ‘repeats’ itself, unfolding and bifurcating until it reaches all the seas and lands of the earth.”

Romblon Island. Photo from Wikimedia commons.

What then would a Philippine text look like? What are the critical appropriations and contrapuntal rhythms shaped by the continuing presence of and resistance to the plantation machines in the Philippines? And how do these rhythms exist in counterpoint, a constant weaving in and out of various strands of what combine to be Filipino?

How can the Philippines be read as a repeating archipelago?

The reason? These businesspeople from the Middle East grew up with Filipina nannies. Because of their carework, said this acquaintance, Filipina women are in such positions of  influence over the next generation of businesspeople from the Middle East. Pinoy entrepreneurs, he said, could use trade on this predisposed goodwill as capital.

The gender dynamics of Filipino labor migration shifted around the 1980s. More women were recruited for domestic work, a trend that continues today. An estimated 70 percent of the 3,000 Filipinos who leave the country each day due to labor migration are women.

I had already known Filipina mothers work as nannies and caregivers, even as they leave their own children behind.  That these women’s labor feed the remittances that keep the Philippine economy afloat. And that all these benefits to the country, to the private sector, have come at great personal cost to women who spent years away from their own children.

But it still makes me sad and angry to note that decades later, long after their children had grown up without their presence, these women’s labor and sacrifice continues to generate wealth. But not for them.

Photo from Arkibong Bayan (arkibongbayan.org)

Edgar Allan Paule of the blog Viewer Discretion pretty much articulates my thoughts about the short film Ang sinabi ng mga magsasaka sa Hacienda Luisita [What the formers told me in Hacienda Luisita].

In the short film, Felicity Tan interviews farmers involved in the strike that led to the Hacienda Luisita massacre in November 2004.  The farmers argued against agrarian reform and voiced their support for the feudal system that had them as tenants. Under patronage, they said, conditions were better.

There are a number of good takedowns of the short film (such as this one). But the Spivak fangirl in me appreciates Edgar Allan Paule’s analysis of  how systematic forces like feudal capitalism co-opt the speech of those who are already exploited and rendered subaltern.

Hacienda Luisita strike. Photo from arkibongbayan.org

But. I am still struck by the suspicion with which these farmers regarded Satur Ocampo and the representatives of the Philippine left who came to support the strike. The farmers said they were fighting for better work, better pay. But the strike, as represented by their maka-kaliwa supporters, was turned into a call for land.

“Iba na,” said one farmer.

For the record, I strongly believe in agrarian reform, precisely because of the conditions that feudal capitalism gives rise to in places like Hacienda Luisita.

Edgar Allan Paule does a great job of drawing from Gayatri Spivak’s  “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to discuss how supporters of feudal and crony-capitalism have coopted the farmers’ speech. His analysis nicely parallel’s Spivak’s account of how British colonizers used Bhuvaneswari Bhaduri’s 1926 suicide to justify their civilizing mission, to save brown women from sati.

But for Spivak, Bhaduri is rendered unable to speak not just by British colonizers. There were also the Indian nationalists who wanted her to commit a political assassination. Bhaduri’s suicide was a refusal of both scripts, from the colonizer and the Indian nationalist groups of which she was a member.

But her suicide as refusal, her interception between these two silencing scripts, went unrecognized.

There is so much to criticize about Tan’s film, but I actually appreciate two things about Ang sinabi ng mga magsasaka sa Hacienda Luisita. First, of the seven farmers featured, three were women. That is an important point.

And second, a close reading of what the farmers were asking for does offer great insight for their progressive allies. When asked to explain their opposition to agrarian reform reform and support for feudalism, the farmers said:

• Before the strike, we had a hospital, anak. We could get treatment even if we had no money.
• After the strike, my anak, second-year education student,  had to stop going to college.
• Do [the outsiders] know the conditions we live under in the hacienda? What help could they give us?

One of the peasants teared up when she explained that if the land was redistributed, she had no capital. She would have to mortgage the land. What else could she do?

When Spivak concluded that the subaltern could not speak, she was gesturing towards a “violent shuttling” between two forces (in her essay’s case, patriarchy and imperialism) that precluded any space for the subaltern’s speech. .

Hacienda Luisita strike. Photo from arkibongbayan.org

I think I’m more hopeful than Spivak about the possibility of creating spaces for the subaltern to speak and act. But how do we act in coalition with those who are rendered subaltern? In true solidarity and support? Without assimilating their immediate struggles toward our own teleological ends?

It’s a question that merits continued reflection, especially for those of us in the fraught roles of speaking to and for the disenfranchised.

The climb is its own reward:

That hubs are spaces of tension. (The graffiti on this one reads “Hike, not bike.” What does that make those of us who do both?)

That property-owning humans may think they’re the most important beings in the trail:

…but they’re wrong:

That there’s no shame in dismounting if you unsure of the terrain:

But sometimes, you just trust that your body knows what to do:

That when the trail keeps getting steeper, it can actually be a good thing:

***

And after a year of thinking about it, I decided that on my bike, I’m a cyborg.

Neither our personal bodies nor our social bodies may be seen as natural, in the sense of existing outside the self-creating process called human labor. What we experience and theorize as nature and as culture are transformed by our work. All we touch and therefore know, including our organic and social bodies, is made possible for us through our labor.

–Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women