Tuesday, October 10, 2006 Opiniano: Global look at centennial of Filipino emigration to US By Jeremaiah M. Opiniano
SAN FRANCISCO -- Something Filipino is a century-old already. Not that Filipinos have not been to other countries during the Spanish occupation but the 20th century is a period of Filipino overseas emigration that has now escalated into what it is today: an economic machinery.
We mark Dec. 20, 1906 as the first recorded overseas Filipino emigration in the 20th century, called here the Filipino-American centennial. Fifteen Ilocano sugar workers worked for the Hawai'i Sugar Planters Association when the US state's sugar fields needed workers.
A September 1933 thesis by Honorante Mariano at the University of Oregon (surely one of many historical works about the emigration of Filipinos to the US) documented early on the preference to Filipinos: "The sugar planters recruited Hawai'I natives but they had no inclination to plantation life, then South-Sea Islanders and Anglo-Saxons who could not endure the same. Other nationalities including Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, Portuguese, Russians, Koreans, Scandinavians and Puerto Ricans were tried.
"For the most parts, experiments with some of the various nationalities over a period of years proved to be a vain endeavor," Mariano wrote. It was almost a done deal that HSPA would prefer the Chinese and Japanese but homeland-enacted laws cut off labor supply from these countries. So eyes were turned to US colonies Puerto Rico and the Philippines; "Puerto Ricans did not prove themselves worthy as planters. So HSPA sent numerous labor recruiting agents to the Philippines and as a result of their persuasive eloquence a great flow of assisted contract laborers migrated from the Philippines to Hawai'i under three-year contracts to work for sugar plantations."
From 1906 to 1932, 19,524 Filipinos went to Hawaii for the job although there were also agricultural workers going to California. That time there were no available records of how much those sugar workers were remitting, compared to what records we have through our central bank. It was fascinating that during that time, the Philippine government consciously monitored how many are going to the United States, then the only overseas emigration path of Filipinos. From 1927 to 1932 for example, 40,688 Filipinos left for the US.
Noticeably, the semi-skilled jobs are what Filipinos get: shoresmen in the salmon canneries of Alaska, merchant marines, and agricultural workers in California, among others. These stories were also visible during that time: gambling, the lack of family life, dancing, some involvement in crimes, and discrimination. Filipinos then, because of their involvement in petty crimes, were even generalized to be wholly criminals by an American congressman, and were even labeled as carriers of "loathsome diseases" by American labor groups.
If currently the whole nation ponders how this rising overseas emigration phenomenon will affect us, that question was even asked during those early days. A 1929 editorial by The Manila Times carried a message that still applies today: "The migrating Filipino sees no opportunity for him in the Philippines... Any plan to stop Filipino emigration, unless it is absolutely prohibited either by Filipino or American authorities, must strike deep at the fundamental weakness of the Filipino economic system. There must be a quickening of Filipino life, a steady forward progress of Filipino industry, and (we should raise) the wage scale before we can stop emigration. In other words, we must provide jobs at a living wage."
A century hence, the US remains the core of the world's migration basin and one of the most preferred destinations of Filipinos. But forced migration of Filipinos did not stop, and is now 193 countries wide. There may be nil or less historical documentation about who were the first Filipinos in Germany, Australia, Saudi Arabia, Hong Kong, and many others. But part of their history is a homeland's socio-economic condition that pushed them elsewhere, making the world their archipelago, like back home.
So what is the centennial of the first recorded overseas Pinoy emigration in the modern world telling us? Firstly, we are a mobile people who love to trot countries around the world as if it wasn't strange to do so. Whether you can't speak Dutch, stand out the chill in Switzerland, or try to live out a unique culture in the Middle East, Filipinos will be there as part of the adventure and the need to survive.
Secondly, Filipinos abroad have been too hard-working. Says Mariano in his thesis: "Filipinos have proven themselves to be good workers. They adopt themselves well to the tasks of the field, which are the ones they engaged." For being too hard-working, we forgot that Filipinos can be something more than just overseas Filipino workers (OFWs). "That (OFW) is a mentality that has ingrained unto us, and this diminishes the entrepreneurial abilities of these Filipinos in both the homeland and the hostlands," says MC Canlas of the Filipino-American Development Foundation.
Thirdly, Filipinos abroad seem to struggle in being a visible collective group in host countries. I hope I am wrong. It was quite surprising to discover that despite being 2.36 million strong in the US, the numbers do not reflect the muteness of Filipinos as an ethnic group compared to others. In other countries they can be visible, like when there are Filipino-participated protests in Hong Kong affecting domestic workers. But like their archipelagic homeland, Filipinos are really scattered and are looking for that "plaza" community, as Canlas would say, to bring them all together. To give credit to movie and TV stars who perform in shows overseas, their prominence helps make Filipinos visible at least once in awhile.
But a century hence, and with fast-paced developments coming into play (including rising overseas migration and globalization), you wonder if the Philippines will forever be settled as a services hub ready to serve the world, and a boom-and-bust economy that will still drive many of us away. This history of emigration has cemented the country's culture of migration as being Filipino; not that we want stop people's right to travel, but Filipinos do not have much of a choice.
We envision a day when there will be a "hump" to this emigration road, leading Filipinos abroad to the Philippines because they were magnetized by her equitable growth. For the meantime, majority of them abroad have themselves to worry much and the country to be concerned less-and that's a century old as well.
Comments are welcome at ofw_philanthropy@yahoo.com.
(Jeremaiah M. Opiniano of the Institute for Migration and Development Issues (www.filipinodiaspoiragiving.org) is in San Francisco, USA as a Yuchengco Media Fellow at the University of San Francisco-Center for the Pacific Rim. He is representing the OFW Journalism Consortium (www.ofwjournalism.net) during a three-month media fellowship that is focused on writing about overseas Filipinos.)
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