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Augusto Fauni Espiritu is Assistant Professor of History and Asian American Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

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Five Faces of Exile

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Contents

Preface....................................................................................xiIntroduction...............................................................................11. "Expatriate Affirmation": Carlos P. Romulo..............................................92. Suffering and Passion: Carlos Bulosan...................................................463. The Artistic Vanguard: Jos Garca Villa................................................744. Nativism and Negation: N. V. M. Gonzalez................................................1025. Fidelity and Shame: Bienvenido Santos...................................................139Conclusion: Toward a Transnational Asian American Intellectual History.....................179Notes......................................................................................195Select Bibliography........................................................................281Index......................................................................................305

Chapter One

World War I had just ended and the "Jazz Age" was just beginning when a young pensionado named Carlos P. Romulo arrived in the United States. From 1918 to 1921, he would study foreign trade service and comparative literature at Columbia University. As an expatriate far from the comforts of an elite upbringing at home, Romulo would become acutely aware of the salience of race in this country. Soon after the start of classes, he found white and black college students divided by the "race problem," and each side questioned his association with members of the other race. While confronted by both groups to choose his friends, he found a third way, which would become characteristic of his approach to race and international relations. He refused to relinquish his friendships with both groups and continued to talk to "both sides." Romulo also realized that while the American flag flew on Philippine soil, and Filipinos indulged in a feeling of self-importance as American colonials, they were unknown in America, and he himself was often mistaken for Chinese or Japanese. Romulo tried to remedy this invisibility and the larger society's inability to distinguish between Asians in America through education, by organizing, along with his fellow Filipino students, a Jos Rizal Day celebration, which was attended by Columbia University's president. Indeed, racial experiences such as these would provide the young colonial scholar with a far wider education than he had expected.

Although rarely remembered in the United States today, Carlos P. Romulo was one of the most famous transnational Filipino political leaders of the twentieth century. He served at the highest levels of government, played a significant role in Philippine foreign affairs, and participated in the founding of the United Nations, where he argued for his liberal nationalist views. For many years, including those he spent at Columbia, Romulo resided in the United States. His diplomatic shuttle between Asia and America gave rise to a cosmopolitan, bicultural "Asian-American" outlook, which negotiated modernity and tradition. On the one hand, U.S. colonial rule of the Philippines was instrumental in shaping his political education, especially in patron-client relationships. On the other hand, living as an expatriate in America and encountering its urban industrial and racial landscapes shaped his ideas of modernity and national identity and helped fashion his diplomatic approach to the problems of nationalism and race relations. Moreover, Romulo drew on Filipino cultural conceptions to explain his political views. For instance, utang na loob ("debt of the inside") was important to his interpretive framework, suggesting cultural links with the age-old folk idiom of the pasyon.

Carlos Pea Romulo was born on January 14, 1899, the son of Gregorio Romulo and Maria Pea of the town of Camiling, Tarlac. Carlos studied at Manila High School, the University of the Philippines, and Columbia University. He married a "beauty queen," Virginia Llamas, and together they had four sons-Carlos Llamas, Gregorio Vicente, Ricardo Jos, and Roberto Rey. In the 1920s and 1930s, he worked as a professor of English at the University of the Philippines, as the secretary of Senate President Manuel Quezon, and as publisher of a multilingual chain of newspapers. During World War II, he was drafted into the U.S. Army as General Douglas MacArthur's press officer. He was decorated with the Silver Star, two Oak Leaf Clusters, and a Purple Heart. When the Philippine Commonwealth Government was forced into exile to the United States by the Japanese, Colonel Romulo also fled, leaving his family in the Philippines. Altogether, Romulo wrote four books about his wartime exile. After the war, he brought his family to New York, where he served as Philippine ambassador to the United States and as the Philippines' chief diplomat to the United Nations. In 1949, he was elected president of the UN General Assembly. In the 1960s, he served as president of the University of the Philippines. And from 1968 until 1984, he served as the foreign minister of President Ferdinand Marcos.

Despite the fascinating cultural intersections of his life, Romulo remains invisible in American ethnic history, especially in Asian American studies. In the field of U.S.-Philippine relations, Romulo has often been portrayed as a pro-American diplomat whose stances border on the traitorous. In his 1969 biography of the nationalist Senator Claro M. Recto, the historian Renato Constantino, a strident critic of Romulo's, expressed the characteristic nationalist view, speaking of Recto's "very low regard for Romulo" and his dislike of Romulo's "fawning attitude towards Americans." On foreign policy matters, Constantino labeled Romulo the "Architect of Subservience." Subsequent critics have charged Romulo with justifying authoritarianism. Romulo is portrayed as an apologist for the Marcos dictatorship in Raymond Bonner's critical account of America's foreign policy toward the Philippines, Waltzing with a Dictator (1987), and Pio Andrade's The Fooling of America (1985) accuses Romulo of covering up for Marcos. Many of these criticisms are often on target. Yet without minimizing the force of these objections, one can go beyond the binaries of nationalism and collaboration, authenticity and duplicity, and profitably study Romulo's life in more complex and suggestive ways.

As one of the few transpacific Filipino intellectuals of the U.S. colonial period, Romulo provides a focal point for crucial discussions of colonial culture, patronage, national identity, gender, and race. Using his largely unexplored autobiographical texts and personal papers, I argue in this chapter that his identity was nurtured in a diverse cultural milieu involving a residual Hispanic influence, a dominant American colonial modernity, and an emergent Filipino nationalism. Romulo's life thus teems with complex and ambivalent cultural and national identifications, embodying the conflicts of Filipino traditions and nationalism and Western modernity and Enlightenment principles. It is also replete with performances of national identity and masculinity that exemplify his uncanny ability to negotiate the multiple pressures of varying sponsors and audiences. At the same time, I explore the paradoxes of Romulo's career, which on one hand led him to pursue his personal ambition and on the other inspired him to articulate trenchant postwar analyses of transnational relations. Finally, I highlight Romulo's searching reflections on "the color line" in America and in colonial and postcolonial Asia. As simultaneously an "outsider" and a participant in America's racial dilemmas, with one foot outside and one foot inside America, Romulo provides a unique perspective on race and ethnicity, which not only reflects the prevailing postwar liberalism but also anticipates post-civil rights movement Asian American identity and Third World nationalism.

This matrix of transnationalism, performance, patronage, and race can be condensed in a phrase coined by Romulo toward the end of his American sojourn-"expatriate affirmation." For Romulo, expatriate affirmation reflects the positive valorization (rather than denial or negation) of the extraterritorial experiences that contribute to the social construction of national or ethnic identity. It is also an assertion of the performative dimensions of colonized intellectual life, given the pressures of personal ambition, colonialism, and national patronage. And, finally, it acknowledges the power of colonial racism and American race relations, while at the same time rejecting their dichotomies.

Romulo as Ilustrado and as Quezon's Protg

The intellectual influences upon Romulo grew out of a long historical tradition. They were the legacy of the creators of Filipino nationalism in the nineteenth century, the ilustrados. To a great extent, he inherited their sense of ambivalence, their social dependence upon patronage relationships, and their construction of national identity through performance. Romulo had an intuitive understanding of ilustrado nationalism-he himself came from a similar class of respectable, multilingual citizens and rising entrepreneurs. In his youth, Romulo's participation in spectacles, under the watchful eyes of American colonizers, was an important constituent of his identity. At the Manila High School, he participated in poetic declamations and debating clubs such as the "Cryptia" and the "Rizal," which extolled American moral values and acceptable Filipino leaders. Through such performances, American teachers seduced Romulo and his generation to love English, American literature, and American heroes. While still in high school, the young Romulo began his hero worship of Senate President Manuel Quezon. As a reporter for the Manila Times, Romulo covered Quezon's dramatic speeches and earned an invitation to his office.

Reflecting several decades later on his first meeting with Quezon, Romulo explained in more traditional terms why he had idolized the Filipino politician and served under him for so long. He found Quezon attractive in a primitive, animistic way. He felt "the emanation of power" from Quezon, like an indescribable "psychic wave" or compelling "magnetic charm." These confirmed Romulo's belief in his heroic stature and his destiny as the future national leader of the Philippines. Quezon "might have ordered me as he willed," Romulo confessed. "I was his creature." And he added: "Quezon could win any person he chose with the warm, personal charm that was his greatest asset as politician and man."

Quezon's attraction for Romulo derived in large part from the politician's penchant for grand displays, a trait that Romulo would emulate. In particular, he recalled Quezon's dramatic entrance through the walls of Intramuros in 1916 after winning passage of the Jones Law through the U.S. Congress. A section of the historic walled city was demolished to make way for the parade that was to honor him, in a sense symbolic of the will to power of the new Filipino elites, like Quezon, trained in Philippine-American political culture. Moreover, Romulo claimed that Quezon was "the idol of Philippine youth." He was sartorially exquisite and "debonair." Romulo's fascination with Quezon's charm, his diplomatic success and performance before crowds, and the energy that seemed to emanate from his body-all reflect the influence of traditional beliefs about leadership in Southeast Asia upon Romulo. Here, the power of the leaders derives from their dynamic ability to mobilize followers through personal relationships, and from their recurrent displays of strength, rather than static factors of heredity, blood, or birth.

Like the ilustrados, Romulo first gained a sense of duality through his encounter with racial exclusion and inequality in his own country, particularly in social clubs dominated by white Americans, who determined the criteria for membership. His sense of racial identity was further sharpened outside of his country. From 1918 to 1921, when Romulo attended Columbia University on a government scholarship, he encountered instances of white racism directed toward blacks and Filipinos. In Washington, D.C., he saw slums worse than in Manila. He responded to these challenges by rededicating himself to eliminating racial barriers and, in nationalist fashion, by organizing a rally to memorialize Jos Rizal, to which he invited the university's president, Nicholas Murray Butler.

Romulo returned to the Philippines in 1922. His essay "The Tragedy of Our Anglo-Saxon Education" (1923) epitomizes his evolving synthesis of nationalism and American liberalism. He expresses his robust "faith in the spirit of America and its institutions." Using the stages of his education as an example, he traces the growth of the Filipino's love for America. He then severely criticizes the colonial governor-general Leonard Wood for reversing the pro-independence policies of the Wilson administration, thus nullifying the benefits of American tutelage of the Filipino in democratic government. Romulo ends in dramatic fashion: "We stand at the crossroads, uncertain but unafraid, the future imaged forth in our one supreme aspiration to freedom, the present a recessional that our faith in America shall not die." The essay prefigures Romulo's brand of colonial discourse: he would begin with a glowing apostrophe to America, then follow this with frank criticism of its present-day policies, and conclude with a reaffirmation of America's benevolence. Moreover, to Romulo, "America" transcended its immediate historical mistakes. It represented the synthesis of Christian ideals and American power, godlike and omnipotent.

Also in the early 1920s, Romulo was becoming more entrenched in Quezon's political machine. Quezon established the Philippines Herald in 1920 as his journalistic voice and hired Romulo as his assistant editor. In addition, Romulo worked as Quezon's private secretary and as publicity agent for the Philippine "Parliamentary Mission" of 1924. During the apogee of the Filipinos' love affair with America in the 1920s and 1930s, the youth emulated Romulo. To them, he became the essence of the "Filipino as Yankee" and the "Little Brown Brother Who Made Good."

Romulo's presence in the public arena was complemented by his love for the stage, which showed his complex national identity. As U.P. professor of American literature in the 1920s, Romulo wrote plays for the university. In his The Real Leader (1924), Romulo created the character of Jos Santos, a poor schoolteacher and ex-pensionado, who symbolizes the values of the new, modern American dispensation. Jos is faced with a dilemma. The rich, proud parents of his lover, Carmen, a U.P. coed, refuse to sanction their daughter's wish to marry him. One might have expected Jos and Carmen to flout the strictures of conventional morality. Instead, however, the two accept the decision of their elders. Jos honors Carmen's feeling of indebtedness to her parents and decides to bide his time. Thus, he is portrayed not as a disrupter but as an integrator of Filipino family and gender traditions and American ways, something akin to Romulo's developing role as a bridge of understanding between East and West.

From the middle to the late 1920s, the friendship between Quezon and his protg suffered as Romulo began to assert his independence and maneuver for a better position in their relationship. In 1925, the Herald suffered a string of financial setbacks. The affluent Roces family took over the paper and declared it politically independent. Romulo was asked to stay on as editor. Quezon responded by buying back the Herald with the help of his powerful friends. He then asked Romulo to be the editor of the reorganized paper. But having already committed to Roces and disdaining Quezon's attempts to muzzle the press, Romulo refused Quezon's invitation and went with Roces to establish the Tribune on April 1, 1925. The staff of the Tribune was made up of former Herald men who followed Romulo.

Quezon attacked the Tribune for its critical posture toward him, and Romulo retaliated by berating Quezon for his escapades in the nightclubs and cabarets of Manila. In further articles, Romulo questioned Quezon's "[exorbitances] of temper," which he believed were damaging the campaign for independence, and contrasted Quezon's leadership with Sergio Osmea's "conservative conciliation devoid of theatricalism." For over six years, Romulo presided over the Tribune's growth into the country's largest daily. Despite his difficulties with Romulo, Quezon, however, never gave up on his protg. In 1933, in the heat of the campaign for Philippine independence legislation, he successfully enticed Romulo back into the fold with an offer that could not be refused: editorship and part ownership of the Herald. This time, Quezon used his group of wealthy backers to expand the Herald into a chain of newspapers, the Mabuhay, Herald, and Monday Mail, designed to compete with the Roces family's string of periodicals.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Five Faces of Exileby Augusto Fauni Espiritu Copyright © 2005 by Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission.
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