By now, news of former Philippine President Corazon Aquino’s death is everywhere, so I don’t think I need to post any article links. I just want to go back in my memory to 1986, when I was a freshman at Moreau Catholic High School in Hayward. I remember my Honors English teacher, this simultaneously granola and crabby old crone of a white woman, who expressed her elation at the beginning of class one day, about this non-violent revolution which ousted the dictator Ferdinand Marcos, how apparently this was a big deal in the history of the world. I knew all this because my father and many of the grown-up’s were glued to the TV (pre-TFC), constantly reading the Philippine newspapers, and sharing the news with one another.
Here’s the thing. Even though I was surrounded by Filipino Americans in high school (though so many of them were members of the Polynesian Club), and even though huge percentages of my younger sisters’ elementary school classes were Filipino American, I was still pretty sure that Americans did not know what a Filipino was. I’d been mistaken for Chinese and Mexican, or Hawaiian, or “What are you,” followed by “You’re so dark,” my whole life in the suburbs, that it seemed pretty clear to me indeed that Americans just did not know or want to know much of anything about Filipinos.
So the fact that my English teacher had anything at all to say about People Power, much less that it was majorly important in world history, confused me. I really did think it was important only to my parents and all the Filipino grown-up’s they knew. This was my first clue that Americans did indeed know Filipinos exist, and that Filipinos were capable of the opposite of invisibility and silence, and that the world knew this.
Perhaps this is also generational. I have no idea what my younger sisters, who were four and nine, remember. As a 14-year old, I knew that Ferdinand Marcos and Martial Law were bad, though I probably couldn’t really tell you why. As a 14-year old, I also knew that the Catholic, male-dominated Philippines had a woman president and the USA didn’t.
I’ve been emailing with Sunny Vergara, who is in the Philippines as we speak. We were both teenagers during the People Power Revolution. He lived in the Philippines, and was a high school student in Los Baños, outside of Manila. Our memories of People Power’s importance are pretty different. Hopefully, we will soon see a blog post from him about this. Definitely for me, being an invisible, ugly adolescent Filipina in suburban America, witnessing all eyes on this homely former housewife of a Filipina taking a center position on a world stage meant something big.
[Edit 2: Sunny Vergara has blogged here.]
In the meantime, former Foreign Correspondent of the SF Examiner Phil Bronstein,who covered the whole movement, has a good write-up in the SF Chronicle.
I will also point you to Eric Gamalinda’s blog post:
We wanted Cory Aquino to be strong so we could remain passive. We wanted her to save us so we could refuse to save ourselves. She was there so we could continue the infantile neurosis that has always sustained the Philippines’ need for a “guiding” power – God or a dictator, choose your daddy – and has always justified its corruption and poverty. She was, as so many predicted during the heyday of the people power revolution, our Joan of Arc. We knew we would burn her for allowing us to corrupt the vision we wanted her to sustain. We forgot so soon that she had achieved what no man in our supremely machismo-obsessed country had done – to get rid of the Marcoses. For that alone, we should be grateful. If the Philippines never rose from the “long nightmare” after she took over the presidency, we have no one to blame but ourselves.
What a wonderful writer you are.
It is a shame that someone has to die before some of us get an education as to who someone was.
I was born in New Zealand and spent the last 28years in Australia, now currently in Calamba – south of Manila. I have been in the Philippines for 3 months and I know what you mean about feeling different! Not many American’s know where NZ is either !!
We’d always heard of the Marcoses ( only the bad news seem to travel) but not the Aquino’s so much.
I am spending the weekend in front of the tele and on the computer learning (albeit a bit late) what wonderful people the Aquino’s are.
Keep up the great writings.
Cheers,
Keith.
P.S. – Sorry, forgot to tell you great post!
Hi Barbara, How are you? Glad to read your reflections! 1986 was also the year I left for the USA to study. I was in the Baguio edition of EDSA 1 (people forget that EDSA happened all over the Philippines, although not on the same scale as Metro Manila’s, obviously). I wish to demur with Eric’s self-flagellation; he cannot speak for and OF all of us. I am sorry, but what he says (in your quote) is true only for the craven leaders and trapos (esp. the ones Arroyo brought back in, full scale, from their places of hibernation) that God, in his infinite goodness, has blest this hapless country with [to paraphrase and bowdlerize the wilfully ironic Rizal]. This is why Cory became such a potent symbol in her life and now still works as such in her death: ordinary folk, middle-class folk, even some socially responsible elite folk do see in her–and get mobilized accordingly–some embodiment, and a point to rally around, of their hopes for a future and other Philippines. There’s a whole world of difference between that and Cory being seen as a kind of elder or prophetic figure on whom then everybody mindlessly and fatalistically depends. Ever since returning to the Philippines in 2000, participating in EDSA 2 (even mortified by EDSA 3), I have seen so many people, each in their own ways, as citizen groups, as activists, as just people or individuals, bring the ideals crystallized in some way by Cory (or those in our history like her), to everthing that they do and to their vigilant and constant concern for social change to take place, not in terms of apocalyptic events anymore, but on the level of the everyday, in the meanings they invest their preoccupations with, and in living a life of decency and courtesy with concern for others, that are in stark and marked contrast to the cupidity, cynicism, power mania, corruption, greed, and sheer irresponsibility and selfishness of their trapo leaders. These are the sorts of commonplace (even quotidian) acts or deeds, the phenomena, that are invisible, and can never be spotted from a lofty and alienated (dare I say bourgeois?) viewpoint. When you live in the midst and among the people here, you see a different story unfolding (or continuing to unfold), not always with the desired and ideal effect/s, but always in some inexorable movement toward the possible. I have very little room left in my heart anymore for victimology, or its opposite, blaming those PERCEIVED as or reduced to victim. First either is not helpful (some kind of agency has to happen and be exercised, happens and is exercised all the time); second, either is patently inaccurate, and for me an inadequate way to understand an ever-complex social situation and historic predicament; and three, with Filipinos (and here I exclude their cadre of enduring trapo leaders who multiply with a ferocity that never ceases to amaze me inspite of so many efforts to produce an other kind), however long it takes, one must be prepared to be surprised with what they are capable of doing once they put their minds and wills to it, once a coalescence of such takes place (which is difficult to manage and here is where symbols like Cory–not prophets–can come in handy, although not always). My long and short way of saying, “huwag kayong o tayong magsalita ng patapos” and it would help if people desisted, with the opportunity presented by the event of Cory’s death and the widespread mourning it seems to occasion, from engaging in vulgar sociology, and worse, self-indulgently, in a sado-masochistic and utterly predictable fit of chestbeating. As I tell some of my other friends abroad who express puzzlement over what is going on, “hayaan ang mga pangyayari na maging or so kanilang pagiging (let current and recent events unfold or leave them to their unfolding). Who knows? ["Malay natin?"]. Marcos sure did not know he was going to end up fleeing, with his long tail between his wobbly legs, to Guam, and then to Hawaii. Portly and corpulent ERAP sure did not know that the days of heedless feasting and jousting in the Palace by the Deathly River would come to an unceremonious end. What does Arroyo, the Lilliputian Tyrant with the Gargantuan Hubris know? What do we know? Just my two deflated centavos’ worth…Regards, OSCAR
Oscar, wow, good to hear from you. Thanks for this comment. This is certainly a lot more than I actually think I know about Philippine politics. I chose to excerpt Eric G’s post because so soon after news of Cory’s death spread, already I was seeing so much internet backlash for all of her failures, which I thought was in poor taste. Then I started second guessing myself, whether I was falling into any trap of sentimentality for a political situation about which I understand little.
Still, I definitely agree with you on this: “ordinary folk, middle-class folk, even some socially responsible elite folk do see in her–and get mobilized accordingly–some embodiment, and a point to rally around, of their hopes for a future and other Philippines.” Yes.
Anyway, wow, thanks so much for commenting here. I hope you are well!
Barbara, thanks for posting my comment and for responding to it, truly appreciate it. Today is President Aquino’s funeral. Everyday since the beginning of the wake, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos have been lining up to pay their respects to her, braving sun, heat, torrential rain, and the wee hours of the morning (persisting in up to 4 or 5-hour waits) to get their chance to file past her bier. It is an astonishing sight. Countless more people are expected to line up the route of her funeral cortege today. I certainly mean to be one among them. Bests, OSCAR