Alon: Journal for Filipinx American and Diasporic Studies

Introduction: New Filipino American Scholarship on the Marcos Era

Western classical music flourished under the patronage of Imelda Marcos. While this legacy is often touted as a positive one, the genre of music itself and its imbrication with colonialism and racism cannot be ignored. This essay illustrates how Marcos harnessed Western classical music and conceptions of the global and universal to access ideological capital and claim a place for the Philippine nation as an equal in the international community. While the New Society also heralded nativism as nationalism, Western classical music and its trappings of Whiteness and modernity paralleled the regime’s elite cosmopolitan aspirations.

Alongside official policies and speeches declaring and steering official national identity, I turn to songs and dances as affective and performance archives that strategically rouse and structure our feelings of belonging to a cohesive and stable national culture. More broadly, I track the crafting of a Filipino/a national subject through state reliance on sedimented (and thus value-laden) forms such as ‘national traditions’ and ‘folk cultures’ to make possible the idea of a laboring and productive citizenry. I ask: How do traditional dances and songs sustain and indeed supplement the ambitions of government initiatives implemented during Ferdinand Marcos’s martial law, such as the rice production program Masagana 99? How do the timeless assemblages of performance shore up the edifice of an embattled and yet resilient nation-state? As we commemorate the afterlives of Martial Law, I return to such fragments of embodied memory with adjacent governmental policies of the time to underscore the complex scope and the scale of Marcos’s dictatorship, as well as relay these scenes as seeds of struggle, labor, and resistance.

The Marcos regime’s seizure of culture® and the first couple’s promulgation of “truth, beauty, and goodness” as guiding cultural principles® was more than an act of political repression. It was the purposeful and incisive reimagining of Filipino subjectivity for the global capitalist paradigms of the cold war order. This essay analyzes Lino Brocka’s 1976 film Insiang as a visualization of authoritarian violence that acknowledges the insidiousness of Marcosian cultural reforms and their adamant demand to affect and seize Filipino sensibilities. The film illustrates the ways that Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos’s mandates for morality, beauty, and humanity were impossible within the impoverished conditions of Manila’s urbanity. More importantly, I argue that the film disrupts the coherency of the Marcoses’ renditions of Filipino subjectivity by making a case for lifemaking practices bred and cultivated by chaos itself.

This essay examines the radical potential of shared living spaces as sites of revolutionary intimacies. Revolutionary intimacies, I argue, are close bonds, relationships, and social practices in the home and other private spaces that foster the creation of new political imaginings for democracy and liberation. Centering stories of activists involved in the US-based anti-Marcos movement during the 1970s and 1980s, I ask: How does one “work” the home, from a place that has traditionally reinforced heteropatriarchal violence, toward a space with liberatory intention?

During the 1970s and 1980s, the United Methodist Church in the Midwest prioritized recruiting people of color. This included Filipino immigrants whose population continued to grow across greater Chicago. Amid these recruitment efforts, Methodists took firm stances on matters related to social justice and international affairs using religious doctrine or reasoning to justify political mobilization. Filipino Methodists formed critical alliances with non-Filipino Methodists, other Christians, and leftist organizations to raise awareness about Ferdinand Marcos’s dictatorship and martial law order in the Philippines. Their grassroots activism helped sustain and bolster the efficacy of anti-Marcos and anti-martial law movements occurring worldwide.

"Ousting One Man Is Not Enough" looks at the cultural factors which enable dictatorships to re-surface again and again in Philippine politics. A very important study, considering that the son of the country's only formal dictator is now running for president. "Ousting One Man..." was presented at the September 21st webinar commemoration of the declaration of martial law by Activista/Dakila. 900 registered for this webinar.

Reflections from Vice Preisdent Leni Robredo