POSC 3333
Rudy Rico
Interview Questions for paper:
Jody Blanco, M.A., Ph.D. candidate, Dept. comparative Literature, 9/93-present,
(2) How and when did you originally get involved in PANGIT or PAA? (rough dates are helpful) What issues (specifically) drew you in? (social, academic, political?)
PANGIT 1993-2000
I got involved b/c I was actively involved in Asian-Am. Student activism at U Mich., and I went to the Philippines for 2 ½ years after that.
(5) What issues did you feel most strongly about while you were involved? (for example, the Amado Cabezas tenure issue & lack of Pilipino-American Professor at UCB, the issues leading up to & surrounding "Flip Side")
My issue has always been education. I always found it embarrassing that every PCN I attended has some speech on "knowing your history," when the only history most of us ever learned was a handful of names and outdated slogans. That, together with hip-hop dancing and the alibata, make a poor foundation for understanding the prospects and pitfalls of a Filipino or Filipino American cultural identity. But even more importantly, I’ve always felt like Filipinos and Fil-Ams at Berkeley were missing out on the best part of higher education – that connection between what you see as the most personal part of yourself, and the histories, cultures, and dreams of other people, places, and events that you didn’t even know you had a connection with. People talk a lot about jungles and going "home," and realizing that they’re "really" Filipino-American, not Pinoy – but wouldn’t it be more interesting to hear about how Jose Rizal spent the last year of his life learning Russian so that he could read Tolstoy’s War and Peace; or how Filipino revolutionary diplomat Mariano Ponce was friends with Sun Yat Sen? Or what about how the Filipino war veterans of U.S. sponsored wars are still trying to receive the benefits owing U.S. war veterans, which were denied to Pinoys b/c they weren’t citizens? Don’t Fil-Ams want to know about how members of the Kilusang Demokratikong Pilipino in the Marcos years eventually became the leaders of most Filipino and Fil-Am nonprofit orgs in the Bay Area and New York? Do we assimilate so easily with the mainstream that these things cease to be worth learning about?
(8) If you were involved in subsequent Flip Side (2-4) - please describe what you can about what occurred at these events and how well they were received.
I was involved with them – the 4th one was definitely the most successful, b/c we had well-known Filipino comedians to draw a crowd. But I personally liked the 2nd and 3rd ones better – we just got a group of students together to showcase their talent, in a kind of open-mike setting, and it was sheer magic. We predate PiNoise Pop Festival by a couple of years in terms of time. I thought the acts were brilliant – not only because of the talent we put out, but also because the modesty of the undertaking flew in the face of the deep, inspiring sincerity and beauty of the music, the poetry, the performing arts. Of all the things I did in grad school, I’ll look back to those events with a special affection – they affirmed for me how the smallest pockets of the world (La Pena on a Wednesday night, for example) give birth to the biggest and most enduring dreams.
(11) If you were involved - what activities did the students undertake (protests, letters to anyone? e.g. ethnic studies, UCB president/president's office, regents?) in the Amado Cabezas case?
Anatalio can answer this question – he was around for the first phase of this conflict. When I came in 1993, the ES dept. had already promised to try and obtain a Filipino-American studies tenure-track professor for their next hire. The candidates they chose to interview were Enrique Bonus (now in the ES department at UW in Seattle), Steffi San Buenaventura (now I think at UC Irvine), and a candidate who didn’t have anything to do with Filipino or Filipino-American studies (leave her nameless, she turned out to be a very good professor from what I’ve been told). After choosing Enrique, the academic senate turned down his nomination for confidential reasons (even today we don’t know the story). Instead of defending him, the Asian-American Studies program scrambled to choose another candidate, fearful that they would lose the tenure-track position if they didn’t. There was no defense of Enrique’s candidacy, no challenge to the authority of the academic senate. The students were baffled when they returned to school in 1995 to find that all their efforts resulted in the capitulation of the program to the decision of the higher authority. It led many of us to the conviction that either the AA members who nominated Enrique in the first place were not brave enough to defend the strength of their convictions (the core had gotten soft, so to speak); or they really had no interest in hiring a Filipino-American studies professor to begin with. I have yet to hear anyone offer an alternative explanation.
The following year, students released a Statement of Concern regarding the decline in Filipino student admissions, the absence of a Filipino or Filipino-American studies professor in the ES department, the unprecedented departure of Professor Oscar Campomanes from the English department, and the anomalous position of Filipinos with regard to Affirmative Action (we were excluded from the program in 1990). A Filipino and Fil-Am student and community meeting followed the publication of this statement. Vice-chancellor Carol Christ’s response was to ask other departments to share a joint-appointment of a Filipino or Fil-Am studies professor with ES. No other departments were interested. In 1997 I went to the Philippines on a Fulbright. When I got back, the whole issue had been swept under the rug. The good thing is, students who led the De-Cal Filipino orientation class like Perry Aliado began to teach the history of Filipinos at UCB. And Nerissa Balce and Dylan Rodriguez took over the Pinoys and Pinays in U.S. history course, which seems to have had a decisive impact on the shape of PCNs in recent years.
The issue of a tenured Filipino Studies prof. didn’t resurface until last year, when the supporters of students on a hunger strike asked for, among other things, a Filipino or Filipino-American studies faculty member in the ES department. Unfortunately, this demand was dropped during the ES faculty negotiations with Chancellor Robert Berdahl. A discussion group called the Rad Pinoy Caucus (spearheaded by Robyn Rodriguez, Nerissa, and Dylan, along with Jared Sexton and Camille… I don’t remember her last name!) took the debates around the future of ES as a point of departure for investigating some larger issues around our relationship with the university as an institution. Recently, I heard that undergraduate students are once again agitating for a professor in Filipino-American studies. It’s frustrating; to think we’ve been trying to reinvent the wheel for the past ten years.
To my mind, only two options confront us now: extreme measures, which would involve the politicization and activism of the Filipino and Fil-Am student community at UC Berkeley; or the willingness of the UCB administration to step in and take up the initiative with the power that students lack. Although I would love to be proven wrong, I’m skeptical of both. I dearly want the students to succeed where we failed, but it’s easy to put a group of eager and intelligent students on a paper chase that will last at least until the leaders of the movement graduate and leave Berkeley – or just get tired of the whole runaround. And it’s very difficult to sustain a student movement, especially now – I don’t know if students today are willing to take the same risks our parents took, to fight for what they believed belonged to them.
There is perhaps a third way, which would involve a little bit of activism and negotiation. Specifically, I mean the coordination of students in building an effective and sustained argument for a Filipino and / or Filipino-American studies, addressed to the right people in the right places, with the objective of obtaining a VERBAL or WRITTEN promise from someone in the faculty or administration that such a professor will be hired at such and such a time. Timing is of the essence – the initiative would have to begin in August and end in April, with a promise or a signature. In the interim, a time line would have to be drawn, petitions collected, letter campaigns launched, and meetings with department and administrative heads arranged with that specific goal in mind. Add to that the involvement of other Filipino and Fil-Am Bay Area groups, some attention from the media and press: and at the end of the second year UC Berkeley will have a Filipino or Filipino-American Studies professor. It takes a lot of initiative, energy, and willingness to participate collectively and cooperatively on such a project – not to mention shrewdness at cutting to the quick when seeming obstacles emerge. We lacked one or more of those things while we were organizing. But perhaps the undergrads will have better luck.
(14) What was FHWG and how did it come about?
Do you mean the Filipino Studies Working Group? That was a Townsend Center for the Study of Humanities working group that, in its brief 3 year existence, launched two Filipino / Fil-Am studies conferences, and hosted several symposia of well-known scholars, activists, and community members who shared their work with the students. We also held biweekly discussions of the members’s scholarly work. It was originally started by Prof. Oscar Campomanes of the English dept. (now head of the Literature dept. at De la Salle University in Manila). The coordinators of the group were: Nerissa Balce, Jody Blanco, and Maria Bates. It began in 1995 and ended after 1997.
(15) Why do you think there are so few Pilipino-Americans in graduate school?
Part of it’s external, part of it’s internal. External factors include lack of money, low quality of life as a grad student, the need to pay back debts as an undergraduate, and the institutional invisibility of Filipinos b/c of the PI’s "special relationship" with the U.S. Internal factors include first and foremost, lack of encouragement from Filipinos and non-Filipinos alike. Of course, this hasn’t deterred some very determined Filipinos and Fil-Ams in Education, Ethnic Studies, Engineering, and maybe one or two other graduate programs, from running the gauntlet and coming out on the other side. But why go into literature when the so-called experts in English like Stephen Greenblatt sincerely believe (and it is, above all else, a question of faith) that there is no such thing as Filipino literature? It goes against common sense – and, you know how the saying goes, momma didn’t raise no fool.
(16) Why did you leave PANGIT/PAA and why? (graudation, time, ...? )
We didn’t leave PANGIT, PANGIT left us. I think it had its time, and in its time we did some wonderful things. It was born as a response to some very difficult questions regarding the abandonment of Filipinos and Filipino-Americans in higher education, the university’s suppression of its intimate relationship (as Bernard Moses, Karl Kroeber, and David Barrows would have attested) with America’s colonial experiment in the Philippines throughout the first half of the twentieth century. Until these walls can speak, we will have to teach each other and ourselves what the university will not teach us. But this stopgap measure shouldn’t distract us from the bigger picture: we have to use the resources and mechanisms already in place (PCN, PASS student tutoring and outreach, MAGANDA magazine, PilGrad, the De-Cal and Tagalog classes, the Filipino Studies consortium being organized by the director of CSEAS, et. al.) to develop other effective ways of addressing the issue of Filipino and Filipino-Americans in higher education.
(17) Any other comments/criticisms/things I should have asked but did not?
Good luck on your paper – publish it, so that undergrads will have a resource to turn to when they organize for their collective welfare and prosperity at UC Berkeley. I’ll be graduating in another month or so, and I don’t know what future awaits me. But I have a lot of love for Berkeley, and the students here; and although I have some regrets, my hope is that the future generations of Filipinos and Fil-Ams will turn those regrets into lessons for future organizing.
Warm regards,
Jody