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Louisiana "Manilamen" from an Expert's Perspective |
|
 Note: This was letter written by Prof. MICHAEL M CULLINANE of the SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES
dept. of the University of Wisconsin at Madison to Prof. Stephen H. Sumida of Asian/Pacific American Studies Program at University of Michigan in 1998.
Prof. Cullinane made his assertions on the validity of the "Manilamen" stories particularly the one written by author Marie Espina...
**************************************
Prof. MICHAEL M CULLINANE
SOUTHEAST ASIAN STUDIES
University of Wisconsin at Madison
207a Ingraham Hall, Mark H
1155 Observatory Dr
Madison, WI 53706
April 24, 1998
Stephen H. Sumida
Asian/Pacific American Studies Program
G410 Mason Hall
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor MI 48l09-1967
Dear Professor Sumida,
I read with interest your article, "East of California," in the new Journal of
Asian American Studies. We here in Wisconsin welcome the move beyond the master
narrative of Asian American studies, and welcome the new journal.
I have been for some time concerned with the way in which the field has
uncritically incorporated the "history" of the so-called "Manilamen" or
"Filipino Cajuns" into the larger narrative. I find it somewhat disturbing since
much of this "history" suffers from a remarkable paucity of source materials, as
well as from a very limited use of critical oral histories. I have not responded
to these accounts, assuming that since they have not been integrated into the
larger narrative, they pose no serious problem. With your placing the Louisiana
stories squarely into the mainstream in your article, I feel obliged to comment.
What, perhaps, makes the claim of 18th-century Filipino settlement in Louisiana
particularly disturbing is that varieties of these claims have been a part of a
popular, somewhat romantic notion propagated for quite some time by a range of
observers and writers -- Espina is not the first to promote the "Filipino Cajun"
narrative. The first publicist known to me was Lafcadio Hearn in the 1880s (see
below), and, after the US conquest of the Philippines, there have been a number
of accounts published both in the US and in the Philippines. Although Espina is
quite familiar with many of these, she has not cited them and continues to
promote herself as the central author of this history. Her history has been more
recently legitimized, without critique, by the important publication of Fred
Cordova (1983) and by FAHNS. I would argue that Espina has made some valuable
contributions to Filipino
American history, the least of which is her attempt to place the origins of the
community in the 1760s.
Although we can be certain that Filipinos resided in what is today lower
Louisiana before the American conquest of the Philippines (1899-1902), it is not
at all clear when and how these Filipinos came to the area. Marina Espina's
various essays (since 1974) suggest that Filipinos came to the Louisiana gulf
coast and Mississippi delta, as well as to New Orleans, shortly after the
Spanish acquired the area from France in 1763. It is reasonable to assume, as
she does, that Filipinos, who were at the time crewmen on Spanish vessels moving
between Spanish America and the Philippines, would have visited the Louisiana
coast during the forty years that Spain held title to this area (1763-1803).
This may be so, but Espina presents no documentation whatsoever for this claim.
What is even more frustrating with Espina's published works are that, except for
photographs displayed from her personal collection, they provide readers with
almost no sources (oral or archival) for most of her history of the "Manilamen."
Though we assume that much of the material for her accounts derives from oral
histories with Filipino oldtimers of the area, these interviews and interviewees
are only inadvertently mentioned and rarely cited clearly as sources. If there
is a tradition of 18th-century settlement preserved in the tales of the
descendants of the early settlers, careful recordings of these would be
extremely valuable, both as historical memory and as legends. Instead, the
musing and speculations of early 20th-century popular writers substitute for
more authentic renderings of the past. What results from Espina's works is an
undocumented claim that Filipinos started coming to the area in the 1760s and a
better documented claim (with photos and some recorded memories) that there was
a sizeable group of Filipinos in New Orleans by the end of the 19th century.
Unfortunately, we know almost nothing about any Filipinos ("Manilamen") in
Louisiana between the 1760s and the 1870s.
The most authoritative material presented by Espina on the pre-1898 Filipino
community is her telling of the story of the Madrigal family: "Seven Generations
of a New Orleans Filipino Family." In this account of "the oldest documented
Filipino family" known to her, Espina has made good use of family photographs,
as well as some useful oral history. The Madrigal story, however, recounts a
very much later migration than the tales of 18th-century Filipino deserters from
Spanish ships. Felipe Madrigal, the family's first settler to Louisiana, is said
to have been born in the Philippines in 1803. If so, he did not reach Louisiana
until the territory had passed out of Spanish control and into the possession of
the U.S. Madrigal's permanent residence in New Orleans may not have begun until
the 1840s, since he was said to have been on the crew of the same ship that
brought his soon-to-be Irish
wife, who, along with her family, may have been among the thousands fleeing the
famine. At the time (late 1840s and early 1850s), large numbers refugees from
Ireland entered the U.S. at the port of New Orleans. If so, that would place the
origins of the Madrigal family in the area in the mid-19th century, with their
three daughters marrying local Filipinos as late as the 1860s and 1870s.
Madrigal's ethnicity is also not clear. At the time (early 19th century) in the
Philippines, the term "Filipino" generally referred not to a native of the
islands (who were generally indios to the Spaniards) but to creoles (i.e., Españoles
Insulares or Españoles Filipinos). Moreover, at the time, natives of the
Philippines did not generally have formal family names, but were rather assigned
two baptismal names (e.g., Juan, Francisco, Jose, etc.); legalized family names
for the native population was not instituted by the Spaniards until 1850. Being
that Felipe presumably held a family name (Madrigal) at the start of the 19th
century, it is possible that he was either a Spanish mestizo or creole,
permitting him to be formally designated a "Filipino." His Hispanic-Filipino
origins and heritage would have made him foreign (even Asian) to the society of
mid-19th-century New Orleans and may explain his association with Filipinos,
especially his three future sons-on-law, all of whom came themselves from the
Philippines at a time when the native population, particularly those engaged in
international travel, would have identified themselves more self-consciously as
Filipinos. From the account of the Madrigal family, we can be certain that some
Filipinos were residing in New Orleans by the middle of the last century. By the
1860s (four decades before the American takeover of the Philippines), there was
a large enough body of Filipinos residing in lower Louisiana to form a
recognizable community in New Orleans and beyond, giving rise in 1870 to the
formation of the earliest Filipino organization in the U.S., the Sociedad de
Benficencia de los Hispano Filipinos de Nueva Orleans. None of this evidence,
however, indicates any substantial Filipino settlement before mid-century, and
none of it has anything to do with Filipinos arriving in the area as early as
the second half of the 18th century.
Given the clear ethnic identity of the late-19th-century "Manilamen" as
Filipinos (that is, natives of the Philippines and not creoles or even Spanish
mestizos), it can be postulated that most of them actually arrived in the area
during the second half of the 19th century. By far the most revealing and
elaborate contemporary accounts of Filipinos in lower Louisiana derive from the
writings of Lafcadio Hearn. Despite his tendency to exoticize his subjects,
Hearn's account of Filipinos, especially of the St. Malo village of the early
1880s, depicts a vibrant community with a rich economic and cultural life of
their own. In this account, and in his references to "Manilamen" in his novel,
Chita, Hearn seems to be describing more recent arrivals, not a community that
had been adapting to the gulf coast and delta area for over a hundred years.
Let's assume, as we should, that any Filipinos who jumped ship and settled in
the bayous in the late 18th century did so as a community of males -- there were
few, if any, crew-women on board Spanish vessels of the time. If the late
19th-century Filipinos of St. Malo and the Filipino looters depicted in Chita
were direct descendants of these late-18th-century settlers, they should have
undergone a century of assimilation and considerable intermarriage with
non-Filipinos. And yet, Hearn's "Manilamen" (after, perhaps, 4 generations)
still spoke Tagalog and retained "Filipino" cultural traits. This may, of
course, be quite possible given the sparse population of the area and the
limited demands on more isolated communities to assimilate. It may also be
attributed to Hearn's propensity to "study" his subjects and to his imposing a
more "Filipino" culture on his "Manilamen" (including Tagalog) than was
otherwise the case. Whatever the situation, the Filipinos described by Hearn in
the 1880s appear to be more recent migrants, rather than the descendants of male
settlers who arrived in the area over a century before his time. In fact, nearly
all the evidence (especially that of Espina) suggests that the "Manilamen" of
Louisiana came to the area in the second half of the 19th century, not in the
second half of the 18th century. If so, this migration remains fascinating and
little understood: how did hundreds of Filipino men chose Louisiana and New
Orleans as their destination, especially if we remove from the equation the
romantic vision of repressed Filipino sailors jumping off Spanish ships and
disappearing into the bayous? Rather than focusing on Spanish galleons as the
source of Filipinos in Louisiana, it may be more important to concentrate on the
impact of the Spanish opening the Philippines to foreign trade between
1838/39 (Manila's opening) and the 1860s (the opening of Iloilo and Cebu).
So, there is still a great need to include these Filipinos and this dynamic
locale into the master narrative, and to indicate that the mid-19th-century
Chinese who arrived in California were not necessarily the first Asians to
permanently settle in America. We must be more cautious, however, in stamping a
date (1763 or 1765 or 1781) onto this movement of Filipinos to Louisiana, lest
we get caught up in the tiresome game that now alleges that Filipino seamen
actually settled in California in the 16th century.
Please do not consider this a criticism of your essay -- it is not. The above
topic is simply one of my pet peeves and I was both delighted and dismayed that
you devoted so much space to it in your essay. I would love it if someone
uncovered some reliable evidence on Filipinos jumping Spanish ships in New
Orleans in the 1760s, or being forcibly resettled there in the 1770s to
establish Spanish control over Louisiana, or even abandoning Spain for Louisiana
at the start of the Mexican struggle for independence in 1810. I want this story
to be true, but, alas, have come to realize that it may not be. I am now more
interested in the experiences of Filipinos who came later, both before 1898 and
after, and there is much to learn from their experiences.
Sincerely yours,
Michael Cullinane
mmcullin@facstaff.wisc.edu
REFERENCES
1 . "Filipinos in Louisiana: imported over a century ago still retain their old
customs," The Manila Times, February 1, 1902: 6 (reprint of an article in the
Washington Post November 3, 1901: 29); "Discovery of a new colony of Filipinos;
over 300 identified by C.H. McClure as shrimp fishers in Louisiana; married to
white women -- a thousand mestizos," The Manila Times, July 23, 1907: 1, 8; "35
years in the United States: can any Filipino beat his record?" The Philippine
Republic, 3(1) January 1926: 18; Carlos Quirino, "Louisiana's Filipino fishing
village of St. Malo," Graphic (Manila), March 23, 1933: 8-9, 52-53, 60-61;
Quirino, "The unusual life led in Louisiana's `Manila Village'," Graphic
(Manila), March 30, 1933: 8-9, 49, 52-53; Quirino, "A `Promised Land' for `Paisanos',"
Graphic (Manila), April 6, 1933: 12-13, 49, 53; Frank E. Schoonover, "In the
haunts of Jean Lafitte," Harper's Monthly Magazine, December 1911: 80-91;
Adeudato J. Agbayani, "The century-old Filipino colony in the United States,"
Journal of the Philippines Historical Society (Manila) 1(1) July 1941: 54-64;
Ray M. Thompson, The Land of Lafitte the Pirate (New Orleans: Jefferson Parish
Yearly Review, 1943): 89; Harnett T. Kane, Deep Delta Country, edited by Erskine
Caldwell (New York: Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1944): 112-118; Larry Bartlett,
"Filipino 'Cajuns'," Dixie Magazine (Sunday Times-Picayune), July 31, 1977,
citing the work of Marina Espina; Carlos Quirino, "Roots on strange shore," in
Filipino Heritage 9, 1978: 2405-2408; Rhys Richards, "The `Manilla-Men' and
Pacific commerce," Solidarity (Manila) 95, 1983: 47-57; Jim Kenny, "Dancing the
shrimp," Philippine Studies, 42, 3rd Quarter 1994: 385-390 (first published in
Cultural Vistas, Fall 1992: 42-46).
2. Her most important essays are reprinted in: Marina E. Espina, Filipinos in
Louisiana (New Orleans: A.F. Laborde & Sons, 1988).
3. Originally published in New Orleans Ethnic Cultures, edited by John Cooke
(New Orleans: Committee on Ethnicity in New Orleans, 1978), and reprinted in her
Filipinos in Louisiana, 56-74.
4 . Espina, Filipinos in Louisiana, 80.
5 . See Lafcadio Hearn, "Saint Malo: a lacustrine village in Louisiana,"
Harper's Weekly, March 31, 1883: 198-199 (reprinted in: Hearn, Miscellanies,
compiled by Albert Mordell (London: William Heinemann, 1924): volume 2, 89-102;
and Hearn, Chita: A Memory of Last Island (New York: Harper & Brothers
Publishers, 1889). For some insight into Hearn's knowledge of Filipinos, see
Hearn, Fantastics and Other Fancies, compiled and edited by Charles Woodward
Hutson (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1919): 21-22.
6 . Lorraine Jacobs Crouchett, Filipinos in California: From the Days of the
Galleons to the Present (El Cerrito: Downey Place Publishing House, Inc., 1982);
and more recently, Eloisa Gomez Borah, "Filipinos in Unamuno's California
expedition of 1587," Amerasia Journal, 21(3) Winter 1995-96: 175-184.
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Posted on Monday, October 17 @ 14:39:20 CDT by don |
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