In the introduction to her Legit News video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L9Dh8HEmoBc&list=WL&t=38s&index=28) Filipina-American writer Tricia Capistrano made clear that she feels totally and personally in touch with the diversity-driven state of much of American culture in the 21st century: “Today, I'm the face of America.”
As a Filipina-American, Capistrano’s succinct but highly-meaningful opening is something of a defiant statement, defiant towards the post-truth, racist forces embodied by Donald Trump and what is still left of the increasingly-retrogressive Republican Party. In braving the heavy winds produced by Trump’s dark and dystopian vision of the United States, Capistrano has tried to come to grips with America’s imperfection as a great nation.
When Capistrano first came to the United States 22 years ago, it was for her a momentous opportunity to have arrived in what waves of Filipino immigrants have deemed to be the promised land. Capistrano alighted on to American shores trusting that her new country was “going to be very open-minded.” It was also for her a nation where “the systems of government were very fair”. Capistrano added that the American model of government entailed “a lot of accountability” and “no corruption.”
Over time however, her once full and firm conviction that America was the land of liberty, justice, and democracy would dim as the reality of life in the United States gradually swelled in her consciousness. This led her to the conclusion that America is “not as perfect as I thought it would be.”
Capistrano is hardly the only immigrant from the Philippines—or from any other country for that matter—to find that her new homeland was a cauldron of bewildering inconsistencies and contradictions. Generations of immigrants from the Philippines have voyaged across the Pacific Ocean to the United States only to see their preconceived ideals of America run up against the adversities produced by its social, cultural, and economic cleavages.
What Capistrano and other Filipino immigrants have been confronted with takes us back to the Depression-era period of Filipino American laureate Carlos Bulosan, himself an expectant expatriate from the Philippines. Not that Capistrano and all other Filipino immigrants necessarily had to bear the depth of what Bulosan went through. The author did have to suffer racism, illness, and privation all which made existence in America for him “swift and dangerous.”
However, Bulosan’s rude awakening and resulting despondency did not translate into disillusionment or surrender. While Bulosan and many of his emigre compatriots’ enthusiasm for their new home had been dampened by the worst of American xenophobia and inequality, the novelist persevered and refused to give up on the United States and its promise.
Bulosan’s literary depiction of what he endured is reflected in his novel “America Is In The Heart.” Undeterred like Bulosan himself by the trials and tribulations that come with trying to make it in the US, Carlos, the novel’s protagonist, says in the novel “It came to me that no man —no one at all —could destroy my faith in America again. It was something that had grown out of my defeats and successes, something shaped by my struggles for a place in this vast land. . . . It was something that grew out of the sacrifices and loneliness of my friends, of my brothers in America and my family in the Philippines —something that grew out of our desire to know America, and to become part of her great tradition, and to contribute something toward her final fulfillment.”
Along the lines of Bulosan’s story, Tricia Capistrano has earned the right to express her reservations about what America has meant to her. She has paid her dues as a law-abiding immigrant and now as a patriotic US citizen. Capistrano and Bulosan, although separated by temporal and qualitative differences, share comparable cultural value in the collective Filipino American experience.
One theme that both Capistrano and Bulosan have in common is a paradoxical perspective of life in America. One might argue that both of them see America as what the Greek philosopher Plato referred to as a “pharmakon”: something that is at once a cure and a poison. The United States, with its diversity of culture and institutions of modern democracy, has been a towering pedestal of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It has acted as a beacon of progress and opportunity that the whole world envied and followed. This is the historically-prevailing ideal that hopeful immigrants continue to believe in to this very day.
On the other hand history, with the passage of time, has provided with us with a more critical consideration of the United States. The light-filled, effectual ideal of America as a moral and ethical foundation for humankind doesn’t quite correspond to the historical evidence that has been amassed over the years. By now, a majority of historians have chronicled the hatreds, the vanities, the insecurities, the violence, and the injustices that have deleteriously shaped the American social landscape.
Capistrano has been able to successfully navigate her way through this confusedly bifurcated record of American history and society. She has done so as, in her words, a “member of a mixed-race family” (Capistrano is married to Tony Kelso, a Caucasian). In the Legit News video, Capistrano also mentions that she and her husband are the well-disposed parents “of a gender non-conforming child.”
It is the socially- and culturally-liberal side of the American spectrum that has given its blessing to Capistrano’s “gender non-conforming” teenage son, as well as to other historically marginalized persons. It is that progressive side of her adopted homeland that has allowed Capistrano and her interracial family to embrace the salutary benefits of American democracy and tolerance and avoid the worst impulses of American prejudice and bigotry. Very few countries other than the United States, despite all its warts, blemishes, and ignominies, can offer such freedom and open-mindedness.
For all that he withstood during his American journey, Carlos Bulosan chose to fashion the summa of that experience in positive terms: “I knew that no man could destroy my faith in America that had sprung from all our hopes and aspirations, ever.” In tune with Bulosan, Tricia Capistrano shares his optimism even as she laments that there hasn’t been sufficient change in America. Nevertheless, Capistrano urges that in spite of all the daunting challenges that await all Americans in the future, “people should continue working for that change.”
ALLEN GABORRO
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