Lost and Found in Manila

For my final blog post for UW’s 2016 CHID Philippines study abroad program I am asked to reflect critically upon what I have done, what I learned, and how I interacted with others. For me I have to find a place within amid a level of internal conflict regarding my own identity and the situations I have found myself in over the past month. This makes it a bit hard for me to know exactly how objective I am being. As Feliciana Santos (or Tita Peachie), one of our elder luminaries and givers of wisdom on this trip, said to our group, “Your perception depends on your history.” With this is mind, and given that the nature of this final blog post is one that asks for our personal reflections, I ask you, dear reader, to look at my observations as my own, from my gut, my mind, and my heart.

A Pre-Trip Enoch

This trip and program has really shook me up and transformed me. There are many reasons for this. Our group dynamics were not the strongest and we had conflicts. This was no one’s fault in my mind. We come from a country where there are some great divisions about how people feel about what it means to be an American, and the concepts of race, identity, politics, and a myriad number of other societal issues. This played out in many ways relating to how our group members interacted with each other. The conflicts of personalities and identities really opened my mind to the different ways that people back home viewed themselves and others. This includes me. I feel that being removed from our comfortable milieu back home, and thrust into a situation that was alien for many of us, forced us to look at our lives, and the beliefs and identities that we carry with us, in a manner which we do not normally do in the States. One could say that our group dynamics here were a microcosm of the greater societal macrocosm that is the collective life and experiences of people in the United States. I am by no means saying that there is one “American Experience”. In fact that very notion is one that was seriously challenged and, in my mind, completely broken down and obliterated by the curriculum in this program.

Graph Truth

Another reality that really hit me at my core was the glaring inequity that exists in this world. This exists on many levels and is, in many ways, relative. In Manila we have the super-rich elites and the extremely poor of Baseco. In turn you can flip this to an examination of global issues of inequity. In the United States I am pretty darn poor and I come from a family that was poor when I was young. But here I am extremely privileged economically. My money goes very far here. This is this is result of my country’s privileged status and position in the modern global-capitalist economy. Both my personal as well as my country’s position are not due to merit or an earned status as we like to believe. They are, in part, a result of a history of exploitation and colonization of others and an unearned “luck-of-the-draw” positionality in history and geography. In addition to these privileges I also have what I like think of as a “Meta-Privilege”. This is the situation I find myself in wherein I have, due to my economic, educational, and class privileges, the ability to explore my situation, observations, and emotions surrounding all of this at my own leisure. I have the privilege of existing in a state of guilt, pride, or any other non-productive state of self-involved emotion if I so chose to. Other people in other situations do not have that freedom due to aspects of their lives that due not grant this “Meta-Privilege”. I deeply hope and firmly believe that I will not fall in to such self-serving traps as those emotions and can instead grow into a better citizen of the world as I continue past this program.

This One Simply Had to be Added, Just Because...

This leads me directly to the next major aspect of my personal introspection and reflection that I feel is necessary at this juncture. What I am I going to do with my new found knowledge about others and the world? How am I going to interact differently with the systems at play in the world and the people I come into contact with now that I have shed some of my outdated belief systems and gained new insights? I do not yet have full answers to these questions. But I think I have a start. I want to work for more equity in this world. I want to interact with people in a way which recognizes everyone’s experience and identity as valid even if I do not agree with their “truths”. I feel that education is a vital component and my privileged position in higher education needs to be utilized to the best of my ability. How to go about this in a real-world manner, long term, is a tough question. I feel that I am still new to some of my feelings and insights I have gained here so even if I do not currently have answers to these questions I am in a good place from which to grow. I feel that not knowing all the answers and being willing to grow, progress, and learn is the first step in reaching some of the goals I have towards interacting with the world and other people in the positive and productive ways mentioned. A very real and very serious consideration I feel I need to explore is how to not forget the insights and learning moments I have been exposed to in this program.

Dr. Vicente Breaking it Down, for Y'all.

The next major area to explore in this blog is how I interacted with others in the groups in which I worked during this program. I feel that both of the groups in which I worked functioned pretty well considering some of the ways in which the main group had strained interactions. The first group I was in was composed of myself, Andrés Coca, Gabby Humkey, and Christina Price.We read, discussed, and gave a presentation on the following articles. They were “The Archaeology of Pericolonialism: Responses of the unconquered to Spanish Conquest and Colonialism in Ifugao, Philippines” (Acabado, 2016), “Bagiuo between two wars: The creation and destruction of a summer capital” (Alcantra, 2002), “Bagiuo Graffiti” (Bose, 2002), “White love: Census and melodrama in the U.S. colonization of the Philippines” (Rafael, 2000), and “Colonial domesticity: Engendering race at the edge of empire” (Rafael, 2000). We divided the work and readings as evenly as possible and I feel that all members contributed. We all worked on our own part of the PowerPoint presentation and I feel that voices and opinions were heard and respected. In my mind we did not really have any major conflicts and most of the decisions were made by consensus. I felt we worked well together especially considering we had to put together our presentation late at night after a long and arduous road trip. I personally benefited from the connections I made with my group members through this process and I feel that the this benefited my interactions with them throughout the rest of the program.

Inequity on Display, Via the Disney Store, Manila 

  
The next group I worked with consisted of myself, Sarah Clark, Aedan Roberts, and Ariel Corpus Delos Santos. This group examined tourism and some of the issues surrounding it such as sex tourism, environmental degradation, and the displacement of people. We, as a group, had more conflicts on the surface but I feel they were handled well, all in all. We ran into issues such as technical difficulties which contributed to the strain we all felt, and additionally a level of exhaustion we all felt by this point in the program. I feel very close to all the members and feel that we really formed a long term bond. We all brought something unique to the table. Sarah had a well-researched historical perspective. Aaden brought genuine emotion and a beautiful poem to the table. Ariel was really balanced in her perspective regarding tourism and also had an amazing seat-of-the-pants spoken word piece. I solved many of our technical difficulties, conducted the outside research for additional media, facts, and additional data, and conducted many interviews to explore the effects that tourism has on real people in the trenches of the industry.

Graph Truth, cont.

  
The final piece of this blog is the tying of my observations, feelings, and reflections to the course readings and some of the theses and the concepts therein. A piece that I feel has a deep connection to the first area I explore in this post is the paper, “Knowledge construction, transformative academic knowledge, and Filipino American identity and experience” (Andresen, 2012). In it Andresen (2002) explores identity construction, transformative knowledge, and the importance of a multicultural education. These are all themes and topics which influenced my feelings, thoughts, and experiences in this program. While many of the specifics were related to the Filipino-American students’ experience I feel that there was much that a White student could take away from it and many of the ideas and topics I feel informed and directed some of my own feelings related to my own identity reconstruction during this trip. In addition Andresen (2012, p. 82) built upon the concepts of Banks (1996) regarding transformative academic knowledge which “consists of concepts, paradigms, themes, and explanations that challenge mainstream academic knowledge and that expand the historical and literary canon” (Banks, 1996, p. 16). For me the entire experience here was firmly in the camp of a transformative academic experience as well as an opportunity to examine and restructure my own identity internally and in relation to others in the world around me.

Modern Global Capitalism and Colonial Mentality, in a Nutshell

The second piece that is central to the next area I explored is “White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women’s studies” (McIntosh, 1988). In this piece McIntosh (1988) examined the ways in which she encountered White Privilege day to day in her life as well very clear explanation of White Privilege in the way that we, in an academic setting, understand it today. Throughout my experience here I tried to examine my own privileges on multiple levels and look at the ways in which they shaped my views about myself, others, and the world around me. I am by no means saying that I did a perfect job of this but if one revisits my earlier posts on this blog I feel it will be clear that this was a major area of personal as well as academic thought for me. If I were to put my feelings related to this this topic in layperson’s terms it would go something like this, “Privilege of many types exist in the modern world and it is vital for us to examine, come to terms with, and hopefully voluntarily relinquish them”. I have privilege in this world. How will I use it? Why do I have it? Can this state of affairs be changed? This are all concepts that I dealt with during my experience here.

When You Break Your Mental Chains You are Free to Open New Doors 

The final concepts I want is look at here are explored in Viola’s “Blue Scholarship to Challenge the Miseducation of the Filipino” (2006). These are directly related to what I will do with the transformative academic experiences and restructuring of my personal identity construction that I have had the privilege of experiencing in this program. I would like to point out that much of what Viola (2006) talked about related to what a Filipino-American’s experience of hip-hop can be. I however, as a white person, can still learn much from this article. This once again goes back to a main underling core concept for me. That is that a multicultural education is valuable and can help us understand systems at play in the world as well as each other better. The last statement is a side note, albeit a very important one, in relation to what I now want to examine in regards to the correlations between Viola’s (2006) article and my reflections on what I want to do with what I have gained from this program in the future.

Through Art Modern Filipinos are Breaking Those Chains

Viola spoke several times to the importance of action on the part of academics and intellectuals. I do not want to claim either of these titles in their entirety but I think that I, in some manner, am serving both of these roles to some extent in the present. I hope to continue to expand upon my role as both in the future. I am engaged in higher education. I do plan on continuing my education to at least a Master’s level and, if I don’t go broke, hopefully a PHD. This places me in the world of academia to some extent, and if I continue to write and be self-reflective in that process, I see myself as being, in part, an intellectual as well. I want to be clear here that I am seeing this as a responsibility and not some badge of pride or merit. Ironically enough both of these statuses both carry privilege. I know that this is very complex and perhaps slightly convoluted way to look this topic but then again how we navigate our roles in life as well as our identities is also quite complicated. There is a statement that Viola cited that I feel is important in regards to the topics at hand, “We need to be able to speak our struggle not just in abstract terms, but in ways that touch hearts and minds. Thus, we must…engage in finding ways of recognizing points of commonality, of mutual interest, where our own struggle for liberation intersects with the struggles of others, where we can begin to transcend the limitations of what is, in the struggle for what could be…[This struggle] must take place not only on the picket line or protest march, but also in the schools, places of worship, libraries, shop floors, and corporate offices – in every venue where people come together to learn, to labor, and to love” (McLaren, 2005, as cited in Viola, 1996, p.12).

Finally I wish to close with a haiku. Simple and short, I feel that this is a true and heartfelt summary of my experiences.

My Identity,

Lost and Found in Manila,

I will carry home.

~Daniel Enoch Tobin, Manila, 2016

References

Acabado, S. (2016). The Archaeology of Pericolonialism: Responses of the unconquered to Spanish Conquest and Colonialism in Ifugao, Philippines. International History Archeology. Springer Media: New York.

Andresen, T. (2012). Knowledge construction, transformative academic knowledge, and Filipino American identity and experience, In E. Bonus & D. Maramba, (Eds.) The “other” students: Filipino Americans, education, and power. (pp. 65-87). Charlotte, NC: IAP.

Alcantra, E.R. (2002) Bagiuo between two wars: The creation and destruction of a summer capital. In Shaw, A.V. & Francia, L.H. Vestiges of war. (pp. 207-223). New York: New York Press.

Banks, J. (1996). Multicultural education, transformative knowledge, and action : Historical and contemporary perspectives (Multicultural education series (New York, N.Y.)). New York: Teachers College Press.

Bose, S. (2002). Bagiuo Graffiti. In A.V. Shaw & L.H Francia, Vestiges of war. (pp. 260-67). New York: New York Press.

McIntosh, P. (1988). White privilege and male privilege: A personal account of coming to see correspondences through work in women’s studies. In K. Tupper, Introduction to women’s studies: Women 200 (2nd ed.) (pp. 62-71). New York: McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Rafael, V. (2000). White love: Census and melodrama in the U.S. colonization of the Philippines. In White love and other events in Filipino history. (pp.19-52). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

 Rafael, V. (2000). Colonial domesticity: Engendering race at the edge of empire, 1899-1912. In White love and other events in Filipino history. (pp. 52.76). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Viola, M. (2006). Blue Scholarship to challenge the miseducation of the Filipino. Journal for Critical Education Policy. 4 (2).