THE QUESTION OF RACE Quarter 2 Lesson 4 (Essay)

VIEW
A significant portion of our Philippine literary tradition is made
up of works written by Filipinos abroad, most notably those in
the United States.
Conventionally known as “Filipino- American writings” these
literary texts explore the personal , social, cultural, and even
political issues that Filipino- American confront as they
experience life in the United States.
The list of Fil-Am writers is extensive , and in many ways ruins
parallel to the tradition of Philippine writings in English.
IT’S ALL IN THE DASH
What does it mean to be a Filipino-American?
The dash between the words “Filipino” and
“American” is interesting point for discussion because
in talks about between, between being nether here
nor there.
We call this experience liminality.

If you are a new student in a particular school, you must have

hone through this experience of liminality- you are wearing you
new school uniform and you are physically present in your new
classroom, but your mind is somewhere else

Probably you are still thinking about your old school, the
friends you left behind, or even you old house if you come from
different city.
Interestingly enough, a good number of Fil-Am writing
deals with this experience of liminality as through the
process of homecoming.
Imagine moving back and returning to your old school
after being away for some time.
There are new younger teachers and school administrators
who do not recognize you
There are new classrooms and building. Can you consider
it a homecoming if so many things have changed? Or is the
school that you came from your new home?
These are real questions that balikbayans face and these are
issues that Fil-Am writers deal with.

The essay that you will be reading for this section is a work by
a young Fil-Am writer Laurel Fantauzze as she humorously but
also reflectively recounts her process of integrating herself into
the homeland of her mother

As you read this rather entertaining piece, pay particular

attention to the unique perspective that Fantauzze brings to the
experience of being a balikbayan in a country she truly calls
but one that consistently reminds her being different.
RACE
A race is a grouping of humans based on shared physical or social
qualities into categories generally viewed as distinct by society.

RACIST
A person who believes in or supports rascism
A person who believes that a particular race is superior to others

RACISM
prejudice, discrimination, or antagonism directed against someone
of a different race based on the belief that one's own race is
superior.
The traditional definition of race and ethnicity is related to
biological and sociological factors respectively. Race refers to a
person's physical characteristics, such as bone structure and skin,
hair, or eye color. Ethnicity, however, refers to cultural factors,
including nationality, regional culture, ancestry, and language.

An example of race is brown, white, or black skin (all from various

parts of the world), while an example of ethnicity is German or
Spanish ancestry (regardless of race) or Han Chinese. Your race is
determined by how you look while your ethnicity is determined
based on the social and cultural groups you belong to. You can have
more than one ethnicities but you are said to have one race, even if
it's "mixed race".
 Is a Filipino-Italian by ethnicity but was born in
LAUREL FANTAUZZO the United States.
She studied creative writing in the University of
Lowa home of the most prestigious creative
writing programs in the world
In May 2013 interview with Golden the official
student publication of the Ateneo de Manila
University, Fantauzzo claims that her
displacement in the Philippine was “more honest”
because the difference in her upbringing was
real .
“ Under My Invisible Umbrella” a piece which
won her a prestigious Don Carlos Palanca
Award, (The adventures as she struggles to
integrate herself in her mother’s homeland while
at the same time dealing with the discomfort she
feels in her priveged position.
 DON CARLOS PALANCA MEMORIAL AWARDS
FOR LITERATURE
Are literary awards of the
Philippines
The Manila Standard called it the
Pulitzer Prize of the Philippines in
terms of prestige.
The Palanca Awards, organized by
the Carlos Palanca Foundation, is one
of the Philippines' longest-running
awards programs
 UNDER MY INVISIBLE UMBRELLA
LAUREL FANTAUZZO
I accepted the man’s service without question, as if he had been standing at the
doorway of the Olongapo office building waiting only for me and walk at my
peace, getting wet himself.
I accepted his work without a “Salamat po.”
I was second to worst in my class of Filipino American would-be Tagalog
speakers .I was still too embarrassed to try.
As I waited for the rest of my Fil-Am classmates, my Tagalog teacher Susan
Quimpo approached me, holding her own umbrella.
“Did you notice that he held the umbrella only for you?” she murmured.
The man was not holding the umbrella above me. He was holding the
umbrella above my whiteness.
He was holding it like a flag for everything he assumed my whiteness
represented: my wealth, my station in life—higher than his—and my
deserving extra service.
This worship of whiteness is not a phenomenon unique to the Philippines. But
that day in Olongapo, I felt a surge of shame.
Of course, whether I felt guilty or not, I was still dry.
Whether I use checks, credit cards or cash, I can count on my skin color not
to work against the appearance of financial reliability.
I can choose public accommodation without fearing that people of my race
cannot get in or will be mistreated in the places I have chosen.
I wandered onto a fenced-in, exclusive university campus for the sole reason
that it was a nice walk, and I wanted to be there. The guard smiled and
tipped his hat to me. He did not require me to sign his security book.
In a live, crowded theater, I crossed a restricted area to use the much less crowded staff
restroom. Four guards said nothing.
As I slowly learned my motherland’s arithmetic of identity—repeated in countries once
brutalized by white rulers around the world—I realized what members of the service
sector assumed of me: English speaker + pale face + black hair = A foreigner. Or a
mestiza. She looks like the rulers—Spanish, or American. She and her family must have
some authority—perhaps political authority.
My mother was the second-to-youngest child of seven. The last home she shared with her
family was a small apartment that flooded regularly. She was a scholar at Ateneo de
Manila University, always explained to me as the Harvard of the Philippines. Her
classmates’ easy, entitled affluence depressed her. We lived in a wealthy California
suburb because my mother was always conscious of the necessity to perform wealth. And
we ate bread from the Wonderbread surplus store
My favorite karinderya serves scrambled eggs and rice for twenty pesos. My presence
amuses and annoys the guards and drivers who were never granted scholarships to study
me in my birth country. As my Tagalog improved, I began to understand their objections.
Didn’t I have a more sosyal place to eat as a foreigner? What was I playing at, treading
into their space?
I occasionally see my relatives in Tandang Sora, a long but narrow
street with many working-class neighborhoods. My cousins often think
about strategies to become Overseas Filipino Workers. It isn’t their first
choice to leave. But they have no other escape from the criminally small
wages given them
I always consider their position against mine. It is an uneasy
comparison. Had my mother not been a scholar—had her own, elder
sister not married an American, and petitioned for her to join them in
California—had my mother not found my father, a U.S. Naval officer
who made her laugh—I too might be starting a karinderya, finding
strategies to go abroad.
Whenever I visit Tandang Sora, I always bring dessert—a box of
donuts, or a bag of cookies, or ice cream. My cousins always feed me:
sopas, afritada, fried chicken, tilapia stuffed with garlic and tomatoes,
which they know to be my favorite. They joke about my Italian side
when spaghetti is on the table. They feed me well.
Of course, none of the economic struggles that once haunted my
family approach the reality of the kalesa driver, who winces when he
tells me about his wages, as he plies the avenues of Malate. He is
allowed to take home only twenty pesos of each 100-peso ride. The
rest he owes to the owner of his kalesa. It’s perfectly legal. He does not
say the rest, but I can perceive it: he can go to no one for fair wages.
Or my cab driver who dozes off at a stoplight—who apologizes when
I nudge him—since it’s the twenty-third hour of his twenty-four-hour
shift. How often will he get the chance to sheepishly say, “Extra charge,
ma’am,” for a cross-Quezon City ride?
Or the server who looks at me in terror when we realize she brought
the wrong order. Who will stop her boss from automatically deducting
the two hundred pesos from her own small paycheck? Who can she look
to, besides me, and the narrative of wealth my pale face projects, to
momentarily assist her with a generous tip?
 No one in the Philippines will ever immediately believe I am Filipina, no matter
how strongly and how affectionately I choose the country. My Tagalog will take
years to reach everyday, pun-level proficiency. My mother chose not to teach me
and my two younger brothers Tagalog, for fear that our Italian American father
would feel excluded. My brothers feel no connection at all to her home country. I
alone return regularly.
One night, a new friend invites me to a party in Forbes Park. I know the
neighborhood’s name as code, the way I know certain last names as code: upper-est
class, highest security, a servant for each family member, etc.
A private gate guards the house. It reminds me of the palatial, forbidding, buttery
mansions I used to pass on drives through Malibu in Southern California with an ex-
girlfriend who knew where celebrities lived. The young man hosting the party here in
Forbes Park is connected, in a way I don’t immediately grasp, to a political family.
Inside the house, a fog machine distorts the regal dark. A DJ’s bass line shakes my
skeleton. A man dressed like a pirate urges us to drink. Small, oval-shaped rainbows
glow intensely at a slick, temporary bar. Servers call me “Ma’am!” and gesture
toward the rainbows. I realize they’re drinks. I pick one up. It illuminates my hand.
My rainbow shot is very, very sweet.
Outside, serious-faced cooks grill hamburgers. I grew up knowing never to spurn free food, so I
stand in line for one. I watch more and more young Manileños arrive. They are, I realize, all part
of the ruling classes somehow, or they have befriended members of the ruling classes. Many of
them—though not all—are as white as I am, or more white.
I see a mechanical bull.
“What?” a Filipina friend mocks me later, when I describe the bull and the bass line and the sweet
rainbow and the Malibu-celebrity-style house and the free burger that was really very delicious.
“Were you just judging it the whole time?”
I flinch. But I fail to explain to her that the same thought occurred to me at the party, too.
Why, I argued to myself, should I judge this? Why should I worry about my complicity in racial
hierarchies and class hierarchies and family entrenchments that were constructed long before I
ever arrived in my motherland? Why not imagine, for just one night, that I am part of a powerful
family? Why not just laugh?
So I drink another rainbow. I get photographed. I exchange business cards. I
memorize new names. I watch the whipping hair of socialites who ride the now-
bucking bull. In the small hours of the night, I feel glad I am able to enjoy myself.
When I finally exit the gate, I am surprised to find another, more muted party—
party in the most utilitarian sense of the word.
These are the drivers and bodyguards, waiting for the members of the Philippine
elite inside. They smoke and murmur to each other and check their cell phones.
Their own families are waiting for them at homes far from Forbes Park
Ihave no easy explanation for my feelings about this moment. The workers
would not welcome, and do not deserve, my pity. But as I move mere footsteps
from the company of the sovereigns to the company of their servants, I feel the
uncertainty and shame that blur so often in me here. In the Philippines, I can get
past the gate.
For a chance at the social mobility I perform effortlessly, many Filipinos, waiting
forever, unprotected, outside barred mansions, will leave. They will hope for
work in a place—Europe, or my birth country—that helped create and enforce
the intractable inequity forcing their displacement today.
When I cease imagining the difference of those lives—when I choose dismissal
over compassion and self-examination and criticism, to make my own path in
the country feel less unnatural than it is—
How do I make space in myself for everyone on both sides of the gate?
Protected and unprotected? I don’t know.
I have a troubled relationship with umbrellas. They are daily necessities in
Manila, where the weather can alter by the hour with the intensity of an
erratic god. But I always lose umbrellas. Or I break them. It always surprises
me when umbrellas break. I never expect them to be as fragile as they are.
Once, when the wind blew the trees horizontal in the business district of
Ortigas, I paused in the lobby of an office tower, drenched. More and more
passersby, each of their umbrellas brutalized and useless, joined me. The
guards let us all stay. Most of us were waiting to walk to the MRT train. Over
the next hour, we watched power lines whip and taxis forge defiantly forward
and rain slash into the streets’ now-surging floodwaters. We were all, for a
brief moment, equally halted, equally soaked.
Then one guard noticed me.
“Taxi, ma’am?” he asked. “Taxi?”
He smiled, offering to go out into the rain for me. I smiled back, and told him
no.
MARKERS
Liminality
is a metaphysical state of being neither here nor there.
IMAGINE THAT YOU ARE ASKED TO COME UP WITH A
"THINGS A BALIKBAYAN NEEDS TO DO TO FIT IN " YOUR
GUIDE SHOULD HIGHLIGHT THE UNIQUE FILIPINO
CHARACTERISTICS THAT ONE CAN BE PROUD OF.
 ACTIVITY Exemplary Proficient Partially Proficient Incomplete POINTS

Concept 15-20 points 10-14 points 5-9 points 0-4 points

Has a clear picture of what they are trying to achieve. Adequate description of what they are trying to do and Has a fairly clear picture of what they are trying to achieve. Can describe what they are trying to do overall but has trouble Has brainstormed their concept, but no clear focus has emerged. Goals/final product not clearly Little effort has been spent on brainstorming and refining a concept. Unclear on the goals and how the output objectives
generally how his/her work will contribute to the final output. describing how his/her work will contribute to the final output. defined. will be met.

Script/ Storyboard 12-15 points 8-11 points 4-7 points 0-3 points

The storyboard illustrates the video presentation structure with thumbnail sketches of each scene. Notes of proposed The storyboard includes thumbnail sketches of each video scene and includes text for each segment of the presentation, The thumbnail sketches on the storyboard are not in logical sequence and do not provide complete There is no evidence of a storyboard or script.
transition, special effects, sound and title tracks incl: text, color, placement, graphics, etc. Notes about proposed descriptions of background audio for each scene, and notes about proposed shots and dialogue. descriptions of the video scenes, audio background, or notes about the dialogue.
dialogue/ narration text are included.

Content/ Organization 15-20 points 10-14 points 5-9 points 0-4 points

The content includes a clear statement of purpose or theme and is creative, compelling and clearly written. A rich variety Information is presented as a connected theme with accurate, current supporting information that contributes to understanding The content does not present a clearly stated theme, is vague, and some of the supporting information Content lacks a central theme, clear point of view and logical sequence of information. Much of the supporting
of supporting information in the video contributes to the understanding of the output’s main idea. Events and messages the output’s main idea. Details are logical and persuasive information is effectively used. The content includes a clear point of does not seem to fit the main idea or appears as a disconnected series of scenes with no unifying main information is irrelevant to the overall message. The viewer is unsure what the message is because there is little
are presented in a logical order. Includes properly cited sources. view with a progression of ideas and supporting information. Includes properly cited sources. idea. Includes few citations and few facts. persuasive information and only one or two facts about the topic are articulated. Information is incorrect, out of date, or
incomplete. No citations included.

Quality 12-15 points 8-11 points 4-7 points 0-3 points

Movie was completed and had all required elements. The video was well edited and moves smoothly from scene to Movie was completed and contained all required items. Editing was not done as well as it should have been. Some poor shots Movie was made, but had very little if any editing. Many poor shots remain. Video was very There was no movie, or tape was totally unedited with no transitions or audio support of any kind.
scene with proper use of transitions. Audio and other enhancements were well used. remain. Movie is still somewhat choppy. Audio and other enhancements were utilized, but not for maximum effect. fragmented and choppy with little to no audio reinforcement.

Teamwork 12-15 points 8-11 points 4-7 points 0-3 points

Student met and had discussions regularly. All students on the team contributed to the discussion and were part of the Students met and had discussions regularly. Most of the students on the team contributed to the discussion and were part of the Only a couple of team meetings were held. Most of the students on the team contributed at some level, Meetings were not held and/or some of the team members did not contribute at all to the output. Low levels of respect
final output. Team members showed respect with each other. final output. Team members mostly showed respect with each other. but a majority of the work was done by one or two. were evident within the team.

Timeliness 12-15 points 8-11 points 4-7 points 0-3 points

All deadlines were met. Most output deadlines were met. Those that were late did not have significant impact on the finished output. Many output deadlines were not met, resulting in some impact on the finished output. Deadlines were regularly missed, having a significant impact on the final output.

Final Score
Directions: Imagine that you are hosting a balikbayan
relative for a week during summer vacation. He/She has
not been in the Philippines for twenty years. Prepare an
itinerary for him/her so he/she can experience the
homecoming visit of hi/her life. What places should
he/she visit? What food should he/she eat? You may
situate your imagined itinerary in your hometown and you
may include out-of-town trips.
 DAY ACTIVITY

SUNDAY

MONDAY

TUESDAY

WEDNESDAY

THURSDAY

FRIDAY

SATURDAY