Ilocano Immigrant' Renegotiation of Space in Gumil Hawaii Fiction (Circa 80s)

• Main Author: Perez, Ma. Socorro Q.
• Format: text
• Published: Archīum Ateneo 2024
• Subjects: Ilocano-Hawaiian fiction; Filipino diaspora; migrant literature; plantation workers
• Online Access: https://archium.ateneo.edu/kk/vol1/iss10/5; https://archium.ateneo.edu/context/kk/article/1126/viewcontent/_5BKKv00n10_2008_5D_203.1_NewScholarsForum_Perez.pdf
• Institution: Ateneo De Manila University

Migration, transportation, overseas labor, globalization, etc., have spawned complex and overdetermined consequences—among them the unprecedented migration of Filipinos, particularly Ilocanos, to Hawaii. The Philippines’ colonial history and neo-colonial realities often figure in the Filipinos’ construction of their identity in Hawaii, resulting in their essentialization as unskilled, uneducated, and unassimilable plantation laborers. The decline of the plantation era, however, led to the reconstitution of the Ilocano labor force into the “new plantations” of the tourism industry’s hotel and restaurant sectors. The new set-up is nonetheless rooted in what E. San Juan calls the “integration of Filipinos into US society on the basis of inequality and subject[ion] to discrimination due both to their race and nationality.” This study looks at Ilocano immigrant writers’ prize-winning short fiction (circa 80s) anthologized in GUMIL Hawaii; how Ilocano immigrant personas negotiate experiences of diaspora, dislocation, marginality, and disempoweredness; and how they create and recuperate a new hybridized space, even as they struggle with exilic life and its neo-colonial realities.