Between colonialism and settler colonialism: Filipino youths in <scp>C</scp>anada

In this fascinating paper, Philip Kelly (2015) takes a new approach to an important issue that has concerned a number of Filipino-Canadian community organizers and their academic allies: why is it that the children of one of the most highly educated groups of immigrants to Canada, typically with competence in the English language and a familiarity with American culture, have relatively poor records of educational attainment relative to youths of other immigrant groups? Why are children of Filipino immigrants to Canada apparently experiencing downward social mobility? In the U.S. context, survey data have added concerns about mental health: a significant proportion of Filipina students surveyed in San Diego high schools in the 1990s reported high levels of suicidal ideation (46 per cent) and alarming rates of actual suicide attempts (26 per cent), the highest of any ethnic group surveyed (cited in Espiritu & Wolf, 2001: 178). As Kelly notes, typically the explanation for educational outcomes in Canada has taken shape as a critique of the material impacts of various state policies: in particular, the labour export policy of the Philippines government on the one hand, and Canadian immigration policy, especially the Live-in Caregiver Program (LCP), on the other. With respect to the former, the Philippine economy and individual families in the Philippines are now heavily dependent on remittances from overseas Filipino workers, and a discourse of sacrifice to nation and family obliges Filipino immigrants to send remittances home rather than invest in the human capital of family members in Canada. This is of more than academic interest: debate about this culture of transnational sacrifice has become a key point of conflict among different Filipino-Canadian activist groups over at least the last five years. There has been disagreement about the extent to which Filipino-Canadians should reorient their vision of home towards their permanent settlement in Canada (that is, away from the Philippines as diasporic homeland) and invest in their immediate families in Canada rather than transnational families in the Philippines. Critique of Canadian policy has been multifaceted, and as Kelly notes, much has focused on the LCP, the programme through which a good proportion of Filipino families have migrated to Canada since the mid-1990s. Filipinas coming to Canada under temporary work permits as live-in caregivers can sponsor their families after fulfilling the terms of the programme and gaining their permanent resident status. The LCP thus institutionalizes and regulates family separation, along with the deskilling of the women who come through it. Like Kelly, the Philippine Women Centre of BC and I have attributed the problems experienced by youths to trauma and family conflict (bound up with family separation) and the pressure to leave school and enter the labour market (in order to contribute wages in households where the primary wage earners have been deskilled through the LCP) (Pratt, 2012). In the Vancouver context, May Farrales (2015) has added to this analysis a critique of public education policy, specifically of English as a Second Language (ESL) Programs. Finding that Filipino youths express high aspirations for themselves in their early years in Vancouver high schools, she documents the ways that they become stalled in ESL programmes and eventually ‘time out’ of the public school system when they reach the age of 18. Philip Kelly has been key in developing the arguments outlined above; in this paper, he adds another important strand of explanation that focuses on the deep emotional impacts of two distinctive but converging histories of colonialism and settler colonialism, in the Philippines and Canada respectively. He argues that Filipino youths in Canada internalize the injury of, not just one, but two cultures of racism, and they experience their heritage as Filipinos as shame. One source of shame emerges from the trauma of colonialism in the Philippines and the ways that the superiority of whiteness and American culture has been inculcated within the Philippines. Another message of cultural inferiority is simultaneously lived through and obscured by discourses of multiculturalism in Canada. He writes of the effects on youth of the reluctance within some Filipino Canadian families to talk about the Philippines, something that the Filipino Canadian Youth Alliance (FCYA) and I have tried to understand through notions of intergenerational ‘postmemory’ (Pratt with Filipino Canadian Youth Alliance/ Ugnayan ng Kabataang Pilipino sa Canada, 2003). Filipino-Canadian youths interviewed by Kelly spoke of their discomfort visiting the Philippines and their reactions to media and other cultural representations of the Philippines as a site of natural disasters, poverty and political corruption. These negative transnational imaginaries, Kelly speculates, affect self-esteem and a sense of personal possibility. This analysis, which Kelly frames as a preliminary exploration, is immensely suggestive, and I can see further possibilities offered by the literature on shame. Elspeth Probyn, for example, writes of the ambiguity and productivity of shame as a state of feeling, emotion and affect: ‘as the fine line or border between moving forward into more interest or falling back into humiliation’ (2003: xii). As ‘an acute state of sensitivity’ (2005: 2) based in a fear of contempt, shame ‘enforces modesty’, including, possibly, the modesty of ambition discussed by Kelly. But Probyn also argues that shame is based in a longing for engagement and reciprocity and can be transformative: ‘shame promises a return of interest, joy and connection’ (2003: xiii). Further, we fear shame, she argues, in part because it tends to be contrasted to other emotions like pride: ‘the relationship between the terms is seen as one of either opposition or mutual exclusivity, … where shame necessarily detracts from pride’ (2005: xviii). But this need not be so. In a promising move, Kelly turns to the work of organizations in several Canadian cities aimed at developing more positive engagements with the Philippines. Historically this cultivation of an active engagement with the Philippines has been an important focus of activity for the FCYA in Vancouver, and in the small study we did together in 2003, youths spoke of significance of this for their self-identification. As one youth put it: ‘Especially for people who grew up not feeling proud of being Filipino. We found something to be proud of and it is incredible. Your self-identification also changes’ (Pratt with FCYA/UKPC, 2003: 58). Where this new self-identification might lead is an open question. Hopefully, it leads to better educational outcomes among Filipino-Canadian youths. It might lead in other directions as well. The FCYA and I were interested in the productivity of this evolving sense of self for rethinking Filipino youths’ place in Canada and Canada as a multicultural nation. Relocating themselves in relation to the Philippines simultaneously led members of the FCYA to explore the histories of other racialized immigrant groups in Canada. They also explored, together with a First Nations youth organization, different but resonating histories through which different groups of peoples—in Canada and in the Philippines—have been dispossessed from their land. The process of study and discussion was one means for FCYA members to rethink their relationships to and within the Canadian nation and to find a new sense of belonging in Canada as critical and politically engaged citizens. More recently at the University of British Columbia, for several years now, graduate students involved in the Philippine Studies Series have been preoccupied with holding their entanglements with colonialism in the Philippines together with their complicities and entanglements within settler colonialism in Canada. They are navigating a difficult conceptual and political terrain of mobilizing an idea of Filipino in Canada that exists beyond liberal categories of identity and a politics of liberal multiculturalism, in ways that disrupt rather than reproduce settler colonial relations and its foundational logics. As Probyn notes, shame and pride need not work in opposition, and the former may hold within it an affective intensity and momentum towards positive transformation, new connections and entirely new ideas. The explorations that Philip Kelly opens up are very exciting indeed.

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