Like the Molave: Listening for Constellations of Community through “Growing Up Brown” Stories

Terese Guinsatao Monberg, Michigan State University 

(Published April 20,, 2016)

Sitting in the National Office of the Filipino American National Historical Society [FANHS], I am constantly reminded of its roots in community. Posters and photographs of Filipina/o1 American community-based readings, events, and performances—past and present—line the walls. The Filipino Youth Activities, Inc., which like FANHS was co-founded by Fred and Dorothy Cordova, is located down the hall. During my visit, Filipina/o American youth (and adults) are in and out of the building, actively involved in art projects, Filipina/o martial arts classes, and planning future community activities. Dorothy Cordova attended school in this very building, the former Immaculate Conception Catholic Church Elementary School located in the Central Area of Seattle. Growing up here, Dorothy was part of a dense fabric of Filipina/o American union activism, community building, social justice and immigrant rights organizing. But she was also part of larger interracial coalitions with African American and other Asian American groups. The neighborhood has been gradually gentrified, and Dorothy has noticed the demographics of the neighborhood shifting racially and economically. As we walk to lunch, she points out different landmarks, some containing only a trace of the history she carries with her. 

Listening to Dorothy’s stories of this place, I am reminded of the palimpsest metaphor often used by cultural geographers, urban historians, anthropologists, and artists to describe a place with sedimented layers of history and culture, a place that has been written upon and overwritten many times. But as I’ve continued to listen, I hear how FANHS itself, as a community-based organization, is also a palimpsest, one deeply shaped by the place(s) of Seattle but also layered with other traces and places, other palimpsests, previous community formations that have emerged, thrived, faded, or changed over time—some in Seattle, some in other geographical locations. This sedimented notion of community is a key characteristic of alternative institutions, like FANHS, but one that is often invisible to community-based projects that neglect to take what Jacqueline Jones Royster calls “the long view,” a historical narrative that references “institutional, collective patterns in broad scope” (83). A long view of community recognizes communities as existing not just in time but also over time. This view is crucial for understanding how alliances emerge, shift, and seemingly fade, often in response to changes in the larger political, economic, and global climates that challenge communities to regroup—rhetorically and otherwise—repeatedly over time. An understanding of how community members persist in their cultural/rhetorical work, often beyond the temporal and spatial boundaries we assume or see, redefines what it means to research, teach, and work with community members. Growing Up Brown stories reveal legacies of community building and community advocacy and the deeper constellation2 that surrounds any community institution.

“Growing Up Brown” Stories

I began to hear constellations of community by listening to what FANHS members call “Growing Up Brown” stories. These stories are told predominantly (though not solely) by members of what FANHS calls the Bridge Generation: “Filipino Americans of the Second Generation … born on or before 1945.”3 It is significant that the Bridge Generation is marked as ending before 1946, when passage of a number of federal legislative acts began altering the demographic contours of Filipina/o populations living in the United States. In addition to marking the first year after World War II, 1946 also marks the end of the territorial period of U.S. colonization in the Philippines, the beginning of the right for Filipina/os who had been living in the United States to apply for naturalized citizenship, and the passage of new immigration policies that admitted more Filipina/o women, children, and families than before. As Filipina/o populations in the United States grew following the war, racial structures and attitudes impacting Filipina/os were also shifting. These shifting political, economic, and cultural contexts help explain why living in the United States as a Filipina/o or Filipina/o American was radically different before rather than after World War II. The stark contrast between past and present communities and contexts helps explain why members of the Bridge Generation feel compelled to share their stories, not just to remember the past but also to bridge different waves and generations of Filipina/o Americans who might be positioned differently but persistently in larger social structures and legacies of colonization and racism. 

As the daughter of a Filipina American of the Bridge Generation, I have heard stories of growing up brown my whole life. As a child and young adult, I heard them as stories about how the world works, how our community has worked as it has changed over time, and as a reminder of how important it was for me to hear these stories given my own experience growing up off-white as a mixed-race Filipina American. When I began researching and writing about FANHS as a community-based organization over fifteen years ago, I came across published Growing Up Brown stories in the FANHS Journal4 and in historical programming videos produced by FANHS. I attended my first FANHS Conference in 2000 and heard them performed for a FANHS audience, confirming my understanding of how these stories were both pedagogical and methodological, and therefore, deeply theoretical. As I collected a handful of interviews for my project, I listened to these stories, recursively, along with other kinds of stories I was gathering though pamphlets, journals, videos, conferences, participation in local public programming/events, informal conversations after conference sessions, during historical tours, and over meals. I have followed these stories as they’ve been documented and published in community-based publications and book-length memoirs. I’ve listened to stories told by subsequent generations, including grandchildren of the Bridge Generation. And when I write about these stories, I honor the stories in the manner in which they are told and shared. For example, the Growing Up Brown stories that I cite in published work, like this article, are stories that FANHS members themselves have published or made widely available beyond the FANHS community. But my own story is continually shaped by my recursive listening across all the stories I have heard over time. What follows is the story I am able to tell by listening to these stories not as individual narratives but as collective accounts about community. I listen to these stories, in other words, as theories and practices of community.

Like the Molave: It’s About Time

As it concerns community, the notion of time is underdeveloped in comparison to the notion of space and place.5 When working with communities, time is frequently framed as a logistical concern when, for example, academic timeframes and goals constrain the ways we might work with communities. Or, more importantly, time becomes a concern as we consider the time it takes to build reciprocal, responsible relationships, the time needed for responsible reflection and collaborative action, and the willingness to invest the time required to grapple with the complexities of community-based work. But if we recognize the rhetorical legacies present in any community, it changes the ways we might historically situate any given community member, tradition, or organization. For the purposes of this short article, I turn to the metaphor of the molave tree to illustrate how the notion of time is crucial for understanding the rhetorical/cultural work that community members perform, collectively, over time.

Filipina/o American literary scholars have referenced the image of the molave to theorize Filipina/o American writing as a continuous but often invisible tradition.6 Rafael Zulueta da Costa’s poem “Like the Molave” calls forth legacies of oppression, but also legacies of Filipina/o people who are “firm, resilient, staunch.”7 The molave tree, which grows in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Malaysia, is a strong tree often used to build houses or furniture. Because the molave propagates as a rhizome, it has also become a symbol of the strength and endurance of Filipina/o resistance movements. Like a rhizome, when forces of colonization or oppression break a given resistance movement into pieces, these pieces may be able to grow entirely new movements. These rhizomatous resistance movements grow horizontally rather than vertically, underground rather than above ground; they grow continuously, but their existence or direct connections to one another are not always visible. Filipina/o American writing, as a rhetorical practice situated, shaped, and often informed by these resistance movements, is also a legacy that persists over time but is not always visible in any given moment. N.V.M. Gonzalez and Oscar V. Campomanes, for example, theorize Filipina/o writing in the United States as marked by “chronic and multiple displacements,” and often “unsuccessful attempts by Filipinos to break through the pall of invisibility that has historically shrouded anything Philippine-related in the United States’ popular memory or historical memory and consciousness” (80). But the “Filipino imagination,” as Gonzalez and Campomanes confirm, is resilient and spans deep into the past in various guises always with an eye toward a possible future.8 

Listening to Growing Up Brown stories through the metaphor of the molave, enables us to understand how Filipina/o American community formations are rhizomatous like the molave, having grown from horizontal stems of previous community formations. These stories illustrate how community institutions, like FANHS, grow like the molave tree: they come up through an often invisible and sometimes underground constellation of grassroots movements, community-based associations, and nonprofit organizations. Referencing intergenerational lifetimes of experience with building, sustaining, and renewing community, these stories, heard in the company of other stories, flesh out a cultural rhetorics framework that makes visible the dynamics of how community members see the community landscape shifting and repurpose their tactics accordingly. As narratives about community, Growing Up Brown stories contain evidence of previous community formations. For example, the community-based organization known as FANHS grew out of previous community-based organizations that Fred and Dorothy Cordova have formed including the Filipino Youth Activities, Inc. (FYA) and the Demonstration Project for Asian Americans (DPAA). But members of FANHS, including FANHS members of the Bridge Generation, have also been part of community formations prior to and parallel with their participation in FANHS. Growing Up Brown stories, in other words, do not just narrate how one community-based organization intervened; they also demonstrate how members of the Bridge Generation have actively built community-based organizations at different times in their lives,9 a practice that stems deep into their ancestral past. As stories that reference previous community formations and traces of distant past and possible future community formations, these stories place FANHS within a larger continuum of Filipina/o American resistance to colonial and racial oppression that has persisted over time. 

Listening for Community Constellations

I begin with stories from my own history of community constellations. Fran Alayu Womack and her two sisters grew up on the same street as my mother as part of a small south side Chicago Filipina/o American community in the 1930s and 1940s. One of Fran’s favorite phrases to characterize her growing up brown experience is the phrase, “Always on Sunday,” which she has presented on many times and tells again during my interview with her:

Well, I’m going to write a book one day. It’s called, “Always on Sunday.” Every Sunday there was a Filipino picnic, christening, birthday party, something to go to. But Monday though Saturday, you were busy being ‘American,’ in quotes. 

Fran puts “American” in quotes because her family struggled with everyday acts of racism and, like many members of the Bridge Generation, she and her sisters were continually asked to explain their brownness to others. Her sister, Jane (Terry) Alayu remembers playing the following guessing game:

When people would ask us what we were, they’d say, “Are you Chinese?”  “No.” “Are you Japanese?” “No.” … ‘Oh, are you from Cuba?’ Or ‘Is that Hawaii? Is that where the Philippines are?’” 

While this story is not uncommon to Filipina/os who lived in the United States before World War II, listening to these two sisters’ stories of growing up in Chicago reveals deeper constellations of community. Because of constant interrogation, Terry and Fran both remarked on the importance of being immersed in a Filipina/o community, to “be Filipino,” on Sundays. Fran says that these community gatherings served as “extended family,” and in her stories, I can hear how these gatherings provided her generation with positive role models and exposed them to a larger network of support that existed outside of dominant American institutions, like school. The Filipina/o American community that Fran and Terry often refer to in their Growing Up Brown stories, in other words, was not just a gathering of people at a picnic or a party but a larger constellation of people involved with building and participating in community-based institutions that can’t always be located on a map. As I listen, I hear formations of community that, like the molave, are not tied to a single geographical location but grow in a dispersed formation as the community gathers in different spaces regularly over time, strengthening the community’s resilience to sustain and renew itself over time. 

I’ve had many conversations with Fran and Terry, about how their experiences growing up brown differed from those shared by members of the Bridge Generation who grew up on the West Coast. And, as I listen to her stories, I hear how their parents worked hard to build and include them in community networks available to them, given that the number of Filipina/os in Chicago was much smaller than those living on the West Coast. For example, Terry tells the following story about life on Chicago’s south side:

We were very lucky, we lived near the University of Chicago. And my folks-except for my mother one time—didn’t look for Filipino students at the University but they would hear that there was a Filipino working at the library (because there weren’t many around you know). So, they’d go over there and they’d meet my father and then eventually would come over for dinner, or, you know, several times, more times, I don’t know. But anyway, it gave us an opportunity to see professionals—Filipinos—women and men. … And I could go up and talk to them anyway I wanted to, if they were available. 

Growing up near the University of Chicago, Terry and her sisters were exposed to a network of Filipina/o associations meant to support Filipina/o students. In that era, Chicago was “an American educational mecca,” Barbara M. Posadas and Roland L. Guyotte explain, because it offered “a gamut of educational opportunities from junior college to graduate school unparalleled in any West Coast urban area before 1945” (32). While small in number, Filipina/os pursuing these educational opportunities in Chicago formed loose community-based and campus-based organizations to develop camaraderie, ease their adjustment to life in the United States, and support their academic aspirations—and Terry remembers being part of that network through her parents. As I listen to Terry’s story, I hear her tell not just of exposure to role models, but exposure to methods for building community networks, growing those networks into more stable community-based organizations, and shifting organizational purposes based on shifting social structures. In this way, Terry (and Fran) learned to be activists and community advocates through gestures that might be considered small and inconsequential and would therefore be invisible to most paradigms and theories of community because, like the molave’s, the communities’ interconnected root systems were often grown underground, sideways, and sometimes they seemingly died back only to surface in entirely new locations above ground. During their lifetimes, Terry and Fran were active not only in FANHS but in other Filipina/o American community-based organizations and civil rights organizations, and actively instilled this same sense of community in the next generation. 

While Terry and Fran often spoke of the differences between growing up brown in Chicago versus on the West Coast, they also often spoke of the striking similarities. And stories of growing up brown on the West Coast also demonstrate how legacies of community building extend into the deep past of many members of the Bridge Generation. In “Letters to my Beloved Grandchildren,” Herb Jamero shares stories of growing up in a farm labor camp in Livingston, California that housed “as many as 100 ‘Pinoys’ [Filipinos] at the peak of harvest time” (24). He remembers, as a young boy, working alongside these “uncles” in the fields, doing domestic chores, and playing with them after work, talking, laughing and singing. But compared to the sense of community he felt in the labor camp, Herb describes going to school as “pretty strange”:

All of a sudden I was no longer surrounded by familiar and caring Filipino adults or playmates with whom we gathered every Sunday at the “sabong” (chicken fights).  Now, I was in a schoolroom where I was the only Filipino boy with 20 to 30 other children – mostly white and Mexican. … Then, hurrying home, to the safer surroundings of our [farm labor] camp where I would read my daily lessons to my uncles.  Not only would I read my lessons, I would read newspapers, comic books, and magazines to them.  Not until much, much later did I come to realize that [me and my brothers and sisters] were tutoring them also – helping them become more familiar with English and expanding their own vocabulary. This I did not know. (24) 

Herb’s Growing Up Brown story recalls memories of feeling safer in the labor camp than he did at school. Upon returning to the labor camp after school, Herb and his siblings shared what they had learned about American society—including the English language—with their uncles. In this role, Herb advocated for members of his community who were excluded from educational resources that would help them navigate American society and negotiate better working conditions. But he was also building community among a group of men, women, and children who were similarly positioned by racial, economic, and colonial forces and who were “[l]iving and depending on each other for the survival of a people so very far away from their own family and home [in the Philippines]” (25). Herb needed the sense of belonging and purpose this community provided him just as much as the men he tutored. The men encouraged Herb’s education in dominant U.S. institutions like school because as Herb brought his studies back to his community, the importance of that education was magnified. But Herb also needed the education that alternative institutions like the labor camp provided through his uncles—knowledge, relationships, and strategies around Filipina/o culture, language, history and the challenges facing Filipina/os in this particular racial and colonial context. Herb and his uncles formed horizontal alliances in their collective interest to resist and survive the racist and colonial institutions that structured their lives in the United States. And it's the power of these horizontal stems of community and social justice movements that have the power to propagate new movements as shifting landscapes impact the health of any given node.

Looking back on this practice, Herb not only emphasizes the significance of reading to his uncles but also places this practice within a longer legacy of community building practices. Embedded within his “Letters to My Beloved Grandchildren,” he shares “the story of how we all came to be and its beginnings” (22). In this particular story, Herb shares memories of his father, who, “as a young man, responded to the call for labor in the pineapple and sugar cane fields of Hawaii as did thousands of other Pinoys from the regions of Visayas and Ilocos” during the territorial period of U.S. colonization (23). As Herb explains that his father came from “a poor land,” he also calls forth the memory of centuries of Spanish colonization that transformed an agrarian subsistence economy into a global (primarily export) economy. But as he shares his father’s long-standing reputation as a leader, he calls forth his dad’s leadership in the Philippines and in the States: his need to leave school in the second grade, in part, to support his family; his willingness, as a young man, to migrate to the States for work; and his role as founder of a labor camp who “negotiate[ed] with the local farmers and ranchers for a better deal” for his workers (22). But Herb’s story of Growing Up Brown, like Terry’s story, also indexes other forms of work that his father performed to build and grow the rootstalks of community resistance and survival:

Because of his role, function, and connections in the community it was natural that he became a leader. However, he earned his leadership in many other ways as well. Through his visits and contacts with families or laborers in other camps (many isolated, at the end of dusty roads, or almost hidden by orchards)—he developed a network of communication and mutual support which strengthened their resolve and determination to “make it” in this country. (23)

Herb’s story demonstrates how his father built and used a network of community connections to help struggling migrant workers, families, and communities. In telling this story to his grandchildren (and to a larger intended audience of Filipina/o Americans), Herb is not just recounting and documenting memories that honor his father. He is also reenacting his father’s community leadership. Listening to this story, I hear not just the telling of how his father planted deep roots for community, I also hear Herb reenacting this practice. True to the molave, he is a node in an already complex ecosystem of resistance, a node that now grows another interconnected root system that both stabilizes and protects the larger movement by providing the nutrients that allow present and future community formations to sprout and grow. 

Herb’s story demonstrates how his parents’ labor camp served as a community-based institution. While his father negotiated labor conditions, his mother also served as a bridge between these migrant workers and larger American society. In sharing his mother’s story, Herb also describes her as a leader among the migrant workers:

Because of her generosity, openness, and willingness to share her life with others—she attracted to her home many single and lonely men. This was the beginning of the “Jamero Labor Camp.” They not only sought out her company, but learned to depend on her natural and acquired skills of communicating to a different, and sometimes hostile culture. (17)

Just as Herb situates his father within longer legacies of struggle and resistance against colonizing forces, he also places his mother within these legacies when he asks: “Who was this ‘Pinay’ who came from an island archipelago half way around the world named after the King of Spain by those early Spanish explorers?” (17). As I listen to Herb’s story about his mother, I don’t hear a story of individual exceptionalism. Instead, the story evokes a deeper constellation of community formations and resistance movements led by Filipinas including Gabriela Silang, Teresa Magbanua, and Marina Dizon. Herb’s mother, in this story, is placed on equal footing with these revolutionary leaders. Her work is deeply connected to resistance movements that stem back in time and across space. 

Herb’s Growing Up Brown stories, like those of Fran and Terry, provide us with a longer view of FANHS, showing us how previous community formations are carried forth in (re)newed rhizomatous community formations. In this long view, FANHS exists as part of a larger constellation of alternative institutions that persist (in old and new forms) because of their ability to excavate and mobilize—to carry forward—what I call alternative institutional memory in ways that meet contexts that are forever shifting. These stories demonstrate that the rhetorical work of building community happens not just once but repeatedly across lifetimes. As a member and former President of the Santa Clara Valley Chapter of FANHS, part of Herb’s work in FANHS is now dedicated to preserving the history of the Jamero Labor Camp—its stories and the land on which it once stood—for future generations. In telling his story, Herb places his grandchildren and other readers in this same interconnected system of lateral roots, cautioning them (and us) not to take community for granted but to keep growing these horizontal formations across time and space.

Stories and Sedimented Histories

While Growing Up Brown stories are particular to specific moments in the racialized and colonized history of these Filipina/o Americans, they also hold larger significance for what it means to do historical work and the role that stories play in doing that work. Research has not always recognized the long legacies of community-based institutions that communities, especially those of color, have built to resist, survive, and work toward changing the structural oppressions of dominant society. But stories of previous community-based organizations, however small or loosely defined, are present in all communities, even if they only “whisper rather than scream” (Royster 80). Stories help us view a community over time—rather than in time—and begin to unfold the layered histories and intricate constellations that help community members build, sustain, and renew community during times of rapid change as social structures shift yet still persist in making certain bodies and stories invisible and irrelevant to the project of “America.” And because all community-based organizations have been shaped by the rhetorical and social justice legacies of their members, an important dimension of this broader view must include an attention to how the stories of community members themselves contributes to this sedimented understanding of community. 

Thank you for listening.

Dedication

I offer this story as one way to honor the memory of the Alayu sisters: Fran Alayu Womack, Terry Alayu, and Ethel Alayu Parisot. 

• 1. Historically, the term Filipino has been used to refer to both Filipino men and Filipina women. Following Dorothy Fujita-Rony, Emily Porcincula Lawsin and others, I prefer the more inclusive term Filipina/o, which recognizes Filipina women as integral to the community formations, resistance movements, and forms of rhetoric that I discuss throughout the book. This designation is also consistent with the designation used for Chicana/o studies and movements.
• 2. I use constellation in the same manner as those in the Cultural Rhetorics Theory Lab (Malea Powell, Daisy Levy, Andrea Riley-Mukavetz, Marilee Brooks-Giles, Maria Novotny, and Jennifer Fisch-Ferguson) in their article, “Our Story Begins Here: Constellating Cultural Rhetorics.” A constellation, they write, “allows for all the meaning-making practices and their relationships to matter. It allows for multiply-situated subjects to connect to multiple discourses at the same time, as well as for those relationships (among subjects, among discourses, among kinds of connections) to shift and change without holding a subject captive” (5).
• 3. According to Fred Cordova and Peter Jamero, the term “Bridge Generation” was first used at the 1994 FANHS National Conference, which honored Filipina/o Americans of this generation. The definition I cite here is taken from Fred Cordova’s essay, “Building Bridges and the Bridge Generation,” which was originally presented at the 1994 FANHS National Conference. More recently, Peter Jamero, who was also involved with naming the “Bridge Generation,” has articulated a more precise definition: “children born in America by the end of 1945 to at least one Filipino parent who migrated to the United States during the early 1900s” (Vanishing 1). This definition recognizes that many Filipina/os of this generation were mixed race due to the large ratio of Filipina/o men to women in early twentieth century migration patterns. While Fred Cordova’s essay also explains this phenomenon, this more precise definition is helpful for academic and community-based historians alike.
• 4. For a discussion of my understanding of the community-based pedagogies embedded in stories shared in the FANHS Journal, see my 2004 article, “Reclaiming Hybridity: How One Filipino American Counterpublic Hybridizes Academic Discourse.”
• 5. Two notable exceptions are Malea Powell’s collaboratively composed 2012 CCCC Chair’s Address, “Stories Take Place” and Jacqueline Jones Royster’s discussion of Swahili notions of sasa and zamani time in Traces of a Stream.
• 6. While bamboo plants and volcanoes have also been used as metaphors for the rhizomatous nature of Philippine resistance movements, the molave metaphor is also based on Rafael Zulueta da Costa’s 1940 poem “Like the Molave,” which explicitly refers to Jose Rizal’s legacy: “Not yet, Rizal, not yet. Sleep not in peace.” The power of the rhizome metaphor is also demonstrated through Deleuze and Guattari’s use of this metaphor in a very different context.
• 7. The title of this piece comes from the title of R. Zulueta da Costa’s poem, “Like the Molave,” but the stories I have been listening to about his poem reveal another sedimented story, which goes beyond the scope of this article and which I will tell another time.
• 8. Gonzales and Campomanes remind us that under Spanish colonization, for example, the “Filipino imagination could aspire to expression only through orality” (65).
• 9. This is a phrase and theory gifted to me by Dorothy Laigo Cordova. In my interview with her she talks about her own community-based research and how she’s interviewed people “who were now in their sixties, seventies, and maybe close to eighty, who had different lives at different times. And you had to—it’s just like an artichoke—you had to uncover it. There are the outer leaves and you keep going on in…” (like the molave).