Lani Asunción

Looking Through the Mirror of the Imperial Gaze on the Philipina Diaspora 

The people do not complain because they have no voice; do not move because they are lethargic, and you say that they do not suffer because you have not seen their hearts bleed. 

―José Rizal (1887) [1]

[...]  As new immigrants, they were constantly in motion, working towards their unique American Dream. For a brief moment, when the camera pointed its lens, centering them for once, they stopped what they were doing. They posed; sometimes, they smiled. They said, “I was here." 

―Grace Talusan (2019) [2]

Reclaiming Identity by  Reframing Boston History

Duty-Free Paradise – Dole House [3] explores the colonial history between Boston and Hawai’i through my queer, multiracial, Filipinx identity and lived experience. In the 1920s, my  grandparents immigrated from the Philippines to the island of O’ahu to work at the Kahuku Sugar Plantation, where my father was born. Decades later, I found myself creating in my studio in Jamaica Plain, a few blocks away from the historic Dole House home of James Drummond Dole—founder of The Hawaiian Pineapple Company, now known as the Dole Food Company. Dole’s legacy is intricately rooted in the dispossession of Indigenous Kānaka Maoli lands orchestrated by his cousin Governor Stanford Dole, who was a key figure in the 1893 coup against the Hawaiian monarchy, and became governor of the territory once the colonial settlers illegally seized power. In 1898, the once-free sovereign state was illegally annexed by the United States. That same year Spain formally ceded the Philippine Islands to the US. This convergence of events set the stage for the migration of Filipinos to Hawai’i, where they labored on plantations such as Dole’s. As a Filipinx-American who grew up in Hawai’i, now living in Boston, this work offers an exposition of Boston’s complicated history with Hawai’i. The Duty-Free Paradise - Dole House series aims to offer counter narratives that highlight how the Dole family played a key role in the overthrowing of Queen Lili'uokalani in 1893 and helped to lead the way for Hawaii’s formal annexation into the US as the fiftieth state in 1959.

Family Tree Archiving from the Plantation to Overseas

My Lola and Lolo are Ilocano from Luzon, Philippines and were born at some point between 1902 to 1905. My father said they migrated at the age of 19 and 16 to O’ahu, Hawai’i with my uncle Larry who was a infant at the time, in the 1920s to work in the sugarcane plantations on the Windward side of the island between the area of Kahuku to Makapuu Point. The plantation was [ owned by Alexander & Baldwin, one of the Big Five or Nā Hui Nui ʻElima corporations that wielded considerable economic and political power in the Territory of Hawaii during the early-twentieth century.[4] My father Miguel O. Asunción briefly worked harvesting sugarcane; he said it was hard, hot, and backbreaking work. How the sun would beat down on them, and the hours spent in the fields were long and exhausting. He was able to get out of working in the fields due to a sports injury that caused his nose to bleed profusely, guess they saw him as more of a liability than an asset, so he was not sent to the fields like his seven siblings. He was drafted into the Army at the tail end of the Korean War in 1953. After being discharged from the Army he returned to Hawai’i and attended Leeward Community College where he learned drafting and established himself as an architect working as an assistant to firms throughout Honolulu (1968–1978), San Francisco (1979–1982), and eventually Guam (1985) and Ryuku Islands (Okinawa, Japan) (1986–2002) where he began working for the Air Force and Navy, making his way up the ranks to Major GS-12. He was in civil service to the US military for about fourty years before retiring.

Under the Sun Sang the Last Kauaʻi ʻōʻō

In 1985 my grandmother Alfansa died from heat stroke in her garden and was the last of the Asuncións to live on the sugar plantation housing in Kahuku. I sometimes wondered if she dreamt of going home as the sun overtook her, and if she was ever able to find her way back across the sea, back to all she left in a country ravaged by the post-war colonial aftermath. She and my grandfather left the Philippines at the end of the Philippine-American War (1898–1902). I cannot imagine what my father’s parents went through to survive such a violent timeline in both Philippine and American history with somewhere close to 200,000 Pilipino civilian casualties, the majority from the countryside and from areas like Luzon, where the Philippine Revolution in 1896 took place [5]  stood in resistance to Spanish forces and then in defense against US attacks..

Benguet Province, Philippines, 1898–1912

The history of the Philippines from 1898 to 1946 is known as the American colonial period,  following the 333 years during which the Philippines was a colony of Spain. The Spanish–American War began in April 1898, and concluded on December 10th with the signing of the Treaty of Paris . The United States bought the Philippines from the Spanish for $20 million dollars, equaling about $1 per head.

The Philippine Islands experienced a period of great political turbulence, characterized by the Philippine–American War which lasted from 1898 to 1902. This period has been referenced in American history as a pacification of the Philippines, but in truth was a militaristic wielding of force and dominance initiated by the United States as part of a wider scope of biopolitical initiatives also administered at the same time in Hawai’i, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Cuba.

William Cameron Forbes from Boston to the Philippines, 1898–1912

There are about 4,520 archival photographs from the Philippines in the photographic department cataloged under the Oceanic Collection at the Peabody Museum donated by William Cameron Forbes from 1898 to 1902. He was the son of William Hathaway Forbes, president of the Bell Telephone Company in Boston, and was a descendant of two famous American men: Boston’s railroad developer John Murray Forbes and Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Unitarian minister who delivered his famous "Divinity School Address" (1838) to Harvard Divinity School where Forbes studied business and earned a degree in 1892. Forbes was then sent from Boston to the Philippines in 1904 by President Roosevelt, who appointed him to the Philippine Commission that was responsible for exercising legislative control over the Philippine Islands. In 1908 he was appointed Vice-Governor, and President Taft made him Governor-General from 1909 to 1913. In addition to these thousands of photographs Forbes catalogued, he also collected classified documents, combined with personal journals and correspondences published in a book he wrote in 1928, The Philippine Islands (1870–1959) [6], appointing himself as a self-made historian and anthropologist of the Philippines, while serving the United States government.[7] The point of perspective of each portrait and moment captured in time on light fixed in silver, exposes the imperial gaze. In the 1997 book Looking for the Other: Feminism, Film, and the Imperial Gaze, E. Ann Kaplan defines the gaze in relation to the “look” and she argues within western patriarchal cultures, the imperial gaze cannot be separated from the male gaze first theorized by Laura Mulvey in the 1975 essay “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”[8]

The Young Ilocano Girl with No Name

This photo was taken in the timeline of the Philippine-American War, during one of the bloodiest and most violent periods of Philippine history. The person in the photograph is only identified as "Young Ilocano girl" who was in some way connected to the Octaviano family, the former Provincial Secretary of Benguet, Philippines. In other photographs she is seen standing next to Octaviano's wife; her identity is unknown. Her gaze is haunting, the shock and disembodiment is present through her gaze directed at the photographer, one can only imagine the unimaginable things she must have experienced when the United States invaded her country and made it a US colony.

This photo compels me to share what transpired on the Redwood City military base where I was born in 1982. My mother gave birth on the base, away from her midwives and primary care doctor who guided her through her final trimester of pregnancy. I was born breech, refusing to turn, legs crossed and held up tight like a little ball. She was in labor for many painful days, but I refused to rotate. The military doctor, who was in training, attempted to perform a cesarean but cut my mother’s stomach the wrong way. Luckily he missed my head because it was positioned in the opposite direction. If I had heeded the nurses pleading for me to rotate my head it would have been sliced open by a scalpel held by an unskilled military appointed physician. It is through these memories of trauma that explain the miracles of survival.

The horrors of war reflected through the eyes of this young girl who embodied, endured, and we hope, survived the destruction ravaging the land, freedom long forgotten as her people got passed from one colonial power to the next.

Shared Colonial Histories

Both James Drummond Dole and William Cameron Forbes are part of colonial histories that descended from elite Boston families, both American businessmen who studied business at Harvard University, who then continued their family legacies of brutal commodification of Indigenous peoples’ and stolen land in Massachusetts, Hawai’i and the Philippines. They used business to exploit people weakened by military oppression and American biopolitics. Through revisiting the archive and highlighting the combination of events and pointing out how these archives fit into both historical and personal timelines I’m able to suss out silenced narratives between the imperial gaze and the subject.

These histories repeat imprinting themselves on our DNA handed down from ancestors who made us from the fabric of their resilience and transformation, in their work towards a free and liberated country for all peoples everywhere and the end to all empires.