The day John Denver died, my dad locked himself in the bathroom with his guitar and played John Denver songs for hours. My mother loves to tell this story. It was 1997 and I was two years old and we were still living in Cebu, the city where they’d met and married and had me. By the time of Denver’s fatal plane crash, the American singer/songwriter of the classic hits “Country Roads,” “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” and “Sunshine on My Shoulders” was already a defining feature of my father’s repertoire. It would be another year before our move to the United States.
He still loves John Denver, still knows the songs by heart. On a recent trip home, I remember thinking how funny it was for this middle-aged Filipino man living in the suburbs in California to be singing about West Virginia and going “Woo! Thank God I’m a country boy,” with such gusto.
He also loves John Mellencamp, the Eagles, Jim Croce, Simon and Garfunkel, Bread, and Bob Dylan. One could describe his taste as folksy singer-songwriter soft rock from the ‘70s and ‘80s, stuff you hear playing at thrift stores. The songs evoke images of Levi’s jeans, suede fringed jackets, feathered haircuts, and old Mustangs zipping down long highways.
It’s these imaginative highways I traverse in search of my father’s America. To get there, we start with where he’s from.
The Philippines’s long history as a Spanish colony (1565-1898) is well-known and thoroughly documented. It’s in our language, names, religion, food, architecture, literature, and cultural practices—you know it when you see it. Our history as a U.S. colony, however, is a frank truth shrouded in mystery.
One possible reason for this is its relative brevity and recency (1901 to 1949). Another explanation, the one I propose, is that the workings of empire are most invisible to those who live in its center. As a result, we often learn our history backwards.
Like the way we who went through the American education system learned to memorize all the states and their capitals in the fifth grade. We learned that Alaska and Hawaii were the last to join the Union, sliding into their rightful places as the 49th and 50th pieces of the puzzle. We learn that “Hawaii” means hula skirts and coconuts and aloha. We start here before we understand what is meant by military occupation and exploitative profiteering and settler colonialism. We learn our history first (e.g. the bombing of Pearl Harbor) before we learn theirs (e.g. how Pearl Harbor became a U.S. Naval base), if we learn it at all.
The period of American colonization of the Philippines was glossed over in my world history textbook at school—I remember this tiny paragraph at the bottom of the page like a light bulb casting its dim glow over my entire past, present, and future. Whatever cleaned-up version of history this was (calling it “whitewashed” feels a bit too on-the-nose), it’s still being written: On the U.S. Department of State’s website, you’ll find a fact sheet on diplomatic relations between the two countries that states:
The United States established diplomatic relations with the Philippines in 1946.
U.S.-Philippine relations are based on strong historical and cultural linkages and shared democratic values.
Here, at the center of empire, we’re taught to take things at face value.
The city of Manila, a trading hub and bustling metropolitan, dates back to the 16th century. In Manila, on April 22, 1963, Joel Evangelista Madarang was born.
As with most Filipino names, my dad’s is like a map of our history: Evangelista (Spanish: “evangelist”) a signifier of Spanish linguistic and religious colonization, and Madarang (Ilocano: “to burn”) a signifier of our heritage as Ilocanos, the third largest ethnic group in the Philippines.
Though his family spoke Tagalog and Ilocano, he grew up at a time when, according to him, teachers would punish you if you were caught speaking any language other than English at school. His was a world where radio hosts spoke English and played, almost exclusively, hits from the U.S. and U.K.
“You were classy if you knew Western music,” my mom tells me.
It’s a hot June evening and I’m standing with my parents and sister at Madison Square Garden, waiting to see Billy Joel in the final tour of his career. I clink gin and tonics with my dad and ask him how he got into Billy Joel, the man whose voice and lyrics comprised so much of my and my sister’s childhood soundtrack. My dad replies: “Greatest Hits! On cassette.”
In the process of writing this essay, I had tried and failed to explore its central question with some cursory research, entering Google search terms around the history of music in the Philippines and American influence on Filipino culture. Nothing was useful in my goal of reconstructing my father’s world—his subjective view from the outside of empire looking in. I realized what I needed was an oral history.
But memory’s a funny thing, and my parents’ recollections from the home country inevitably take on a layer of immigrant self-consciousness in the retelling.
“We loved ‘American Pie,’” my dad says, referring to the 1971 Don McLean song. It goes: Bye, bye, Miss American Pie / Drove my chevy to the levy but the levy was dry. My dad laughs, remembering. “We used to sing that song all the time. We didn’t know what a levy was!”
No, they didn’t have levies, but the Philippines is an old, old country, rich not only in natural resources but in culture and history. In the metropolitan areas of the Philippines in the 1970s, we find a cultural scene on the brink of reinvention. They coveted American brands and watched American movies and rode in U.S. military jeeps repurposed as public transportation. Don McLean, Billy Joel, John Denver, James Taylor, Eric Clapton—these were the soft rock white men whose songs my dad learned on the guitar, songs he’d find in the Jingle Chordbook magazines that published chords and lyrics for popular hits.
Filipino artists who wanted to make it big wrote songs in English, but the ‘70s saw the rise of Filipino language music for the first time. “Original Pilipino Music,” or OPM, was pioneered by the three-man music group APO Hiking Society; along with contemporaries like Asin and the singer Freddie Aguilar, they made music with Tagalog lyrics but with clear American folk rock and rock and roll influences.
This decade also found the country in the midst of political turmoil. In 1972, President Ferdinand Marcos seized indefinite power by declaring martial law, and this period of political corruption, violence, suppression, and resistance defined my parents’ generation.
It was inseparable from the cultural shifts that were taking place: my parents tell me that because Marcos was pro-American—the Reagan administration was unsurprisingly supportive of the Marcos dictatorship—resistance took shape in the strengthening of national Filipino identity. “Bayan Ko,” a revolutionary folk song originally written in protest of American occupation, resurged as an anti-Marcos anthem and was banned from public performance by the government. (This didn’t stop Freddie Aguilar from defiantly performing the song at the funeral of Marcos’s political opponent, Ninoy Aquino, whose assassination in 1983 sparked the famous People Power revolution that eventually ended Marcos’s rule.)
Remembering this, it doesn’t feel fair to say my father spent his thirty-plus years in the Philippines dreaming solely of America. APO, Asin, Freddie Aguilar, Hotdog, Sharon Cuneta, Rico Puno, Jose Marie Chan—these voices also comprised the soundtrack of my childhood. Even now as I recall my dad with his guitar belting out a song about West Virginia, I also recall the way he sang the 1996 OPM song “Manila” with the same rock-and-roll growl: “Miss you like hell, Manila!”
Hinahanap-hanap kita, Manila | I always look for you, Manila
Ang ingay mong kay sarap sa tenga | Your noise is such a pleasure to my ears
Mga jeepney mong nagliliparan | Your jeepneys that are flying
Mga babae mong naggagandahan | Your beautiful women
Take me back in your arms, Manila
And promise me you'll never let go
Promise me you’ll never let go
*
Obscured by fragmented histories, by the conflated imaginings of memory and aspiration, the America of my father’s dreams is hard to define.
Like for so many, it meant a house. Suburbs, green lawn, backyard, two-car garage. We even had a lemon tree.
It also meant speaking English. Immigrating from a former U.S. colony, Filipinos mostly arrive with a fluent command of English (though this hasn't curbed my dad’s habit of repeating random English phrases over and over, as if to bend his tongue to the sounds). Combined with the urge to assimilate, they’re more likely to raise their children to abandon their native languages altogether.
I believe this linguistic disruption to be at the core of the fragmentation of my own understanding. When my parents speak to me, it’s in English (my native Tagalog and Bisaya reserved for themselves). When they tell me stories of their childhood, of their favorite songs and movies, of the Marcos era, it’s an act of translation at multiple levels—they think in a language and culture I don’t fully understand.
In “The Children of Polyphemus” from her essay collection How to Read Now, Elaine Castillo writes about the act of storytelling and its “capacity for epistemic violence and erasure.” What we know of as the standard literary canon, folk tales like Cinderella or Greek myths like the Odyssey, are never apolitical, but carry within them the world that produced and circulated them: a world with power structures that determine what stories get to be told, and by whom.
Learning to identify these gaps in storytelling helps us understand how children of diaspora learn of their own histories: through “erasures, oblivions and misremembrances, pockets of inarticulacy,” through “tales pockmarked with gaps, silences, unfinished business.” She writes, “That our lives are often incomprehensible to us is not just a human fact, part of the mystery of being alive, the mystery of being in the world—it’s also a fundamental fact of coloniality’s legacy.”
Castillo, a Filipinx-American author, explores the origins of her own last name and its colonial legacy. She intentionally pronounces it the Filipino way, Cah-still-yo, rather than Cah-stee-yo, as a way of reclaiming her heritage, an act of “re-membering”; and yet she acknowledges that this act is still fraught. Castillo is still Spanish, and a name. Even my last name, an indigenous word, is a stamp of Westernization—before the Spanish came, we didn’t have surnames at all.
How do we hold ourselves accountable—the root of the word accountable meaning: how do we let the story of ourselves be told? How do we hold ourselves accountable to the things we’ve received and internalized: the knowledges and unknowledges, the narratives, silences, and violences, the particularities?
The phrase we use to describe Filipinos’ preference for American culture and Eurocentric beauty standards is “colonial mentality.” But a sense of Filipino pride, cultivated through decades of cultural and political revolution, persists through Filipinos in the global diaspora.
We revere Filipino musicians, athletes, beauty queens, and actors who gain international fame. We threw huge parties for Manny Pacquiao fights and celebrated (with feigned lack of surprise) every Miss Philippines who won the Miss Universe title; we adore Lea Salonga, the Tony award-winning Broadway star and Disney voice, and we tell the story of Arnel Pineda, who replaced Steve Perry as frontman for the band Journey, like a Cinderella-style urban legend. It explains my dad’s current music fixation, a pop star whose songs, written for a teen girl demographic, he’s learned by heart: Olivia Rodrigo.
Given our history, the rigor with which we stan these Filipino celebrities seems to point to something beyond nationalist love or the immigrant need for community. Is it possible to separate this sense of Filipino pride from our unspoken sense of Filipino shame? To confront the centuries of colonization that has led us to accept our worth only as defined by Western recognition? Is it really so complex—or so simple?
My cousins’ America, the shared musical language of us second-generation kids, was American R&B and hip-hop from the ‘90s and 2000s. It was SWV and Boyz II Men and NSYNC; it was Monica and the Black Eyed Peas and Mariah Carey. Struggling to find identity in a country whose racial history is told in black and white, Filipino-American youths tend to align themselves with one or the other—often without self-awareness, without a full understanding of the cultural nuances that drive them to do so.
Then the age of YouTube came as nothing short of a juggernaut for a culture that loves to sing, with young Filipinos around the world uniting on the Internet through a shared love of Bruno Mars covers.
From this emerged a subculture within and overlapping with the broader Asian-American Internet music scene, the karaoke-loving, ukulele-carrying, boba-drinking, nerdy sneakerhead kids who swarmed my high school. I was a teenager during the rise of the YouTube Filipino singer/songwriter era: marked by acoustic guitar- and piano-led love songs with R&B-like vocal riffs, this era was spearheaded by artists like AJ Rafael, Jeremy Passion, Melissa Polinar, and Jeff Bernat, names you likely wouldn’t know unless you grew up around Asian-Americans in the 2010s. These were the homegrown stars of the second generation, the faces we saw ourselves reflected in when we were hungry for a shared cultural identity but felt disconnected from any culture we tried to attach ourselves to.
1970s folk rock to ‘90s R&B to 2010s Asian-American love songs—whatever they have in common is what makes Filipinos who we are. We love cinematic ballads, strong vocals, catchy melodies. We’re romantics. We have a corny sense of humor, we’re loud, we’re dramatic, we’re sad, we love to sing, and we love to laugh. Sentimentality is a key ingredient of the Filipino soul.
Tracing my father’s America has become my own way of accounting for what I lack. Growing up, my America was a rejection of this Filipino-ness that I couldn’t even fully define, so much of it having been transfigured through layers of time and translation. I’ve studied our history but don’t know when I said my final word of Bisaya as a native speaker. I don’t know when I started eating food with just a fork, or when I began to seek out music that was different from what everyone else was listening to.
I still don’t know why I look for white American academic writing about the Philippines, like journalist Sandra Burton’s eyewitness account of the People Power Revolution, or historian Alfred W. McCoy’s study of American policing methods in the Philippines—like I have to read about my people’s history in a way that I, with my American education and sensibilities, can understand. It’s inarguably problematic, as if native Filipino writers aren’t good enough to tell their own stories, and I try to catch and resist this bias.
But it’s almost like I also want to see us through my eyes, the I somehow split into dimensions that are both me and not-me, forced to reckon with the unknowable gap between them.
I’ll end on a sentimental note, on a night years ago. I couldn’t sleep. In the dark, the outline of my father and his guitar perched on the edge of my bed.
A soothing twang of a guitar riff, a gentle melody parlayed by his falsetto, “Vincent” by Don McLean. It goes: Starry, starry night / Paint your palette blue and gray. The blue-gray shadows of my vision punctuated by a splatter of adhesive glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling. My toddler sister in her trundle below. Stuffed animals sprawled across my mattress, gathered in my arms. On the walls of the room in this house we owned back then, hand-painted by my mother, a trail of purple butterflies.