4/18 Vergara

In “Betrayal, Class Fantasies, and Filipino Nation in Daly City”, Benito Vergara Jr. examines the relationship between Filipino migrants and their mother nation. In the eyes of high class members of society, the Filipinos who left the country for a new life are deserters who betrayed their country for their own selfish desires. As many of them begin to leave in flocks post 60’s, nationalists and high ranking officials begin to publish and instill the ideas of “Heroism” into members of their society to prevent them from leaving the country. Simply put, heroes stay and deserters betray. They believed that money from outside sources are the cause of people leaving, thus they published “the pull of money is seen to go against…nationhood and an untainted Filipinoness.” (Vergara 142) The upper class made sure that money made overseas are detestable, and that Filipinos should invest and try to improve their own economy within the country. Yet, during their testimonials, the upper class acknowledges that they do not know even the simple tasks of house work which they surrendered to their maids and lower to middle class workers. Their ignorance, I believe, is due to their own hypocrisy in the desire to maintain low wages, more expendable workers, more economic power, and less competition. These are all examples of personal desires, not the nations, thus they are no better than those they claimed to “betray” their country in pursuing their own needs. Foucault would probably answer to these testimonials and publishes by saying that informational control is at its worse since officials were selfishly trying to criminalize their own people based on their desire to retain them. If he had say, he’d probably advice the officials to work on policies to fix the economy, and not waste time on meaningless patriotic publishes that would only result in more hate against the nation. Honestly, to answer to Tiongson’s excerpt, Filipino Americans wanted to relive their home culture, but their own country’s image was vandalized by their officials' selfishness, and shaming them, thus it was hard for Filipino Americans to establish any meaningful foot marks of their culture. Finally, their officials should honor the spread of their culture and not shun their people for spreading their wings. This statement is not to be taken offensively, but a sympathetic message that I can interpret the lack of outstanding Filipino culture foot mark for Filipino Americans to expand on innately from their own motherland.