Paula C. Park, in Intercolonial Intimacies: Relinking Latin/o America to the Philippines 1898-1964, retraces linguistic and cultural proximities that underline networks of kinship between the Philippines and Latin America. These networks help us to better understand the distant, yet interconnected regions impacted still by the legacies of colonialism, but not by centering the US and Spanish empires. Rather, Park compellingly traces a new map of affective proximities and rivalries through a rigorous exploration of poetry, prose, journalism, political speeches, and historiography that interpolates and questions the boundaries of the fields of world literature, global Hispanophone studies, Latin American studies, and Philippine studies
Ernest: ¡Hola Paula! I loved your book! Thank you for agreeing to do this interview with me.
Paula: Hola Ernesto. I should be the one thanking you for reading my book. It’s a pleasure to engage in conversation with you.
Ernest: Intercolonial Intimacies is boldly and beautifully written. It’s the book we all needed in part because it reads Latin American-Philippine conversations and collaborations, affinities and affections in the writers’ own terms and not principally through the prism of Spanish or US imperialism. Before we get into the nitty gritty, some readers might be thinking something I hear a lot when I talk about my research. “Wait, people speak Spanish in the Philippines?” Do you hear this question a lot? How do you respond?
Paula: Oh, yes. That is a question I have definitely heard many times before and in different contexts. I usually begin with the basics, the fact that the Philippines was a colony of the Spanish Empire for over three centuries, and then go into more or less specifics: that there is a body of work in Spanish produced during the colonial times by religious figures, colonial officials, and travelers, and that at some point toward the end of the nineteenth century and during the first decades of the twentieth century, ironically when the Philippines is no longer a Spanish colony, but a territory of the US, there was a boom of sorts of Philippine literature in Spanish. Some people have heard about José Rizal and what seems to surprise them is that there is more than Rizal, which is what the first chapter of my book focuses on: twentieth-century hispanophone writers from the Philippines.
Ernest: Yes! That even surprises people in Spanish departments, let alone those in other fields. In part because of this, I think your book should be required reading in so many fields: Philippine studies, Filipinx American studies, Asian American Studies, Latin American Literature, Latin American and Latinx studies, Global Hispanophone studies, Transpacific studies… I could go on. I have two questions related to this. 1) This book stems from the dissertation you submitted to the Spanish department at UT Austin, right? How did writing for a Spanish department inflect the form and scope of your dissertation and book project? 2) What are your views on the state of our field in terms of disciplinary distributions, for example the discrete fields of Philippine studies, Filipinx-American studies, and Hispano-Philippine studies?
Paula: Actually, only one chapter of the book originated in the doctoral thesis at UT Austin: the chapter on the anglophone writer, José Garcia Villa. I was lucky enough to be in a department that was very receptive to projects that go beyond the traditional limits of the Iberian peninsula and Latin America, as well as an advisor, César Salgado, who was particularly interested in Latin America-Asia connections. But I was first introduced to Philippine literature in Spanish, in particular, Rizal’s Noli me tangere, in an Anthropology class taught by Ward Keeler, who is a specialist in Southeast Asian studies. I asked if I could read the novel in Spanish and reading the edition I got from the university library, the Ayacucho edition, I remember being curious about Leopoldo Zea’s prologue. I also remember, of course, thinking about why I had never encountered Rizal’s work before. From there, it was almost by chance encounter that I ended up writing about Villa. I literally ran into his work in a library stack as I was trying to read as much as I could about modern Philippine literature at the time. It was through Nick Joaquin that I started looking into Anglophone Filipino writers and at some point I considered writing a chapter about his work, but decided to focus on Villa and Jesús Balmori. The other half of my dissertation focused on Cuban writers.
To answer your second question, I think that if I were to write a doctoral dissertation today, my experience be very different. Just ten years ago, there were few scholars that popped up when searching for experts in twentieth-century Philippine literature in Spanish and nowadays there is a solid international group that keeps on growing, which is exciting! I also believe that at this point there is more interest in sort of linking Philippine studies, Filipinx American studies, and Hispano-Philippine studies. I don’t think that these fields should be conflated, but I do think that being in one of them one should also be interested in what is going on in the other ones.
Ernest: Absolutely. I’ve also noticed that Philippine literature in Spanish, alongside Hispanophone African literature, is an area of exciting growth in Spanish departments around the world. As evidence of this, two or three academic positions focusing on the “Global Hispanophone” were advertised in the US last year, the first such positions I’ve ever seen. How do you see your work converse with and diverge from other scholars of early 20th-century Philippine literature in Spanish, like Beatriz Álvarez Tardío’s work on Adelina Gurrea or Adam Lifshey’s Subversions of the American Century?
Paula: Yes, it is great that more positions in our field are gearing to the global hispanophone. I appreciate the work that Beatriz Álvarez Tardío and Adam Lifshey have done. I remember a footnote in one of Álvarez Tardío’s articles, an article on Fernando Canon, that sort of confirmed for me that Hispanophone writers from the Philippines were avid readers of a wide range of Spanish American modernistas. Lifshey’s Subversions of the American Century seeks to tease out the globality of Philippine literature in Spanish and to an extent, this is also what I do in my work. But our approaches are very different. For instance, Lifshey declares that Balmori’s novel Los pájaros de fuego is a landmark of world literature or something along those lines because it takes place during the Japanese occupation of an American territory that was once a Spanish colony. To me, this definition of wordliness or globality depends too much on empires; it almost inadvertently validates imperial expansionism. My approach to globality emerges more out of relations and parallels between the different colonial subjects.
Ernest: Thank you! I agree. As I said before, your focus on the relations between colonial subjects is remarkable in our field. How did Filipino poets get their hands on modernista literature and what did they find so compelling about it? Thinking in the other direction, what do you think Darío or Nervo would say about Bernabé’s Cantos del trópico or Balmori’s “Poema de la nueva España”?
Paula: I believe that modernista literature arrived in the Philippines through Spain as the modernistas were also fervently read there. Alejandro Mejías-López’s The Inverted Conquest is a great book that addresses their influence in Spain. There were, however, other routes. For instance, there is at least one Spanish-language journal published in New York City, Revista ilustrada de Nueva York, that also featured modernista writers and apparently also reached the Philippines. As for the second question, I think Darío and Nervo would have been fascinated by Bernabé’s Cantos del trópico and more than Balmori’s “Poema de la Nueva España,” which is an homage to the rise of Franco, Balmori’s earlier work, perhaps his Rimas malayas. I also think Fernando María Guerrero would have been very warmly received. It’s a bummer that these works did not circulate much in the Americas. When I did archival research in Mexico I did find that Hispanophone Filipino writers were published here and there, in particular one poem by Cecilio Apóstol and another one by Claro Mayo Recto. I also was able to track down how Balmori was received in Mexico City during his visit in 1930-1931, but overall they were unfortunately not read enough in the Americas.
Ernest: You demonstrate really sophisticated and innovative literary analysis in the genres of poetry, prose, journalism and history among others, and what are just as exciting, in my view, are the historical snapshots you narrate. Some of these are Mexican President Cárdenas hugging Philippine President Quezon during the latter’s visit in 1937; Chilean patriot O’Higgins sitting down to write a letter in 1821 in which he yearns to claim the Philippines as Chile’s own; Mexico’s “Aztec Eagles” a squadron of fighter jets returning to exultant crowds of supporters in the Zócalo after having flown to Manila in 1945 to fight against the occupying Japanese only to find out that the Philippines had already been declared free. These intimate portraits not only resound with your book’s objective to recuperate a genealogy of transpacific affinities and anti-imperial collaborations between the Philippines and Latin America, but they also deepen them, complicate them, and tie them in quite nicely with your innovative critical framework based in part on affect theory. Can you tell me more about how you see these historical snapshots contribute to your book? What do they tell us about the connections between culture and politics, between history and literature?
Paula: I remember first seeing the photo of Cárdenas and Quezon in Mexican newspapers at the UNAM’s hemeroteca. They have a lot digitized, but most of it has to be consulted on site. So I initially went there to see if I could find anything on Balmori’s visit to Mexico in 1930, and I did find interesting bits here and there. But I was equally if not more captivated by other mentions of the Philippines in Mexican newspapers. I got a sense that throughout the years I cover in my book, 1898 to 1964, Mexicans consistently wanted to resume Mexico’s historical link to the Philippines. They write about the galleon trade with profound nostalgia. In the case of the Philippines, I tried to read as much as I could from Spanish-language magazines, for instance Excelsior and Philippine Review, to get a sense of what Hispaphone intellectuals were reading at the time. I just found it crucial to try to understand the political atmosphere at the time these writers were producing their work. On many occasions it was also inevitable for me to consider the political dimension of their work because of their role as politicians or diplomats. Filipino poet Claro Mayo Recto, for instance, went on to become a senator; Mexican writer Rafael Bernal devoted most of his life to diplomacy and one of his diplomatic appointments was in the embassy of Mexico in the Philippines.
Ernest: On a personal note, your historical snapshots give me a kind of archival excitement when reading them… Is that something you felt when researching for this project? Related to this, what archives did you work with when preparing this book? Were there any challenges that archival research posed or surprises you found in dusty archives?
Paula: In the Philippines, I went to the National Library, the libraries of the Ateneo, the UP, and the University of Santo Tomas, the library of the Lopez Museum, the Filipinas Heritage Library, and the one that is on the top of a mall (Ortigas Foundation Library). The experience of doing archival research in the Philippines was great. Sure, at times they had annoying rules, like limiting how much one can copy or photograph from an archive per day, so you have to go back each day to get a full copy of a work you’re interested in, but overall, they are very receptive to researchers from abroad. At times, they would give me access to newspapers from the 1920s and the state in which they were was so delicate that I found it more ethical not to consult them. As you probably know, Rocío Ortuño Casanova is directing a digitization initiative, with the objective of preserving newspapers and journals from the Philippines from 1850, I believe, to 1950, and I think this will generate amazing research projects in the near future. In Mexico, beyond the UNAM’s hemeroteca and general library, which is huge, I also went to smaller libraries and also the Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores, which was quite a different experience because diplomatic archives are catalogued differently and one doesn’t know where exactly to start looking. Other institutions I visited include the library of Instituto Caro y Cuervo in Colombia, where I found a few papers by Filipino writer Antonio Abad, from his visit to Colombia in 1960. I have also visited the Houghton Library in Harvard a number of times to consult José Garcia Villa’s personal papers. It’s really a luxury to be so close to this archive because it contains a lot: from personal memorabilia and drafts of his published works, to articles about him and articles Villa cut out and kept, which at times gives surprising hints at what he was interested in reading.
Ernest: Oh man. What a range of experiences. From an archive above a mall in Manila to the high backed chairs and velvety snake weights of the Houghton library. What’s consistent between these distant spots are quirky and helpful librarians. Speaking of Garcia Villa, your “genetic” readings of his unpublished notebooks and poems in Spanish as well as his “untranslatable” sonnets which blend non-sense and Spanish morphology are deeply impressive. How do his lived experiences and literary explorations contribute to and/or cast new light on Latinx as well as Filipinx poetics and politics? And, in reference to his archive in Cambridge, what articles was he cutting out and what can we learn from them about his interests and identity?
Paula: To answer your second question first, his clippings come from a broad range: he collected pages from newspapers and journals like Life, Time magazine or The New Yorker to more specific regional journals like The New Mexico Quarterly. The second one I know and have fresh in my mind because I just finished writing a piece on the two years Villa spent in New Mexico as a university student. In this piece I am trying to figure out to what extent Villa felt a sense of familiarity with New Mexico’s Hispanic past. I sometimes sense that I am reading too much into his clippings because as I said, they belong to a broad range. And this is because they were part of his experiment with poetic form: Villa would versify or re-versify lines from prose or poetry and called his technique Adaptation. But getting back to what I was saying: at times it could be that I am reading too much only into the pieces that indicate his connection to Hispanic culture, but I wouldn’t do this if I hadn’t encountered his unpublished poems in Spanish and Spanglish.
I think that Villa’s poems in Spanish and Spanglish open up an interesting discussion on how Latinidad is redefined in the US. My objective is not to declare that he was a Latinx author, but to think about how ambiguous the boundaries of Latinidad are. And Villa is of course not the only person who allows us to think about this. I remember reading an interview with Jessica Hagedorn in which at some point she pointed out how she engaged with the Spanish language and how she identified as a “Latin” person. There is also an interesting statement that Junot Díaz made when he visited the Philippines about how Filipinos and Dominicans share so many traits or something like that. He’s quoted by Anthony Ocampo in his book Latinos of Asia: How Filipino Americans Break the Rules of Race. But again, my objective is not to conflate US Latinx and Filipinx studies, but to see in what ways they share some experiences and goals. Sony Coráñez Bolton has an excellent piece on this that is titled “A Tale of Two ‘X’s,” which refers to Latinx and Filipinx studies. I’m looking forward to assigning his piece the next time I teach a class on Asian Latino encounters.
Ernest: Yes indeed. I also find Sony’s article to be such a great invitation to justify and rethink the “x.” This makes me think about the classroom. At Wesleyan, have you been able to teach about Garcia Villa or other authors you study in Intercolonial Intimacies? How do you present their work to undergrads in a way that is relatable to them and also intellectually rigorous? Do you ever bring in your own personal experiences to humanize these texts and authors or to connect with students?
Paula: Funny that you ask this because it is precisely these days that I am teaching not Villa, but Filipino modernistas. It’s for a class devoted fully to modernismo, so it’s more than relevant for me to assign the work of Filipino modernistas. We devote only a couple of classes to them and my goal is for students to see how Filipino writers were not imitating Hispanic American modernistas in adopting their aesthetics, but adapting them and doing something completely different. One of the complaints that my students have with Spanish American modernistas and rightly so is that they don’t engage with indigeneity in meaningful manners; they are too caught up in their Westernized mentality, their obsession of defending their direct link to Ancient Greece and Rome. With the work of Guerrero, Bernabé, and Recto, they see something different because they redefine and reorient the “raza” discourse of the modernistas and they do this by still engaging with Darío or Santos Chocano but giving much more room to Rizal and the particularities of racial discourses in the Philippines. I have also taught Philippine literature in my Asian Latino Encounters class. There I guess I do bring in a bit of my own personal experience as we look into how authors who are from an Asian diasporic group in Latin America, like myself, have at times identity crises that are somewhat similar to those of writers from the Philippines.
Ernest: I am struck by the “Note on Language” you include preceding the introduction. You clarify that you personally prefer the inclusive term Latinx, but that other considerations have led you to use other terms in Intercolonial Intimacies. You also clarify that you “do not adhere to conventions of Spanish orthography but to the way authors themselves wrote [their names].” Can you tell me a little bit more about 1) the terms and spellings you use and why you use them, and 2) your decision to include this note on language? Was there any name spelling or identity political term that you particularly struggled with? I notice that José Garcia Villa has an accent mark in the first name but not on GarcÍa, as the rules of orthography would require…
Paula: Well caught! For me it was important to keep the spelling that the authors themselves used. I did not want to impose the norms of orthography in what is arguably the aspect that is closest to one’s identity: one’s name. It would be like forcibly changing someone else’s name from Guillermo to William or Fred to Friedrich. Some people may not have a problem with something like that, but it seemed insincere for me to impose an orthographic rule on names. The first time I published a peer-reviewed article it was on Villa and the editors asked me to add the accent and I did. And I regret doing so. As for Latinx versus Latino, I decided to go sometimes for Latino or Latina because there is an immediate, indelible link with the Spanish language that is ciphered in those two terms when speaking English. In a way, it’s about legitimizing Spanglish. On the contrary, one of my reviewers wanted me to drop the usage of Latinx, but I felt it was important to keep it because the x not only stands for gender inclusivity but also signals how the field of Latinx studies continues to grow in different directions. Claudia Milian writes very convincingly about the multiple meanings of the x in Latinx.
Ernest: Super fascinating. The same thing just happened to me in an article in which I quote Leon Ma. Guerrero. The only problem is that in some publications he’s León and in others he is Leon! Is it an editing issue or is he playing with his identity by sometimes including and sometimes omitting the accent? Zooming out a bit… What are some observations you make in the book or takeaways that result from the book that resonate with broader cultural debates that circulate today in the US, Latin America, the Philippines, and beyond?
Paula: I think one of the broader observations I make in the book is that we need to rethink how we define globality and world literature. We need to reconsider who we decide to compare when we do and how their works that reach the category of world literature arrive there. There is a tendency to hang on to certain hierarchies, the idea that cultural productions need to go through or be approved by major institutions before being deemed of importance. As I move forward in my research, I’d like to continue exploring routes that are a bit less familiar and be more aware of this conundrum of approaching works that are considered “peripheral” and to do so from a position of privilege, based in an institution in the US.
Ernest: Can you tell us about any upcoming research projects that you’re working on or thinking about?
Paula: I am working on various projects, but all of them at snail’s speed. I guess the bigger research project I’m trying to embark on is on the relationship between Latin America and the Pacific Ocean. I am still interested in the intricate cultural links between Latin America and Asia, but I have begun reading more on Chile’s interest to expand across the Pacific and how the Rapanui, in particular, have resisted Chile’s claim of their land.
Ernest: Exciting! Sounds like you’re busy, even if it’s at a snail’s pace! When you’re not busy with research or when you want to get your mind off of it, what are you reading or watching? Any good recommendations?
Paula: There are too many good shows out there! Maybe one that comes to mind now, a hilarious one, is Kleo on Netflix. It’s about a former East German spy that sets out to take cold-blooded revenge upon those who have betrayed her. There is actually a bit of Chile and even Rapa Nui in it, but it’s a superficial representation of them. It’s all part of a satire of Cold War politics. Two writers whom I’ve read recently, unrelated to my research, who also have these sort of cold-blooded plots that I enjoy, at times simply because of their shock value, their surprising twists at the end, are Cuban writer Dainerys Machado Vento and Argentine Mariana Enríquez (Las noventa Habanas & Las cosas que perdimos en el fuego).
Ernest: Muchísimas gracias, Paula, por tu tiempo y por compartir tu sabiduría, tus experiencias, tu trabajo y tu “wit”. Ha sido un gran placer.
Paula: Mil gracias a ti, Ernest. It’s always fun to talk to you.
Intercolonial Intimacies: Relinking Latin/o America to the Philippines 1898-1964
by Paula C. Park
University of Pittsburgh Press, $55.00
Paula Park is associate professor of Spanish at Wesleyan University. Her research and teaching interests are Latin American literature/culture and Philippine literature in Spanish and English from the twentieth century. She focuses on exile writers, Orientalism, Asian diasporas, transpacific studies, and sound studies.
Ernest Rafael Hartwell is Assistant Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies at Western Washington University. He writes and teaches about 19th-century literature and culture of Latin America and the Philippines, with emphasis on anti-colonial political writings of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.
