history

my head is spinning...again.
attended a lecture given by dr. ricardo jose.
he is a history professor at UP Dilliman and a damn good one.
he is a storyteller.

i am redefining my relationship with history.
i used to hate it. what did it have to do with me? a bunch of old white guys wearing wigs and waging wars.
i distinctly remembered stopping paying attention to history in 5th grade, where i learned that "ferdinand magellen was eaten by cannibals in the Philippines."

not a peep about the Philippines in my whole school "career," and THIS was the first mention?!?!

being the only brown girl in my class, i remember sinking lower and lower in my seat, face hot with shame and embarrassment.

from dr. jose's lecture i learned that the vine of colonization took its strongest foothold in the Philippines between 1945-1946. it was the last year of the Philippine Commonwealth. the country was in shambles after WWII, and americans would finally grant Philippine independence.

any advances made before the war towards sustainability, a national identity, infrastructure, stability, inner agency were completely destroyed.

great timing for independence, di ba?
the country was split between completely trusting the US (give them anything they want, MacArthur came back didn't he?) and completely mistrusting the US (get them out, they lied and basically we traded one colonizer for the next)

seems like this is the time when the Pinoy penchant for imported goods began.
children learned that they could get chocolates from american GI's by greeting them with an emphatic, "Hi Joe!"
in the provinces, GI's, tired of their army rations of SPAM, traded for fresh chicken, pork. Pinoys gladly traded their fresh eggs for the army ration powdered eggs, as powdered eggs were viewed as so modern, so american. just add water!

i think about the balikbayan boxes that my family in the US send here. they are full of chocolates and SPAM. i think of how those canned goods are proudly displayed in locked glass cabinets in my relatives' homes, perverse indicators of status. i think about how my lola will only eat "american corned beef." (isn't it from argentina?) and how a tito of mine has placed a bottle of Lee Kum Kee oyster sauce as decoration on the only shelf in his living room.

i think about parity rights and trade agreements during that period of time in history. of course, they favored the US. these agreements allowed the rape of Inang Bayan. rampant logging and mining... industrialization poisoned the Pasig.

american products were tauted as superior, and so many Pinoys preferred Colgate and Dove over locally made toothpaste and soap. goodness, isn't this literal and figurative whitewashing? brainwashing?

how many boxes have i seen my mother pack that contain Colgate and Dove soap nestled amongst the cans of SPAM, chocolates, old clothes, and toys? how do we unwittingly contribute to reinforcing the colonized mindset in sending these things?

ugh. my stomach feels tight.

my mother was born in 1946. perhaps the vine had cradled her in my lola's womb.