Filipino American college students at the margins of neoliberalism

Abstract

This article analyzes the various ways that Filipino American students have navigated the system of higher education in lieu of expanding neoliberal public policies. In an era where neoliberalism has sought to minimize minority difference within a universal “common sense” pursuit of individual freedoms, the academic, economic, social, cultural, and political actions of Filipino Americans have served as continual reminders that the holistic contexts of under-served and under-represented student populations continue to significantly shape educational inputs, environments, and outcomes in ways neoliberalism cannot fully take into account. A review of the historical formation of the Filipino American identity, combined with contemporary Filipino American higher education experiences, collectively establishes the inability to reduce the Filipino American identity to an objective marker of social difference. Moving forward, implications of this research illustrate an inherent paradox in the neoliberal concept of “diversity” in higher education, wherein colleges and universities actively forge a dually marginalized Filipino American identity that exemplifies the continued significance of race, in spite of higher education institutions’ growing attempts to downplay the correlations between race and educational access and attainment.

Approximately 400,000 Filipino Americans are currently enrolled in higher education, while the Filipino American ethnic group is the second largest within the Asian American racial category and also growing at the second fastest rate (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). Despite these significant demographic growths, the needs and capabilities of Filipino American students are rendered largely invisible within higher education discourse and education policy in general (Halagao et al., 2009; Maramba and Bonus, 2013). This omission is due not only to the homogenization of over 40 different ethnic groups under the aggregate category of Asian Americans but also the incongruence of Filipino Americans with stereotypes that categorize Asian Americans, both writ large and within an educational environment, as overachieving foreigners and passive, apolitical subjects (Wu, 2002).

In this article, I utilize Filipino American students in higher education as an example of the limits of neoliberal education ideologies that attempt to transform racial and ethnic categories from central codifiers of social stratification to ahistorical and objective criteria of social difference. By incorporating the genealogy of the Filipino American identity and the century-long colonial relationship between the Philippines and the United States, I illustrate how the higher education system has been a crucial site in forging a dually marginalized Filipino American identity that is neither Asian nor American, thus exemplifying the contemporary significance of race in spite of higher education institutions’ growing attempts to downplay its continued relationship with educational access and attainment. Moving forward, I use this evidence to argue that by ignoring the historical and contemporary contexts that link racial and ethnic identity to disparate educational outcomes both within and between racial groups, neoliberal ideology obscures educational research and practice from addressing the roots of educational inequity that still largely fall along racial and ethnic lines for specific reasons that go beyond natural statistical variance. At the same time, I also critique the established boundaries of race and ethnicity that miscategorize Filipino Americans and argue for a refined way of thinking about these categories for the mutual benefit of all educational demographics.

Under-represented students and the ideological shift of neoliberalism

Multiple scholars have characterized the current social, economic, and political landscape of American public policy as focusing on a neoliberal ideology (Giroux, 2014; Harvey, 2005; Ong, 2006). Whereas the traditional liberal perspective aspires to use public policy and government intervention as a means to uphold equality among the citizenry, the neoliberal ideology aims to reduce government control and emphasize the economically driven decisions of individuals. The “neo” aspect of neoliberalism thus borrows from the conservative ideology of reduced government control and free market capitalism as means to pursue traditionally liberal ends. The emergence of neoliberalism in the 1970s and 1980s was an institutional response to shifting perspectives of America through both foreign and domestic lenses. As traditional liberal public policies sought to provide social services and civil liberties to previously disenfranchised and socially marginalized groups (people of color, women, LGBT, persons with disabilities, etc.), conservative backlash mounted against these measures, characterized by calls for increased levels of accountability for public sector spending and fear of “reverse discrimination” against traditionally privileged groups. The end result has been a new system of “relationships between governing and the governed, power and knowledge, and sovereignty and territoriality” (Ong, 2006: 3). Appealing to a “common sense” rhetoric, neoliberalism has ushered in an age where “the language of the market and business culture have now almost entirely supplanted any celebration of the public good” (Giroux, 2014: 8). Liberal policies in higher education, such as affirmative action, interdisciplinary studies, and minority student affairs are hence critiqued and curtailed under the supposedly universal criteria of controlling government spending (portrayed to the individual as the equal use of her/his tax and tuition dollars without differential treatment for specific groups) and academic excellence (the fair chance for an individual’s academic qualifications to retain social/human capital by not admitting supposedly undeserving students into higher education).

Throughout the 1980s, educational policies that reduced needs-based financial aid to low-income students and raised tuition at rates far eclipsing national income began to dictate that higher education was a private good that should be financed by individuals rather than the public. The exorbitant financial costs of higher education shifted the expectations of students and their communities from one of constituents seeking political and moral accountability (the ability to be included in the “public” of public education) to one of consumers seeking capitalistic returns on their investments into the higher education system (Bowen and Bok, 2000; Giroux, 2014). According to the free market principles of neoliberalism, students who are qualified and motivated enough to attain higher education should be able to find their own opportunities. Conversely, those who do not attain higher education are the product of their own inability to achieve, for all types of students presumably have equal opportunities to succeed. Liberal considerations of the Civil Rights Era that viewed higher education as a means of upward mobility for under-privileged and systematically excluded communities were taken off the table. The benefits of including such students within a higher education landscape became reduced to a color-blind notion of “diversity” that was rooted in academic excellence and the abstract exchange of ideas, thus presuming that legacies of racism and injustice had been eradicated and were no longer relevant to educational access and attainment. The most prevalent example of the ideological shifts of neoliberal diversity is the policy of affirmative action. Once established as a means to remedy the historical and contemporary effects of racial discrimination in college admissions, affirmative action has been revised through United States Supreme Court cases to simply reflect a “compelling state interest” in diverse higher education environments. This contemporary emphasis on diversity makes no mention of prior institutionalized discrimination on behalf of the state and its continued residual effects. Rather, it counter-intuitively ignores lingering social stratification that forms the foundation for diverse worldviews and attributes student diversity to natural variance along various demographics with no systematic analysis of these differences or their impact on educational access and attainment.

The modern rhetoric of diversity in higher education emphasizes student demographics, such as socioeconomic status, religion, and ability in addition to and on equal footing with race and ethnicity as factors of individual and institutional diversity (Urciuoli, 2010). Yet in spite of the growing attempts to dismiss race as irrelevant, disparities in educational outcomes continue to persist along racial lines. African American and Latino students are much more likely to be perceived as antagonistic and punished severely, particularly for minor infractions (Ochoa, 2013; Schofield, 2009). Diversity in higher education is not increasing relative to the population of qualified students (Chang et al., 2003), and residential segregation is leading to increased segregation in K-12 schools as well (Bonilla-Silva, 2009). Even when equal educational qualifications are accounted for, African Americans and Latinos are still underemployed and underpaid relative to Whites (Grant and Sleeter, 2009). These continuing disparities reflect the notion that “race is a master category—a fundamental concept that has profoundly shaped, and continues to shape, the history, polity, economic structure, and culture of the United States” (Omi and Winant, 2014: 106). Omi and Winant’s seminal theory on racial formation—or the historical process by which identities are created, lived out, transformed, and destroyed (p. 109) is based on the fundamental assumption that race is a fixed, objective social fact that cannot be reduced to notions of ethnicity, class, or nationhood. As they state, “race is a fundamental organizing principle of social stratification. It has influenced the definition of rights and privileges, the distribution of resources, and the ideologies and practices of subordination and suppression” (p. 107). To that end, the individual and institutional inequalities highlighted above are some of the innumerable examples of how the American education system continues to serve as an integral tool in reinforcing socially stratified racial categories, thus perpetuating the uneven distribution of rights and resources in spite of seemingly equal opportunity.

However, when faced with these harsh realities, institutions of higher education rely on the self-fulfilling prophecy of neoliberal diversity—by claiming to embrace diversity and eradicating explicitly discriminatory policies, universities create a façade that deflects future claims of wrong-doing or inadequacy. As Ahmed (2012) describes:

What is created by the description of the university as diverse might be the very idea of a university as being diverse, which as an idea then circulates within the community that is being described. The “diverse university” becomes a shared object, if others within the university repeat the description the repetition of utterance gives it force … The circulation of the word “diversity” creates the very idea of “the diverse institution” and in turn, this idea gives the word “diversity” its circulability. (Ahmed, 2012: 56)

Ahmed further describes diversity as a “kind of ‘yes’ politics that encourages people to do something, rather than a ‘no’ politics that aims to prevent people from doing something” (Ahmed, 2012: 67). Diversity thus becomes more marketable and viable within higher education rhetoric for their perceived traits of equality and inclusion. However, the adoption of this neoliberal, color-blind version of diversity has, in reality, helped to obscure and marginalize many students’ educational needs and capabilities. One particular demographic of college students, Filipino Americans, pose a unique case to dissect and critique the effects of neoliberalism on the holistic higher education experience. As a population that has grown dramatically within postsecondary education since the passage of the 1965 Immigration and Naturalization Act (Museus, 2013; Teranishi, 2010), the establishment of a prominent Filipino American population has paralleled the development of neoliberalism. The history of the United States’ colonial and post-colonial relationship with the Philippines is one of the earliest and most long-standing examples of the blurred borders of American economic and intellectual influence that are a central aspect of neoliberalism (Ong, 2006). Tracing the various contexts in which Filipino Americans have shifted their identity in relation to one another, other Asian Americans, and other people of color, illustrates the ambiguous and often contradictory ways that racial and ethnic identities are conceived and given meaning versus how they are experienced in people’s everyday lives.

Historical genealogy of the Filipino American identity

As neoliberal policies in higher education attempt to transform minority difference into an objective marker of social difference, the Filipino American student identity defies the oversimplified logic of the abstract racial categorization of students and the reduction of educational attainment to measures of individualistic educational outcomes. The Filipino American identity has been formed in constant dialogue with both Asian America and the United States as a whole, thus creating a unique demographic group that has constantly blurred the lines of racial and ethnic categorization. As an archipelago with inhabitants of various ethnic origins that held no singular, collective identity until it was colonized (and hence culturally influenced) by Spain and the United States, the Philippines does not concisely fit into the mythical concept of Asia as a monolithic area of ethnic ancestry. Conversely, the physical marking of Filipino people as non-White persons within a United States racial landscape categorically excludes them from full inclusion as Americans. Throughout the course of American history, Filipino Americans have been neither Asian nor American, occupying various intermediary identities on the spectrum between these two polar opposites. Within the current neoliberal boundaries of American higher education, this fluid Filipino American identity exhibits possibilities for resisting neoliberal ideals through collective resistance to antiquated schemas that narrowly associate educational success of minority students with cultural temperaments and dismiss the heavily segregated nature of campus environments and educational access.

The first waves of Filipino American immigration began shortly after American colonization of the Philippines in 1898. This particular time period is notable in the overall Asian American historical narrative, as immigration from China had recently been banned as a result of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, and the exclusion of Japanese immigration would soon follow with the 1904 Gentleman’s Agreement. These restrictions on the two largest immigration streams from Asian countries were the result of growing social unrest from Whites who vilified the “Yellow Peril” of Asian immigrants as criminal deviants who were inassimilable to American culture and created competition with Whites for working class jobs (Okihiro, 1994). Although Filipino Americans were not subject to the same exclusionary laws as their Asian counterparts, they were not afforded the full rights and privileges of being American, either. In addition to interpersonal discrimination and violence, Filipinos also became subject to the same anti-miscegenation and anti-citizenship laws that initially only applied to “Chinese,” “Asiatics,” or “Mongolians” (Chuh, 2003). Their identity on the one hand as non-White “Malays” from Asia and as “US nationals” from an overseas colony on the other thus created a contradictory space that valued the Philippines as a colonial territory in Southeast Asia, but devalued the presence of Filipino Americans within the domestic sphere. Espiritu (2003) refers to these processes as “differential inclusion”:

I define differential inclusion as the process whereby a group of people is deemed integral to the nation’s economy, culture, identity, and power—but integral only or precisely because of their designated subordinate standing … I use the term inclusion to underscore that Filipinos, and similarly racialized groups, have always been inside of and played absolutely crucial roles in the building and sustaining of the nation … In so doing, I wish to show that the process of differential inclusion is intimately connected to the “possessive investment in Whiteness.” (Espiritu, 2003: 47–48, emphasis in original)

The education system was one of the first contradictory public sites where the identity formation of Filipino Americans was strategically different from that of other people of color in general, and Asian Americans more specifically. The institution of higher education played a central role in the differential inclusion of Filipino American US nationals, subsequently revising the traditional relationship between a liberal American education and national citizenship. Starting in 1903, 104 Filipino students were selected to be pensionados in prestigious US colleges and universities. Unlike their Asian American counterparts (and almost all non-White persons in general) who were categorically excluded from public education at all levels, these select few Filipino Americans were granted access to the top tiers of public education in the United States (Posadas, 2013). As part of the American colonial project in the Philippines, the United States sought to spread Western ideals throughout the colony by educating elite Filipino students in American universities under the presumption that these students would return to the Philippines and utilize their positions of influence to establish a self-sufficient, American-modeled system of government. Pensionados were strategically chosen for their social statuses of power and influence, and as such were from far different social, economic, and cultural backgrounds (many were mixed race, as was typical for the elite at the time) than the Filipino American migrant laborers who migrated to the West Coast, Hawaii, and Alaska in the early 1900s (Chan, 1991). Thus, the purpose of incorporating Filipinos into American higher education was not to diversify the higher education landscape, but rather to use higher education as a tool of social control. Debates about whether to uphold public education as an elite privilege, or to diversify it for the sake of assimilating and controlling those to be perceived of lower classes have been at the forefront of education reform throughout American history (Cremin, 1964; Hessinger, 1999; Thelin, 2011). In the case of the Philippines, the strategy of using education as a tool of social control was particularly useful for the United States, because it gave their colonial power a façade of benevolence that stood in stark contrast to Spanish colonial rule that relied heavily on oppressive religious doctrine (Agoncillo, 1990).

Despite the pensionado program ending in the mid-1910s and the United States granting the Philippines its full independence in 1946, the effects of American colonialism are still readily apparent in the Philippine education system and its culture as a whole. English is one of the country’s official languages, used as a primary language of instruction in schools as well as in government affairs. In 2011, the Philippines Department of Education adopted a compulsory K-12 educational system, adding two more years onto its pre-existing system in order to make Filipino graduates more marketable to educational and professional opportunities outside the country (De Los Reyes, 2013). To that end, the prestige of colleges in the Philippines is evaluated heavily on an institution’s ability to make graduates marketable for jobs abroad, where people are often able to make more money underemployed in the service sector than they would in their respective professional fields in the Philippines (Parreñas, 2001, 2011).

Just as these educational policies shape the cultural landscape of the young Republic of the Philippines, so too do they continue to shape and influence the growing Philippine diaspora, the majority of which is only one generation or less removed from the Philippines. In the United States, the ways that the Filipino American identity has been shaped and re-shaped by American public policies provides great insight regarding the effects of post-1965 neoliberal policies on the lived experiences of college students. In an ironic twist, American neoliberal policy is now trying to homogenize and undervalue the very Filipino American identity that the American government once played a crucial role in differentiating and bolstering on a global stage to serve its own interests domestically and abroad. Thus, dissecting Filipino American experiences within higher education becomes a project that does not merely highlight difference for difference’s sake but also exposes the ways that the neoliberal system of higher education falls short of effectively managing these differences due to inherent shortcomings within the system that miscategorize students and fail to accurately capture the relationship between racial and ethnic identities, and educational achievement.

Filipino Americans in neoliberal higher education

As a result of the liberal accomplishments of the mid-20th century, Filipino American students have benefitted greatly from measures designed to foster educational access, retention, and attainment for under-represented minority students. But as the public education system has begun to lean more directly toward neoliberal ideologies and policies in the subsequent decades, Filipino American students find their needs and capabilities ignored, rendered invisible, and/or grossly mistranslated in lieu of structural constraints that refuse to acknowledge the complexities of their educational experiences. Differences in educational experiences and utilization of vital campus resources between Filipino Americans and both the Asian American majority and the predominantly White student population at most universities are seen as nothing more than individual deficiencies that need to be overcome through free will. In addition, the neoliberal ideology that stresses the individual liberties of citizens and the free market principles of achieving these liberties ignores the active role that public institutions play in deciding whose liberties are valued and who is given the opportunity to participate in the free market. Within the realm of higher education specifically, this means that colleges and universities are not merely passive receptacles of democratically determined public policies, but rather they are central hubs of activity that determine what identities are valued and how these identities are given value and primacy over others (Ferguson, 2012; Park, 2013). For Filipino American students, being subsumed under the institutional category of “Asian American” ignores their colonial linkages to the educational system and the differential experiences of Filipino Americans within the modern American racial landscape. Given this context of the modern neoliberal university, I explore how Filipino American students continue to defy the simplistic boundaries of educational policy as it deals with minority difference.

Higher education as a mitigating factor in identity formation

One of the most salient debates in higher education asks how educational research can specifically attribute the characteristics of college graduates to causal phenomena that are exclusive to the college experience, rather than natural aspects of human development that would have occurred for young adults regardless of where they spent these four to five years of their lives (Astin, 1993; Evans et al., 2010; Kuh et al., 2005; Pascarella and Terenzini, 2005). Research across racial and ethnic minority groups has shown that extra-curricular student organizations aimed at under-represented and under-served students have acted as crucial networks for these students to acculturate to the systems of postsecondary student life and find a greater sense of purpose in their academic endeavors (Gonzalez, 2002; Guffrida, 2004; Harper and Quaye, 2007; Inkelas, 2004; Museus, 2008). Rather than being the clannish forms of self-segregation that they are anachronistically categorized as by modern conservatives, student organizing serves as both a literal and figurative lifeline for students who are systematically unwelcomed by their campus communities.

Due to the deeply ingrained power structures of higher education, nearly every step made in the name of educational equity has been made from organized student demands. The establishment of ethnic studies and other interdisciplinary programs, departments, and colleges in higher education over the last 40 years has largely been the result of student-led movements to diversify the campus both physically and intellectually. Student-of-color organizations have also been at the forefront of hiring faculty of color (and in some cases, appealing their unrightful denial of tenure), establishing multicultural/diversity-based centers on campus, and providing university administration with an overall barometer for the concerns of under-represented students within the ivory tower (Liu et al., 2010; Museus, 2013; Patton, 2010; Umemoto, 1989; Williamson, 2003).

For Asian American college students specifically, the higher education environment serves as a crucial site of study regarding racial identity formation for two reasons: (1) college student organizations were crucial in the very development of the “Asian American” identity as a self-determined marker of political solidarity (Espiritu, 1993; Ho et al., 2000; Louie and Omatsu, 2001); and (2) despite being a minority within predominantly White institutions, colleges and universities still serve as the primary site where most Asian American youth come to terms with their racialized identity due to the raw number of Asian Americans who are concentrated within a particular place, as well as the heavily segregated and racialized nature of college life that is so systemic that it comes across as “natural” (Inkelas, 2004). As Kibria (1999) states:

Even however for those students who remain distant from formal pan-Asian activity, the college years are likely to be a time of encounters with the Asian American concept and reflection about what it means for identity and community. For one thing, regardless of whether or not one chooses to be involved, pan-Asian groups and organizations are a visible part of campus life … Thus while an Asian-origin student may very well avoid pan-Asian activities on campus, she or he is nonetheless likely to confront the idea of “Asian American” in some fashion. (Kibria, 1999: 34, emphasis added)

Kibria’s observations about the visibility of Asian American groups and organizations allude to two different ways that the Asian American presence is viewed on college campuses. First, in the general sense, student organizations of all types serve as flag bearers for their target demographic. The establishment of any student organization on campus serves to legitimize the physical presence of that particular interest group within the student population. Second, the Asian American presence is constantly seen as hyper-visible due to the stereotype of Asian Americans as “perpetual foreigners.” As people who are assumed to be out of place, the Asian American presence is noticed much more intently than that of Whites. Within the higher education environment, the hyper-visibility of Asian Americans is heightened even more due to larger sociocultural discussions about who “deserves” to obtain access to higher education, with the stereotypes being that Asian Americans are often solely focused on academics and do not actively contribute to extra-curricular campus life, or that Asian Americans, as foreigners, are taking over jobs and opportunities that should be reserved for Whites (Takagi, 1993; Wu, 2002).

Despite being institutionally categorized as Asian Americans, Filipino American students often find themselves disconnected from these processes of Asian American identity formation due to their inability to fit the mold of an Asian American identity that is directly influenced both internally and externally by educational experiences and outcomes. Therefore, the Filipino American identity within the higher education system is not just one that is formed in dialogue with the White majority but also in response to the non-Filipino, Asian American majority.

Still neither Asian nor American

For almost five decades, Asian Americans have been labeled as a “model minority” within the United States’ racial landscape. Their perceived unique cultural traits of hard work, discipline, and sociopolitical passivity are seen as inherent characteristics that are the antithesis to those displayed by other minorities. Asian Americans are bolstered as the model for how others should act: hardworking, non-complaining, independent, and self-sufficient (Suzuki, 2002; Wu, 2002). As a result of this overbearing stereotype within the educational realm, Asian American students who do not fit the mold of the model minority are considered “less” Asian and viewed as irreparably deficient by their own lack of merit (Trytten et al., 2012). Under the neoliberal construct of race as a category of social difference that is irrelevant to educational inputs or outcomes, the existence of Asian Americans who are not naturally gifted and overachieving are seen as isolated exceptions to the rule, rather a critical mass of exceptions that disprove the rule.

In spite of the relative invisibility of the Filipino American narrative within educational policy discourse, research that has been conducted on Filipino American college students serves to actively complicate the relationships between racialized identities and student achievement throughout the higher education pipeline. Whereas the classification of Filipino American students under the Asian American racial category links them to the model minority stereotype of academic overachievement, the Filipino American experience through the student perspective exhibits characteristics that are unique to this ethnic group and defy simplistic categorizations of how the term “Asian” is understood.

Ocampo’s (2013) research on second generation Filipino American identity theorizes that higher education has created a system where Filipino Americans are more closely associated with Latinos and African Americans than Asian Americans. As students in “majority-minority” high schools in suburban Southern California, where they were the predominant Asian American ethnic group, Filipino American subjects reported receiving many of the benefits of the model minority myth that other students of color did not—they were given preferential treatment in disciplinary matters, placed in college preparatory classes, and their reputation as hyper-achieving students was causally tied to their perceived identity as Asian Americans (Ocampo, 2013: 304–308). But as these Filipino American students advanced to California’s public universities, their Asian American identity was quickly called into question by East Asian Americans—students of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, or Taiwanese descent whom subjects would come to classify as “Asian Asians” (Ocampo, 2013: 315, emphasis in original). Although they were in the same institution, East Asian students were characterized by Filipino Americans as having elevated standards of educational achievement, such as private tutoring, higher GPAs, more strict “Asian educational values” from parents, and concentration in sciences and engineering majors (Ocampo, 2013: 309–310). It was not until they reached college that Filipino American students had to give more reflective thought about whether or not they could be considered “Asian.” Furthermore, it was not until they came to college and compared themselves to other Asian Americans that they began to come to terms with the non-biological, non-quantitative aspects of racial identity that seemed to place them in more cultural congruence with Latinos and African Americans, who also deal with their own conflicting experiences of academic belonging and intra-ethnic othering, especially in elite institutions. Therefore, based on these underlying factors of race as the culmination of cultural, socioeconomic, physical, and other structural factors, Ocampo notices a panminority identification among Filipino Americans that reflects an ethnic background, cultural upbringing, and educational experience that is more congruent with Latino and African American cultures and experiences rather than other Asian Americans in the university setting.

As the culmination of immigration settlement patterns, comparative racialization, and localized schooling experiences, the racial dis-identification of Filipino American students from East Asian Americans in a college environment is reflective of larger patterns of educational access and attainment that affect students at the gateways to and transitions through higher education. When Filipino Americans are compared to East Asian Americans, Filipino Americans have lower levels of college completion, are more likely to attend colleges of lower selectivity, apply to fewer colleges, and cite non-academic factors (family, money) as significant factors in college choice (Museus, 2013; Teranishi et al., 2004). Furthermore, Filipino American high school students have been stereotyped as gang members and academic delinquents and are therefore not given adequate college counseling, despite having the necessary qualifications for university admissions (Buenavista, 2007; Teranishi, 2002). These findings imply that Filipino Americans, particularly males, are stereotyped in the same way as Latino and African American students—hostile, adversarial, and in constant need of criminal surveillance (Ochoa, 2013: 116)—and not as Asian American model minorities. Despite achieving objective markers of educational access, the Filipino American experience illustrates that access is not the same as success, and that students who are similarly situated and categorized from an institutional standpoint can still navigate the education system in incredibly disparate ways.

Within an educational landscape that counter-intuitively homogenizes Asian American difference in the name of bolstering institutional diversity, the educational needs and capabilities of Filipino American students are deeply misconstrued. But as a “minority within a minority,” Filipino American students are not merely passive victims of dual marginalization but have also exhibited great agency in making their own voices and concerns expressed through their actions as students and members of campus communities.

Historical and contemporary significance of Filipino American student organizing

Filipino Americans formed civic and student organizations upon their arrival in the early 20th century as a means to cope with their isolation from their homeland of the Philippines as well as their dual isolation within their new country of the United States (Cordova, 1983; Espiritu, 2003; Koerner, 2007). Espiritu describes the phenomenon of community organizing as a way for Filipino Americans to establish a sense of “home” in a country where it did not exist:

The stresses of migration—the struggles against xenophobia, cultural racism, and economic discrimination—have intensified considerably Filipino immigrants’ identification with their place of origin. At the same time, they have also firmly rooted Filipinos in joined struggles with each other and with other kin communities to define and claim their place in the United States. (Espiritu, 2003: 16, emphasis in original)

Within colleges and universities, which are often their own self-contained communities within larger cities or regions, Filipino American students utilize these same principles of community organizing as a means to establish and reinforce their identities both in and out of the academy. In the early years of the post-1965 immigration wave, these identities were explicitly radical. One of the earliest influential post-1965 Filipino American student organizations, the Philippine American Collegiate Endeavor (PACE) at San Francisco State College, took part in the Third World Liberation Front (TWLF)-led student strike of 1968 that established the first ethnic studies program in the nation (Umemoto, 1989). PACE was an integral organization in the TWLF, separate from yet allied with multiple other student-of-color groups, including the Asian American Political Alliance (AAPA) and the Intercollegiate Chinese for Student Action (ICSA). The separation of PACE as its own organization was a conscious decision reflective of the material conditions of PACE members and their communities. As predominantly working class, first generation students in a small but growing ethnic community, their political concerns were distinct enough from other Asian American groups to warrant ethnic separation, but similar enough to maintain ties through the TWLF. According to Umemoto:

The purpose was fourfold: to encourage and aid low-income Pilipino ¹ -American [sic] students in the Mission area to enter college; to establish communication channels between youth organizations in the Bay Area; to research socioeconomic problems and their solutions; and to serve as a referral agency for employment, medical, housing, recreation, and counseling services. (Umemoto, 1989: 16)

These original goals of PACE illustrate a direct connection between the community and the academy, and not merely segregation for the sake of social difference. Filipino Americans in the San Francisco Bay Area had specific cultural, economic, social, political, and academic needs, and saw the university as an active gateway toward addressing these needs in the short- and long-term. These communities traced an academic trajectory in which the desired outcomes of educational attainment were directly related to the inputs these students brought into the higher education environment. Their specific needs and capabilities were not homogenized under a neoliberal ideology that attempts to define the acceptable contours of diversity and higher learning as self-contained, objective outcomes. Rather, under-represented students used their pre-college experiences to dictate their own, self-determined goals and demand that the university provide the necessary liberal pathways to achieve the most of their education.

However, as larger portions of the Filipino American second generation from the post-1965 immigration wave came of college-going age in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Filipino American organizations across the state of California in particular began to see large booms in their membership, with some swelling to over 300 members in any given year, drawing from Filipino American student populations of 1000 or more at some campuses. Concurrently, the dawn of neoliberal higher education policies during the Reagan era of the 1980s began to stifle notions of racial and ethnic diversity (both inter- and intra-) in lieu of multiculturalist policies that viewed diversity through the color-blind and historical lens of Whiteness. The end result of these two larger occurrences was the stifling of political action and shifting of priorities by Filipino American student organizations. The act of being in higher education itself was no longer seen as a political act, but rather a universally opportunistic pursuit of an objective goal. Race and ethnicity were reduced to happenstance (“a student who happens to be Filipino”) or essentialist views of the tokenized history of a strange land. In regards to the latter, Filipino American student organizations in the 1980s and 1990s became known for their proliferation of the Philippine cultural dance genre, a heavily European-influenced style of dance that translated cultural rituals into commodified products for a non-Filipino audience. Philippine dance became a staple for all Filipino American student organizations (and remains as such to this day), ignoring the inherent Orientalism and vestiges of the Spanish and American empires that were contained within these routines and the abbreviated stories that supposedly gave them meaning (Gaerlan, 1999; Gonzalves, 2010).

This ideological shift in the culture of higher education reflects what Hale (2005) defines as neoliberal multiculturalism, or the relationship between neoliberal political economic reforms and the collective rights granted to previously disadvantaged cultural groups (Hale, 2005: 12). Hale argues that neoliberal multiculturalism reaffirms the status quo when institutions in power grant previously disenfranchised groups their rights to representation in the political sphere, yet ultimately exclude these groups from obtaining equitable positions of power. Rodriguez’s Suspended Apocalypse (2010) highlights one effect of this shift toward neoliberal multiculturalism by conducting an analysis of a student-led pro-affirmative action protest from the year 2000 at the University of California, Berkeley. Protesters occupied a school building in the immediate vicinity of a Filipino cultural dance practice being held by University of California, Berkeley’s Pilipino American Alliance (PAA), who continued to resume business as usual in spite of a growing police presence in response to the protest:

[s]tudent-performers were simultaneously inventing, rehearsing, and assimilating an eager (if stridently amateurish) production of the Filipino American real … The students’ movements mocked the very historical moment in which their rabid fabrications of Filipino American “history” and “community,” and their sincere though no less flimsy counterfeiting of a native homeland, had become a collective gesture of allegiance to a repressive, deeply racist university apparatus: California had passed the paradigmatic Proposition 209 less than three years earlier, rendering affirmative action illegal. (Rodriguez, 2010: 14)

PAA is one of the oldest Filipino American student organizations in California and was instrumental in establishing the ethnic studies department at UC Berkeley in the late-1960s. However. Rodriguez’s account of this protest and his analysis of the implications of PAA members refusing to participate in lieu of their impending cultural dance performance, highlights the contradictions that underlie the Filipino American identity within the neoliberal university. The UC Berkeley PAA, once an active advocate for students of color in the post-Civil Rights Era, was collectively foregoing participation in an affirmative action demonstration—a policy directly descended from the Civil Rights Era—in favor of an annual performance that celebrated a multiculturalist and de-politicized Filipino American identity. Taken within the complete historical context of the UC Berkeley campus, this incident sheds light on the ways that racial and ethnic identities and meanings can shift drastically within college environments over a relatively short period of time, while simultaneously demonstrating the influence of Filipino American cultural organizations in controlling the narrative of the Filipino American identity to a larger campus community. This incident from 2000 captures the divergent points of view that can develop under the guise of neoliberal multiculturalism. As a previously disenfranchised group now granted access to the university environment, in many senses the cultural dance performance does assert the Filipino American presence on the UC Berkeley campus. However, this presence, when deemed as a success that obviates the need for further political action toward educational equity for Filipino American students, such as affirmative action, becomes detrimental for Filipino Americans by upholding the imbalance of political power within the university that has always existed.

But this is not to say that such a mentality has coerced every Filipino American student organizer on every campus away from activism. As Hale states, “these institutions, however, cannot easily set limits on the mobilizations that follow, nor can they readily fix the cultural-political meanings that people produce and affirm as they mobilize (Hale, 2005: 13).” In response to the emergence of a tokenizing, superficial codification of their life and culture, Filipino American students have begun to create new organizations, expanding the definition of Filipino American student organizing beyond all-encompassing, universal multiculturalist banners, and addressing more specific class, gender, and academic interests. Filipino American student organizations now include radical political organizations (Louie and Omatsu, 2001), K-12 outreach and tutoring programs (Halagao, 2013), fraternities and sororities (Gonzalez, 2012), academic retention programs (Buenavista, 2013), feminist groups (Strobel, 2001), performance arts troupes (Gonzalves, 2010), and undocumented student outreach (Ryoo and Ho, 2014), among many others. Many of these organizations exist on the same campuses together and are also part of regional, national, and international alliances that extend far beyond one campus or higher education in general. Rather than diluting the Filipino American voice, the new facets of Filipino American organizing more deeply critique the boundaries of the Filipino American identity beyond (and sometimes altogether foregoing) the essentialized, multiculturalist history of the Philippines and the United States’ role as a (neo)colonial power within that history. In describing the benefit of these alternative spaces, Strobel states:

Unity is often a euphemism for control, a means to confine and contain the elements of a society that do not fit into the definition of “American.” To challenge these imposed definitions, the participants [students] discussed the necessity of creating community institutions that will do political and cultural education simultaneously … There will be a need to find a new language and develop a conceptual arsenal with which to articulate the Filipino American position. (Strobel, 2001: 115)

While these efforts to organize students illustrates that Filipino Americans value unity under a specific social, cultural, and/or political cause, they also exhibit the agency of students to unite on their own terms and not rely solely on social identities that are imposed on them by their institutions. Collectively, these organizations resist oversimplified constructs of what it means to be Filipino American and a student-of-color in higher education, instead choosing to explore the constant dialogue that occurs between the academy and the community, past and present. These efforts symbolize students’ critiques of the Filipino American identity as more than an individual marker of social identity, but as a part of their academic trajectory and collective self-efficacy that are not extraneous to their curriculum but rather an integral aspect of it.

In pursuit of a greater understanding about the holistic significance of the higher education experience for minority students, extra-curricular organizations provide crucial intermediary sites to analyze the interactions of these students with the larger university infrastructure. More specifically, the sites of Filipino American student organizing as places where various academic, social, cultural, and political histories converge to create the modern Filipino American identity are incredibly valuable spaces of resistance as the institutions in which these organizations are housed continue to shift toward neoliberal ideologies that seek to drastically modify how minority difference is understood by students of color. Rather than confirming to the viewpoint of racial and ethnic difference as natural, individualized variance, Filipino American student organizers are actively resisting neoliberal ideologies by critiquing the systems of structural inequality and oppression that still marginalize under-represented and under-served communities.

Conclusion

Throughout this article, I have used the case of Filipino Americans to highlight numerous flaws within two underlying, fundamental beliefs of the current theory and implementation of neoliberal policies: (1) individual, private citizens are mutually exclusive entities from the public structures that govern them at a macro level; and (2) race is a mere objective category of social difference that the university (and the education system as a whole) has no role in shaping or determining. The sociocultural designation of Asian Americans as “model minorities” is reflective of multiple tenets of neoliberal education policies that have deliberately sought to counteract the liberal progresses of the Civil Rights Era. In an attempt to demonstrate the irrelevance of race, the supposed success of Asian Americans was bolstered in contrast to the supposed failures of Black and Latino communities. The racism of model minority logic dictates that if Asian Americans are successful, it is due to their individual, cultural temperaments, which African Americans and Latinos allegedly do not possess. As such, any racial considerations are individual, private concerns and should not be addressed by public policies. However, the construct of an Asian American model minority, which disregards race as reflective of life chances or educational opportunities, is drastically complicated when the Filipino American identity is examined in relation to both the Asian American majority and the racial landscape of the United States as a whole. Ironically, it is this very identity that was created in large part by the United States’ conservative ideals (which would eventually spawn neoliberalism) that complicates and negates a neoliberal framework of racial and ethnic identity in higher education.

Filipino American experiences, both in and out of the American educational system, serve as a means to better understand the complex systems of marginalization and oppression that still permeate throughout our society. Whereas differing schools of thought, particularly those focused on the cause-and-effect relationships of policymaking, are often looking for the root cause of a certain problem or deficiency, an intersectional analysis of Filipino American students demonstrates that their needs and capabilities are not easily reducible to their racial and ethnic ancestry or perpetually foreign cultural difference. Across their various and often conflicting identities as children of immigrants, people of color, Asian Americans, Filipino Americans, and/or college students, Filipino American students’ hybrid identities cannot be summed up through one category of social difference or one check box on institutional data collections. The American educational experience throughout its various iterations has consistently created an arena where individual and collective identities are established, examined, and critiqued in ways that are unique to the specific material conditions that guide public education in the current historical moment. As the United States continues to diversify upon multiple axes of social, political, cultural, and economic difference, the field of education will continue to remain a vital component of the government’s institutional response to its various constituencies.

Moving forward, this research on the trajectory and experiences of Filipino American students in higher education is not merely a means to describe one population or demographic in depth. It is my hope that an intersectional analysis of the Filipino American experience will help to deconstruct false binaries that restrict our ways of thinking about education policy, research, advocacy, and pedagogy. While the case of Filipino Americans is unique, the method of incorporating histories of public policy, foreign relations, community building, socioeconomic development, and racial formation into discussions about the purpose and objectives of public education should continue to be placed in the center of the discussion, rather than the margins.