This week in North Philly Notes Thomas Xavier Sarmiento, author of The Heartland of U.S. Empire, wrotes about the queer Filipinx Midwest.
In the fall of 2010, I decided to watch an episode of Glee, a popular comedy-drama about members of a high school glee club who sing pop hits (among other genres). Incidentally, my first episode was the season two premiere, which featured a character named Sunshine Corazon, a new exchange student from the Philippines. As a queer Filipinx person, I reveled in watching a Filipina belt out lyrics to Lady Gaga and Beyoncé’s sapphic anthem “Telephone.” I was already a fan of the actor playing Corazon, Jake Zyrus, because of his single “Pyramid,” recorded under the name Charice. After this episode, I wanted to see more.
As I started watching more episodes, backtracking to season one, I learned that the show was set in Ohio and the high school was named after President William McKinley. I found it ironic that a Filipina exchange student was enrolled at a high school named after the person responsible for the annexation of her country in 1898. More puzzling was her presence in the middle of the country—a place not readily associated with Filipinx America. And yet, I was also living in the Midwest, starting my third year in the American Studies Ph.D. program at the University of Minnesota and being advised by a queer and trans Filipinx scholar. Nevertheless, being queer and Filipinx in the Midwest can feel like being a unicorn, a unique, beautiful, mythical creature that stands out of place.
Thus began my quest to understand the queer Filipinx presence in America’s heartland, resulting in my book, The Heartland of U.S. Empire: Race, Region, and the Queer Filipinx Midwest. I narrowed my research to literary and cultural representations, given their power to shape perception regardless of actual reality. And given the vastness of the Midwest region, such texts are more accessible. Although some of the texts I analyze feature queer identity, most would be not readily classified as LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and related identities); rather, I frame them as queer for their nonnormative orientation to both Filipinx America and the Midwest. That is, queerness names that sense of being strange and out of place. Filipinxs in the Midwest are neither part of mainstream Filipinx America, which is oriented to the West Coast, nor part of the mainstream Midwest, which is perceived as White. But as my book shows, the middle can be a productive space and place to reimagine what we think we know about race, gender, sexuality, nation, diaspora, and empire.
The book makes a case for both the Midwest as central to the story of the United States’ colonization of the Philippines (1898–1946) and Filipinx Midwesterners as reconfiguring the bounds of the U.S. Filipinx diaspora. Examples include
- Museum exhibits in Kansas about the Spanish– and Philippine–American Wars and the Pacific front of World War II
- Poems (Aimee Suzara’s Souvenir), an experimental film (Marlon Fuentes and Bridget Yearian’s Bontoc Eulogy), and a short story (Jesse Lee Kercheval’s “The Dogeater”) about the display of over 1,000 native Filipinxs at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair
- Photographs and unpublished memoirs of White and Black civilian Kansans living in the Philippines during the early twentieth century
- Filipinx handwritten student essays from 1904 housed at the University of Michigan
- Filipinx Minnesotan student perspectives on Philippine independence during the 1920s
- Bienvenido Santos’s literature (Scent of Apples and The Man Who (Thought He) Looked Like Robert Taylor) and memoir (Memory’s Fictions) that capture his time in the Midwest
- Short stories about Filipinas growing up in Chicago and suburban Milwaukee during the 1970s and 1980s (M. Evelina Galang’s Her Wild American Self)
- A play about Filipinx siblings growing up on a non-working farm in Middle America in the 1990s (A. Rey Pamatmat’s Edith Can Shoot Things and Hit Them)
- Filipinx characters and actors on television shows set in the contemporary Midwest (Glee and Superstore)
What these numerous examples revealed to me, and what I hope they reveal to you, is that Filipinxs in the Midwest are not anomalies, but rather appear so because of dominant narratives about race and region. This constellation maps the queer Filipinx Midwest: a counter-narrative of America’s heartland and the U.S. Filipinx diaspora that places queerness, Filipinxs, and the Midwest in dialogue with one another.
The Heartland of U.S. Empire invites you to dive into the middle and to see that “flyover country” is not as bland as you might think.
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