by Mark Villegas
Thanksgiving marks a significant holiday in U.S. culture, so it would behoove us to be informed of its origins, especially given that we (as a nation) spend so much money and energy on food, shopping, and marketing for this special day.
Why is it important to celebrate this day as a time of conviviality, family-centeredness, and peace?
Digging a little deeper, maybe the imperatives of Thanksgiving can be seen as emerging from a root of unrest and violence, and not from the benign coming-together-Pilgrim-and-Indian story that we know from kindergarden. Here is a good article, "Thanksgiving: A Native American View", that gives light to a more accurate truth to the holiday--one that underscores the disease, war, displacement, and colonization of the first people in the U.S.
Even though I'm writing about a very sobering subject, I want to make it clear that I love Thanksgiving. Most of all, I love Thanksgiving food: stuffing, sweet potatoes, ham, syrup, gravy, green beans, etc. Yes, its a good excuse to eat carbs and fatty foods. But it is also an appropriate opportunity to address the realness the holiday represents, a realness which is masked, erased, and obscured by our glorification of food, shopping, and gathering with family members.
What does Thanksgiving have to do with Filipinos? Well, the short answer is that U.S. expansion from the East to West is always written in a heroic narrative of Manifest Destiny, a narrative that determines U.S. colonial movement as good, peaceworthy, and heavenly-ordained. The Philippines, like the Mexican-American War and other U.S. wars of expansion that displaced and erased people, was subjected to U.S. take-over, genocide, and occupation beginning with the often forgetten Philippine-American War. This moment in U.S. and Philippine history is so forgotten, in fact, that this veterans memorial statue off Westwood Blvd. in Los Angeles completely erases the Philippine-American War and subsumes it within the Spanish-American War, which was not the same war.
Coming back to Thanksgiving, the holiday did not actually enjoy a national scope beginning with the mythical the Native American and Pilgrim dinner. Just like the veterans statue Westwood, there was a deliberate campaign to paint a particular story for the U.S. national imaginary. In Anarchy of Empire, Amy Kaplan writes of one woman, Sarah Josepha Hale, the editor of the popular magazing Godey's Lady's Book, who made it her mission to make Thanksgiving a national observation during a time of national unrest: the Mexican-American War:
"In 1847, in the middle of the Mexican-American war, Hale launched a campaign on the pages of Godey's Lady's Book to declare Thanksgiving Day a national holiday, a campaign she avidly pursued until Lincoln made the holiday official in 1863...Godey's published detailed instructions and recipes for preparing the Thanksgiving fest, while it encouraged women readers to agitate for a nationalwide holiday as a ritual of national expansion and unification... Hale imagined millions of families seated around the table on the same day, thereby unifying the vast and shifting space of the national domain through simultaneity...If the celebration of Thanksgiving unites individual families across regions and brings them together in an imagined collective space, Thanksgiving's continental scope endows each individual family gathering with national meaning" (34-35).
In other words, Momma's turkey, cranberry, and greenbean casserole recipes did not spring forth from the Pilgrims' cookbook, but from Hale's successful lobbying to weave a national and unifying myth when the nation and the geographic coherency of the U.S. lay in utter turmoil. Our family gatherings complete with lechon kawali and drunken uncle karaoke untangles from the fabric of a domesticating practice predicated on the imperatives of a very public war of expansion...thank you Sarah Josepha Hale.
How does our "forgetting" of the Mexican-American War and U.S. expansion help us celebrate things like Thanksgiving (let's not even get to Columbus Day) without reminding us of our nation's sins? Is this a good thing? Will our awareness of the origins of certain holidays and events such as Thanksgiving change how we celebrate them? Are there alternative ways to celebrate?
Also, what impact does "disappearance" of the Philippine-American war have on our own consciousness and awareness of ourselves as Filipino Americans?
Will the obscuring of U.S. violence on indigenous people and Filipinos encourage similar actions to be inflicted onto more people? Is the "forgetting" of U.S. wars of expansion so effective that its justification has been used again...and again...our mission never accomplished?
U.S. soldiers massacre Southern Filipinos during the protracted Philippine-American War: "Result of Mount Dajo Fight- Those in the Trench are 'Good Moros'" (1907) from The Forbidden Book.
The veterans statue in Westwood, CA is just one example in the fashioning of U.S. innocence and exceptionalism; but the overwhelming presence of the Pilipino diaspora in the U.S. is an ironic reminder of U.S. occupation in the Philippines: the classic "we are here, because you were there." The logic of Manifest Destiny is invested its own vanishing, or at least its morphing into something pleasant.
So, "we are here" on Thanksgiving, a day to spend with people we love and to eat good food. However, let us also remember that our very privilege to celebrate such a day is born out of the lives of indigenous and Mexican people. So perhaps the love we share today will also be a reminder of the love we should have for all people, especially those communities displaced by war.
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Some books on the topic of "invisible" U.S. Empire in the Philippines:
Anarchy of Empire by Amy Kaplan
American Tropics by Allan Punzalan Isaac
Model Minority Imperialism by Victor Bascara
