In 2006, an issue of Wedding Essentials, a Philippines-based bridal magazine, featured a center spread of four Filipinas, all dressed in distinct wedding attire. The story, titled “The Four Faces of Maria Clara,” attempts to illustrate the different facets of Filipina beauty and femininity. The article proceeds to describe these four faces as mestiza, morena, chinita, and “dusky.” In her analysis of this magazine cover and the corresponding story, Denise Cruz asserts that it “locates the four women within a site shaped by intimate connections among continents—the eddies and flows of multiple migrations, trade relations and imperial conquests. . . . The layout nevertheless reproduces a racial hierarchy shaped by the Philippines' contact with Spain, China, the United States, and Japan” (p. 4). Cruz points out that this is not a simple magazine cover meant to show the diversity of modern Filipinas. It is a contemporary reflection of a history of complex, shifting representations of women during the Philippines' colonial transitions.
In her new monograph, Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina, Cruz argues that the modern Filipina has been created and defined by “transpacific femininities.” She explains that transpacific femininities are “women who are influenced by the contact between the Philippines, the United States, Spain, and Japan. . . . They speak multiple languages, travel, and receive advanced degrees from American and Philippine universities. They are cosmopolitan tourists, college coeds, writers, nurses, teachers, doctors, and lawyers” (p. 6). The project focuses on Philippine elites during four major historical moments: the transition between Spanish and U.S. colonial presence in the Philippines, the independence movements of the 1920s–30s, Japanese occupation in the 1940s, and the country's new relationship with the United States and Asia during the Cold War. Cruz examines evolving representations of Filipinas in various texts, including Jose Rizal's Noli Me Tangere, Maximo M. Kalaw's The Filipino Rebel: A Romance of American Occupation in the Philippines, Felicidad Ocampo's The Brown Maiden, and Yay Panlilio's memoir, The Crucible: An Autobiography by Colonel Yay. In doing so, Cruz reframes Filipinas as active agents in the relevant global historical and political issues of the time, such as women's suffrage and women's rights campaigns.
Cruz's project has many strengths. Cruz skillfully explores the notion of haunting—how the legacies of Spanish, U.S., and Japanese colonialism continue to haunt their current relationship with the Philippines, and how the silence of the Philippine-American War continues to haunt contemporary politics in the United States. In chapter 2 Cruz uses the backdrop of the suffrage movements of the 1930s to argue that notions of femininity in Philippine history shifted according to changing nationalist narratives, from Maria Clara (the popular character of Jose Rizal's classic novel Noli Me Tangere) as the symbol of femininity and home, to the Filipina co-ed as dangerously educated, and to the barrio girl as an ideal woman untainted by travel and education. Regardless of how feminine identities are framed in the present, they continue to be haunted by past representations in Spanish and U.S. imperial history (and briefly, Japanese occupation of the archipelago). Cruz also extends this notion of haunting to the problem of class. Her discussion suggests that while elites were trying to define Philippine nationalism and feminism in the wake of colonial transitions, these notions were still haunted by class difference, racism, and sexism, all of which could be traced back to the legacies of empire in the Philippines.
Like many scholars, such as Noenoe Silva, Amy Stillman, Epeli Hau'ofa, Vicente Diaz, Allan Isaac, and others, Cruz identifies the Pacific as a major site for overlapping empires. Chapter 4 on World War II in the Pacific and the following chapter on the Cold War address how Filipinas built coalitions with other Asian communities during these two major transformative historical periods. In these chapters Cruz provides a useful appraisal of the tension between Asian American and Pacific Islander studies. She also draws careful distinctions between how Pacific Islanders and Filipinos experienced U.S. colonization in the Pacific.
A major critique that some may have of the project is that it focuses on the Philippine elite. The texts Cruz uses are written in English, which potentially negates perspectives coming from different Philippine languages and dialects and also limits the class backgrounds of the women in question. In defense of the author, she is already tackling a subject that has been historically erased from history—the role of Filipinas during various colonial processes. In these processes, Filipinas are rendered nonexistent. Given that the work is new and quite groundbreaking, Cruz chooses an appropriate starting point. Though it is centered on the elite, her analysis is consistently mindful of the silencing of the poorer classes and indigenous Filipinos. It serves as a first step so that other scholars can continue the work Cruz has started.
Overall, the work inspires us to read the texts Cruz uses and prompts us to rethink the significance of these texts given the historical framing she provides. Transpacific Femininities provides a nuanced perspective to existing literature on women's history, colonialism in the Pacific, Asian American studies, and transnational studies at large.
