The practice of belonging implies accountability. We have seen Philip prove his faithfulness to his father and to his family by sharing his hard-won wages, denying himself the opportunity for an education or even for a relatively comfortable life. He has in effect been fulfilling an unspoken promise to maintain his organic linkage with the community. This is itself a mark of character as well as a sign of self-hood, although the practice of helping the family back home is shared by the majority of Filipino workers in one degree or another. Another sub-cultural characteristic of Philip’s generation is what he calls pride, the refusal or failure to convey the forbidding reality of their lives to their parents and relatives back home. Everyone in the colony believed in America as the “land of promise,” a place where hard work would reward you with success, status in terms of money and material possessions. Conditioned by this ideological expectation, Philip and the “Manongs” lived a life of suspended utopian longing, if not stubborn self-deception. Philip did not want to disappoint his brother so he persuaded him not to follow and join him: “I was trying to be truthful but at the same time I didn’t want to tell him the details of how hard life was here.” Philip confessed the nature of the collective predicament:

”I couldn’t tell them some of the truths about my life here because I wanted to make them believe that America was good as I believed before I left. I had to struggle to make it good, at least for myself. Most of my Filipino compatriots felt this way too, and that’s why very few of us wrote truthfully about our lives here to our families back home. Many of us were guilty of fooling our families in the Philippines into believing we were something here that we really were not” (2000, 29).

For the most part, Philip never dwelt at length or in depth on the illusions most colonials cherished about the United States. To be sure, the schooling and ideological apparatuses of the state conditioned every native to believe in the equivalence of prosperity and everyday life in the metropolis. So efficient was this mass indoctrination that it had to take the daily ordeals of survival for these young Filipinos to get rid of years of what Filipino historian Renato Constantino calls “mis-education.” An emblematic symptom of this may be found in Philip’s discovery of his ignorance when he disembarked from the ship that took him to Vancouver: he saw that the wealthy class enjoyed themselves above the deck while hundreds of his companions suffered in the steerage. This “shock of recognition” precipitated a turn or reversal that reinforced the latent streak of independence already manifested in his childhood.

We can speculate then that Philip’s narrative of his life is an attempt to explain his character, the habitus of the self shared with his ethnic group. But what distinguishes Philip from the others, and in what way is this selfhood (ipse), a departure from the typical paradigm of the immigrant fable of success in America? What kind of moral or ethical subject is exemplified in Philip’s decision to reveal his judgment of Chavez as a consequence of his being faithful to the demand of the larger Filipino community that was prior to his obligation to the bureaucratic constraints or rules of being an official of the union?

Philip’s critique of Chavez’s authoritarian style is nothing new, as Frank Bardache (1993), Rodolfo Acuna (1988), and others have elaborated on this on various occasions. Qualified by profuse praise of Chavez’s charismatic stature and his self-sacrificing devotion to the welfare of the farm workers, Philip’s objection to Chavez’s top-down management was long suppressed for the sake of the public image of UFW unity. However, the struggle for popular democracy in the Philippines and in the U.S. pre-empted Philip’s devotion to UFW bureaucracy. It was only when Chavez embraced the brutal Marcos dictatorship in the Philippines, and invited the fascist labor minister Blas Ople to speak to the UFW rank and file in the August 1977 Convention, while muzzling his own vice-president Philip, that Philip could no longer restrain himself.

This crisis is significant for configuring Philip’s narrative because it ushered the rupture, the ethical choice, that defined his character from idem-sameness to ipse-selfhood: his opposition to the authoritarian rule of Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines coincided with a national upsurge of radicalism among Filipino-Americans, in particular the second or third-generation youth, who were mobilized in the late sixties and seventies by the civil-rights and anti-war campaigns. This is the youth that he appeals to at the end, his audience, his hope for a new future. No such turning-point can be found in the early stages of Philip’s life that equals this episode in intensity and resonance. Patient and forgiving, self-effacing to the point of seeming to be fatalistic or indifferent, Philip finally disrupted postcolonial inertia and connected his present with other moments in his life when he rebelled, contradicted abusive authority, and tried to help sustain a community of honest, dignified, morally capable citizens of equal status.

In the section of his autobiography, “The movement must go beyond its leaders,” Philip opposed the irrational cult of a leader and the suppression of criticism which deprived union members of “their right to reason for themselves.” Capability for moral choice needs to be actualized by democratic public institutions such as unions, etc. Notwithstanding the praise of Chavez by Peter Mathiessen, the biographers Richard Griswold del Castillo, Jacques Levy, Joan London, John Gregory Dunne, and others, Philip’s reservation may be explained by his identification with the plight of his compatriot Larry Itliong who initiated the Delano grape strike and had never really been credited for his part in this historic event. Philip regretted not having been closer to Larry whose self-contradictions, tied to the apathy and suspicion of his ethnic group, limited his efficacy. Responding to those who wanted to preserve the mythical aura of Chavez and the movement, Philip writes: “For me, we need the truth more than we need heroes” (2000, 91). He has broken from the circumscribed locus of family and ethnic kinship; defamiliarized, he joins a larger family of citizens united by the solidarity of civic cooperation and the humanizing telos of transformative political praxis.

Truth, in Philip’s eyes, concerned principles, not personalities. Although he resigned from the union after he publicly distanced himself from Chavez’s support of the Marcos dictatorship, Philip remained supportive of the UFW and the entire unionizing movement. Although he bewailed the fact that he sacrificed too much in his struggle to survive (a duty to support his family in the Philippines) and maintain his dignity as a Filipino assisting his community and fighting for workers’ rights, Philip was never bitter or cynical. He affirmed an internationalism that transcended the narrow parochial claims of ethnicity, racial affiliation, and nationality: “…I respect the differences between people through their cultures, and I think all efforts, energies, and money should be concentrated to serving the people instead of making profits for a select group or country here and there.”

The narrative climaxes with an invocation to his successors, the youthful workers whose representatives here may be the editors, Scharlin and Villanueva. Philip’s message to the young generation in whom rests the future of any country clearly serves as the leitmotif of his chronicle: “The success of any positive changes in this country depends on the strength of the workers and the organizations that hold the workers together are the unions…. Nothing will really change in this country without the total support of the working class” (2000, 154). He was seventy three when he chose the popular, democratic resistance against the right-wing Marcos dictatorship over Chavez’s open support for it, a stand that also confirmed his internationalist, progressive spirit of opposing capitalism as a system whose destructive exploitative logic was the lesson and truth that Philip wanted to impart by recording his life.

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