We Do Not Have Middle Names

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Today we share the final piece of public writing selected for publication from an assignment in ENGL 801 “Graduate Studies in English” — and the third selection from Section A of ENGL 801, taught this fall by Cameron Leader-Picone: a piece of public scholarship (700-1,000 words) which tailors an academic paper and its scholarly intervention of 10-12 pages for a general-interest audience.

Read more about the assignment and the first publication, “Mina Harker is More Than Just a Love Interest” by Destiny Munns (MA ’25), in the post from December 7, and enjoy the subsequent posts: “Resting in Peace: Why Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Keeps Sharon Tate Away from the Action” by Mike McCoy (MA ’25), “What Happens to Childless Mothers?” by Beth Jones (MA ’25), “The ‘Pretty’ Trap” by Aimee Lamoureux (MA ’25), and “Maybe We’re All Bottoms!” by Margo Losier (MA ’25). Now, on to “We Do Not Have Middle Names” by Gabriell Antonio Padua (MA ’25)!

— Karin Westman, Professor and Department Head / Instructor for ENGL 801 ZA (Fall 2023)

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Filipinos do not have middle names. Instead, we have two first names. My name isn’t just Gabe as many of my friends tend to call me. My name isn’t even just Gabriell (the two Ls in my name is a long story for another time — just know that my mom had it legally changed from something else when I was like 3 months old).

My name is Gabriell Antonio, and my mother had named me after her own father, Antonio Gimenez Tito, a man who had died of alcoholism at 49 years old. A man who had left behind 8 children with his death, my grandmother to raise them all on her own. A man whose face was round and oblong just like mine, whose hair reached to his shoulders like mine does right now, and whose hairline was slightly pushed back just like mine. And I only know this because I finally got a chance to see old photos of him during our last trip to the Philippines at my mom’s childhood home.

See, my mom didn’t bring any pictures of him with her when she immigrated to California in 1992, 6 years before I was born. And the only grandparent I had in my life was my maternal grandmother, who spent her whole tenure in the States as an undocumented worker, often sleeping in the backseat of my auntie’s van, hiding, as ICE would come knocking at the door asking for a “Myrna [Echavez] Tito.” She was still undocumented when she passed away from lung complications due to her smoking habit (and frankly, she’d probably be upset that I’m following in her footsteps). I was only 7 years old.

Growing up, then, my knowledge of what it meant to be Filipino only went back a generation. I only knew as much about my lineage and my heritage as my parents shared, which wasn’t a whole lot. I don’t know if they just didn’t know what to tell me. I didn’t know if they just didn’t know what stories to share, or how to tell those stories in English, a language they had trouble speaking (and for some reason, I’ve decided to get a Master’s degree in it). I find it fitting how much my own grandmother, my lola, mama, had spent her entire time in America hiding in plain sight because I think that’s indicative of what Filipino history and stories are to me — hidden.

And I loved stories — I always had. I had been an avid reader since I was a child, but not once did it occur to me that I never recognized myself in the stories I read; or rather, I never recognized the people that I knew in these stories I loved so much. I was subject to a specific canon, one where there were positively no Filipinos, no space occupied by the people I had been surrounded by my entire life. Their laughs. Their breath. Their furrowed brows, their calloused hands, their pointed lips were never in the pages I read. They could not be found, and I began to think it was for good reason — that the Filipino did not belong in these stories. I had begun to believe that Filipinos just did not have stories worth sharing.

That was until I was introduced to America Is in the Heart by Carlos Bulosan (his full name Carlos Sampayan Bulosan), a semi autobiographical novel published in 1946 about migrant Filipino laborers. I remember grabbing my copy used, marked at $4 even, sitting on the discount shelf at The Last Bookstore in L.A., wedged between other lost books whose ruffled and battered spines fell to the peripheral.

And for the first time, I had seen, much like how Allos saw “through the tall grass in the dry bottom of the river” in the novel’s opening line, someone who I was familiar with.

As I flipped through the pages and read the story of a man whom I’ve never met yet still know so well, I had found what I did not find in stories prior: Philippine rainfall, the hard muscle of a carabao, the longing and struggle for a better life where there was no concern to put food on the table. I grinned because it was so familiar, but I then winced for what that meant for the novel’s other parts.

Much like my own mother, Allos himself journeys to America in pursuit of that better life, to chase that dream promised to them — a dream of prosperity, of opportunity, of mobility. Also like my mother, he finds himself in California. He is transient, finding himself in cities and towns that I know.

Oxnard. Stockton. Pismo Beach. San Luis Obispo. Los Angeles.

But in these places, Bulosan details the discrimination. He speaks on how there was no prosperity, no opportunity, no mobility. There was still struggle — the “crime” it was to be “Filipino in California.” There was violence towards Filipinos in the places that I knew, that I myself have walked.

Yet, in spite of all of this, Bulosan remains optimistic: “it’s only in giving the best we have that we can become a part of America.”

But is this sentiment satisfactory? There is a tension here, and scholars have pointed out how assimilative this idea of “giving the best we have” seems. Prolific Filipino scholar E. San Juan Jr. (I’m inclined to refer to him as a cranky old tito, and I mean that lovingly) brings to question “how do we reconcile this stark discrepancy between reality and thought, between fact (the social wasteland called ‘United States’) and ideal (‘America,’ land of equality and prosperity)? Is this simply an astute ironical strategy to syncopate naive narrator with subversive author[?]” (259).

Meg Wesling from UC San Diego argues “that at stake [with this tension] is an epistemological impasse whose irresolvability provides a critical key to discerning the novel’s critique of the imperial occupation of the Philippines” (59).

What is urgent for me is that this tension is something that is also still so familiar. When Allos remains steadfast in finding his place in America, I cannot help but think of my grandmother asleep in the back of my auntie’s van. I cannot help but think about what my family’s place here in America is.

This book has shown me a history, one I felt was deprived from me, and broke open the floodgates to understand who and what I am, my family is, and Filipinos are here in this country. And in doing so, I believe the book speaks on a tension about this liminal space that the Filipino occupies.

“Yes, I will be a writer and make all of you live again in my words,” Bulsoan writes. And maybe that’s what this book is to me. By telling the story of the Filipinos, my grandparents come back to life, and they can, in turn, finally tell me their stories — a story instigated by imperialism, colonialism, strife, and perseverance. A story of identity, of dream-chasing, of reconciliation of who one is.

What Bulosan’s story shows us is that history has maybe forced Filipinos into the middle, but we still do not have middle names.

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Works Cited

Bulosan, Carlos. America Is in the Heart. 1946. Seattle: U of Washington P, 1973.

Maitino, John R., and David R. Peck. Teaching American Ethnic Literatures : Nineteen Essays. University of New Mexico Press, 1996. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=22681&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Wesling, Meg. “Colonial Education and the Politics of Knowledge in Carlos Bulosan’s ‘America Is in the Heart.’” MELUS, vol. 32, no. 2, 2007, pp. 55–77. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/30029724. Accessed 2 Dec. 2023.

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— Gabriell Antonio Padua (MA ’25)