Islands of Empire: Pop Culture and U.S. Power 9780292756311

Citation preview

Islands of Empire

Fojas-final.indb i

12/6/13 1:55 PM

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

• Camilla Fojas •

Islands of Empire

Pop Culture and U.S. Power

University of Texas Press

Fojas-final.indb iii

Austin

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Portions of the introduction originally appeared in Transnational Crossroads: Remapping the Americas and the Pacific, edited by Camilla Fojas and Rudy P. Guevarra Jr., and are used by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 2012 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska. Portions of Chapter One originally appeared as the article “Foreign Domestics: The Filipino ‘Homefront’ in WWII Hollywood” in Comparative American Studies, Volume 8, Number 1, March 2010, pp. 3–21(19). The article appears online at www.maneypublishing.com/journals/cas and www .ingentaconnect.com/content/maney/cas. Used with permission. Copyright © 2014 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2014 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-7819 http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-form The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Libr ary of Congr ess Cataloging-in-Publication Data Fojas, Camilla, 1971– Islands of empire : pop culture and U.S. power / Camilla Fojas. — First edition. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-292-75630-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Mass media and culture—United States—History. 2. Popular culture— United States—History. 3. Power (Social sciences)—United States— History. 4. United States—Relations—Islands of the Pacific. 5. Islands of the Pacific—Relations—United States. I. Title. P94.65.U6F65 2014 302.23′0973—dc23 2013030222 doi:10.7560/756304

Fojas-final.indb iv

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Contents

Pr eface. Our Island Frontier: The Philippines, Guam, Hawaiʻi, Puerto Rico, and Cuba vii

Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction. Islands of Empire

1

Chapter One. Foreign Domestics: The Filipino “Home Front”

in World War II Popular Culture

31

Chapter Two. Imperial Grief: Loss and Longing in Havana

before Castro 60 Chapter Thr ee. Paradise, Hawaiian Style: Pop Tourism and the State of Hawaiʻi 93 Chapter Four. Tropical Metropolis: West Side Stories and

Colonial Redemption 132 Chapter Five. The Guam Doctrine: Colonial Limbo in the Pacific

167

Afterword. Whither Empire? The Colonial Complex of U.S. Popular Culture 190

Notes

205

Works Cited 215 Index

Fojas-final.indb v

223

12/6/13 1:55 PM

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

Preface

Our Island Frontier The Philippines, Guam, Hawaiʻi, Puerto Rico, and Cuba

T

his is a very personal story. I was raised at the intersection of empires, the waning British one of my mother and the expanding U.S. version I live in. The latter was obvious in ways I explore intuitively, an awareness I gained from the presence of U.S. empire in the Philippines, where my father is from, and Hawaiʻi, where I was born. I often wondered why the United States seemed so powerful in those places, an object of both awe and contempt. While living briefly in Makaha, Oʻahu, in the 1980s, my siblings and I heard bombing practice in Makua Valley so frequently that it became just part of the daily noise; it was even vaguely exciting to be close to so much danger. That danger is persistent and ongoing. After the U.S. military commandeered the valley, its training exercises polluted it with explosives and toxic chemicals, and Native Hawaiians continue to struggle to have it cleaned up and returned. We were kids who had no idea about the ominous nature of those sounds or what they represented. Similarly, in the film The Rum Diary (2011), adapted from the novel by Hunter S. Thompson, Johnny Depp’s character experiences the clamor of bombing practice on Vieques, Puerto Rico. Yet he has a more conscious and adult reaction to it: he cringes and ducks. He is there as part of a tour of the island by developers who want to build a tropical resort. To him, it seems paradoxical that such a place could ever be a desirable tourist destination. The Rum Diary is set in 1959, when tourists were forced to find another playground in the Caribbean to replace Havana. San Juan was a good proxy for its neighbor, but Conrad Hilton had already colonized and cornered the tourist market on it; the smaller Vieques was wide open for development. Around the same time, popular culture began its love affair with

Fojas-final.indb vii

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• viii •

Islands of Empire

Hawaiʻi and tiki culture, and the invention of the jetliner made the distant islands seem closer than ever before. It is easy for mainlanders to forget that Guam is part of the U.S. insular empire. Guam is always a point of reference in the military complex of the Pacific, and it shares with Puerto Rico the dubious status of being one of the oldest colonies in the modern world. The superferry debacle in Hawaiʻi brought Guam, nominally, back into the imperial picture first imagined in 1898—when the United States gained a slate of colonies and protocolonies in the Pacific (Hawaiʻi, the Philippines, and Guam) and the Caribbean (Cuba and Puerto Rico). In 2007, Hawaii Superferry put two high-speed superferries, the Alakai and the Huakai, into service from Oʻahu to Maui, despite a Hawaiʻi Supreme Court ruling that the company had to first complete an environmental impact statement (EIS). Governor Linda Lingle, who had secured a $140 million dollar loan to Hawaii Superferry on the condition that the company would not have to complete an EIS, overrode the ruling, allowing the fleet to set sail. Lingle courted this lucrative new industry and its military-connected owner and board of directors in order to curry political favor—the superferries were prototypes for navy vehicles and were to ferry army Stryker tanks to Maui for practice runs before their deployment to Iraq and Afghanistan. (For more information on this incident, see The Superferry Chronicles: Hawaii’s Uprising against Militarism, Commercialism, and the Desecration of the Earth (2009), edited by Koohan Paik and Jerry Mander.) The superferries were docked in early 2009 because of political pressure brought by a coalition of activist groups pushing for adherence to the original Hawaiʻi Supreme Court ruling. In a twist of fate, that turn of events ultimately benefited the military. The U.S. Navy purchased the ferries at a foreclosure auction and renamed them the USNS Guam and the USNS Puerto Rico, in homage, no doubt, to the longest-standing colonies in the world. I weave together these personal, political, and pop-culture points of reference because it is in this piecemeal yet deeply connected manner that empire makes sense and becomes visible. And it is in this fragmentary way that I piece together a portrait of U.S. empire from its symbolic origin in the successful campaign against Spain in 1898, which yielded control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. That year garnered even more symbolic resonance because it was also when the United States annexed Hawaiʻi. I have been gathering articles, films, pamphlets, and images of these places for years, out of fascination with how often they are paradoxically both interchangeable and yet com-

Fojas-final.indb viii

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Pr eface

• ix •

pletely distinct and unrelated in the U.S. national psyche. That is, they are perceived as repeating tropical pieces of U.S. empire, but each had a different role and status within it throughout the twentieth and twentyfirst centuries. Yet this imagined interchangeability has incredible potential and significance; it bespeaks an interconnectedness that may form the basis for alliances among the global peace and antimilitarism movements—for example, the World Social Forum, the Occupy Movement, the (De)Occupy movement in Hawaiʻi, the numerous groups protesting against the Group of Eight and the World Trade Organization in Seattle and Cancún, among others. After 1898, the cardinal question in the United States about the new “island empire” was what to do with them. While the country was working out its imperial strategy, each place was struggling with the persistent and ongoing question of how to achieve self-rule within the force field of empire. Perhaps one way this might be achieved is through the accretion of small and large acts of resistance. The success in shuttering the superferries in Hawaiʻi is one sign of how a coalition of groups seeking global peace and justice can work together to throw a wrench in the imperial machine and thus stop one small part of its operations.

Fojas-final.indb ix

12/6/13 1:55 PM

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

Acknowledgments

I

would like to thank Jim Burr at the University of Texas Press for supporting this project and for being, as always, a kind and dedicated editor. I am deeply indebted to the Pacific Century reading group at Northwestern University, which reviewed the entire manuscript and gave countless helpful suggestions. Thank you to Nitasha Sharma, Jinah Kim, Kathleen Belew, Simeon Man, Sylvester Johnson, Beth Lew-Williams, and Daniel Immerwahr. I owe a special thanks to Daniel for going over the manuscript with meticulous care and for sharing insights from his similar project. I thank David Palumbo-Liu for his helpful comments on a version of chapter four. Lourdes Torres offered a small archive of articles on Puerto Rico, a sign of her true generosity as a scholar and friend. The small theory reading group that meets for brunches and dinners over intense and boisterous conversations was a source of great intellectual energy. Thank you Martin Manalansan and Billy Johnson González. At different stages of this project, Mary Beltrán, LeiLani Nishime, Jane Park, Rudy Guevarra, and Shilpa Davé gave valuable feedback. This work was completed with funding from the University Research Council at DePaul and the Society of Vincent de Paul professors. I am indebted to the anonymous readers for their helpful comments and careful reading of the manuscript and to Kip Keller for his tremendous editorial skill and care with the text. A special thanks to the staffs at various archives, including the History Miami Archives and Research Center, the University of California at Los Angeles Film and Television Archive, the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, the Newberry Library, and the Hawaiʻi State Library.

Fojas-final.indb xi

12/6/13 1:55 PM

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

Islands of Empire

Fojas-final.indb xiii

12/6/13 1:55 PM

THIS PAGE INTENTIONALLY LEFT BLANK

Introduction

Islands of Empire

I

s the United States an empire? This question might be answered in part through popular culture, the locus of the most spectacular displays of U.S. hegemony. Michael Mann’s cinematic remake in 2006 of the popular television series Miami Vice (NBC, 1984– 1989), which he produced in the 1980s, is a particularly appropriate place to start, for a number of reasons. First, Miami Vice glorified the war on drugs in the Caribbean basin, strongly suggesting that the onus of law enforcement in the Americas rests on the United States.1 That position is a reminder of the country’s role after World War II as global enforcer of what has been referred to as the Pax Americana—an allusion to the Pax Romana of the Roman Empire. Mann’s remake of the television series into a major Hollywood film exploited audiences’ nostalgia for cultural productions of earlier eras, offering them the opportunity to revisit the reassuring mood and sensibilities of another time. The original Miami Vice took place during a period of prosperity and economic boom in the United States—while its southern neighbors were suffering their worst economic crises to date, when, for instance, debt defaults rocked the economies of Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. The United States was in a favorable position to shape policies that would put the rest of the hemisphere at a disadvantage in the decades that followed—culminating in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) of 1994. The film Miami Vice encodes the imperious position of the colossus of the North in pleasurable law-and-order stories populated by the usual suspects: swarthy “foreign” villains and slick U.S. buddy cops. The film shows U.S. security forces operating on a larger field of operations, revealing the expansion of the impact of the United States on the world, along with post-9/11 cultural preoccupations. Miami is key to

Fojas-final.indb 1

12/6/13 1:55 PM

•2•

Islands of Empire

Vice detectives Sonny Crockett (Colin Farrell) and Ricardo Tubbs (Jamie Foxx), seen against the skyline of their Miami beat in Miami Vice (2006).

this enterprise: it is a cultural and financial capital of the Americas and a place populated with characters from the Caribbean and Latin America. Florida was also an imperial object of an expansionist United States, which purchased it from Spain in 1819. Part of the story takes place in Cuba—also the object of persistent U.S. imperial desire—in a subplot of illicit romance in a forbidden territory. The rest of the story is global. The buddy cops chase down money-laundering and drug-trafficking networks that extend all over the world: Russia, Ukraine, China, Colombia, Haiti, Cuba, and the triple border of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil—a known site for the transfer of contraband. The opening scene, set in the Miami waters, captures the omniscient perspective associated with the local police force and, by occurring in a border region, U.S. national security forces. The audience perspective begins underwater but breaks the surface in the midst of a speedboat chase between Miami vice and the bad guys. Our view then shifts from watching the chase to sharing the perspective of the cops to taking in a soaring view the of the entire scene from air to finally arriving back on land as the cop couple, Sonny and Ricardo (Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx), capture the bad guys. In this short opening, we unconsciously receive a brief but significant lesson about U.S. land, sea, and air power through a visual experience of omniscience and omnipotence, one that is as national as it is global. The new Miami Vice dramatizes the shift of the United States from be-

Fojas-final.indb 2

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Introduction

•3•

ing the “capital of the Americas” to a political operative of global dimensions.2 This new incarnation of the popular television series is truly imperial entertainment.

Empire’s Origin Story The story of U.S. empire emerges out of the successful military campaign against Spain in 1898. The association of military prowess, colonial acquisition, and political benevolence made the war a powerful icon and origin story of global power in the national imaginary. The war is often elided with the era and the date of its occurrence, 1898, when expansion beyond the continent was afoot not just in the former Spanish imperial holdings but also in the former sovereign kingdom of Hawaiʻi—a key player in the military campaigns of that year. The rumblings of empire demanded a story that was to be conveyed partly in the emerging technology of cinema as well as in the popular press. The Spanish-American War was the first to be captured in moving images, and the development of cinema coincided with the expansion of U.S. influence and power abroad. Many of the images appeared in short newsreels and pithy takes on a battle or scene, while the full drama of empire and its possible futures was played out in another fanciful genre, travel writing. In these narratives, the imperial fantasy and its engineering gaze cast various island locations as interchangeable sites on a leisure tour of possible capital ventures for the enterprising imperialist. The diverse and geographically distinct locations of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Hawaiʻi, and, only tangentially, Guam, were insular parts of an imperial whole. The period after 1898 saw mass enthusiasm and a desire to know about these places and about the new status of the nation as a major world power. The Spanish-American War is an overdetermined and overarching symbol used to celebrate the benevolent form of U.S. empire; it signaled liberation from European imperial cruelties and alignment with U.S. democracy, freedom, and progress. Moreover, the Spanish-American war, also called the Spanish-Cuban-American War, constituted the roots of U.S. militarism, not just as the seed for establishing military bases in the Pacific and the Caribbean (and Latin America) but also as the origin of the modern organizational structure and strategic planning and coordination of the military.3 Islands of Empire is about the aftermath and popular-culture afterlife of U.S. empire in the current, former, or protocolonies of Hawaiʻi,

Fojas-final.indb 3

12/6/13 1:55 PM

•4•

Islands of Empire

Guam, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Cuba.4 Each place had its “moment in the sun” of intense yet transitory visibility in popular culture, to borrow the title of John Sayles’s novel set during the first epoch of U.S. imperial overreach. Sayles gives a rich account of characters and locations brought together by tensions brewing on the continent and in the Caribbean and the Pacific. I explore popular depictions of each place at different moments following the dizzying turn of events after the Spanish-American War. The war set the national mood and attitude of global superiority. We live in the afterlife of that imperial moment. While the popular and trade press depicted the sites of empire as interchangeable, Washington treated each place differently as a result of the Insular Cases (1901–1922), a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions that sanctioned colonization of the islands ceded by Spain. Each place matured politically and culturally to disrupt the homogenization of the imperial optic. The story of empire is full of paradoxes: the colonized suffered under the forces of indifference along with those of historical change. While representational similarities among these islands persist, contemporary popular culture accords each a unique role in the overall career of U.S. empire. And the epoch of formal empire is the symbolic origin of the informal imperial career of the United States. This book is but a small part of a popular-culture archive that draws together places that persist in their dynamic relation to the United States as neocolonies, enemies, component parts, or client states. All of them contain U.S. military installations as part of an interconnected matrix of bases. Some are tourist destinations. The story lines of Hollywood films are fundamental to the structure of feeling of empire, in which an imperial sensibility is dramatized and displayed across tropical landscapes. For this reason, major films about each location are the primary coordinates of discussion; texts and ephemera of popular culture—postcards, documentaries, short stories, novels, tourist manuals, and promotional brochures—contribute pieces of the overall portrait.

The New Imperial Frontier After the Mexican War, in 1848, the imagined frontier of the United States moved south, challenging the supremacy of its mythic western orientation; that is, U.S. industrialists became more attentive to the possibilities for capitalist expansion in Latin America, and in Mexico more specifically. The frontier, the national boundary and border, carried a dif-

Fojas-final.indb 4

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Introduction

•5•

ferent significance as a line securing an embattled territory that once belonged to Mexico. The expanding U.S. boundaries seemed to have found natural limits in the Rio Grande in the South and at the end of the landmass in the West. Yet the sense of the borders shifted again just fifty years after the Mexican conflict. As a result of the Spanish-American War, the United States satisfied its ambition to exert more influence in the Americas and the Pacific. It gained control over several island nations, some just beyond the physical boundaries of the United States and others farther afield: Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam. In the same year, but through different means, the United States added the territory of Hawaiʻi to its coffers, and a year later eastern Samoa was acquired. By 1902, Cuba had returned to sovereignty, but remained within the orbit of U.S. influence as a protocolony, through the Platt Amendment, and as a tourist paradise made by and for the colossus of the North. The United States was no longer contained within a single continental mass, reaching beyond the mainland and into the Pacific and Caribbean. The new island frontier was the first global sign of the expanding circumference of the U.S. empire in the Americas and beyond. It remained for the U.S. to project its supremacy throughout the world and to expand the circumference of its imperial drama. In this way, the United States is both an actual empire in the formal sense and an agent of imperialism or of the logics and strategies for the expansion and assertion of global power. Media creations that feature the U.S. insular empire, such as Miami Vice, are key players in the North American imperial drama. A major locus of the action is Havana, where Sonny engages in an affair with the Cuban-Chinese Isabella, a business partner of the kingpin of the contraband-trafficking operation. Their intimate relationship enables him to broker a deal that will lead to a major drug-ring bust in which Havana is a significant point of reference. The former tourist paradise signals the expansion of North American police networks in the Caribbean while it tacitly points to a lost piece of the U.S. empire, to a place long coveted and now off-limits. Miami Vice draws our attention to how the formal U.S. insular empire appears in popular culture in oblique and tacit ways, often, for example, as the backdrop to the wanderings of the U.S.-based protagonists. The popular-culture framing of these island locations exposes the ideological moorings of U.S. global power. Often, the formal U.S. empire is less visible against more recent military and political campaigns for global dominance. Yet as many critics have argued, the latter is a symptom of the former. In this work, I argue that both are significant, that there is a symbolic assertion of U.S. hegemony, often

Fojas-final.indb 5

12/6/13 1:55 PM

•6•

Islands of Empire

without reference to its insular empire, and that there is a distinct and significant origin of U.S. empire in 1898. Empire is both actual and symbolic at once. Greg Grandin has written persuasively of how Latin America has served as a crucible or workshop for the development of U.S. imperial strategy in the world, particularly for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.5 U.S. interventions, military operations, and covert missions in the Caribbean, South America, and Central America were all productive and efficient practice for the subsequent end run for power in the Middle East. John Mason Hart makes similar claims about U.S. imperial strategies in Mexico that are evident in the investment patterns and subsequent political influence of U.S. business leaders. Likewise, in an innovative approach to U.S.–Latin American relations, Dennis Merrill charts the routes of U.S. tourism in Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Cuba as evidence of imperialism’s soft power.6 All these studies are nominally area studies with a primary point of reference in Latin America. Yet U.S. empire, in the strict sense of the term, is much more geographically broad and diverse. For instance, in the case of imperial travel circuits, Hawaiʻi is a significant point of reference as a model for other tourist sites, including Puerto Rico and, formerly, Cuba—though the loosening of U.S. travel restrictions to the latter may change this. Christine Skwiot rightly notes that Cuba and Hawaiʻi are key, though divergent, coordinates in the development of empire as a tourist enterprise.7 These studies are important points of departure for examining U.S. empire through its insular holdings, yet a more expansive view reveals an important circuit of exchange among tourism, militarism, and popular culture in the post-1898 U.S. insular holdings. In popular culture, the depiction of each of these locations, either together or separately, contributes to the projection of the U.S. imperial status and the global expansion of its geopolitical boundaries. For this reason, I examine cultural productions that take place in the physical locations of empire. That is, the very places where the United States has maintained administrative, political, military, economic, and cultural control over a diverse slate of imperial outposts linked to 1898. These are places where the United States has acted as an empire and not merely like an empire. In response to the war in Iraq, former president George W. Bush offered a key lesson in this regard. He compared the U.S. role in Iraq to its earlier one in the Philippines. He echoed what several scholars and artists have concluded with regard to Iraq and other U.S. wars, particularly those in Afghanistan and Vietnam. For Alfred W. McCoy, the

Fojas-final.indb 6

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Introduction

•7•

Philippines was the key testing ground and crucible for the expansion of U.S. global power, particularly in the Middle East.8 E. San Juan, Jr., explores the ideological links between the Philippine-American War and Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and other wars involving “foreign” lands and peoples of color.9 Brian MacAllister Lin likens U.S. insurgency practices in the Philippines to those used in Iraq and shows how past deployments shape current military policy.10 Angel Velasco Shaw’s film The Momentary Enemy (2008) uses archival footage from commercial and news media to render explicit the link between the Philippine-American War, the Vietnam War, and U.S. interventions in the Middle East as signs of U.S. imperial ambitions. Likewise, John Sayles’s film Amigo (2011) exposes the U.S. ideology that fueled the Philippine-American War, locating it as the origin of strategy and torture methods for subsequent interventions in Vietnam and Iraq. In fact, the history of the U.S. role in the Philippines could be neatly grafted onto Iraq—from intervention to occupation to the transition to self-government. As mentioned earlier, his novel A Moment in the Sun puts the dramatic development of U.S. imperialism squarely in the geopolitical spaces—including Manila, Honolulu, and Havana—related to the events leading up to the Spanish-American War. In fact, the novel and the fi lm are pieces of the same project; Sayles got the idea for Amigo while doing research in the Philippines for A Moment in the Sun. The relatively low cost of production and labor made the Philippines an ideal location for the film, a persistent symptom of global economic inequities.11 The U.S. island frontier reaches beyond particular areas or regions, even those that are broadly defined, such as Gary Okihiro’s “black Pacific” or Antonio Benítez Rojo’s “repeating islands” of the Caribbean— though a decontextualized use of the latter term is useful. In fact, the continuity between the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hawaiʻi does not arise from geographic proximity but by the centripetal force of empire. The popular attitudes and perceptions about “our island possessions” reveal many enduring lessons of empire. The mass-cultural handling of these islands has powerful political implications for Washington’s relations with each place and, perhaps more significantly, for the management of the self-identity of the United States as a global power. Indeed, much of U.S. popular culture might be characterized as “imperial” for its worldwide dissemination and domination of local markets. For Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart, Washington’s dominion over Latin America was due in large part to its popular-culture interventions. They unveil the sinister machinations of Disney’s seemingly benign hero

Fojas-final.indb 7

12/6/13 1:55 PM

•8•

Islands of Empire

Donald Duck, who is shown to be an agent of U.S. hegemony.12 Matthew Fraser makes a similar case when he examines how U.S. popular culture has become an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Pop culture is a “soft power” that lays the groundwork for Washington policy initiatives by instilling the American way of life beyond its borders.13 Likewise, James Chapman and Nicholas J. Cull, in their examination of imperial themes in British and U.S. cinema from the 1930s to the 1990s, describe imperial cinema as one that engages in public diplomacy and propaganda. Empire films often celebrate and may critically frame the British Empire in British colonies or U.S. empire through U.S. military power. Yet for Chapman and Cull, the notion of empire is often elided across British and U.S. American contexts, thereby subordinating the formal U.S. empire to other forms of imperial power.14

Empire Demands a Story We experience the lessons and instructions of empire when we watch television, listen to music, and go to the movies. While the entire context of a popular historical moment is relevant to the overlapping and contradictory information about a place, event, or peoples, fictional narratives provide the emotional landscape for audience participation, and often, the longer and more complex the narrative, the deeper the investment. This is due in part to the sustained work of viewer identification with main protagonists of film and other media narratives. Islands of Empire is anchored in imperial stories. The major story lines and narratives of empire concretize and syncretize the range of audience fantasies, desires, and emotions associated with each insular holding. These stories tend to feature Anglo-American heroes and heroines at the narrative helm. The image and idea of empire is projected onto the colonized spaces of each island to underscore the power and dominance of the Anglo-American protagonists. The competence and efficiency of the ruling characters are depicted as part of the natural order of things rather than as consequences of colonial conditions. The result is an image of the United States as a global leader with experience in civilizing or subordinating colonial subjects. These and other consequences of U.S. imperial chauvinism are evident across the visual field of popular culture throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this work, I focus primarily on major popular-culture media representations—in journalism, literature, travel writing, advertisements,

Fojas-final.indb 8

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Introduction

•9•

promotional brochures, films, and television—that are set in or thematize the islands representing the epoch of U.S. territorial expansion beyond its mainland borders. Whereas the United States expanded beyond its borders into Alaska in 1867, the insular matrix gained in 1898 signaled its global imperial status. Most of the examples are drawn from visual culture and represent the most accessible and visible texts about each place. They vary according to the kinds of publicity accorded each location during a period of heightened exposure in the mass media. Empire is as much about the U.S. role in the world as it is about the expanding and constricting U.S. boundaries and the subsequent intermingling and separation of foreign and domestic territories. For instance, in the film cited earlier, Miami Vice, Cuba is not a neutral location. Cuba has endured many different kinds of relationships to the United States: desired object, possession, semicolony, and enemy state. In the popular-culture imaginary, Cuba has changed in conjunction with its shifting alignment to the United States. Likewise, each island acquired by the United States has had a changing role in popular culture that roughly indexes a varied and sometimes contradictory political status. It is not just the fact of empire, of formal empire, but the character and sensibility of empire that has been transmitted by popular culture after World War II. Popular representations of the island nations map two kinds of imperial temporalities: the ghosts and detritus of the formal empire of 1898 occupy the spaces of the new performances of empire in the contemporary era. In this way, depictions of each territory or former territory expose fragments of all aspects of its shifting status in relation to the United States: colony, neocolony, unincorporated territory, annexed territory, enemy state, protectorate, or client state. U.S. popular culture maintained a separate romance with the Philippines, Cuba, Hawaiʻi, Puerto Rico, and Guam at different moments in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and each location has served the interests of the expanding frontiers of U.S. empire in different ways. Each place had a key moment of visibility in popular culture or was associated with specific historical moments. The Philippines and Guam moved center stage in popular culture during World War II, primarily in war films, as adjuncts of U.S. military operations, sharing the spotlight with Pearl Harbor. While these films designate Pearl Harbor as a major point of reference, I focus on another key moment of visibility for Hawaiʻi, the postwar and poststatehood boom in tourism to the Pacific island chain. The entry of Hawaiʻi into the Union dovetails with another historical signpost in the drama of U.S. empire. Cuba and Hawaiʻi are

Fojas-final.indb 9

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 10 • Islands of Empire

associated with the year 1959 for vastly different reasons: assimilation into or rejection of U.S. hegemony, via statehood for Hawaiʻi and revolution in Cuba. In the postwar years, Hawaiʻi became the gold standard for development, according to which all other colonies or former colonies fell short, particularly Puerto Rico and Guam. Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans found their way into U.S. popular culture in the 1960s through urban migrant narratives. They were depicted as dragging colonial deficits into the metropolitan center. But they achieved redemption by showing how to transform their deficits into productive pursuits and thus become icons of U.S. attainment. All the stories about these islands and their peoples ponder in some manner the question posed in 1898 by a popular travel writer: “What shall we do with them?” That is, these popular texts question which islands qualify to be part of the United States, which might be molded in the image of the imperial center, and which should be expelled from its orbit. Each place was both familiar and strange at once, and popular culture shaped and ultimately determined where each island fell on the continuum from domestic to foreign territories. The question of what is to be done with them remains relevant for those islands in some state of colonial limbo. Indeed, Christina Duff y Burnett argues that the question of the hour in 1898 about the future status of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines was actually the “question of the century.”15

Accidental Empire The strict definition of empire—direct political and administrative control over a sovereign territory—might seem to preclude the United States from being considered an empire, yet the expansion overseas through the islands gained during and after the war with Spain in 1898 was a significant and decisive factor in the U.S. attainment of imperial status. At the time, political leaders disavowed their imperial designs, claiming Spain’s cruelty toward its colonies as the main impetus for the war. Yet it was no coincidence that the spoils of war included control over a number of strategically located islands that could ensure U.S. global power. But according to historian Ernest May, the United States did not plan for or seek out its imperial status. Regarding the events of 1898, May contends that “some nations achieve greatness, the United States had greatness thrust upon it.”16 Similarly, Ronald Steel claims that “the American empire came into being by accident and has been main-

Fojas-final.indb 10

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Introduction

• 11 •

tained from a sense of benevolence.”17 Andrew Bacevich describes this imperial disavowal as the “myth of the reluctant superpower.”18 The tradition of disavowal has not waned; Washington continues to deny empire and to describe it as something else, something more palatable to the U.S. psyche. While contemporary critics on the left decry U.S. empire, conservatives either deny its existence or describe the international role of the United States in less inflammatory terms, such as “leader of the free world” or “liberal global leader.” Although, it should be noted, some members of former president George W. Bush’s administration proudly assumed U.S. imperial status and all the privileges thereof.19 Some analysts even call for reclaiming the term from its ill repute. Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, in describing U.S. global status, opts for (and co-opts) the “more forthright if also more controversial term American Empire . . . sort of like the way some gays embrace the ‘queer’ label.”20 The semantic congruence between “queer” and “empire” is a curious sleight of hand that disregards systemic power inequities between the mainstream and the marginalized. Niall Ferguson, a prolific neo-imperialist historian, finds that the United States, though long an empire, “eschews the appellation.”21 Ferguson attributes this denial to a narrow definition of empire as a rapacious and tyrannical superpower.22 Indeed, imperial denial may be attributed to other perceptions of the term. Craig Calhoun, Frederick Cooper, and Kevin W. Moore note that empire might be interpreted as an antiquated term rendered defunct by the decolonization of Asia and Africa.23 Yet the end of empire was the end only of formal empire. We have entered an era in which U.S. imperialism has occupied the global imaginary; it circulates not through direct rule over and administration of colonies, but through hegemony and the image and ideology of domination and control buttressed by the planetary matrix of U.S. military operations. For Bacevich, the distinction between “empire” and “global hegemony” is minor and semantic; both stand in for permutations of empire used to describe the colossus of the North: global leader, sole superpower, Pax Americana.24 Ann Laura Stoler finds that empire is hard to define because it is a “moving target.” Global power is exercised through “imperial formations” or the shifting boundaries and definitions of belonging and legal membership founded on “degrees of sovereignty” and “gradations of rights.”25 Niall Ferguson argues that although the United States has the imperial holdings and global power of an empire, it lacks the “imperial cast

Fojas-final.indb 11

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 12 •

Islands of Empire

of mind,” since Americans “would rather consume than conquer” and “would rather build shopping malls than nations.”26 He suggests that the country lacks a true sense of imperial responsibility or consciousness. Ferguson argues for an empire of global arbitration and policing where the creation and sustaining of “order” is a precondition for “liberty”; since, as he argues, there exists no viable alternative to U.S. hegemony.27 I would argue that a great strength of U.S.-based popular-culture industries is the ability to project an “imperial cast of mind” or an imperial sensibility that, while lacking an explicit ethical dimension, is shaped by ideologically charged and value-laden messages about liberty, selfreliance, democracy, and the virtues of free-enterprise capitalism and industriousness. If the conscious message of mainstream discourse is to deny and repress empire, then there is no better place to decode its imperial unconscious than in the workings of popular culture. We are immersed in and absorbed by stories and images that support an imperial sensibility. Yet empire is not just a sensibility; it is a set of ideas about the U.S. role and function in the world. And these ideas were distilled during the first epoch of formal empire. The post-1898 locations of U.S. empire were discussed together quite frequently in the mass media. Current discussions of U.S. empire suggest a departure from the idea of empire as a collection of formal holdings. Instead, it is an attitude and disposition that derives from the U.S. rise to global power after World War II, which coincided with a consolidation of dominance in the Americas. U.S. empire is much more likely to conjure images of, for example, Iraq, Afghanistan, Central America, Vietnam, Latin American (Venezuela, Honduras, Colombia, Chile, Argentina, Ecuador, Brazil, Nicaragua, Panama, the Dominican Republic) than of the formal colonial and protocolonial holdings it gained in 1898: Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Hawaiʻi. While the United States had clear policies toward Latin America, including good neighborliness, the Alliance for Progress, eradication of communism, and at-will intervention, no clear policy governed the diverse locations of formal empire. Instead, each place was treated differently, not only politically, but also in how they were imagined and experienced in popular culture. For this reason, empire in a formal sense never acquired a fully defined image and ideology. The island empire quickly faded from memory, and was, as Grandin notes, replaced by military muscle and market power in Latin America.28 After World War II, the imperial position of the United States with regard to its territorial possessions slipped from public memory. The

Fojas-final.indb 12

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Introduction

• 13 •

United States had become a powerhouse in the Americas and the rest of the world. William Appleman Williams notes this crucial turning point in the projection of empire for the United States: “That process of reification—of transforming the realities of expansion, conquest, and intervention into pious rhetoric about virtue, wealth, and democracy—reached its culmination during the decades after World War II.”29 Williams describes this as the imperial “ethic” and “psychology,” and empire as the “opiate of the American people.”30 If empire is an opiate, its delivery system is popular culture. While all parts of popular culture contribute to creating the feeling, aesthetics, and ethics of empire, those delivered via narratives create the most potent and insidious systems of fantasy. To fully understand the affective operations of U.S. empire, we might recall the way that the mass media imagined and narrated the novel imperial status of the United States just after 1898. Those narratives created the fantasies that perpetuate and sustain popular attitudes toward empire as well as its national character. And the stories attest powerfully to U.S. global primacy.

Empire’s Origin Stories: Repeating Islands In a contemporary context, it might seem strange to put Hawaiʻi, the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam in the same interpretive orbit, yet they are part of the same representational matrix of overlapping and interchangeable spaces of empire. For example, in contemporary popular culture, local Hawaiian characters are played by Filipino actors, Cuban films are shot in Puerto Rico, Filipino actors play Chamorros, Pearl Harbor leads into Manila Bay, fi lms set in Guam are shot in the Philippines, and Puerto Rican actors play heroes of the Cuban Revolution. The assumed interchangeability of these peoples and locations can be traced back to the cultural mood of excitement just after the islands entered the U.S. sphere of influence. In 1898, though the United States had been gaining territory for years in the South and Southwest, the islands acquired in the Pacific and the Caribbean were new and fascinating outposts in the North American imagination. By 1899, they were being mentioned constantly in the U.S. press and the idea of U.S. empire was a major topic of mainstream discourse. The American public was eager for information about the islands, and a number of travel writers and historians produced travelogues, guidebooks, handbooks, chronicles, and history books. Writings

Fojas-final.indb 13

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 14 •

Islands of Empire

about the new U.S. possessions took part in the legacy of travel writing as a function of empire. They disseminated the idea of U.S. empire by asserting a sense of control over these diverse locations. By the early twentieth century, the islands were not grouped together so often in the popular presses. But the legacy of representational collapse among them was apparent throughout the twentieth century and beyond, firmly establishing the Spanish-American War as a key origin of U.S. imperial culture. War often has special significance in the imperial career of the United States. For example, while not technically a U.S. war, since it occurred within a Mexican state, the siege of the Alamo has been appropriated as one by the mass media. Richard R. Flores finds the Alamo to be a symbol of modernity and a symptom of the complexity of cultural formations along the border.31 Likewise, Emily Rosenberg examines the role of Pearl Harbor in U.S. memory during what she calls a “memory boom” regarding World War II after September 11, 2001. Like the Alamo, Pearl Harbor is a highly charged icon that persists in an “ongoing present” of mediated representations.32 Indeed there is significant rhetorical resonance across U.S. wars from the Spanish-American War to World War II, Vietnam, and the war in Iraq, among others. Americans’ memories of these wars is shaped and cultivated by popular culture. The stories and the narrative framing of these events create and sustain a mood of U.S. heroism and imperial benevolence. The mood can be traced back to the war of 1898, the origin of U.S. national identity as an imperial power. Some of the major narrative strands are energized by simplistic language about native backwardness, sensuousness, passivity, and lassitude. This language was deployed to justify colonial exploitation as entrepreneurial leadership through the proper commercial use of island resources. The stories, prevalent in the travel narratives and guidebooks of the era, overcame mainstream resistance to empire by outlining the benefits of imperial status. Lanny Thompson shows how imperial guidebooks and attendant political and cultural discourses subtend and justify a hierarchical colonial order that corresponds to forms of rule.33 He draws on the work of Edward Said, for whom the discourses of colonialism across textual and visual genres elucidate discursive formations in service to power. Yet Thompson departs from the postcolonial criticism that emanates from Said’s foundational work, because of its tendency to homogenize the colonial subaltern, or “other,” ahistorically. The suppression of forms of difference among subalterns may conceal differences in colonial rule. It is this notion that Thompson finds to be the most significant distinction

Fojas-final.indb 14

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Introduction

• 15 •

between U.S. and European forms of imperial rule. Each island nation gained in 1898 was subject to diverse forms of governance and thus was accorded a distinct political status. This is evident and traceable in the colonial discourse of the era, particularly as it was worked out in a series of U.S. Supreme Court decisions about each island, together known as the Insular Cases. To examine the rhetoric of rule, Thompson goes beyond the fabulations of the tourist manuals and examines the political discourse of the era in newspapers, congressional hearings, and other official sources. He clearly frames the historical record around each location and the emergent discourses relevant to each with regard to political status. The fabulations, fantasies, and stories about each place do a different kind of work than that of the historical and political record. Stories act upon the national mood and shape the emotional life and attitudes of a culture. They persuade and entice a reluctant public, they shape public opinion, and they lay the foundation for the treatment and role of each place in the larger U.S. cultural imaginary. Careful scrutiny of the popular-culture story around each island throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries reveals resonances of the colonial story set in 1898, yet there are also major departures from these inter woven and complex tales. The tacit hierarchy of rule established in 1898 remains intact while the narrative features of the overarching story have changed. Hawaiʻi became the gold standard of what Teresia Teaiwa calls “militourism,” or the process by which military and paramilitary powers ensure the mutually beneficial operations of the military and tourism.34 Guam and Puerto Rico remain in the shadows of Hawaiʻi’s development story; Washington tacitly acknowledges their persistent colonial limbo and their potential but asymptotic proximity to full integration into the Union. Until 1959, Cuba was a semicolonial tourist appendage of the United States; contemporary stories about Havana are marked by nostalgia and loss, energies that must be redirected to more suitable objects. The Philippines remains hidden behind the veil of World War II and other conflicts both before and after that momentous war—most notably, the Philippine-American War, Iraq, and the war on terror. It remains caught in an ambivalent state, wavering between being aligned with and opposed to Washington. For Frank Ninkovich, the U.S. drive to empire around 1898 was energized by “public opinion” influenced by the “newly aggressive communications media,” not just the telegraph and the telephone but global news-gathering organizations such as the Associated Press and the United Press.35 In the 1890s, the U.S. public became accustomed to a

Fojas-final.indb 15

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 16 •

Islands of Empire

Stereoscopic image of mission home grounds during the U.S. Navy rule of Guam, the Keystone View Company.

Stereoscopic image of the Intramuros district of Manila, Universal Photo Art Co., 1902.

daily dose of international news and political cartoons and began to develop and assert opinions about foreign policy and the place of the nation in the rest of the world; foreign affairs became a national obsession. Handbooks, travelogues, and “historical” texts filled in the gaps left by the journalistic coverage of the new territories; they gave the “whole” story. The stories transformed public interest into something actionable by giving all the information necessary to set up industries and house-

Fojas-final.indb 16

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Introduction

• 17 •

holds and plan touristic ventures to new U.S. territories. The guidebooks were filled with numerous photos, maps, and images from each location, satisfying the desire to know through seeing. Another vital technology was the stereoscope, which exhibited three-dimensional images of “natural” posturing by natives and other scenes from the colonies.36 The images were used to educate and entertain; they gave brief views of places that had become an intimate part of the United States. Audiences were introduced to filmic coverage of these locations through short newsreels, particularly of the Spanish-American War, and other dispatches from these imperial outposts. Newsreels lacked cohesive narratives, but were accompanied by narration that emphasized U.S. imperial prowess.

The Birth of the Nation as Empire Numerous travelogues and handbooks about the new U.S. territories—Our Island Empire, Our Islands and Their People, Everything about Our New Possessions, and Our New Possessions—were published within a few years after the Spanish-American War. To get a sense of the main tropes and preoccupations of these writings, I turn to two examples, published in 1899, that offer the longest and most in-depth descriptions of Hawaiʻi, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines (though only passing reference to Guam). Our Island Empire, by Charles Morris, a prolific travel writer and historian, was the most widely read of these tomes; the second example is Our Islands and Their People: As Seen with Camera and Pencil, written by José de Olivares, a war correspondent for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, and edited by William S. Bryan, with a preface by General Joseph Wheeler, who served in Cuba and the Philippines.37 The two texts differ in many ways, particularly in their target audience, style, and address; yet both offer a sense of the islands for the purpose of engendering capital relations between the colonial center and the island periphery. These texts and others like them created the popularculture scaffolding for future tropes, images, and story lines about the insular empire. They are primarily concerned with civilizing native populations through the discourse of work and transforming local cultures with the development of U.S. American institutions. They inspired U.S. citizens to perform the work of settling and setting up households and businesses in the new island frontiers, and offered suggestions for leisure and travel there. The guidebooks and travelogues overrode the critical rhetoric of the anti-imperialists, who were caught up in raging press

Fojas-final.indb 17

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 18 •

Islands of Empire

debates on imperialism. Imperialism was framed as a noble venture of capital investment and entrepreneurialism, and thus an American activity par excellence. The guidebooks responded to the question, posed by Morris about the new colonies, “What shall we do with them?”38 In Our Island Empire and Our Islands and Their People, each island is described with the same tropes, which link these locations in ideological portraits that seek to manage diversity for the purpose of control. In fact, Morris does not distinguish one island from the other: “There is a natural feeling of interest concerning these islands, based partly on the usual desire to know, partly on more personal motives, which it is important to gratify. There are some who have it in view to visit one or more of these islands, for business or observation, or for permanent residence; others who desire to enter into business relations with their merchants or producers; and many others who are moved by the natural thirst for information, which recent events have directed strongly towards these oceanic lands.”39 There is a distinct tone of excitement about the new position of the United States in the global order; the potential for worldpower status seemed within reach, and new opportunities for average Americans promised an immediate elevation of social standing. Regardless of the distinct histories and plain differences among these island nations, the popular press used the same language to describe them all. What strikes the modern reader is the unreconstructed evolutionary rhetoric, apparent in the continual emphasis on the constitutional weaknesses of the colonized peoples; those native to Hawaiʻi, the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico are assumed to share the same inborn desire for a sensual life unencumbered by the worries of work or business. They are preoccupied with gambling, music, dancing, sexual pleasure, surfing, and diving. The islands are presented as ripe for exploitation; rich in resources, all of them except Hawaiʻi have been ruined by the oppressive taxation and commercial restrictions of Spanish colonization. Each colony is populated by workers awaiting orders, raw resources awaiting extraction, and tropical landscapes beckoning the exhausted American industrialist to luxuriate in its warmth. Moreover, their peoples have been ruined by the unchecked proclivity for vice. Both the world of letters and the world of politics shared a fear of social and cultural degeneration and decadence, and expressed concern for how the United States might combat moral decline once it entered into more intimate relations with its island outposts. These two guidebooks and others like them were the first media representations of empire, the first popular-culture musings about

Fojas-final.indb 18

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Introduction

• 19 •

the new status of the United States. They urged and encouraged readers to indulge in the pleasures and privileges of empire. The guidebooks begin, not coincidentally, with the colonial subject of Cuba. For years, the United States had been trying to gain control of Cuba and its sugar industry, and the events of 1898 satisfied that ambition. As early as 1823, John Quincy Adams had declared that Cuba and Puerto Rico were “natural appendages to the North American continent” and that Cuba in particular, being “almost in sight of our shores, from a multitude of considerations has become an object of transcendent importance to the political and commercial interests” of the United States.40 Indeed, Cuba, the largest Caribbean island, became a coveted object of the expansionist cause. For this reason, both texts lead with Cuba as the symbolic origin of empire and a point of reference for the other island colonies. Our Islands and Their People begins by affirming the legend of Don Diego Velázquez, who, five centuries earlier, claimed that Havana was the “llave del Nuevo Mundo,” the “key to the New World.” Olivares revises this legend to proclaim Havana the “key to the new possessions,” citing its proximity as justification.41 U.S. government administrators are cast as heroes engaged in the reconstruction of the city and its institutions, cleaning up the pestilent waters near Havana (which made the beach unsuitable for “surf bathing”), ridding neighborhoods of the illnesses resulting from unsanitary conditions, reforming the corrupt police force, and transforming the educational system and the attitude among Cubans that “study in any form” was “an unnecessary tax upon [their] energies.”42 The section on Cuba ends with the prophetic musing that Havana, though burdened by “sanitary and moral” shortcomings, would be transformed into “one of the most attractive and popular winter resorts of the world.”43 Olivares promotes Cuba as a place of winter health resorts “for the fashion and wealth of North America.” In language that was continually reiterated later, he writes that “its future could hardly be more promising,” noting its native “hospitality” and plentiful opportunities for industrial investment.44 Although Cuba attained sovereignty soon after the Spanish-American War, it was shaped by and for U.S. American tourist desires until the late 1950s. Many of the attitudes in these texts were part of the racial discourses that guided policy initiatives and applications of the rights of citizenship. Filipinos were unseemly and racialized primitives who would remain wards of the imperial state until they were politically mature enough for emancipation. Olivares goes beyond the bland rhetoric of tropical mal-

Fojas-final.indb 19

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 20 •

Islands of Empire

aise and work-averse pleasure seeking in his portrait of Filipinos, which tacitly suggests the exclusion of the Philippines from the Union. This devaluation of the Philippines and Filipinos is evident not only in the placement of the Philippines at the end of his tome, but also in the tone of the narrative. The narrative reflects public ambivalence about retaining the Philippines as a colony and ire over Filipino resistance to U.S. rule. Filipinos are described as “treacherous and blood-thirsty hybrid Malays,” a condition that justified the illegal takeover of their country and the subsequent violent subjugation of the native population. In support, Olivares cites the murderous language of General Henry Lawton, who fought in the Spanish-American War and would fight against Filipino “insurgents” in the Philippine-American War, which began in 1899: “The lamented General Lawton knew them well; a green mound in Arlington Cemetery attests to his intimate acquaintance with these people, and he declared that the only good Filipinos were the dead ones.”45 Olivares avoids depicting resistance to U.S. occupation, but the spirited Filipino insurrection was no doubt a reason for the dismissal of the Philippines. Unlike other accounts, his section on the Philippines contains no description of happy and grateful natives throwing themselves at the feet of their liberators. Rather, many of the negative connotations associated with domestic racialized populations are found in his portrait of the Filipinos, who are described as “negros” and “blood-thirsty.” The Philippines itself is a “hot tamale.” Like the other colonies, it suffers many of the problems associated with “tropical climes.” Yet unlike other colonized peoples, Filipinos are given a different status, deemed unfit for U.S. citizenship for reasons attributed to race and character, but which seem to derive from the spirited manner of their resistance to colonialism.46 While the Philippines remained an important port and military outpost, the role of the Philippines and Filipinos in the U.S. imaginary never extended beyond this limited view. In the guidebooks, the Philippines has little to offer in the way of either a workforce or vacation spots, and the native population is deemed too volatile and unfriendly for assimilation. U.S. Americans are guided away from the Philippines and toward the more hospitable new U.S. territories, ones that are more exploitable, with populations waiting to serve their new masters. (The term “U.S. Americans” is used to distinguish them from other residents of North and South America.) The Jones Act of 1916 promised future independence for the Philippines, which was not achieved until after World War II. The country retains a “special” relationship to the U.S. as a client state and protocolonial appendage.

Fojas-final.indb 20

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Introduction

• 21 •

Puerto Ricans are marked by a passivity that translates into loyalty, making them desirable potential members of the Union. They, according to these texts, readily assumed their role as U.S. colonial subjects, and Olivares hopes to reward them with U.S. citizenship. In our war with Spain, the Puerto Ricans were our true and loyal friends; they welcomed the advent of the “flag of the stars” with demonstrations of the most extravagant joy. We should not, therefore, treat them in such a way as to cause them to regret their union with the great Republic. The good work begun by the military authorities should be continued by our legislators at Washington, in order that the Porto [sic] Ricans, at the earliest practicable date, may become not only good citizens, but also firm friends of our nation.47

Later, Olivares erroneously (failing to take into account U.S. racism and xenophobia) prophesies the swift entry of Puerto Rico as a “State of the Union” and its future as “an unusually bright commercial horizon.”48 Like Cubans, the Puerto Ricans are grateful to the United States for their liberation: “The people seem to be abundantly satisfied with their transfer to the care of the United States, and upon every opportunity give free expression to their loyalty and devotion to the Government which relieved them from Spanish oppression.”49 The role of Puerto Rico was already determined in 1899; thus, the only problem noted by both Morris and Olivares is the islanders’ lack of investment in the value of work and a tendency to indulge in idle occupations and amusements, which, rather than a source of trouble, are viewed as signs that Puerto Rican annexation and subjugation would occur with little resistance or difficulty. The attitude toward Puerto Rico shaped by these guidebooks ensured investment in the continuation of its colonial dependency. Puerto Ricans were received more favorably than other colonials: local elites were viewed as almost white and very nearly civilized, and they were granted citizenship by the Jones-Shafroth Act of 1917. Yet citizenship did not grant them the full rights accorded to mainland U.S. citizens: they can vote in U.S. presidential primaries, but not in the general election; the island has many of the powers of a state but is not part of the Union; and as a “free associated state,” it has more sovereignty than a state but is not independent.50 Its status as a nonstate state is a sign of a continued colonial condition. Morris finds that Hawaiians, like Filipinos, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans, shirk responsibility, opting for the pursuit of pleasure over busi-

Fojas-final.indb 21

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 22 • Islands of Empire

ness: “They are a good-tempered and light-hearted race, given to mirth and laughter, fond of pleasure, and of the most genial disposition. Friendly and forgiving, the Hawaiian meets every one with a smile, and is genuinely hospitable. He is free from malice, harbors no treachery, and is natively simple-minded, kindly and benignant. Though seemingly unfit to conduct business, he makes a faithful and trusty employee.”51 This supposed hospitality and friendliness was exploited by American industrialists to create the conditions for annexation. Olivares describes Hawaiians in much the same manner, as hospitable pleasure seekers who are “not naturally an industrious race” and “passionately fond of music and dancing.”52 Olivares blames the Hawaiians for their loss of sovereignty and selfrule. The illegal overthrow of Hawaiʻi by American capitalists is justified in the portrait of reigning monarch, Queen Liliʻuokalani, especially “her monstrous actions as a sovereign.”53 Citing her conflict with the cabinet, their subsequent removal, and her attempt to promulgate a new constitution, Olivares makes his indictment: “Through her stubborn opposition to the rights of the people, her selfishness, bigotry and immorality, she brought about such a feeling of revulsion, unsafety, and disgust, that her government was overthrown.”54 All these actions are attributed to her low morality and childlike arbitrariness. After the queen was ousted, a provisional government of the major businessmen of Honolulu was installed. The illegal overthrow initiated Queen Liliʻuokalani’s long campaign, with the overwhelming support of Native Hawaiians, to regain the sovereignty of the nation of Hawaiʻi.55 Yet Olivares describes the removal of the queen as a welcome liberation from her tyranny. The Hawaiians, he suggests, annexed themselves: “The first American troops, on their way to Manila, landed at Honolulu some days before the passage of the resolution of annexation, but they were welcomed as cordially as if the islands had already become part of the American territory. The Hawaiian Republic was then in existence, and we were at war with Spain, but there was no consideration of the question of neutrality. They Hawaiians annexed themselves and literally went mad in their extravagant welcome to our soldiers.”56 Elsewhere, Olivares writes at length about Hawaiians’ lack of appreciation of the leasehold system of landownership, ostensibly set up to restore land to native peoples, but actually an egregious land grab by nonnatives. He then gives a detailed description of how investors might acquire land, since “no previous acquisition of territory by the United States [was] more desirable or of greater value.”57 Hawaiʻi is depicted as naturally belonging to the United States. Even

Fojas-final.indb 22

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Introduction

• 23 •

the volcano Mauna Loa conspires to anoint this union, the eruptions of which were taken as a natural sign of the predestined union of Hawaiʻi and States: “Eruptions from Mauna Loa have taken place at various intervals of years, the latest and most terrific having occurred on the 4th of July, 1899, as if in commemoration of the union with the great American Republic.”58 The swift takeover of the Hawaiian nation was anything but an act of nature, one that, as Noenoe K. Silva has argued, was strongly resisted by Native Hawaiians. In fact, she argues that the notion of a lack of Native Hawaiian resistance is a myth that legitimates the illegal actions of the United States. She refutes the idea of natives’ passivity, finding resistance from the earliest history of contact to annexation, as documented in over seventy-five Hawaiian-language newspapers. She uncovered a major antiannexationist movement document: a petition of 1897 housed at the U.S. National Archives, which has become a vital educational tool about the native response to colonialism.59 The colonial portrait of Hawaiʻi is similar to that of Puerto Rico and Cuba; all are places that offered industrial opportunities along with sun, sand, and hospitable natives. Its status as “naturally” belonging to the United States is part of a mythos generated during its rule by U.S. business leaders and military strategists. The transition to statehood was spearheaded and secured by big business in the islands, and Hawaiʻi quickly became one of the largest, perhaps the largest, U.S. military base of operations. Guam is the least visible of these cases and is often connected to the Philippines and Hawaiʻi as a way station and outpost in the U.S. matrix of military bases; like Puerto Rico, it remains a non-selfgoverning territory. In these guidebooks there is brief mention of Guam as rich in copra, a source of oil, soap, and glycerin. Guam is currently a major focus of U.S. military buildup in the Pacific. Cuba, the most persistent object of U.S. imperial desire and lead case of almost all the travelogues following the Spanish-American War, was able to throw off the yoke of the colossus of the North. The Cuban Revolution is a major point of reference in U.S. popular culture and a massive traumatic rift in the U.S. national psyche. I am not arguing for a clear and unbroken connection between the attitudes of 1898-era popular culture and postmillennial perceptions of formal U.S. empire. But the political practices and cultural attitudes that emanated during the initial epoch of imperial enthusiasm powerfully shaped the popular-culture representations and political futures of each colonial holding. Interest in these island outposts was eclipsed by the onset of World War I, an event that sundered the associations among these territories

Fojas-final.indb 23

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 24 •

Islands of Empire

in the U.S. media imaginary. But the very idea of the island possessions, the country’s first nonmainland acquisitions, intensified the drive for empire, for increasing the circumference of U.S. influence and reach. Though Hawaiʻi, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, Guam, and Cuba drifted away from one another in the media, they continued to share similar types of depictions throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. Fascination with each island corresponded to key historical moments in the changing imperial career of the United States, which shifted decisively in the later twentieth century from possession to influence—that is, it shifted emphasis from owning territories to shaping global popular culture and foreign sociocultural and political attitudes.

The Afterlife of Empire The island empire of the United States was a cultural preoccupation of the early part of the twentieth century; yet after World War II, each part of the empire was given different treatment in popular culture, though the status of all former, neo-, and current U.S. colonies continued to vacillate, paradoxically, between being unique and exemplary and being interchangeable and homogeneous. The Philippines, though a colony until 1946 and still a major U.S. client state, has had episodic representation in popular culture. The visibility of the Philippines seems to be linked to conflict and war—from the newsreels of the SpanishAmerican War to reports on the war on terror. But no era in popular culture matches World War II for the sheer volume of news and number of dramatic films generated about the Philippines. In fact, the era of the greatest intimacy between the United States and the Philippines emerged with the propaganda machine of that war. The purpose of World War II propaganda was to both entertain the public and recruit it into what was deemed a “foreign” war effort. Popular media story lines and narratives about the war, following the war manuals issued by the Office of War Information (OWI), transformed a foreign war in foreign places into a familiar conflict and a space of domestic import. The Philippines acted as a home front or a space of identification through the presence there of an American way of life. There was no better site from which to engage ambivalent U.S. audiences than the already foreign yet domestic space of its colonial possession. World War II films set in the Philippines established a dynamic of foreign domesticity by grafting domestic signifiers onto the

Fojas-final.indb 24

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Introduction

• 25 •

foreign space of the Philippines and across Filipino bodies; particularly through the trope of U.S. heroism as signified by General Douglas MacArthur, references to the Alamo and the genre of the western, and domestic cultural objects and practices. The major feature films and newsreels generated to serve the war effort in the Philippines—or commemorate it—include the highly acclaimed television series Victory at Sea (NBC, 1952–1953) and The World at War (Thames Television, 1973–1974), along with episodes of the newsreel series News of the Day and The March of Time, and the CBS radio and television series You Are There. The feature films include narratives that were most likely shaped by or complicit with OWI guidelines, such as Texas to Bataan (1942), Corregidor (1943), Bataan (1943), They Were Expendable (1945) and Back to Bataan (1945). The influence and aftermath of this era can be gauged in two notable films that return to the scene of the war in the Philippines some twenty-odd years after its end: Back Door to Hell (1964) and Too Late the Hero (1970). Guam has been almost entirely in the shadow of the other U.S. colonies, particularly the Philippines and Hawaiʻi. In popular-culture representations, there is no way to view or imagine the island except via the limited visual language of the military and tourism. Like the Philippines, Guam was a major strategic point in the Pacific theater of World War II, and like Hawaiʻi, it is dominated by the twin industries of militarism and tourism. Two notable Hollywood films show Guam in different eras: No Man Is an Island (1962), set during World War II, and the recent film Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon (2004), a tourist film designed to promote travel to the island. While the story of No Man Is an Island is based in Guam, it was filmed entirely in the Philippines, with a majority of Filipino actors playing indigenous Guamanians, or Chamorros. The film is the first one to be set in Guam and the first to show its peoples; yet what it shows, in keeping with the overt role of Guam as linked to the Philippines, is Filipinos in the Philippines. It took more than forty years to remedy Guamanian invisibility. Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon is an action movie haunted by colonial ghosts and reminders of the Japanese claim to Guam during World War II. It is the first Hollywood production to be filmed there. The film coincides with a larger circuit of Guamanian cultural productions, including the recent documentary Under the American Sun (2008) and the popular Zen self-help writings of Leo Babauta. The film The Insular Empire: America in the Mariana Islands (2010) coincides with a major military development in the Pacific that

Fojas-final.indb 25

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 26 •

Islands of Empire

puts Guam in the spotlight. The U.S. military is currently moving a major base of operations from Okinawa to Guam, which has sparked a wave of protest from Guamanians and antimilitarization activists. While the coverage of the Philippines and Guam in U.S. media is linked to World War II, a later year marks a pivotal point for Cuba and Hawaiʻi: 1959. I argue that media representations of Cuba follow two related temporal tracks: they either take place before the Cuban Revolution or reflect back nostalgically on that era. Such portraits of Cuba turn it into a fantasy island, a utopian and timeless place holding the promise that the impossible might become possible. Like the television series of the same name (Fantasy Island, ABC, 1978–1984), Cuba, in the U.S. imaginary, is a space where fantasies are realized. But the island is also a major bogeyman whose real status as a nation could not be broached in the entertainment media. Instead, the island is infused with the irreality of fantasy and the mood of nostalgia and longing. This dreamlike quality emanates from the Hollywood “image embargo” placed upon Cuba after the revolution. The fantasy island before 1959 was a real playground for television and movie stars and U.S.-based gangsters. In Cuba (1979), Havana (1990), Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004), and The Lost City (2005), the narrative in each case takes place during the height of U.S. tourism to the island, on the cusp of the revolution, and is imbued with longing for a lost paradise. After the revolution, film and television resignified Cuba as the origin, not the playground, of the Mafia and related criminal types, with The Godfather: Part II (1974), Scarface (1983), Miami Vice (NBC, 1984–1989), and Bad Boys II (2003). Cuba was conveyed to the U.S. public as a place of crime and all manner of untoward activities in an attempt to deflect attention away from its political status and contested relationship to the United States. A notable exception to this series of representations might be the recent film Che (2008), which documents Che Guevara’s participation in the events leading up to the Cuban Revolution. The film signals a shift in attitude that may signal a political shift; it represents a lifting of the image embargo on the Cuban Revolution and changing policies toward Cuba. Whereas the Cuban Revolution cut off U.S. influence on the island, statehood for Hawaiʻi intensified and crystallized the U.S. presence in the Hawaiian Islands. The end of the romance with Havana prompted a Hollywood rebound with Hawaiʻi. Tourists were routed to Puerto Rico and Hawaiʻi for the colonial tourist experience, places where English was spoken, dollars were accepted, and passports were not necessary. Statehood proved a major boon for Hawaiʻi in popular culture and subse-

Fojas-final.indb 26

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Introduction

• 27 •

quent tourist flows. In the 1960s, the popular-culture spotlight shifted to Hawaiʻi with films such as Blue Hawaii (1961), Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961), Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962), and Paradise, Hawaiian Style (1966), and television shows such as Hawaii Five-O (CBS, 1968–1980). The Gidget and Elvis films that take place in Hawaiʻi feature popular teen subcultures around surfers and beach boys that showcase all that is good about the U.S. and about Hawaiʻi as its exemplary outpost. The filmic adaptation of James Michener’s historical novel Hawaii was released at the height of the tourist fascination with the island chain. Set before annexation, it provides subtle justification for U.S. occupation and encourages, through idyllic scenery, its adjunct: tourism. This portrait of Hawaiʻi denies the reality of indigenous struggles for sovereignty and of continued native dispossession after the illegal overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani; this colonial denial continues into the present with films such as Aloha Summer (1988, set in 1959) and Blue Crush (2002). Yet only recently, with the independent film Princess Kaiulani (2010), has there been recognition of the historical processes of U.S. occupation and illegal annexation of the sovereign territory of Hawaiʻi. This was followed by the reintroduction of the hit television series Hawaii Five-0—in a move similar to the reinvention of Miami Vice—which features the antics of the police force and hints at the presence of U.S. security forces on the island, which constitute one of the largest military installations in the world. The tourist boom following statehood and the imagined Hawaiʻi of popular culture worked together to domesticate and fully integrate this territory in ways unavailable to the other island colonies. During the same period of the tourist films that celebrated the youth cultures of surfers and beach boys in Hawaiʻi, Puerto Rican youth were reviled as unwanted migrants bringing the ruinous conditions of the colony to New York City. This portrait of Puerto Ricans found its origin in West Side Story (1961), but was repeated in Fame (1980), Do the Right Thing (1989), Girlfight (2000), El Cantante (2007), and Feel the Noise (2007). Hollywood Puerto Ricans are associated with urban problems related to teen delinquency, gangs, poverty, terrorism, and crime; they are not recognized as colonial subjects, which forecloses on any Puerto Rican territorial claims to independence. Such films offer a powerful lesson about how to achieve sovereignty within imperial domination. That is, they suggest that the most productive political condition for Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rico is in the status quo, or the persistence of coloniality. Each story features a colonial subject who transforms environmental deficits into productive capacities. The urban circumstances related

Fojas-final.indb 27

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 28 •

Islands of Empire

to poverty are depicted as the enabling conditions for success, giving these characters the necessary grit, determination, and wit to succeed as boxers, singers, or dancers. Puerto Ricans epitomize the American Dream—which was disseminated throughout Puerto Rico in the midtwentieth century as the bootstrap model of development—triumphing through individual initiative and drive. They are depicted as true Americans who benefit from all that the United States has to offer. Such fi lms as those listed above became powerful arguments for the continued imperial limbo of Puerto Rico. Each island had its moment of greatest visibility in popular culture; taken together, the moments produced an image and ideology of U.S. hegemony. The island outposts were strategic bases of operation for an expanding military complex that is now the largest in the world, with 702  bases of operation in 130 countries, and 6,000 bases in the United States and its territories.60 If popular culture is a pervasive means of expanding U.S. power in the world, there is no denying the actual and symbolic force of the global operation of military bases or what Chalmers Johnson calls the “empire of bases.”61 This brings us back to Michael Mann’s remake of Miami Vice and the main preoccupation of its sprawling narrative: global securing of the nation. The story follows the same tropes and symbols as the television show: a streetwise and nightclub-savvy cop duo working undercover. Sonny and Ricardo enter into a secret operation, against the better judgment of their superiors, out of a sense of justice and duty to state security. While their superiors are satisfied with neutralizing the internal domestic threat of the Aryan Brotherhood, Sonny and Ricardo’s ambitions are decidedly more global: to bring down an international drug-trafficking network headquartered at the triple border of Paraguay, Argentina, and Brazil. This rogue operation has better counterintelligence than the CIA, FBI, and DEA, a development that presents an ominous threat to homeland security. The network is coded as a terrorist agglomeration reminiscent of multiple threats to U.S. security, including the evil Russian empire and Colombian drug dealers. But Sonny has the perfect ploy to bring down the international cartel: seduce the mastermind’s assistant, the beautiful Chinese-Cuban Isabella. Sonny’s romantic machinations expose the imperial sensibility or frame of mind of U.S. popular culture. Of course, Sonny’s work unfolds in Havana, where he and Isabella conduct an illicit tryst and plot their criminal collaboration. As the place where Isabella flees to avoid capture, it is the site of all things illicit and

Fojas-final.indb 28

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Introduction

• 29 •

Sonny and Ricardo track down a global criminal network in Miami Vice (2006).

criminal—in keeping with its reputation in Washington. Sonny makes Isabella an adjunct of his master plan, but he also cares deeply for her well-being and makes every effort—risking his own life—to secure her safety. He is the perfect instantiation of the goodwill of U.S. empire and its purported objective of instilling justice and peace in the world. We trust Sonny and his unorthodox strategies because he is a truly “good” cop who secures the welfare of his people and offers redemption to the wayward criminals of the world. Similarly, the United States is an empire with a heart of gold, accidentally plunged into the role of global cop and protector of wayward former colonies. Miami Vice, like many popular-culture productions, encodes a pernicious message about U.S. empire that, if left unexamined, will continue to train U.S. audiences in imperial chauvinism. Analysis of U.S. cultural productions enables us, in the prophetic words of William Appleman Williams written three decades ago, to “confront our imperial way of life.”62 And as popular-culture representations of U.S. empire reveal, the production of imperial-mindedness at home is simultaneously the projection of power abroad. Islands of Empire explores how popular culture contributes to public discourses about U.S. power and how its foreign-domestic spaces figure in the production of its imperial ideology. Hollywood films and pop-

Fojas-final.indb 29

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 30 • Islands of Empire

ular culture are crucial sites for working through and coming to terms with the contested issues of U.S. global hegemony and empire. While the memory of U.S. imperial holdings is forgotten, the mass media issue intermittent reminders of the former empire while spectacularly displaying a new, bigger, and bolder incarnation of U.S. prowess at every turn.

Fojas-final.indb 30

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Chapter One

Foreign Domestics The Filipino “Home Front” in World War II Popular Culture

The Philippines have about seven and a half millions of people, composed of races bitterly hostile to one another, alien races, ignorant of our language and institutions. Americans cannot be grown there. Andr ew Carnegie, “Distant Possessions: The Parting of the Ways,” 1898

I

n 2007, after becoming a YouTube sensation, the young Filipina singer Charice Pempengco sang two songs on Ellen DeGeneres’s television show to an audience stunned by her vocal range and maturity. She previously had enjoyed success in the Philippines as a finalist on the talent show Little Big Star, though DeGeneres was thought to have discovered this raw talent. She readily crossed over to the U.S. market, a sign of the extent to which Filipinos are already transnational subjects. Her facility in English and her knowledge of U.S. popular culture, both markers of Americanness, are typical traits of former U.S. colonial subjects. Charice’s explosion onto the U.S. popular-culture landscape—among other appearances, she was a guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Glee—is an example of how, since 1898, Filipinos have been both foreign and domestic at once. They are fully domesticated subjects, acculturated to the language and substance of U.S. culture, but remain exotic and foreign subjects visible only in extraordinary circumstances. The Philippines has long been a foreign location of domestic importance to the United States. This foreign-domestic status was a shifting dynamic throughout the twentieth century; at times, the Philippines was more foreign than domestic, and at others it shifted uneasily toward the

Fojas-final.indb 31

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 32 •

Islands of Empire

domestic. This colonial dynamic began during the Spanish-American War in 1898. The Philippines rejected the imperial incursion of the colossus of the North by waging the Philippine-American War, which began in 1899 and ended in 1902, according to official records, but other accounts note that skirmishes continued for many more years. During that war, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos were slaughtered in campaigns lead by Major General Arthur MacArthur, the father of General Douglas MacArthur, who later led U.S. troops in the Philippines during World War II. Many critics and historians refer to the PhilippineAmerican War as a “forgotten war” for its exclusion from the annals of U.S. history; they claim that it has been ignored because of the infamy of large-scale killings of civilian Filipinos as “insurgents” in the scorchedearth policies of the United States.1 By World War II, the foreign insurgents of the Philippine-American War had been transmogrified into intimate family relations. Filipinos became, to use William Howard Taft’s language, “little brown brothers” fighting alongside their U.S. compatriots for the common cause of freedom. More domestic than foreign, the colonial status of the Philippines was forgotten along with the memory of the war of insurgency. In World War II media representations, the Philippines and the Mariana Islands (which include Guam, Saipan, Tinian, and Rota) share the spotlight with Pearl Harbor and Hawaiʻi. War films about Pearl Harbor, which are far more popular and enduring than those about the Philippines, constitute a continual point of reference for dramas that take place in other parts of Asia and the Pacific—and as mentioned earlier, Emily Rosenberg shows how Pearl Harbor continues to be a point of reference for modern conflicts. As the site of the first surprise attack on U.S. soil, Pearl Harbor ignited a spirit of revenge and defiance that was played out in other U.S. holdings in the Pacific—particularly the Philippines. Pearl Harbor served as a reminder, as in the title of the film Remember Pearl Harbor (1942), of U.S. trauma, while the Philippines and, to a lesser extent, Guam became sites of revenge and reinvigorated imperial prowess, where victory over the Japanese was achieved. Thus, in World War II media productions, the real drama of empire belongs to the Philippines, which was a key site for cultivating a sense of domestic participation in wartime victory.2 The psychological proximity of the Philippines to the United States, as measured by its visibility in mass media, seems to turn on the axis of war. In fact, U.S. audiences have only periodically been granted views of Filipinos and the Philippines in television shows—including Victory at

Fojas-final.indb 32

12/6/13 1:55 PM

For eign Domestics

• 33 •

Sea (NBC, 1952–1953), The World at War (Thames Television, 1973–1974), News of the Day, The March of Time, and You are There—and in Hollywood films such as Texas to Bataan (1942), Corregidor (1943), Bataan (1943), They Were Expendable (1945) and Back to Bataan (1945). In popular media of the World War II era, the Philippines acted as a space of identification through the presence of an American way of life; where, for example, troops are reassured by the presence of familiar U.S. cultural objects, practices, and ideals typical of a colonial possession—typified by a scene in They Were Expendable (1945) that features a romancing couple, “sort of like back home,” on the porch of a colonial-style house, or a sequence in Texas to Bataan (1942) in which American men are entertained by Filipinos singing “Home on the Range.”

Foreign Domestics I use the term “foreign domestics” to describe the shifting valences of foreign and familiar in the representation of Filipinos and the Philippines in relation to the United States in popular culture. In the U.S. fi lm and media culture of World War II, Filipinos are treated as foreign, only momentarily familiar or recognizable instantiations and stereotypes of overseas U.S. subjects. Typically, Filipinos appear as brown, uncivilized, infantilized, and feminized bodies, and the Philippines is depicted as an equally uncivilized or preindustrial space. The Philippines is unfamiliar and foreign, yet represented as a temporarily familiar adjunct of the United States, a short-lived reflection that disrupts any easy delineation of foreign and domestic. The image of the foreign-domestic ensures the permanence of this oscillation between foreign and familiar, so Filipinos and the Philippines never become fully integrated parts of the image of the United States and its colonial sphere of influence. The foreign-domestic question before 1898 related to Native Americans, Tejanos, and other non-Anglo populations indigenous to regions annexed between 1803 and 1848.3 After 1898, the nation was engaged in debates about new forms of the foreign domestic beyond the territorial boundaries of the U.S. mainland; previous forms were rendered permanent domestic territorial problems, pitfalls of westward expansion. The new island territories of Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines and the neocolony of Cuba signaled the problems and potentials associated with becoming an empire. Congress debated whether such a course of action was beneficial to the United States. After the Spanish-American War, the

Fojas-final.indb 33

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 34 •

Islands of Empire

United States was faced with potentially having to aggregate wholly foreign and non-English-speaking nations to it. In response, those populations were reshaped in the image of U.S. culture and politics with— among other things—constitutions, educational systems, and city spaces shaped like their U.S. forebears. Those locations were forever caught in the U.S. imaginary as sites of the incomplete transition between foreign and domestic space. Filipinos never became fully domesticated and were permanently caught in the vicissitudes between foreign and domestic subjectivity.

Foreigners at Home One front and one battle where everyone in the United States— every man, woman, and child—is in action. That front is right here at home, in our daily lives. Fr anklin Delano Roosevelt, April 1942

Though Manila remains far from U.S. consciousness, it is intimately tied to the States, having inherited its urban and bureaucratic design from its colonial master.4 In fact, in 1904, President Taft commissioned Daniel Burnham—a famed architect of major work in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and Philadelphia—to try his hand at the redesigning of Manila.5 The result was the complete transplantation of U.S. city planning based on democratic values and ideals: order, coherence, monumentality, harmony, and equity.6 At the time, a Missouri newspaper editor, Edwin W. Stephens, remarked that Manila was “the most thoroughly typical American city” that he “had ever visited outside the United States.”7 That legacy helped make the Philippines an important “domestic” site of World War II combat films aimed at U.S. audiences. According to David Brody, another effect of the redesign of Manila was that it was imagined as a place without history, one that had to be remade by occidental standards.8 In World War II–era Hollywood, the Philippines was a simulacrum of the United States, an unwanted stepchild molded in the image of its patron and protector, a lineage traced to the MacArthur dynasty. The well-worn genre of the western, the foundational genre of the Hollywood style, was grafted onto the Filipino context by Hollywood auteurs.

Fojas-final.indb 34

12/6/13 1:55 PM

For eign Domestics

• 35 •

This charge was led by the legend of the western, John Ford, and the renowned western leading man, John Wayne. (Wayne appeared as well in five films based in or partly in Hawaiʻi, including the World War II features Sands of Iwo Jima [1949] and Operation Pacific [1951].) Indeed, some of the major precepts of the western readily transferred to the war genre, especially the imperative of U.S. national defense, which resounded ever more stridently in a global context. For example, there is a symbolic congruence between Native Americans and Filipinos as colonial subjects caught up in U.S. wars of empire as either collaborators or resisters. Both were threats to U.S. expansion: the United States waged allout war against Native Americans after the Civil War in much the same way that it crushed Filipino resistance during the Philippine-American War. Filipinos likewise have a similar status to Mexican Americans in westerns of the same period. In the World War II fi lms Texas to Bataan, Corregidor, Bataan, They Were Expendable, and Back to Bataan, the battle over territory familiar from westerns is grafted onto the Philippines, and a proprietary stance toward the Philippines and Filipinos is evident at every turn. These films served related purposes: they recruited a public into a foreign war, created a recognizable home front in a war zone, and consolidated the image and ideology of control over a formerly insurgent colony.

Hollywood War After the western, the war film is perhaps the most enduring Hollywood genre. Thomas Schatz describes the World War II combat film as the epitome of the war genre and central to an understanding of it.9 For Schatz, genres are a function of capitalism; they emerged from the recycling of sets, story lines, and stars in the name of industrial efficiency and maximum profit.10 Yet for Rick Altman, a genre is more than the industrial conditions that gave rise to it and is not entirely subject to market forces. He asserts the potential power and agency of the critic and audience to produce individual meanings from mass-produced texts.11 These meanings shift diachronically and according to changing cultural conditions. Genre films meet audience expectations, but are also shaped and reshaped by them as well as by cultural moods and patterns of consumption. Matthew Bernstein describes genre as a social and cultural contract between each film and society, and as a major building block

Fojas-final.indb 35

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 36 • Islands of Empire

of the cinematic industry, giving shape to both the experience and the understanding of fi lm.12 Genres emerge from major cultural preoccupations and questions about national self-identity, cultural values, and social norms. They persist because the major cultural conflicts and anxieties to which they refer remain unresolved. Beyond the conventions of genre, World War II–era media was subject to tacit industry regulation through adherence to the Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry, promulgated by the Office of War Information in 1942 and updated regularly throughout the war.13 Though the manual’s function was described as “advisory,” there were real economic consequences to nonadherence, since the operations of the OWI and its Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP) dovetailed with those of the Production Code Administration (PCA)—censoring agencies with the power to halt the dissemination of films. The BMP was established to “assist the motion picture industry in its endeavor to inform the American people, via the screen, of the many problems attendant on the war program.”14 This interference in the affairs of Hollywood was a complete about-face that ran contrary to the conservative efforts of the PCA head, Joseph Breen, and a large population of isolationists and antiinterventionists. Breen was known for his suspicion of Jewish-run Hollywood, which he found responsible for producing anti-Nazi propaganda films. Breen’s suspicions reflected the public mood and led to a series of encounters between Hollywood and Congress regarding the role and influence of the former.15 Isolationists led the charges against the fi lm industry, out of fear of being dragged into a European conflict by warmongering Hollywood interventionists. Such debates came to a swift end on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, causing a shift in public opinion toward intervention, as retribution, and changing the priorities of the PCA toward adherence to OWI protocols.16 All the films discussed in this chapter were issued after the OWI edict; their creators worked closely with the U.S. military to produce images and story lines that propagated the Allied agenda from a U.S.-centric perspective. In 1942, the OWI became a “liaison agency between Hollywood and Washington in obtaining government assistance or information of any sort.”17 Yet the OWI war manual went beyond mere “assistance,” providing key narrative and topical points to which Hollywood had little alternative but to adhere. Less than a month after the bombing of Pearl Harbor, on January 6, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt gave a speech that the OWI divided into six basic themes that were later used to organize the Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry:

Fojas-final.indb 36

12/6/13 1:55 PM

For eign Domestics

• 37 •

I. Why we fight—What kind of peace will follow victory II. The Enemy—Whom we fight. The nature of the adversary III. The United Nations and its Peoples—With whom we are allied in fighting. Our brothers in arms. IV. Work and production—How each of us can fight. The war at home V. The Home front—What we must do. What we must give up to win the fight. VI. The Fighting forces—The job of the fighting man at the front.18

During wartime censorship, a film was analyzed according to its capacity to “inform” Americans of the “war program” so that they might “willingly make the additional sacrifices that they shall be called upon to make in the prosecution of total war and total victory.”19 The entire ideological purpose of the handbook is summarized in the following assertion: “We practical minded Americans can easily grasp such tangible programs as sugar-rationing or pooling of cars to save rubber. It is a challenge to the ingenuity of Hollywood to make equally real the democratic values which we take for granted.”20 These included diversity, equality, and the “free flow of trade, ideas, and culture.”21 For the war effort, Hollywood was expected to build dramatic narratives around heroism, sacrifice, a noncommunist sense of community, and patriotism. Audiences were to be drawn into battle through identification with their cinematic proxies; to better secure audiences’ allegiance, the site of conflict, the Philippines, was depicted as a mere extension of the home front, with many of the recognizable comforts of home. The Philippines had a special place in the OWI guidelines as a result of Hollywood oversight with regard to films featuring Filipinos. Charles V. Hawley describes how, in 1942, Samuel Goldwyn, hoping to capitalize on interest emanating from the U.S. entry into the war, rereleased the Philippine-American war film The Real Glory (1939). The film is ideological fiction, showing the collaboration between U.S. forces and U.S.-trained Filipinos against Moro insurrectionists. It provided a historical precedent for U.S.-Filipino collaboration in the Pacific theater of war. Goldwyn hoped to get the approval and endorsement of Philippine Commonwealth president Manuel Quezon, but he wildly misjudged the potential reception of the film. Quezon railed against the depiction of Filipinos as savage bandits and “cowards,” demanding that the fi lm be pulled from U.S. theaters, a demand to which Goldwyn quickly capitulated. This brief incident revealed the extent to which the United States, via Hollywood, was ignorant of the impact of its imperial chauvinism.

Fojas-final.indb 37

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 38 •

Islands of Empire

More importantly, the misstep led the OWI to issue new dictates requiring more sympathetic portrayals of Filipinos, ones that showed dignity in Filipino collaboration with Allied forces. But as Hawley argues, while those efforts led to a reduction in the number of overtly racist images of Filipinos, the outcome was a subtler depiction of a neocolonial dynamic of Filipino dependency.22

Reel War The ideological premise of the OWI war manual was adherence to the “weapon of truth” and a disavowal of ideological tarnish or propaganda. Yet the collapse of the representational spaces of fiction, Hollywood films, and the news media, both during and following the war, underscores the complete and total war of propaganda. All those media venues promulgated the ideals of U.S.-driven democratic values against the fascism of the Axis powers. Moreover, the U.S. armed forces joined in the business and politics of media production by providing footage for many films, newsreels, and documentaries and by employing their own filmmaking units, most notably one led by John Ford. Ford contributed to the war effort by pulling together a reserve unit of volunteers for the navy; the group comprised Hollywood cameramen, editors, and soundmen who recorded documentary images and motion pictures for the war effort—many were killed in action.23 The unit made a couple of short documentaries for the Field Photographic Branch of the wartime intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services, which includes the award-winning films The Battle of Midway and December 7— the latter recorded the aftermath of the bombing of Pearl Harbor.24 Toward the end of the war, the navy asked Ford to make a film about the war starring John Wayne. Peter Bogdanovich remarks that Ford, in his style, picked one of the worst U.S. defeats in the Philippines, the Battle of Corregidor.25 Yet for a western director, the choice made sense, since Corregidor carries a symbolic and mythic role in World War II films similar to that of the Alamo in border westerns. Corregidor was one of those defeats from which a story of redemption and indomitability was shaped, charged by the figure of General MacArthur. Besides bringing Hollywood to the military, Ford brought the western to the war film, and possession of the Philippines back to its colonial master. Ford’s only World War II drama, They Were Expendable, glorifies the role and function of the U.S. Navy in the struggle to maintain con-

Fojas-final.indb 38

12/6/13 1:55 PM

For eign Domestics

• 39 •

trol of the Philippines against the Japanese; in particular, it is about the men who commanded patrol torpedo (PT) boats in the Philippines during World War II. They Were Expendable is based on the eponymous book by W. L. White; both versions can be consumed as histories of the war that allegorize the larger drama of World War II propaganda. White describes his work metonymically as “not just the adventure story of a single squadron, but in the background the whole tragic panorama of the Philippine campaign.”26 The book is a loose narrative based on interviews with the men involved in the PT boat squadron that General MacArthur brought back to the U.S. so that they could tell their story. The men were considered national heroes for bringing MacArthur out of Bataan on PT boats under the command of Lieutenant John Bulkeley. The film condenses and distills the events conveyed in the book while maintaining the overall sense of immediacy and realism within a patriotic story of heroism. Ford’s They Were Expendable is not just about war; it allegorizes the propagation and expansion of empire through the military’s collaboration with Hollywood. In fact, Ford’s work as a navy filmmaker and his dissemination of state ideology made him a major player in Hollywood. He directed the film while on leave from the navy in 1944 and received the highest salary ($400,000) hitherto received by a director for any film; he used the money to fund a recreation center for the veterans of his naval unit.27 Ford was an integral part of the complex institutional overlap between the U.S. military and the cultural productions of Hollywood, producing a couple of documentaries and a landmark dramatic feature for the military before returning to his prolific career making westerns— which, during the golden age of Hollywood, was perhaps the most patriotic of all film genres. Frank S. Nugent has described John Ford’s corpus as a split between westerns and sea pictures, although the latter might be more accurately described as “war at sea” films.28 Both genres use open spaces to depict and meditate on symbolic national values. Like the typical opening shot of a western, in which a sole cowboy traverses the desert, They Were Expendable opens in 1941 with a line of PT boats arriving in Manila Bay, with the following tribute superimposed on the image: “We hereby tender our deep appreciation to the United States Navy, Army, Coast Guard and Office of Strategic Services whose splendid cooperation made this production possible.” Like cowboys galloping across the plains, the PT boats speed through Manila Bay with a sense of authority and purpose, ready to defend their rightful territorial possession. Triumphant mu-

Fojas-final.indb 39

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 40 •

Islands of Empire

sic underscores the heroic ethos of the film, introduced by MacArthur’s announcement of victory in 1945, forestalling any doubt about ultimate U.S. success after the devastating defeat represented in the film. They Were Expendable expresses the main ideological prerogatives of war, including the call to heroism, the sacrifices of patriotic service, and the securing of foreign-domestic spaces. Lieutenant Rusty’s (John Wayne’s) naval unit is faced with a shortage of supplies and a lack of preparedness; they have to make do with what they have, creating an effective portrait of military industriousness and pioneering spirit, much like settlers in the westerns made after the war.29 In fact, PT boats were considered a lesser technology of war, but the ill-equipped troops in the Philippines had no alternative but to use them. A commanding officer remarks dismissively of the PT boats that in wartime he prefers “something more substantial.” This technological inferiority is the impetus for Lieutenant Rusty’s decision to quit the PT squadron in hope of finding a place on a career-enhancing destroyer. Rusty prefers personal success to “playing for the team,” asserting that “from here on in I’m a one-man band.” His reversal of that position makes him heroic and dramatizes the kinds of sacrifices demanded of the U.S. public—as outlined in the OWI manual, the sacrifice of personal gain for the public or national good. The overall deficiency of materials and means is visually underscored by close-ups of the baby-faced new navy recruits, revealing their naivete and inexperience. Just after Rusty announces his intended departure, a thirty-year veteran gives a speech about his time in the navy that conveniently doubles as a patriotic exhortation to duty. For him, the navy “means service, tough and good, it means serving your country in peace and in war.” His experience and savvy is offset by a close-up of a young recruit toasting the speech with a glass of milk. Their leisure time is interrupted by the announcement of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the order that all military outfits report to their posts. The unexpected turn of events interrupts Rusty’s plans to seek a more prestigious post just as it disrupts the entire nation’s war plans. The PT boats may not have been substantial enough, but they were a key feature of a spirited defense that included getting MacArthur safely out of Bataan. The term “expendable,” in armed-forces parlance, means anything sacrificed to achieve a war aim. As Bogdanovich claims, Ford focuses on one of the major defeats of the war, but he does so by highlighting one of the most heroic squadrons and the stories of its lieutenants, Brickley (Robert Montgomery) and Rusty, who were awarded

Fojas-final.indb 40

12/6/13 1:55 PM

For eign Domestics

• 41 •

Lieutenant Rusty Ryan (John Wayne) in John Ford’s They Were Expendable (1945), writing a letter requesting to be moved from the PT boat squadron.

Medals of Honor for their bravery in saving MacArthur, turning their expendability into necessity. (In actuality, Lieutenant John Bulkeley was awarded the Medal of Honor, and Lieutenant Robert Kelly was awarded the Navy Cross and the Distinguished Service Cross.) The film ends with the retreat of the weary armed forces and the famous words of General MacArthur “I shall return”—but given in Ford’s fi lm as “We shall return.” By the time the film screened, the phrase resonated as a triumphant incantation of MacArthur’s redemptive success in liberating the Philippines from the Japanese. The phrase “We shall return” recalls a rallying cry from Texas history, “Remember the Alamo,” which became “Remember Pearl Harbor.” They Were Expendable is one of several war films set in the Philippines that, together, tell the story of the U.S. operations in the Pacific. The war there initially favored the Japanese, who sought to control the Pacific by capturing all the U.S. Asian-Pacific strongholds from Hawaiʻi to the Philippines. The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor—a recurrent sign of the “evils” of the Japanese Empire and of East Asian duplicity and inscrutability—invasion of the Philippines, and sei-

Fojas-final.indb 41

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 42 •

Islands of Empire

Lieutenant Rusty Ryan and his squadron, strategizing their next move.

zure of Guam led to the withdrawal of General MacArthur to Australia in March 1942 and the unconditional surrender of all troops in the Philippines in May 1942 at Corregidor, Bataan, and Mindanao. The war narratives set in the Philippines turn on the symbolic figure of General MacArthur, whose myth is embedded in a redemptive narrative about defeat, his promise to return, and eventual victory. MacArthur was rendered a stepfather of the Filipinos, and his centrality in these war narratives reaffirms the valence of the Filipinos as both foreign and domestic “stepchildren” of the United States.

War of Total Propaganda During the war, combat films were exhibited along with newsreels, a common part of the moviegoing experience. A newsreel was a ten-minute segment of news footage. From 1911 to 1967, newsreels were released to movie theaters twice a week.30 Raymond Fielding describes newsreels as “often shallow, trivial, even fraudulent . . . filled with vivid unforgettable pictures and sounds of the people, events, wonders, and

Fojas-final.indb 42

12/6/13 1:55 PM

For eign Domestics

• 43 •

horrors .  .  . of this century.”31 Newsreel images were intended to capture the audience’s attention with spectacular scenes from major events; unknown to the audience, the scenes had often been restaged to intensify their dramatic effect. The fi lmmakers manufactured miniature sets or fake backdrops in order to re-create events from around the world, including scenes from the Spanish-American War of 1898, the eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902, and the San Francisco earthquake and fire of 1906.32 From its inception, the newsreel harbored the potential for fraud, for offering drama as history. In fact, it is difficult to distinguish, to this day, staged events from those captured by the cameras as they took place. For Nick Deocampo, newsreel depictions of the Spanish-American War are a crucial part of the construction of the U.S. “imperialist imaginary” in the Philippines, where depictions of colonial forms of racist ideology passed for documentary nonfiction.33 In many of the staged battle scenes of the Spanish-American War newsreels, Filipinos are depicted as vanquished colonials or as an “absent presence” on the losing side of combat, in which every battle scene ends, suspiciously, with U.S. victory.34 The same imperialist and patriotic fervor energized World War II newsreels. Filipinos are either barely visible adjuncts of the U.S. war effort or else completely invisible to the story of patriotic duty iconized by General MacArthur. During World War II, newsreels were a crucial outlet of information and, often, armed-forces-produced propaganda, usually ending with the exhortation to buy government bonds, which could generally be purchased right in the theater lobby.35 One News of the Day segment after MacArthur’s return to Leyte exhorts: “Take a look at that battlefield and buy another bond!”36 The footage in these newsreels was actually taken during the war, but the tone and tenor of the narration matched that of the most dramatic feature film of the day. Moreover, the short narratives were replete with propagandistic rhetoric. In another News of the Day segment, after a pilot lands a plane on only one wheel on a carrier in the Pacific, the narrator imperiously asserts: “A thrilling finale for this Yank as he puts her down on one wheel. That’s the spirit that makes America’s navy master of the Pacific.”37 In a News of the Day segment from 1942 titled “Salute to MacArthur!,” MacArthur is portrayed as a paragon of heroism.38 As the newsreel pans over the wreckage of war in Manila, ending in a bombed-out church, the narrator promises revenge and redemption: “Inadequate as these pictures are, they tell their own story, the story of an enemy whose fury found targets even in the house of peace. Manila bombed—

Fojas-final.indb 43

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 44 •

Islands of Empire

Colonel Joseph Madden (John Wayne) leads Filipino resistance forces in Back to Bataan (1945).

not news now, but history. Sad beginning of a new chapter, but not the end, for there was still General MacArthur .  .  . His battle cry has become America’s: ‘We’ll be back.’” The narrator states that MacArthur’s determination brought him into the highest ranks of the U.S. Army. Yet in other accounts of the war, MacArthur’s overzealous and vainglorious strategies in the Philippines led to his withdrawal to Australia to save his life.39 The president, embarrassed by MacArthur’s failures and fearful of offending his many political allies in Washington, was forced to award him a medal and place him in command of U.S. forces. In Back to Bataan, MacArthur’s retreat is treated as a matter of course; when John Wayne’s character—an obvious stand-in for MacArthur—is asked to leave his Filipino scouts in order to organize a guerilla unit, he hesitates. Yet when he hears that MacArthur was “ordered” to Australia by the president, it inspires Wayne’s character to leave his faithful scouts. Both “departures” are figured as part of a larger strategy for the greater good. MacArthur’s retreat was deemed by many critics to be the result of poor strategy and arrogance, which was recognized and punished by the president, whereas Wayne’s departure is a sign of heroism. The battle cry attributed to MacArthur has become synonymous

Fojas-final.indb 44

12/6/13 1:55 PM

For eign Domestics

• 45 •

with U.S. will and determination. It is not coincidental that a similar battle cry from Hollywood in the 1980s, Schwarzenegger’s “I’ll be back,” created an image of fortitude that helped Schwarzenegger find his way into the California governorship. The militaristic imperiousness of victory at all cost, of returning to the site of defeat in order to resignify it as victory, is an integral part of U.S. ideology. The story of the U.S. in the Philippines allegorizes the U.S. role in the war, one that recalls the mythic events around the Alamo, where defeat became resignified and recharged as victory. In Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq, defeat and lack of progress caused a redoubling of effort and an attempt to produce success out of failure. The portrait of U.S. heroism against the odds in fi lms such as They Were Expendable recalls the Alamo. At the Alamo, thousands of Mexicans led by Santa Ana utterly defeated the comparatively few Texans inside the mission walls. The mythologizing of the Alamo attests to the powerful force of a U.S. nationalist desire to wring a semblance of victory from the most abject of failures; the cultural resignification of failure has become the cornerstone of U.S. political hegemony. Richard Flores describes the Alamo as a “master symbol” that shaped the U.S. racial imaginary and the narrative of modernity in the Southwest.40 The Alamo also became an emblem of will in the face of defeat and the organizing symbol of a narrative of redemption and revision. From the films about Corregidor—Ford’s They Were Expendable and William Nigh’s Corregidor—and the failed missions depicted in Tay Garnett’s Bataan came Edward Dmytryk’s redemptive Back to Bataan and Robert Aldrich’s Too Late the Hero. The docudramas replayed these losses within a larger narrative about the redemption of the United States, its ultimate victory in the Pacific theater of war, and the ancillary and marginal role of the Philippines and Filipinos in this portrait. The return to these scenes in U.S. popular culture is part of a larger ideology about the messianic duty of the United States in the world. These films transplanted a well-worn domestic space of the film world, the Southwest of the western, onto the Philippines, not simply through the trope and sentiment of the Alamo, but also through the use of stock characters, actors—John Wayne—and even landscapes of the western. The B western Texas to Bataan (1942) makes the most explicit link between the U.S. Southwest and the Philippines. It is part of Monogram’s popular, low-budget Range Busters series (1940–1943), which features stories of the predicaments of a trio of cowboys. Texas to Bataan, which predates the U.S. entry into World War II, tells the tale of the cowboys’

Fojas-final.indb 45

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 46 •

Islands of Empire

attempt to ship horses from Texas to the Philippines, all the while beset by a Japanese-German spy ring. Since the Axis group has its origins in Texas, the film locates the intrigues of the war in domestic territory. Texas to Bataan ends with the announcement of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, which becomes a tacit exhortation for the audience to become involved in the war effort, just like the cowboys, who head off to enlist. Texas to Bataan is true to its title; it begins with the war being staged at home on a shooting range that features images of Hitler and Mussolini as targets. When the cowboys finish their target practice, they are asked, “Well, is the war over?” By grafting the war onto the most familiar of settings and genres, the Southwest of the western, and then transferring that location wholesale to the “foreign” space of the Philippines, the story confronts public resistance to intervening in a foreign war. A ranch owner, Tom Conroy, is the first to notice the sudden appearance of the war at home; since he started selling herds to the army, his horses have been poisoned or stolen. He proclaims, “There’s a war going on in Europe and they’re aiming to get us mixed up into it.” The cowboys eventually discover the source of the intrigue when they meet up with three men who look and dress like gangsters, which here is visual code for “foreign.” The Range Busters capture the “foreigners” and hold them captive in a garage. When they examine their captives’ belongings, they find Japanese rifles—“these rifles are made in Japan”— and dynamite. They claim that with these munitions, “they could arm every enemy alien in the country.” The purpose of this convoluted intrigue is to bring the foreign war onto domestic territory and locate the enemy at home—recruiting the public into the war effort while providing justification for the illegal internment of Japanese Americans. It turns out that their Filipino servant, Cookie, is a “Jap” working for a Japanese espionage agency; he has released the prisoners and escaped with them. At that point, fully involved in the war, the cowboys take the next logical step. They follow their escaped captives to the center of the war and proxy home front, the Philippines; coincidentally, it is also the destination of their cargo of horses for the armed forces. Their voyage takes them to stops along the U.S. imperial circuit: Galveston, Havana, Panama, Honolulu, Wake Island, Guam, and finally the Philippines, at Corregidor. After meeting up with the captain, they suddenly realize that they are in a foreign land: “How can we order, we don’t talk Filipino.” To

Fojas-final.indb 46

12/6/13 1:55 PM

For eign Domestics

• 47 •

their pleasant surprise, they don’t need to speak “Filipino,” since everyone around them is bilingual in both Tagalog and English. In the restaurant, they are met by an American who offers them a “nice table,” where they enjoy an English-speaking Filipino band that plays “Home on the Range” for their benefit. The Rangers sing along, the band picks up a verse in Tagalog, and they all join in to sing the final verse. Thus, in a few bars, the entire scene of alliance and collaboration between the United States and the Philippines is established, with the latter becoming just another part of the southwestern home front. Afterward, the Range Busters meet up with the spies and successfully deliver them to the FBI. But their work is not done; they need to get back to Texas to bring the foreign war back home again. They must deal with the man who harbored the spies at his Texas ranch, Ken Richards, and foil his plans to destroy the U.S. from the inside. Their return coincides with the first instance of the war falling on “domestic” soil, since the drama ends with the radio news flash “Pearl Harbor bombed by Japan,” which seals the conviction of the Range Busters to enlist and ends the story with a tacit exhortation to join the war effort. Typical of the western, the story is about the success of a few men in defense of the nation, recalling the myth of the Alamo, yet it also integrates domestic and foreign relatively seamlessly. This neat integration occurs on the likeliest of places, the foreign-domestic Philippines. Like Texas to Bataan, Bataan reflects the pioneering spirit that infused most westerns and energized the myth of the Alamo. A group of soldiers caught in the retreat from Manila to Bataan lack food, reinforcements, and munitions; but they make do with what they have left in order to wage a valiant defense. A mythological construction of the film is the creation of a harmonious multiethnic and multiracial cast—an image of an ideal liberal U.S. democracy, as opposed to the fascist racism and ethnocentrism of the Axis powers (the cast includes a young Desi Arnaz before his I Love Lucy fame). Bataan and other films set in the Philippines depict Filipinos as a minority of the armed forces, even though the Battles of Bataan and Corregidor were fought predominantly by Filipino soldiers—some six thousand U.S. soldiers fought alongside fortyfive thousand Filipinos. Yet the story is often presented as one of U.S. loss and responsibility for redemption. The reality of the composition of the forces in Bataan is displaced by a story about the multiethnic and multicultural makeup of the U.S. armed forces. Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black describe Bataan as Hollywood’s “version of a World War II

Fojas-final.indb 47

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 48 •

Islands of Empire

Alamo.” They note that it was produced in close collaboration with the OWI, which was most impressed with the representation of the makeup of the armed forces in the Philippines and the image of “Allied unity.”41 Bataan and the battles of World War II involving Japan gave Filipinos a brief reprieve from the charge of being “savages.” The opening scene of Bataan shows a U.S. soldier shooting at what his fellow soldier tells him is a monkey, and he responds, “Well, I missed him anyway, and I’d hate to hit him by mistake for a Jap.” This key opening remark sets up the racial symbology of the narrative, which puts the Japanese on the same plane as that hackneyed symbol of savage and racialized humanity, the monkey. This same denigrated status had been accorded Filipinos ever since the Spanish-American War. World War II momentarily shifted the U.S. image of Filipinos from backward primitives to filial subjects in need of protection. In the next scene, as the soldiers and civilians file out of Bataan, they are fired upon and bombed by Japanese forces; an American soldier clutches and protects a Filipino child, depicting the paternal benevolence of the colonial master. The bodies of solders and civilians alike are strewn all over the streets, and few are left standing after the bloodshed. This depiction of Japanese barbarity and Filipino innocence is a momentary lapse in the history of Filipino representation in U.S. media, although it is in keeping with the anti-Japanese sentiment that characterizes much of Hollywood history. Unlike Bataan, They Were Expendable is more in line with the racial typology of the era, casting Filipinos as marginal characters and foreigndomestic adjuncts. Few Filipinos in the war films do not occupy secondary roles as entertainers, nurses, and servants. By the final scene, almost all the characters have been uplifted by their heroism—but in keeping with the marginal status of Asians in Hollywood, the Filipino characters are the only ones who do not experience a transformation. In fact, beyond the backdrop, there are few reminders that this story is set in the Philippines, since almost all the characters are Anglo-American. This deracination helps audiences imagine the full Americanization of the Philippines, to think of Philippine territory as already part of the United States. Though the United States ended its colonial claims on the Philippines after 1946, Filipinos remained tied to the country through U.S.puppet presidents and economic dependency. In popular culture, the World War II films are the few instances that recognize the place of the Philippines in U.S. history. Back to Bataan, like Bataan, shows a significant amount of Filipino participation and collaboration in the war effort, particularly of Fili-

Fojas-final.indb 48

12/6/13 1:55 PM

For eign Domestics

• 49 •

Madden with Filipino scouts who are accustomed to using bolos instead of guns.

pinos falling in line with the U.S. ideals of freedom and democracy— which satisfies one of the main themes of the OWI war manual and aligns the Philippines with domestic politics. The film was released to coincide with the return of U.S. troops to the Philippines (troops began arriving in the Philippines in October 1944, and the film was released in May 1945).42 Part of the drama is set in a village classroom where the history of the Philippines is being taught to schoolchildren. The lecture covers the imperial history of the Philippines, in which Spain brought Christianity to the Philippines, but the most important lesson is learned from the United States. The teacher explains: “America taught us that men are free or they are nothing. Since then, we have walked with high heads among all men.” The lecture is cut short by Japanese forces, which occupy the village and hang the beloved principal of the school, initiating a plot of retribution. Their anger at Japanese brutality and their colonial gratitude toward the United States makes the Filipinos eager to join Colonel Joseph Madden’s (John Wayne’s) guerilla forces, formed after the exile of General MacArthur to Australia. While the scene with the school lecture is pure ideological fiction, Back to Bataan opens with the following claim to verisimilitude: “This

Fojas-final.indb 49

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 50 •

Islands of Empire

Madden with a U.S. schoolteacher after a lecture on Philippine-U.S. relations over the body of Bello, who refused to haul down the U.S. flag.

story was not invented. The events you are about to see are based on actual incidents. The characters are based on real people.” This preface is superimposed over a map of the Philippines in order to anchor the claim to place. The film opens with the release of U.S. and Filipino soldiers from the Japanese prison camp at Cabanatuan. But what follows actually crosses the line from film to historical narrative as the narrator states solemnly: “The men you are about to see are actual survivors of three terrible years in the Jap prison camp at Cabanatuan.” But the strident, imperious, and patriotic tone of the narration exposes an ideology of wartime propaganda. Americans had been freed—hundreds of them. This was a promise of what was to come. Soon the whole world would be free. But behind the rescue of these men, behind the triumphs yet to come, there is another story—the story of the resistance of the Filipino people. Because of that resistance, thousands of American soldiers’ lives were to be saved. It was of that resistance that General Douglas MacArthur said: “These inadequately armed patriots have fought the enemy for more than two

Fojas-final.indb 50

12/6/13 1:55 PM

For eign Domestics

• 51 •

years. Their names and deeds shall ever be enshrined in the hearts of our two peoples.”

Following the exultant gratitude of the schoolroom lecture, Filipinos join in the U.S. cause not just for survival, but as a selfless expression of gratitude for the lessons of freedom and democracy learned under U.S. colonial tutelage. As part of the gloss that rendered the Philippines a domestic space, the gratitude of the Filipinos stands in for the history of Filipino nationalism and resistance to colonialism. The speech justifies colonialism as benevolent and beneficent while shrouding the imperial intentions that originally put the Philippines in the force field of the United States. Back to Bataan disabuses the Filipinos of any possible reason to ally with the Japanese, their Asian brothers (a familial relation already claimed by the Americans), which was a major part of the Japanese propaganda effort during the war. Miss Delgado, a Filipina newscaster, is a collaborationist who broadcasts Japanese propaganda to the Filipino public. She calls upon Filipinos to recognize the Japanese as “fellow Orientals,” with whom they might put an end to “American domination” and to education designed to instill a sense of “inferiority.” In fact, Miss Delgado is linked to the resistance as the former love interest of a Filipino recruit in the U.S. regiment, Captain Andrés Bonifacio—a romantic subplot that puts a Filipino romance in domestic Hollywood terms. Bonifacio, a historical invention, is the purported grandson of a leader of the liberation movement during the Philippine-American War. In this crucial story line, as a key member of the U.S.-Filipino liberation forces, he represents a legacy of shifting alliances that, in the final turn, favors the United States and redeems the rhetoric of democracy and freedom that justified the imperial co-opting of the Philippines in 1898. As Sharon Delmendo has argued, the story line manipulates historical events to generate a narrative of U.S.-Philippine relations that served the U.S. interest in retaining power and influence in the region on the cusp of Filipino independence.43 Miss Delgado is finally revealed as a spy working for the Allies, not a Japanese propagandist, whose efforts helped to bring about U.S. victory. This plot twist allows the estranged lovers Bonifacio and Delgado to be reunited, symbolizing a U.S.-led reintegration of the Philippines. Whereas Back to Bataan sidelines the romantic love story in favor of battle scenes, Corregidor is centered on a love triangle. The dramatic scenes contain less action than hortatory rhetoric about the U.S. role

Fojas-final.indb 51

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 52 •

Islands of Empire

Madden and Andrés Bonifacio (Anthony Quinn) discussing a setback to the U.S.Philippine defense against the Japanese.

in the war; war objectives are loosely allegorized in a war between the sexes. The real battle is a rhetorical one intended to elicit full adoption of the aims of war and its attendant sacrifices. Like Texas to Bataan, the space of the narrative is clearly foreign-domestic, and the action unmistakably takes place on a set most likely located on a Hollywood studio lot. The story is set in Corregidor, but the opening scene establishes a domestic space demarcated by U.S. racial and gender politics in which Anglo domestic relations are supported by an African American maid. Th is grafting of U.S. racial politics onto foreign terrain is corroborated in another scene in which an officer warns soldiers to “look out for zoot suits.” In December 1941, the main character, Royce (Elissa Landi), travels to the Philippines with her African American maid, Hyacinth (Ruby Dandridge), in search of Dr. Jan Stockman (Otto Kruger); her plan is to secure a marriage proposal from him. The premise renders the Philippines symbolically domestic for the purpose of establishing a filial alliance and collaboration in the war effort. Jan, by virtue of his tenure on the islands, represents the armed forces of the Philippines, while Royce and her maid are the missing pieces of a domestic scene. Their wedding

Fojas-final.indb 52

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Promotional material for Corregidor.

Fojas-final.indb 53

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 54 • Islands of Empire

is bombed by the Japanese, resulting in Hyacinth’s death. The couple is displaced to Manila, where Royce encounters an old flame, Michael. The tensions of the love triangle initiate a series of dialogues that test the patriotism of each man competing for Royce’s attention, with the most patriotic man winning. Jan secures Royce’s devotion with speeches about freedom and democracy. When his pessimistic rival points out the inevitability of death during war, Jan declaims idealistically: “We’re dying for something we believe in. Call it democracy. Well, that’s what it is. The individual’s right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The speech is given in the last hours before the surrender at Corregidor, which sees patriotic Jan sacrificed heroically, but not before he recruited both Royce and Michael (and any ambivalent audience members) into his nationalist idealism. Michael proves his new faith when he echoes General MacArthur: “We’ll be back. We’ll build up everything that’s been destroyed.” The film ends with a montage of U.S. icons that obscure the location of the drama, collapsing domestic and foreign in a neat visual flourish.

War of Propaganda For Jeanine Basinger, Bataan is the key example in her analysis and definition of the genre of the World War II combat film. She notes the irony of critically acclaiming the film’s “gritty realism,” since it was made entirely on a series of studio sets. Something of the artificiality of the filmic scenes matches with the canned patriotism and strident propaganda of the script, though Basinger argues that it is a deeply passionate film that elicits a resounding emotional response in the audience. As in Back to Bataan, Corregidor, Victory at Sea, and the various newsreels about the Pacific operations, the narrative and images present a constructed realism meant to pass as news of the day. Basinger finds the realism in the passionate telling of the story, the anger and humiliation of the defeat at Bataan, while noting that the film makes use of the techniques of cinema to convey a clear and definite ideological position and political message, raising it to a near-platonic form of genre. It is not just repeatable; it set the narrative terms of that repetition: Bataan is sure of its task as a fi lm. Everything that the cinema has to offer—lighting, cutting, composition—is placed in service of the main message of propaganda. Bataan does not seek to make subtle meaning

Fojas-final.indb 54

12/6/13 1:55 PM

For eign Domestics

• 55 •

out of the tools of cinema. It puts them at the service of its message and story. Thus, Bataan is indeed an effective work of propaganda, of storytelling, and, as history has proved, of genre. It told a story we would want to hear again and again. It influenced and affected the way the story of World War II combat would be told in the future.44

The repetitions of genre are like that of trauma, of an event or situation subject to be repeated until it is fully resolved. Through force of

Tensions rising between soldiers in Bataan.

Fojas-final.indb 55

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 56 •

Islands of Empire

habit, repetition may even persist beyond resolution. The defeat at Bataan reflected other battle losses in U.S. history that became subject to similar generic obsessions; contemporary with Bataan was the trauma of the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, which constitutes another major object and obsession of World War II combat films. Hollywood films and other media of World War II share a common preoccupation with loss and redemption, and a common desire to produce victory out of the failed battles in the Pacific. The documentary series Victory at Sea is perhaps the most enduring narrative of U.S. redemption in that theater of war.

Victory for All to See Victory at Sea (1952–1953), the most popular World War II documentary ever made, has become the longest-running and most iconic narrative about the war. Written by Henry Salomon with the assistance of Richard Hanser, Victory at Sea is a twenty-six part, thirteen-hour NBC series that uses actual navy footage to tell a story about U.S. naval exercises during World War II. At the time of his death in 1958, Salomon’s series was said to be the most disseminated documentary on television. It won the George Foster Peabody Award, a Sylvania Grand Award for “the greatest program on television,” and Variety magazine’s Show Management Award. The Sylvania committee of judges found that Victory at Sea was “so significant in its conception, so magnificent in its content, so high in the self-imposed standards of its execution, so deep in its honest impact and so sweeping in its summation of what it means to be an American that the Committee could only throw its hat in the air and say, ‘This is what we have been looking for; this is American television that is truly great.’”45 In addition, Salomon garnered the highest honor bestowed upon a civilian from the navy, the Distinguished Public Service Award.46 The series quickly went into syndication, and was sold to 186 domestic and 40 international markets. It remained on Variety’s best-seller list of syndicated programs until 1963. Victory at Sea often passes as a complete and objective history of events in World War II. But contemporaneous with its release, British media found the series to be a one-sided depiction and an overstatement of the role of the United States in its war campaigns.47 Richard C. Bartone has written of the strident patriotism of the narration and the historical glosses meant to foreground the ideological stance of the United States with respect to its assumed role as global arbiter of democratic ideals.48

Fojas-final.indb 56

12/6/13 1:55 PM

For eign Domestics

• 57 •

The narration of Victory at Sea is sparse and staccato, and Leonard Graves lends it a stoic and prosaic tone. In a 1957 writing seminar at the University of Denver, Richard Hanser remarked, “The rule Pete Salomon and I work by all the time is: ‘The less narration, the better.’” He went on to say: “In both words and film we want to suggest the essence of the event as accurately and forcefully as possible.”49 This often means that the “essence” is the distillation of ideological concepts related to U.S. imperial hegemony in the Pacific. The narration for the episode “Return of the Allies” describes how “under Americans, Filipinos prepare to defend their freedom.” Pearl Harbor is clearly linked to the Philippines as a site where Japan surprised the United States: “Cavite, on Manila Bay, headquarters of the United States’ Asiatic fleet. The false calm that shrouded Pearl Harbor lulls Cavite. Cavite’s Fate? Disaster.” These two sites of the Pacific theater are continually collapsed in World War II–era Hollywood films and television media. Of course, Hawaiʻi and the Philippines are linked to the United States as part of its colonial holdings after 1898; during the war, they were key transit points of military personnel and munitions from the U.S. mainland to Asia and the Pacific. Another elision conflates the Spanish-American War and World War II; in both, the Philippines is presented as a willing pawn in the struggle between imperial forces. The narration in Victory at Sea prefaces the turn to the Philippines in the war by making this link apparent: Once Spanish warships, sunk by Admiral Dewey’s squadron, lay dead on the floor of Manila Bay, and the Philippines became American. Now, in December 1941, the bones of American sailors litter the harbor, and the Philippines are torn from the United States. Manila goes, Bataan goes. And so goes Corregidor. In fire and agony, in smoke and anguish, the Commonwealth of the Philippines is extinguished. The Japanese take over.

With the phrase “the Philippines became American,” the narration then completely glosses the imperial dynamic described above. Over the next shot is heard: “Americans and Filipinos are stripped of their power, seemingly forever. The vanquished—Americans and Filipinos whose hope of freedom is gone, seemingly forever.” This elision of difference in the status of each is part of the ideological premise of the U.S. official story of the war: Filipinos and the Philippines were not allies in the war effort, but U.S. subjects, neither foreign nor domestic. In the final scene of the recapture of the Philippines, the narrator announces:

Fojas-final.indb 57

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 58 • Islands of Empire

“The flags of the free go up in the Philippines—in Manila, in Bataan, on Corregidor. President Roosevelt has told the world American soldiers ‘fight not for the lust of conquest. They fight to end conquest. They fight to liberate.’” Thus closes the final analysis of the war in the Philippines, one that will have an impact equal to, and perhaps greater than, fictional war narratives of the same events. Victory at Sea borrowed many precepts from the fiction while falling directly in line with the major themes of the OWI propaganda manuals. This epic documentary continued the propagation of wartime ideologies of freedom, democracy, and sacrifice for postwar audiences. World War II films, documentary and dramatic, graft the domestic narratives of the western onto that of the combat film. Westerns dramatize the nation as a lived experience in a local setting, usually the western or southern frontier. They are rooted in the territorial spaces of U.S. culture, whereas war films typically expose the power of the U.S. abroad, a power to intervene and assert military prowess. World War II dramatic films are able to broach both domestic and foreign territories by instrumentalizing the Philippines as a double space of foreign-domestic status. The films affected how subsequent events of the war were shaped and depicted, even years after the end of the war. The images of Filipinos during World War II serve as the symbolic origin of subsequent discourses, which are intimately tied to U.S. national identity and strategies of security. By describing Filipinos as either insurgents or friendly and accommodating natives, the discourse is divisive, reflecting the language used to represent Native Americans and Mexicans in the Southwest. Yet in World War II, bandits, in the guise of guerilla forces, were recruited by the U.S. military and represented to the U.S. public as adjuncts of the war machine. The signifiers of opposition and insurrection—the insurgent Filipinos of the Philippine-American War—were co-opted in the visual and verbal rhetoric of alliance and affiliation that reflected U.S. war propaganda. Caught in the matrices of competing empires—American and Japanese—and imperial legacies— Spanish and American—Filipinos were instrumentalized in the international dynamics of the U.S. struggle for global power. Only when Filipinos were in the grip of the Japanese Empire did their status as foreign become transformed into something more familiar, yet they ultimately remained foreign subjects of a domestic war. After the end of World War II and the rise of U.S. global dominance, the Philippines receded from the U.S. imaginary, yet it maintained its role as military outpost and client state. The Philippines continued to

Fojas-final.indb 58

12/6/13 1:55 PM

For eign Domestics

• 59 •

be a foreign location of domestic import, and the history and contemporary context of Filipino-U.S. relations was and continues to be dependent on external factors.50 In the legacy of mass-media depictions of the Philippines, dating back to the Spanish-American War, the visibility and proximity of this former U.S. colony turns on the axis of war. In 2001, the Philippines reemerged in U.S. consciousness in yet another war, as a front in the war on terror—a phrase that, in 2008, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton claimed, after eight years of currency, to be defunct. But the war and the focus on the Philippines continue unabated.51 The Philippines shares this terrorism spotlight with another member of the insular empire: Cuba. But the U.S. Department of State has designated Cuba a state sponsor of terrorism, making it a much more highly charged object of the U.S. imperial gaze.

Fojas-final.indb 59

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Chapter Two

Imperial Grief Loss and Longing in Havana before Castro

It was part heaven. It was part hell. It was pure Havana. Theatrical tr ailer, Cuba (1979)

F

or almost a decade, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, as Lucy and Ricky Ricardo, were one of the most beloved “real life” couples on television. Indeed, the indomitable couple of I Love Lucy (1951–1957) moved into a market shaped by domestic situation comedies such as The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950–1958). The show reflects its title; it is a comedy about Lucy and her antics, which Ricky goes about trying to put right. The popular embrace of this mixed-race and bicultural couple at a time of antimiscegenation laws and immigration quotas was perhaps a symptom of a larger love affair with Cuba and the star appeal of Lucille Ball. The public was delighted with all things Cuban, particularly the music and talent of the island, and Ricky, as a bandleader in the Xavier Cugat mold, delivered nicely on this score. Yet Lucy is the real star of the show, her dynamism and charisma deflecting possible outrage about her being part of a mixed-race couple. Her centrality ensured that the racialized and foreign Desi Arnaz did not occupy the spotlight too long. Ricky’s secondary role was a reversal of the typical role of the husband in the domestic situation comedy; his deferral to the star power of his wife opened up the possibility for a new type of female protagonist, later realized by shows like The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977) and Roseanne (1988–1997). The comedic material of I Love Lucy emanates entirely from Lucy; Ricky acts as the straight man, providing minor comic moments related to his Cuban accent. But in a few episodes, Ricky and his emotional

Fojas-final.indb 60

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Imper ial Gr ief

• 61 •

Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball) and Ricky Ricardo (Desi Arnaz) in I Love Lucy.

life are the focus of the story, and the jokes that ensue lend insight into the status of Cuban Americans in U.S. popular culture. In the episode “Ricky has Labor Pains,” Ricky reacts somatically to the attention Lucy receives because of her pregnancy. He feels abandoned by Lucy, begging without success for his lunch and then dinner. A hungry and frustrated Ricky complains of stomach pains that a Freudian doctor finds mime exactly the symptoms of a pregnant woman. His cure is to make Ricky the center of attention. The remedy is as curious as the symptom; audiences know that Ricky will never displace Lucy in the show and that any atten-

Fojas-final.indb 61

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 62 •

Islands of Empire

tion to him will be temporary. He will remain the invisible subject and empty signifier of the show’s title.1 In the meantime, Ricky throws a tantrum about his unmet needs, showing himself to be vain, temperamental, and sullen. It is perhaps no surprise that once Ricky becomes the focus of the show, his “tropical” infantilization—seen in the tantrums— and feminization—through an imagined “pregnancy”—is revealed. His outbursts coincide neatly with colonial portrayals of Cubans as childish and underdeveloped and in need of paternal guidance. Although Ricky could not remain the center of Lucy’s attention, U.S. fascination with Cuba and Cubans has been at the center of national attention for years. As mentioned earlier, Cuba was a persistent object of U.S. imperial desires as a “natural,” though exotic, appendage of the United States. It was the perfect protectorate, foreign in its domesticity. Like Ricky and Lucy, Cuba is deemed rightfully wedded to its northern neighbor, and it holds a special place in the U.S. psyche—until, of course, it “behaves badly.” The “reel” life of Ricky and Lucy was always a projection of their actual lives as a married couple, which in turn followed popular feelings about Cuba and Cubans. Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball met on the set of the film Too Many Girls (1940), but the flashback story in the Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (1957–1960), depicts the origins of their romance in a manner more in keeping with the U.S. fantasy about Cuba: they met while Lucy was on holiday in Havana.2 I Love Lucy depicted their marriage, pregnancy, and married-couple squabbles; by the end of the spin-off series in 1960, the couple was headed for divorce. Their split, attributed to Desi Arnaz’s bad behavior, coincided with a downturn in public opinion about Cuban politics. The court proceedings captured a war between the sparring spouses that, according to Ball, emanated from the “Jekyll and Hyde” personality of Arnaz.3 Their disputes and public quarrels were epic and infamous. Describing him as subject to unpredictable fits of anger and erratic behavior, she filed for divorce on grounds of mental cruelty. The language used to describe the famous Cuban artist was very much like the language Washington used to describe another, more infamous Cuban icon, Fidel Castro.4 For example, a U.S. national intelligence report of 1959 described Castro as having “little sense of the practical consequences of his impulses, attitudes, and actions.”5 The same could have been said, and was certainly implied, about Arnaz, whose drunken escapades and tirades caused the media to turn on him. The publicity around the Lucy-Desi divorce became a conduit

Fojas-final.indb 62

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Imper ial Gr ief

• 63 •

The cast of I Love Lucy, including Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance) and Fred Mertz (William Frawley).

for the expression of antipathy toward the engineer of the Cuban Revolution. The romance with Cuba had come to an end. Of all the territory acquired as a result of the Spanish-American War, Cuba was special, even exceptional. Congress did not put forth any claim to take control of Cuba, which was not the case with Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. But through the Platt Amendment, Cuba remained a U.S. protectorate and a tourist appendage until the Cuban Rev-

Fojas-final.indb 63

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 64 •

Islands of Empire

Lucy and Ricky at the height of their relationship.

olution. Like the rise and fall of I Love Lucy, media representations of Cuba fall into two periods: honeymoon and separation. The eras correspond to moods of romantic nostalgia and animosity. That is, media depictions are either prerevolutionary romantic portraits of Havana as a tourist playground, reflecting the time before the end of the U.S.-puppet government of Fulgencio Batista, or they are postrevolutionary films that exhibit the tension and animosity of severed relations, associating

Fojas-final.indb 64

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Imper ial Gr ief

• 65 •

Cuba and Cubans with all manner of conflict, criminality, and illegality. There are some exceptions to this very general schema, but U.S. popular culture has followed Washington rather than the other way around. Cuba has long been an object of deep U.S. ambivalence. It was coveted as a site of romantic possibility and then reviled as a communist state. U.S. film and media culture has offered few visual experiences of the island after the revolution—in fact, films supposedly shot in Cuba after 1959 were usually filmed elsewhere.6 However scant, popular-culture portrayals of Cuba serve as social rituals of mourning that manage the inchoate and unpredictable affect of imperial grief, a response that should be distinguished from imperialist nostalgia. For Renato Rosaldo, imperialist nostalgia is a yearning for a colonized culture as it existed before intervening forces destroyed it.7 Nostalgia makes “racial domination appear innocent and pure,” even noble, since it dovetails with the mission to uplift and civilize “savage” cultures.8 Agents of colonization disavow any sense of guilt or culpability in the evisceration of colonized cultures. In U.S. depictions of Cuba, imperialist nostalgia is most certainly at play, yet of all former U.S. island possessions, only Cuba is subject to an imperial affect that goes beyond nostalgia: imperial grief. Only with Cuba did the United States suffer a true loss of access to the island; acceptance of that loss would elicit grief and begin the work of mourning. Though Rosaldo focuses on nostalgia, he acknowledges the interrelation of nostalgia and mourning: “Mourning the passing of traditional society and imperialist nostalgia cannot be separated from one another.”9 For Rosaldo, imperialist nostalgia is directed toward “primitive” or premodern cultures whose cultural forms and ways of life were transformed and violated by the arrival of “civilizing” colonial forces.10 In the nostalgic stories about Cuba in this chapter, the feeling is elicited by the lapsing not of primitive cultures, but of a cultural form of capitalism: the  entertainment and tourist industries in Havana made by and for a U.S. population. U.S. imperial grief is a narcissistic yearning for a lost piece of itself. Whereas nostalgia is a process of yearning, grief is an emotion that precedes the work of mourning in the acknowledgment of loss. The mood of loss around Cuba persists as both the loss of an era and of the island itself as part of the U.S. corpus. This complex longing makes the popular-culture experience of Cuba patently different from that of other sites in the U.S. imperial circuit. Popular narratives indulge in proprietary fantasies about the tourist playground, but they also force audiences to accept the inevitable loss of this space of illicit pleasure. Such

Fojas-final.indb 65

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 66 •

Islands of Empire

stories wallow in the bittersweet pleasures of nostalgia, but share an ultimate aim of shifting and reassigning the energies of attachment back onto the United States. Even as they mourn for a lost Cuba, they offer a suitable substitute and thus a way out of the closed circuit of imperial nostalgia.

The Way We Were In Havana before Castro, a coffee-table book of ephemera and images of prerevolutionary Havana, the architectural historian Peter Moruzzi confesses to being “obsessed” with Cuba, in a manner typical of what Gustavo Pérez Firmat, Louis Pérez, and Lars Schoultz have described as a patently U.S. psychological disorder.11 For Moruzzi, the chance discovery of an old brochure from the Tropicana nightclub ignited a passion to uncover the forbidden territory of tourist Havana. He leads with the question “What was the city like at the time [1940s and 1950s] and why was it so popular with Americans?”12 Moruzzi answers his own question, in part, when he characterizes Havana, in the subtitle of the book, as “a tropical playground.” He concludes the preface with the following assertion: “The answers that I found led to the writing of this book, which attempts to explore Havana from the perspective of an American tourist visiting the city during the first half of the twentieth century and, many decades later, as a twenty-first-century tourist intent on rediscovering the city’s astonishing past.”13 Moruzzi’s romance with the island lends insight into the ongoing imperial nostalgia for tourist-made Havana. His collection of ephemera, stories, and photographs represents a long process of working through the loss of this former piece of the U.S. tourist imaginary, from which, in 1959, the United States suffered a violent separation.14 The reader, sorting through this extensive archive, engages in a process that is part of the collective mourning of an empire deprived of access to one of its former territories. The time line of his recollections of Havana follows a familiar narrative arc that begins with the making of Havana as a colonial outpost of Spain and then the United States, continues to the heyday of tourist Havana in the 1940s and 1950s, and ends with the period just after the revolution. With little reflection on the principles of the revolution, its political meaning in the Americas, or its outcomes, Moruzzi ends his recollections with the wish that Havana be restored to its rightful place as the “Pearl of the Antilles.”15 In popular culture, including music, tourist literature, television,

Fojas-final.indb 66

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Imper ial Gr ief

• 67 •

and film, there is a long-standing fascination with all things Cuban. In Dashiell Hammett’s novel The Maltese Falcon (1930), it signifies a romantic escape from the present. The title of a tourist guide by the playwright Basil Woon, When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba (1928), suggests that there are no limits to indulgences on the island.16 In the 1930s and 1940s, a number of popular “latunes,” or songs written in English and styled on Cuban or Latin American rhythms, appeared, notably Desi Arnaz’s “Ahbah-nah Coo-bah” (1949) and Cole Porter’s “In the Still of the Night” (1937), “Night and Day” (1932), “A Little Rumba Numba” (1941), and “I’ve Got You under My Skin” (1936). Many well-known songwriters followed suit, including Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and Hoagy Carmichael.17 In Hollywood, quite a few fi lms depicted Cuba and Cubans, particularly at the height of the love affair with the island, from the early 1930s to the early 1960s—for instance, Weekend in Havana (1941), We Were Strangers (1949), and Affair in Havana (1957).

Tourist brochure offering a “Gay-Fascinating-Foreign” “Tropical Haven” in Havana. Courtesy of History Miami Archives and Research Center.

Fojas-final.indb 67

Pan American Airways brochure indicating the proximity of Havana to the United States. Courtesy of History Miami Archives and Research Center.

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Scene from Affair in Havana (1957).

Scene from Affair in Havana.

Alice Faye, Cesar Romero, and Carmen Miranda in Weekend in Havana (1941).

Fojas-final.indb 68

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Imper ial Gr ief

• 69 •

Four films produced since 1970 capture, through melancholic visual, narrative, and musical meditations, the U.S. fantasy about Cuba as both a lost place and place of loss. In a Hollywood pattern energized by imperial will, loss inspires a spirited effort at recuperation, and some manner of it is typically achieved. U.S. characters are redeemed through personal success or the recovery of some lost object. Even if the object is eventually released, the sovereignty and dominance of American or U.S.aligned characters are established. Cuba (1979), Havana (1990), Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004), and The Lost City (2005) all take place at the juncture of tourism and revolution as 1958 turns into 1959. The films share the same mood and the same characterization of Cuba. Their plots and story lines are infused with loss, longing, and grief. The island, as an object lost by the United States, is the perfect site for stories of wistful longing as well as for dramas of redemption and the recuperation of lost objects, dramas that set the scene for the recognition and acceptance of a final loss. The films share also a common process of imperial mourning. Through story lines about “the lost city”—to borrow the title of one of the films—in which Havana stands in for all of Cuba, audiences acknowledge the loss of this intimate neighbor and tourist playground while accepting the (temporary) loss and reassertion of U.S. national prowess. Each film ends with characters successfully working through the separation from Havana and moving on to Miami or another of the world’s leisure sites. Each narrative has dovetailing love stories: one with Havana and the other between doomed lovers—the separation of these lovers allegorizes the U.S. estrangement from Cuba. This sentiment is captured nicely in The Lost City when a character comments, about both Havana and lost love, “she was a beautiful thing, Havana, we shoulda known she was a heartbreaker.” After the work of mourning, Cuba ceases to hold such powerful symbolic value as a fantasy island and becomes one tourist site among many. In this way, U.S. popular culture dramatizes the process of working through and adapting to the loss of a treasured part of the imperial circuit.

Fantasy Island U.S., Cuban-exile, and Cuban cinema share the nostalgia for the time just before the revolution, but for vastly different reasons. The era of the revolution was a time of open possibility and excitement for many

Fojas-final.indb 69

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 70 •

Islands of Empire

Cubans who hoped for a better future after enduring repression under Fulgencio Batista. In some contemporary Cuban and Cuban-exile cinema, this era is often tinged with a sense of loss for what might have been, for the possible futures that never came to pass. Cuban cinema might include mournful stories about the end of utopia or about questioning the meaning of utopia—as in Alicia en el pueblo de Maravillas (1989), Fresa y chocolate (1994), or Lista de espera (2000). For Michael Chanan, the Cuban film El siglo de las luces (1982), a story about the French Revolution but involving Cubans, is a powerful tale that encodes disaffection with revolutionary ideals, which is evident when the main character, Esteban, remarks on the “end of modernity, again the failure of the Enlightenment idea of utopia.”18 For Ana M. López, Cuban cinema in exile, though it cannot be totalized, is characterized by being created under the condition of forced political exile without the possibility of return. She notes that exile cinema creates an “other island” that is not always complicit with the ideals of the revolution: “This ‘other island,’ the films and videos of exiled Cubans, has often grated harshly against the sentiments of those for whom the island represented our only utopian hope in the Americas.”19 The composition of artists on the island and in exile is constantly shifting; many who were founding members of the Cuban film institute (Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos; ICAIC) subsequently chose to continue their work in exile, including those disaffected with the revolution and its aesthetic principles. In his speech “Words to Intellectuals” (1961), Castro remarked famously of “artists and intellectuals who are not genuine revolutionaries”: Even though they are not revolutionary writers and artists, they should have the opportunity and freedom to express their creative spirit within the revolution. In other words: Within the revolution, everything; against the revolution, nothing.20

Though Castro’s rhetoric is divisive, López contends that the period following the speech was one of “creative anarchy” and the testing of the boundaries of revolutionary art. Nonetheless, a series of events in the mid-1960s—including the creation of forced-labor camps targeting gay men and the infamous UMAPS (Unidades Militares de Ayuda de Producción; Military Units to Aid Production), agricultural camps where anyone considered counter-

Fojas-final.indb 70

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Imper ial Gr ief

• 71 •

revolutionary could be sent—led to the departure of a number of ICAIC members.21 One such disaffected artist, who had been appointed director of ICAIC in 1959 but was exiled soon after, was the writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, who wrote the script for The Lost City, which was subsequently directed by Cuban American actor and director Andy Garcia. In the script, Infante obliquely captures the nostalgia for the beginning of the revolutionary society: “I love beginnings. Nothing’s happened yet, anticipation is in the air, optimism.” U.S. popular culture readily exploits this era of Cuban history, “before Castro,” to indulge in the romance of revolution and its aura of possibility without acting on any of its political principles. Hollywood depicts prerevolutionary Cuba as a long-coveted place, the perfect colonial object shaped for and by U.S. desires. The longing in Cuban cinema in exile for the possible futures of its utopian homeland is very different from Hollywood’s longing for the foreclosed pleasures of a tourist utopia and other U.S. symbols of imperial status. The Hollywood cinematic memory of Cuba is limited to tourist imaginings, and these memories have largely shaped public attitudes and ideas about the island as a lost piece of the United States. Tourist nostalgia for Cuba is unencumbered by imperial guilt or culpability, though in Havana, Cuba, The Lost City, and Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights there is passing acknowledgment of the U.S. role in the events leading up to the revolution. The pleasurable spectacle of a tourist-made Havana overwhelms the less appealing forays into the negative impact of U.S. foreign policy on the island. Hollywood indulges in and refracts exiles’ longing for the forbidden island territory, yet without acknowledging the political realities of the island or its contested relationship to the United States. Instead, these films dramatize a love triangle that involves Cuban and U.S. intimacies and jealous competition. Lovers are gained and lost, and political events are eclipsed by the drama of characters mourning the loss of their Cuban lovers. Cuba was released exactly twenty years after the Cuban Revolution. The theatrical trailer announces the context and mood of the film concisely: “Cuba in the fifties: exotic, sensual, glamorous, dangerous. Cuba in the fifties: it was open to everything and nothing would ever change it, short of revolution.” Sean Connery, already known for his role as James Bond, is a British mercenary agent, Robert Dapes, on a covert mission to Havana for the Batista government. The film seems to pay tacit homage to another film about a British secret agent in prerevolutionary Cuba, Our Man in Havana (1959)—which, unlike fi lms produced after 1959, was filmed in Havana. In Cuba, Dapes searches for political dissidents,

Fojas-final.indb 71

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 72 •

Islands of Empire

Robert Dapes (Sean Connery) and Alejandra Pulido (Brooke Adams) in Cuba (1979).

but as he gets deeper into the mission, his priorities shift, leaving him in a moral quandary: continue to aid and abet the corrupt Batista government or follow his conscience. His decision is simplified by the appearance of an old flame and Cuban native, Alejandra, or Alex (Brooke Adams), who has (weak) ties to the revolutionary movement. More importantly, Alejandra is a lost love whom Dapes gains and loses again— she is willing to have an affair with him, but chooses to remain with her husband in Cuba after the fall of Batista. Dapes’s relationship with Alex allegorizes the attainment and loss of Cuba experienced by U.S. audiences of this and similar films.

Fojas-final.indb 72

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Imper ial Gr ief

• 73 •

The simple title of the film indicates the loaded meaning attached to “Cuba” in the 1970s. Cuba was the signifier and beacon of radical change and resistance to capitalism and all its ills. The policy of containing communism at all costs led the United States into war efforts that were eventually exposed as misguided, morally questionable, and fiscally irresponsible. The 1970s were a time of social, economic, and political instability; interest rates were at an all-time high, threatening inflation and recession, and unemployment rates were rising. The political movements of the 1960s, spurred by optimism, had lapsed into critical cynicism about the decline of the United States and its ideals. The general mood of cynicism and despair about economic collapse, social inequities, and government failures—Watergate, Vietnam, stagflation, the oil embargo—opened up a space for popular-culture reflections on social and political issues. The 1970s was the era of urban situation comedies such as All in the Family (1971–1979) and Chico and the Man (1974–1978), which examined the conflict between the conservative older generation and the younger, radicalized (and racialized), liberal, post-1960s generation. Critical popular films such as Easy Rider (1969), Chinatown (1974), and Taxi Driver (1976) paved the way for fi lms that questioned U.S. character and identity. Cuba partakes of this cultural mood of self-examination, but deflects it onto the character of the Bond-inspired British mercenary. The film indicts U.S. chauvinism several ways, including through the characters of Gutman (Jack Weston) and the fumbling auditors sent by Washington, as well as by framing a fondness for U.S. popular culture as a symptom of the decadence of the Cuban elite. In the 1970s there was a trend in the Americas of breaking ranks with Washington by opening relations with Cuba. Mexico, it should be noted, never broke ties to Cuba. In Chile, President Eduardo Frei resumed trade relations with Cuba, and his successor, Salvador Allende, opened diplomatic ties with Castro; but all relations were severed again by Augusto Pinochet in 1973. By the mid-1970s Cuba had reestablished relations with Argentina, Panama, Venezuela, and Colombia.22 In 1979, the year that Cuba was released, the Sandinistas concluded a successful revolution in Nicaragua. After their victory in July, the leaders promptly joined Castro in Cuba for the 26th of July celebrations.23 Another nation had broken the yoke to the United States and shifted its alliance to Cuba and the Soviets, putting Washington on full security alert. While Washington swung right, Hollywood films and U.S. media culture were caught up in a moment of liberal critique of U.S. domestic and foreign

Fojas-final.indb 73

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 74 • Islands of Empire

Dapes, Gutman (Jack Weston), and Alejandra being detained by the “rebels in the hills,” or Castro’s forces.

policies. Cuba was released during this period of sweeping changes and self-reflexive questioning about the U.S. role in the world. Cuba is the most critical of the nostalgic films that take place on the cusp of the revolutionary victory. Cuba opens with a Bond-like character, Robert Dapes, carefully studying a slim file marked “Cuba.” He is dressed in a crisp and clean light brown suit. Seated just behind him, in sharp contrast, is a pragmatic and materialistic “ugly American”; reaching for a pen, he finds that the ink has spilled and stained his shirt.24 The soiled American, Larry Gutman, is headed to Havana to seal a business deal that will continue the economic exploitation of Cuban business enabled by the Batista government. From the beginning, he is marked by the stain of his “Americanism,” and each time he appears, he accrues another mark against him— he is shown exploiting the sex trade, brokering crooked business deals, and mistreating Cubans in the service industry. He is nothing like the dapper Dapes, and in keeping with the tacit expectations created by the narrative, Dapes achieves redemption as a “good” character while Gutman does not. Cuba is unique for its contrasting of national representations and

Fojas-final.indb 74

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Imper ial Gr ief

• 75 •

roles, juxtaposing depictions of the cosmopolitan British national, Dapes, to those of the unsavory U.S. character, Gutman. Dapes is an intelligence officer, and Gutman, a businessman, is the incarnation of crass materialism. He proudly announces, “I can always talk money”—an admission that concisely represents the U.S. private interests governing the island. Gutman finds easy kinship with prostitutes, who share his cold view of human relations and likewise quantify time as money; both represent the role of U.S. capital in Cuba. In a speech to the UN General Assembly in 1960, Castro asserted, “Since imperialism has lost all hope of winning us over, they should recognize the fact that imperialist finance capital is itself a prostitute that cannot seduce us.”25 In Cuba, the British openly support Batista, while Washington, in an about-face, imposes an arms embargo on the dictator, whom it installed in office. In the eyes of the Cuban state, British intelligence is described as the best that “money can buy.” By making the British responsible for failing to undermine the revolution, the film lets Washington off the hook while tacitly suggesting U.S. sympathy for the aims of the revolution. The moral of the film is summarized concisely by Dapes in a conversation with a Batista military official: “You’ll only beat someone like Castro if you’re right”—implying that the British, not the Americans, were wrong. When General Bello (Martin Balsam) asks whether he, Dapes, thinks Castro is right, Dapes defers to public opinion: “Does Cuba think he’s right?” Cuba ends with actual footage of the victorious Castro at a massive rally in Havana. For the depiction of the U.S. businessman and the exalted ending of Castro’s victory, the film might be read as a pro-Castro story; but in its cartoonish and simplistic depiction of the insurrectionary forces, it might be deemed less than sympathetic to Castro. This position on the Cuban Revolution was not evident in similar Hollywood films that take place on the cusp of the revolution until the epic drama Che (2008), which shows Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s participation in the Cuban Revolution and his subsequent attempt to bring revolution to Bolivia. The overall sense of Cuba is that Castro’s victory was inevitable, so much so that even the finest British intelligence officers could not forestall it. It is, as Dapes suggests, something that the Batista government and the world (and the audience of the film) would have to acknowledge and accept. Cuba is both a political tale and a love story about a doomed marriage and star-crossed lovers—recalling the mood of longing in the Holly wood classic Casablanca (1942), which likewise takes place at a

Fojas-final.indb 75

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 76 • Islands of Empire

crucial historical juncture for a colonized people. The mood of Cuba is one of decline at the end of an era; there is an overwhelming sense of nostalgia for a past not yet past. Like Havana, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, and The Lost City, it surveys the glamour of tourist Havana in the 1950s, a city slowly being infiltrated by an insurrectionist army. The movement of loss is part of the unfolding of the narrative events, the place that was once the domain of the U.S. tourist begins to give way to the “rebels in the hills.” Although the story may be interpreted as proCastro or as offensive to the revolutionary Cuban state, it is a tale imbued with longing for the prerevolutionary past. One plotline involves a beautiful and wealthy couple, Juan (Chris Sarandon) and Alejandra Pulido, in a marriage doomed by infidelity. Juan is of a long-standing Cuban family that owns many lucrative industries: sugar, cigars, and rum, among others. The Pulidos are part of a class that is itself in decline and suffering from the decadence of excessive privilege and leisure. They are often dressed in pure white, the kind of clothes that connote luxury. The story obliquely takes aim at U.S. intervention by targeting the extension of soft power into the island, primarily through popular culture but also through economic investment—Gutman’s purpose is to buy companies below their market value. U.S. films and television shows, popular music, nightclub acts, and board games are signs of the decadence of upper-class Habaneros, who enjoy these things while their workers are busy around them. For instance, General Bello and his son, joined by Dapes, engage in a leisurely game of Monopoly, attempting, in mock-capitalist fashion, to buy up the most real estate in order to win. In other scenes, the Pulidos play tennis, military officers play golf, and members of the social and military elite gather at fancy dinners and nightclubs while those in the growing insurgency work in menial jobs associated with these activities and locales. U.S. popular culture infiltrates all levels of Cuban culture, but registers differently according to social class. When Juan Pulido’s factory-worker lover is fired by his wife, she sulks over dinner and a Hollywood western that shows cowboys savagely pursuing Native Americans—the scene exposes the racist and genocidal message of U.S. popular culture in a context where a similar, though less overt, form of colonial rule is in place. She lives in ramshackle housing that once was called the Hollywood Hotel, a place that has lost its luxury and appeal and now houses the poor. Everywhere in the story, the sense of elite decline is interwoven with the decadence and lack of relevance of Hollywood culture, which had been so dominant. For instance, the nightclub singer Miss Wonderly, who arrives di-

Fojas-final.indb 76

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Imper ial Gr ief

• 77 •

General Bello (Martin Balsam) and Dapes discussing the operation to “harass” Castro operatives over a game of Monopoly.

rect from “Hollywood,” has a haggard and overwrought appearance and fails to gather an audience. The overall sense is that the influence and soft power of U.S. popular culture, like the elite Cubans and the Batista forces, are in decline, making revolution inevitable. The story captures the last days of a dying class, as allegorized by the disintegration of the Pulido marriage. The young Pulido couple, like U.S. popular culture, has already lost the shine implied by their name (pulido, “polished”). Juan is introduced through his philandering with a female worker in his cigar factory, part of his long-standing habit of infidelity. In one scene, Alejandra and Juan, playing a game of doubles tennis on state grounds, are guarded on all sides by bored military personnel, most of them Afro-Cuban. The scene is intercut with that of a cockfight taking place in a space adjacent to the tennis grounds. The tennis sequence, with its racialized class dynamics, is devoid of tension, yet by splicing it with shots of a cockfight—evocative of competition as a fight to the death—the imminent demise of the elite class is foretold. The tennis court is framed by a small window in the room where the cockfight occurs, indicating the proximity of the events. Dapes, taking a tour of the grounds, sees his old flame Alejandra from the small window,

Fojas-final.indb 77

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 78 • Islands of Empire

bringing the two spaces into visual conversation. He quickly descends to the court to make his presence known to Alejandra. Besides interrupting the tennis game, this is the moment when the inevitability of the shift in state power begins to have traction in the story. The musical anthem of the film is cued, eliciting a mood of nostalgia and lost love—evoked through the plucking of a single acoustic guitar in a mournfully slow melodic tune. The appearance of Dapes shifts the dynamics of the Pulidos’ marriage and signals its demise—and by implication, the demise of the class they represent. Cuba, like other films about the island, is part of the social and cultural processes of mourning as a response to the loss of an extremity of the United States, a sun-drenched southerly piece of the U.S. corpus. Hollywood generates the narratives of these social mourning rites, so it is no accident that each of the films under discussion thematizes loss and longing and takes place against the backdrop of a bygone era in a former piece of the U.S. tourist imaginary. The film ends with actual footage of Castro’s victory march on Havana. The overwhelming mood is that of a new era of long-sought independence. This is dramatically conveyed in the relationship between Dapes and Alejandra. Dapes imperiously demands that Alejandra leave Cuba with him, hoping to save her from the revolution and her failing marriage. Yet when she refuses to leave her husband and the island, we realize that she, like Cuba, is asserting her sovereignty. Clutching a ticket she will not redeem, Alejandra leaves Dapes waiting for her at the airport. This is a familiar scene, repeated in Havana and The Lost City; it initiates the process of mourning, for a romantic relationship and, in the metanarrative, for the U.S. relationship to Cuba.

Casino Capitalism Havana (1990) is remarkably like its predecessor Cuba. The title is a simple place-name that signifies a complex set of powerful ideas. Many critics have noted the similarities between the films, yet there are a couple of significant differences. For one, the story of loss and longing in Havana is allegorized and dramatized by gambling. Gambling in U.S. culture has often been deemed a vice to be relegated to locales offshore, beyond the border, or in the middle of the desert. But gambling is also an apt metaphor for the workings of late capitalism—a rapid series of shortterm investments with the potential for high profits and losses—and its

Fojas-final.indb 78

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Imper ial Gr ief

• 79 •

boom-and-bust cycles. The entire casino atmosphere of Havana is attributed to its foreign players, who stand to gain the most from the games of chance. And this form of rapacious capitalism is the main target of the revolution. The film opens with the internal narration of the main protagonist, Jack Weil (Robert Redford), a U.S. gambler who reflects on his special relationship to Havana and its place among sites in his memory: “I’ve been a lot of places since Pearl Harbor. I like something about every one of them, even Vegas. But there’s only one city I miss.” The narration sets the mournful tone of the story, since this city, Havana, is the only place on his list to which he cannot return. This sentiment is sealed at the end of the film, when this narration continues and Jack, from the shores of South Florida, ponders the city where he left his lost love. Jack continues his opening narration: “This was 1958, and we weren’t paying attention to the rebels in the hills. All we knew about Havana was the lights on the Prado never went out and you had a damn good chance of having the time of your life.” The narration foregrounds the language of chance against images of Jack throwing his cards on a table, which he will do both literally and figuratively in the story to present a portrait of U.S. transparency and integrity. Like Cuba, Havana centers on a married couple troubled by infidelity; yet Havana’s couple is on the other side of the revolution, working for Castro. Though from the elite classes like the Pulidos, the Durans are major operatives in the Cuban Revolution. The story misses an opportunity for a major tie-in with the casinos and U.S.-led capitalism, which, to illustrate a point, Arturo Duran—played by the Puerto Rican actor Raúl Julia—associates with “fairness” as he explains to Jack how, outside the casinos, the rest of the society is “unfair.” Though Havana seems to advance a familiar plot about a love triangle set against the backdrop of revolution, the effect of the narrative development is completely different. Jack is a typical U.S. adventurer looking for sun, women, and easy money in the Havana casinos. A little more than a tourist, he is a wanderer who owns a modest apartment in Havana that he uses as a temporary winter retreat. He makes clear his utter lack of interest in politics, even in the face of the insurrections happening all around him and the violence of Batista’s security forces. His objectives in the story are all self-interested; though, fortuitously, satisfying his desires helps advance the revolution. From the start, Jack sets his sights on Roberta Duran (Lena Olin), not knowing that she is a revolutionary and the wife of a major revolu-

Fojas-final.indb 79

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 80 •

Islands of Empire

tionary leader—a doctor and confidant of Fidel Castro modeled on Che. When he discovers that she is married, the sense of loss pervading the story is finally given a narrative object and context. The story focuses on his attempt to recuperate Roberta (and let her go) and to win the biggest card game of prelapsarian Havana. By succeeding on one of these fronts, saving Roberta’s life, he inadvertently advances the revolution, which, in turn, interrupts the big game. Of course, Jack is deemed the big winner in the story. Through his relationship with Roberta, he learns empathy and altruism, making him the ideal U.S. imperial hero, one who is as enterprising as he is heartwarming. The love story is the site of revolution, not the other way around. That is, the revolution is not just a romantic backdrop for heroic Americans, as it often is in Hollywood fi lms and other media representations about Latin American revolutions. An example can be found in the confused politics surrounding the Nicaraguan revolution in Under Fire, released the same year as Havana. In Hollywood depictions of revolutions, typically, romantic liberal U.S. heroes “take the revolution out of the hands of revolutionaries.” (Sam Sarkesian, a U.S. Special Forces veteran, used this phrase in 1972 to describe counterinsurgency tactics in Southeast Asia; the idea originated in a 1923 book by Arthur Moeller van den Bruck, a German historian from whom the Nazis borrowed many ideas.)26 The Hollywood heroes of Under Fire are posited as protorevolutionaries without whom the revolution would not have reached its successful conclusion. The protagonist, a U.S. photojournalist, “doesn’t take sides,” but by the end, having undergone a moral (not political) transformation, he is advancing the revolution. In Havana, Jack undergoes the same type of transformation; his moral code is activated by his romantic love for Roberta, not by the political events around him. His love for her inspires him to save her life and, eventually, to allow her to return to her husband and the revolution. Yet he continues to assert his personal sovereignty and right to pursue self-interest. Initially, he is a gambler with a “weakness for beautiful women,” yet his desires are channeled to aid the revolution. In this way, the revolution remains with the revolutionaries, but the force of the narrative is driven by the lovers. Individual love relationships, according to Havana, are the main incentive for altruistic action, and that form of self-interest yields the desired result: change. Thus, the love story is an embodied and affective performance of Adam Smith’s discussion of the natural order of the market: self-interest and profit seeking eventually serve the social good.

Fojas-final.indb 80

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Imper ial Gr ief

• 81 •

Jack’s very American apolitical stance makes him a fascinating outpost in the midst of violent political events. Yet his continual assertion of a lack of political sensibility obscures the political implications of his actions. He is a perfect instantiation of the U.S. way of life, a market-driven form of self-interest and profit seeking. In fact, Jack’s natural habitat, the casino, is a metaphor for the form of U.S.-led capitalism that gained ground in the late 1980s, during the era when the fi lm was produced. Susan Strange, in a book contemporary with the release of the film, likens the entire Western financial system to a casino. It is no secret that one of Castro’s objectives was to rid Havana of casinos and the system they symbolized. Strange finds that by the 1970s, the rationality of the Western financial system had been replaced by “luck.” Chance or luck subsequently replaced the core U.S. values of hard work, skill, and thrift.27 The shift to reliance on luck causes “a decline in ethical values”: “Luck and chance are antithetical to the values around the American Dream.”28 By the 1980s, traditional U.S. economic values were eroding; ironically, those same values were defined against imperial tropical subjects who, as discussed earlier, were deemed lazy, decadent, and self-indulgent. Yet late capitalism—marked by heightened consumer spending, easy credit, and radical capital flexibility and adaptability—seemed to promise rapid wealth and easy success. This complex stage in the life cycle of capitalism revised the definition of the American Dream. The film exhibits an imperial U.S. double standard. Laziness, when embodied by Anglo characters, is congruent with U.S. economic principles and is thus coded as a virtue. Yet the lassitude of the Cuban middle classes is a moral target in these films. Their political inertness and indifference is defined negatively, whereas, paradoxically, Jack’s apolitical attitude is depicted as having the potential to become political action. In Havana, Jack’s Cuban sidekick, the journalist Julio Ramos (Tony Plana), jokes that he was going to join Fidel in the mountains but heard that “you have to bring your own gun,” so he is “going to Miami instead.” Julio calls this “the tragedy of the Cuban middle class”: being “paralyzed by self-doubt and intellectuality” and by wanting to be so much like Americans but knowing that Cubans need to be themselves. This is a clear reference to the popular film Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), which documents the tragedy of Cuban middle-class decadence, solipsism, and subsequent inability to take action. In Havana, Jack acts, initially out of pure self-interest; he takes risks to save the life of the revolutionary couple and inadvertently secures the successful outcome of the revolution. He “takes the revolution out of the hands of the revolutionaries” and single-

Fojas-final.indb 81

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 82 • Islands of Empire

handedly secures its objectives—typical for Hollywood and Washington co-optations of revolutionary struggle. Vices that would negatively define any Cuban in the story—drink, women, gambling—are recast as the very things that compel Jack to save two lives and, consequently, the life of the revolution. Inspired by love for a woman, he works the casino and the card table in order to subvert the violent repression of a police state. The casino is the crucible of Jack’s revolutionary action, the place where he makes the connections and earns the profits to fund his endeavors. For instance, he wagers against the chief of police in order to gain information about the Durans. Unlike the Cuban middle class, Jack is redeemed through his vices. He intends to buy Arturo Duran’s freedom with money won in a high-stakes poker game, but since the game falls on the night Batista flees Cuba, all bets are off. Instead, he pays for Arturo with a diamond that was surgically implanted in his arm. His sacrifice ensures Arturo’s release, which reinvigorates the revolution and enables its success, suggesting that the outcome of the revolution was a result of the selfless actions of a U.S. gambler. Havana spectacularly depicts Castro’s victory through the ruin of the casinos. The destruction of gaming is a source of some sadness; the gentlemanly game, with its rules and order—according to the revolutionary leader Arturo Duran—allegorizes the fall of capitalism and its “invisible hand.” As Jack and Volpi (Alan Arkin), the casino owner, watch mournfully, rioters and looters savagely destroy the civilized refuge of gaming and leisure culture. The razing of the casino is a sad occasion because it signals the end of tourist Havana. Like other Hollywood films set during this era, Havana reflects painfully upon the finitude and foreclosure of U.S. intimacy with Havana. The realities of the revolution—the fall of Batista and the victory of Castro—are eclipsed by romantic relationships among the characters. The revolution becomes the event that divides lovers. Jack must leave Cuba immediately and thus part from Roberta. The story ends some years later, in 1963, with Jack reflecting nostalgically on his affair with Roberta and the city where it took place. He drives down to Key West. While pondering the waters along the shore, he offers a final, mournful narration: I do this sometimes, drive down from Miami. It isn’t that I expect her. The ferry doesn’t run anymore. But it happens sometimes. I see a boat

Fojas-final.indb 82

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Imper ial Gr ief

• 83 •

offshore and something goes faster in me. Hope, I guess. What the hell, Fidel Castro is on the Jack Paar show. So anything can happen. . . . It’s a new decade. Things are different. We got our own kind of revolution going. I’m doing OK these days. I’m way ahead, but it’s not the same. I sit with my back to the wall, watch the entrants. You never know who’s gonna walk in. Somebody blown off course. This is hurricane country.

The narration establishes Jack as a romantic dreamer whose apolitical views are a consequence of his idealism. He continues to hope, against the realities evident in the era of the film’s release, that perhaps change in Cuba—signaled by the appearance of Castro on the Paar show—will send Roberta back to him. Instead, the nostalgia associated with prerevolutionary Cuba, which opens the story, persists beyond the conclusion of the story and maintains the audience’s desire for more tales, such as Lost City and Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, about the same era. Like Havana, The Lost City begins on a mournful note that persists throughout the story. It opens on the streets of Havana with a man playing a sad song on his trumpet within a montage of images that includes the nighttime skyline of Havana and a murder by revolutionary forces. The next scene defuses the tension created by the murder with an entertaining dance and musical act in El Trópico, described as “the most famous nightclub in the world.” The narrative mood and rhythm are set. The opening establishes the ominous, negative meanings attached to the revolution, along with a nostalgic framing of the popular-culture venues sacrificed by the political events of 1959. The nightclub, the gravitational center of the story, is owned by Fico Fellove (Andy Garcia), who is part of a well-heeled Cuban family. The Felloves appear in the opening scene as they are enjoying a night out at El Trópico; in fact, this is the last time the cohesive family gathers together before being torn asunder by the political sea change of the late 1950s. In The Lost City, each Fellove suffers death or exile—or worse yet, within the logic of the story, becomes a member of the revolutionary forces and carries out their callous operations against the family. The Lost City goes further than other films of the same genre by incorporating the audiovisual pleasures of tourist Havana in spectacular scenes of song and dance that are typical of musicals. The music and story line together generate a pervasive mood of longing and yearning that mingles Cuban-exile nostalgia with U.S.-tourist nostalgia. The Lost City focuses on two aspects of Cuban culture in the 1950s that remain

Fojas-final.indb 83

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 84 •

Islands of Empire

fi xed in the U.S. imagination: music and dance. The two forms of entertainment signal and summon nostalgia for the “lost city” of Havana. This story is the most overtly political—or anti-Castro—of the four nostalgic films of this chapter, offering entire scenes of debate about Cuban politics rather than, as in Cuba, Havana, and Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, cursory and oblique references to the “insurrection in the hills.” The Lost City seems to fit nicely into the nostalgic register created by Cuba and Havana, but in this case, exiled Cuban artists engineered the film’s story line and visual narrative. Yet the basic story is very much like that of Cuba and Havana: a love triangle between two men and the woman they both love. Her role reductively allegorizes the nation, and the love affair allegorizes the arc of love and loss of Havana. The reality of this loss is figured in the death of one or more of the characters, and those deaths initiate the dramatic process of mourning. The Lost City establishes its meaning in the title, referring to Havana as a city lost to exiled Cubans and U.S. tourists. The exiled novelist (and former supporter of the revolution) Guillermo Cabrera Infante wrote the script, and the visual and acoustic flourishes were styled by the director and protagonist, the Cuban exile Andy Garcia. The visual story of The Lost City is a steady cadence of political scenes tempered and eclipsed by musical performances. When characters discuss the political events of the day, the audience is compensated with pleasurable song-and-dance routines. Early in the story, the Fellove men meet to discuss the future of Cuba. Each family member represents a position. The father, a professor, and his brother represent a “dying class,” the politically conservative older generation, which espouses a politics of reform through democratic means. They demand that when the revolutionaries undertake any action, they do so as “patriots.” The spatial arrangement of this conference indicates the men’s political alignment—the political sphere is a strictly male domain. They form a loose circle, with the older generation seated on one side of the room and the younger sons on the other. Fico (Andy Garcia), the only one not espousing a position, stands outside the circle, mediating and refereeing the heated debate. When asked where he stands, he asserts, “Right here with my family.” The two younger sons are involved with different factions of the revolutionary forces. The son who eventually joins Castro’s 26th of July Movement espouses a politics of revolution through violent means, which makes him seem irrational and bloodthirsty. He asserts, “Batista must be killed.” His political position is rendered questionable, since the audience knows that the revolution took place without the death of Ba-

Fojas-final.indb 84

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Imper ial Gr ief

• 85 •

tista. For enduring this long political discussion, the audience is treated to more musical performance. In The Lost City, the musical performances are more than just a reprieve from the irksome social commentary. The song-and-dance numbers increasingly become a counterpoint to the overt political drama. The story renders overt political discourse and actions unpleasant in contrast with the pleasure of the nightclub acts. In fact, the nightclub is a refuge from the unrest taking place beyond its walls. Music offers a reprieve from the labors of revolution until it, like Fico, is threatened by it. After the revolution, agents of the state demand that Fico replace the pleasurable entertainment line-up with ideological vehicles of the revolution. In the end, it is music and dance, as much as people, that must be salvaged and protected from the revolution. Along with Fico, much of the Cuban entertainment complex is exiled to the United States. The Lost City is the only story under discussion to specify the outcome of the revolution as a purely negative repression of everything pleasurable. It identifies the revolution as a traumatic rupture that ruined everything good in tourist Havana. Fico’s longstanding love for his brother’s wife, Aurora, contributes to the overall mood of longing in the story. When the brother dies, Fico becomes her caretaker and, eventually, her lover. He longed for her for so many years that he had renounced love and, like Jack in Havana, drifted from woman to woman. As in Havana and Cuba, the grieving wife, while in the protective care of the protagonist, quickly mourns her husband and falls in love with her caretaker. Each story offers a curious outcome of grief. All the female characters who grieve the (real or imagined) loss of their husbands immediately shift their attentions to characters originating from or aligned with the United States. In Havana and The Lost City, Batista forces murder Arturo Duran and Luis Fellove. Although Duran’s murder is staged, Bobby mourns her husband all the same. In Cuba, Alejandra longs for her perpetually philandering husband, who is killed at the end of the story by a young revolutionary, the brother of one of his conquests. In all three cases, the wives direct the passions of grief or longing toward a foreign protagonist; they do not, as great heroines did before them—Antigone, for example—turn their grief into outrage or reinvigorated passion for revolution. They simply fall in love with U.S.-aligned characters. This redirection of their formerly revolutionary energies serves the metanarrative purpose of enabling U.S. audiences to move on from an obsession with all things Cuban and to turn that energy back toward their own country. Rather than being seen

Fojas-final.indb 85

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 86 •

Islands of Empire

as culpable or as part of the problem of U.S. economic, cultural, and political interventions in the Americas, U.S. characters are recast as heroes and enablers of social change. As the revolution comes to pass, Aurora becomes more drawn to it than to Fico. Fico offers Aurora a way out of Cuba, an exit visa that she does not take; like the female love interests in Cuba and Havana, she leaves him as he is about to depart, dooming their romance. The romantic love story shifts markedly to one of longing and melancholy when Fico exiles himself to New York City. Recalling the mood of the film El Super (1979), codirected by the Cuban exile Leon Ichaso, about a Cuban couple’s exile in New York City, Fico’s life in the United States is less than ideal.29 He endures a cold climate and lives in a single room. He supports himself by washing dishes in a nightclub—a reminder of the nightclub that he owned in Havana and of how far he has fallen. But the rest of the story follows a typical Hollywood fantasy of the American Dream. Despite his miserable conditions, Fico writes a Broadway play whose success, we assume, will catapult him back into the lifestyle he enjoyed in his homeland. Thus, from lost love—of a woman and his homeland— he achieves redemption in the United States, making the loss of Havana more easily endured. The Lost City ultimately derides the revolution and offers redemption for the middle-class Cubans who, like Sergio in Memories of Underdevelopment, were left behind and bewildered by the political changes ushered in by the revolution. The middle-class position, symbolized by the patriarchs of the Fellove family, of stasis and inaction is justified as the only viable political position. In The Lost City, the inability to act is explained as a chess move that is “no move at all,” but a position in which “each player would obtain a worse result if it were his turn to move” than if it were not. Thus, all one has to do is to act accordingly, which means “do not act at all.” In that way, Fico’s position of detachment and inaction is privileged as the right one. By not acting, by not doing anything to change his conditions, he is engaging in a political act. He does not act against the system, but chooses exile to the United States. Exile becomes recuperated as a political act, no longer merely an escape from or avoidance of the political realities of postrevolutionary Cuba. And the United States, like the nightclub, is a welcome refuge. Cuba, Havana, and The Lost City are stories of lovers from opposite sides of the revolution within a narrative of loss, longing, and redemption. U.S. media representations of Cuba, which treat Havana as a synecdoche of Cuba, share common threads. Longing—for a woman or

Fojas-final.indb 86

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Imper ial Gr ief

• 87 •

for Havana—is redirected to new endeavors or sites of interest. Since attempts to oust or assassinate Castro, like the diplomatic efforts to deal with the Cuban “problem,” failed, the United States has been forced to recognize that Cuba is not and perhaps will never again be within the U.S. sphere of influence. These films engage the yearning for a lost tourist paradise even as they help audiences process this loss and move on.

Unlikely Sequel: Dirty Dancing in Havana Before he was the host of National Public Radio’s Wait Wait .  .  . Don’t Tell Me!, Peter Sagal was a playwright. In the 1990s, he was approached by Quentin Tarantino’s producer, Lawrence Bender, to write a film script based on the experiences of his colleague Joanne Jansen as a fifteen-year-old in Cuba just before the revolution. He decided to write a script called Cuba Mine about a teenage girl’s involvement with a young Cuban revolutionary. The story revolves around two main characters: Maria, a rebellious teenager, and her romantic interest, Josefo, a revolutionary. Sagal’s script eventually became Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, a movie that, he claims, retains not a single line of the dialogue he wrote. As the script about a naive girl’s involvement with a slightly dangerous guy went through many drafts, the story began to sound much like the plot of Dirty Dancing. The script was shelved until the early 2000s, when it was, in fact, redeveloped as part of the Dirty Dancing franchise.30 Sagal’s version was full of historical context and discussions of unfolding political events, which were all but removed from the final product. Even more than in The Lost City, passing references to the revolution are eclipsed by a dance-and-song-based love story that revels in the pleasures of tourist-made Havana. Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights opens with a skyline view of Havana that morphs into a vintage postcard welcoming tourists to Havana. That image is followed by a montage of other such images framed by a collage of postcards. The voice-over narrator and protagonist, Katey Miller (Romola Garai), states that it is November 1958, her senior year of high school, and her family is decamping to Havana. Her father, on assignment with Ford, takes the family to live in a luxury hotel with other U.S. families. As the narration provides background information, Katey is shown as a figure in a postcard that reads “Visit the isle of romance,” presaging what will take place in the story. The title sequence ends with a shot of a throng of writhing and dancing bodies and the announcement

Fojas-final.indb 87

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 88 •

Islands of Empire

that the story is “based on true events.” Given the tone of the title sequence, the “true events” clearly refer to Katey’s romance and not to the revolution, which has a minor supporting role. Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights is vastly different from other stories set during the same era. For one, it has lower narrative ambitions than Cuba, Havana, or The Lost City. Prerevolutionary Cuba serves only as a romantic backdrop for its teenage characters. The story follows the basic pattern of its forebear, Dirty Dancing: a dancer learns unconventional moves from a mentor and love interest, Javier (Diego Luna), who trains her in more than just dance. Havana and Cubans are transitional objects that facilitate Katey’s transformation from a bookish and repressed teenager to a self-possessed and independent woman. With Javier’s help, she learns to navigate Havana, which is depicted as a dangerous environment full of lascivious and leering men and impromptu erotic dance routines. The nostalgia elicited by the story is less for Havana before Castro than for the end of adolescence and the innocence of youth. Yet the era of innocence is also linked with that of open access to the tourist playground of Havana, when the tourist experience of Havana was fun and carefree. The story, which takes place in the tourist hotel, foregrounds the contact and tension between Anglo-American visitors and local workers in the hotel. In fact, the major focus of the story is not revolutionary politics but class politics as played out between Americans and Cuban workers. The crux of the critique is of the injustice of hotel policies forbidding workers to associate with guests. The denigration of the workers is racialized by the Americans, evident in a scene in which Javier’s clumsiness prompts a guest to call him a “spic.” Katey jumps to his defense; she is a “good American” who represents the liberal democratic potential of the U.S. way of life. When Javier loses his job for cavorting with her, she makes it her mission to work with him to win a major dance competition. She is single-minded about winning, even though her ambition clearly exceeds her skills—she lacks rhythm and fluidity of movement. Yet in a dramatic display of imperial savvy, she knows how to make use of her southern neighbor, Javier, to leverage her own success. Her desires are never deemed self-interested or imperious; rather, the pair are engaged in a mutually beneficial relationship and an equal cultural partnership—symbolized by the hybrid style of dance known as Latin ballroom. Katey’s desire to win the competition is veiled by her dramatic gesture of benevolence: she wants to help Javier regain his lost income. But success in the competition would yield an even greater prize for Ja-

Fojas-final.indb 88

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Imper ial Gr ief

• 89 •

vier. Along with the cash prize of five thousand dollars, the winners “get to go to America” and, it is suggested, pursue the biggest possible global prize, the American Dream. As in Havana, the aim of Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights is to win a competition or game whose outcome is disrupted by the revolution. Like the big poker game in Havana, the dance competition takes place on New Year’s Eve, when Batista flees the island and Castro’s supporters take to the streets. In each film, the outcome of the competition is rendered unimportant in the face of other, more pressing concerns that have less to do with the social revolution than the individual transformation of each protagonist. In Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, the real change belongs to Katey, who becomes a competent dancer, a woman, and a liberal and altruistic protector of the less fortunate. Her moral transformation is the key to the story; she becomes an imperial protagonist par excellence. Javier, on the other hand, changes little. He does not win the competition and chooses to stay behind, claiming he wanted to leave only to escape Batista. The ending works perhaps to stave off criticism about laxity regarding Cuban immigration. The story almost ends on a mournful note, with the lovers divided by the revolution. But rather than reflect on the political realities of such an ending, the film closes with a big dance party at which all characters in the fi lm—members of both families—dance away the night before the departure of the Americans. The final scene glosses over all the potential upset caused by the revolution and, like The Lost City, lulls the viewer with spectacular dance scenes. Of the films in this chapter, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights is the most apathetic about the Cuban Revolution. But the story is in keeping with the Hollywood image embargo on the gains made by the revolution. These films support the ideology of the moral superiority of a single heroic character who achieves redemption and success in the face of crumbling social conditions. In Cuba, Dapes, the British agent, is contrasted with a mercenary and materialistic American. The overall message of the film is one of sympathy for the revolution, which would not have been as well received had the protagonist been from the United States. Instead, the story line fits with a persistent American desire to come to terms with the loss of Cuba. The Lost City and Havana—and, to a certain extent, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights—work through American mourning for Cuba in the separation of each protagonist from the Cuban object of their desires. Each fi lm then moves on to another, more suitable site by relocating its protagonist to some part of the United

Fojas-final.indb 89

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Al Pacino as Tony Montana, a ruthless Cuban “political refugee” turned drug kingpin in Scarface.

Detectives Marcus Burnett (Martin Lawrence) and Mike Lowrey (Will Smith) in Bad Boys II.

Fojas-final.indb 90

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Imper ial Gr ief

• 91 •

Lowrey and Burnett at a crime scene.

States: New York, Las Vegas, Miami, or California. These stories of longing and lost love nourish viewers’ desires to indulge in these bittersweet feelings. Yet the energies of these emotions become productively engaged in some new pursuit and attached to a new site while Cuba remains frozen in the past. Popular media representations of present-day Cuba offer only small glimpses into its social life; these glimpses, as in Miami Vice, show a Havana that is much like the city of these nostalgic narratives, its appeal limited to entertainment venues, sun, sand, and beautiful women. Cuba, in the U.S. imaginary, is an island overlaid with fantasy. An island outside time, infused with U.S. fantasies, it is a place where the seemingly impossible might happen. While Cuba was a tourist destination before 1959, it gained a sinister reputation after the revolution. It became an enemy state, a monstrous entity whose name could not be spoken in the entertainment media. Sentiments toward Cuba, a repressed and repudiated object, and Cubans intensified and found negative expression in popular culture. Cuba alone, of all U.S. insular holdings, endured a deeply ambivalent role in the U.S. imaginary as a site of pleasures forbidden and exciting and as a nostalgic object of loss. Cuba, Havana, Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights, and The Lost City maintain Hollywood’s hesitation to show Cuban culture in the years following the world-

Fojas-final.indb 91

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 92 • Islands of Empire

changing events of 1959. But more significantly, they express deep nostalgia about prerevolutionary Cuba and ambivalence about the revolution. All these films mourn the loss of the Havana dominated by casinos, U.S. hotels, sex tourism, and beach holidays. In story lines that take place after the revolution, Cuba is depicted as the origin, not the playground, of the Mafia and related criminal types. Negative depictions of the island as a site of all things illicit are imbued with the vengeful passions that ensue from loss. This is evident in The Godfather: Part II (1974), Scarface (1983), Miami Vice (NBC, 1984–1989), and Bad Boys II (2003). U.S. media representations commingle postrevolutionary society and criminality as if they were one and the same. That narrative strategy deflects from Cuba’s political status and contested relationship to the United States and signals the definitive loss of the Cuban paradise of old. After the loss of Havana, Hollywood moved on, setting its sights and finding its audiovisual thrills on the island chain of Hawaiʻi. U.S. tourism to the Caribbean was rerouted to Puerto Rico. The rumba and mambo were replaced by Hawaiian music, with its slide guitars and ukuleles, and nightclub singers made room for Elvis and hula. The same sorts of beaches, tropical thrills, and exotic men and women awaited the tourists; though it took longer to get to Hawaiʻi than to Cuba, the tourist was met not with the irksome troubles of revolution, but with “the spirit of aloha.”

Fojas-final.indb 92

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Chapter Three

Paradise, Hawaiian Style Pop Tourism and the State of Hawaiʻi

It is said they [the Hawaiian Islands] will come in as a State some time. But they will not come in as a State unless they are fit to be a state. Senator George Frisbie Hoar, r egarding the an nex ation of Hawaiʻi, 1898

P

rincess Kaiulani (2010) opened across the United States without much critical or box-office success. In Hawaiʻi, the film was widely panned for its historical inaccuracies, use of a nonnative Hawaiian in the lead role, and melodramatic simplicity. The synopsis in the Honolulu Weekly summarizes its shortcomings concisely: “Its lack of character development, its strictly PG-rated sentiment and the insertion of fictitious romances is more reminiscent of Sunday afternoon on Lifetime Television. The real Kaʻiulani deserved better, both in life and in this movie.” Outrage over the film led to a spirited panel discussion on July 9, 2010, with some of the film’s producers—Jeffrey Au, Rick Galindez, and Roy Tjioe—the actress Leo Anderson Akana, the Bishop Museum archivist and Hawaiʻi popular-culture historian DeSoto Brown, and the Kanaka historian Nanette Napoleon, a distant relation of Sanford Dole’s hanai (adopted) daughter and also the organizer of the panel. The panel, which was not part of the promotional tour funded by the production company, was intended to educate the public about the film and put to rest questions about erroneous depictions of historical events and misguided casting choices. The panelists contextualized the film in the history of Hawaiʻi and its peoples, noting the film’s successes and failures in representation. For all its melodramatic features and a

Fojas-final.indb 93

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 94 •

Islands of Empire

story line built upon a fictional romance, it is the first fi lm to challenge the official story of the end of Hawaiian sovereignty. It is an exception to the endless mythologizing and commodification of Hawaiʻi and Hawaiians in popular culture. As a consequence of the mythologizing of Hawaiʻi, it is both the best and least known of the U.S. insular holdings. Pop culture locates Hawaiʻi as the origin of tiki culture, volcano sacrifices, friendly and happy natives, grass skirts, hula girls, and surfer boys, thereby helping install the symbolic coordinates of one of the largest U.S. tourist industries. These ideas and icons are supported by the mainland interpretation of aloha culture, embodied by the welcoming native offering up the bounties of Hawaiʻi to the weary traveler. The idea of the Hawaiian Islands and their golden bounty as fruit for the continental United States dates back to the imperial ventures of the annexationists. In fact, John Stevens, U.S. minister to Hawaiʻi, architect of the illegal overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani, and mastermind of the annexationists, likened Hawaiʻi to a fruit ready for the picking in his persuasive missive to the U.S. State Department: “The Hawaiian pear is now fully ripe and this is the golden hour for the United States to pluck it.”1 This language is key to the place of Hawaiʻi in the U.S. imaginary: a subject waiting passively to be subsumed into the imperial whole. As mentioned previously, similar language was used by John Quincy Adams in 1823 to describe Cuba as “an apple severed by the tempest from its native tree” and thus ready for the taking.2 None of the other colonies acquired in 1898, except Puerto Rico, held the same fascination for Americans nor elicited the same covetous gaze as Hawaiʻi and Cuba, and it is no coincidence that they became two sides of the same coin in the U.S. tourist imaginary. Guam, though groomed for tourism, never fully took hold in mass media as a tourist destination for Americans. For both islands, 1959 was a pivotal year: Cuba moved away from the colossus of the North through revolution, and Hawaiʻi was drawn inextricably to the imperial center through statehood. The waning of U.S. tourism to Havana refocused the tourist gaze elsewhere, and one of those places was the island chain of Hawaiʻi. The era just after Hawaiʻi’s entry into statehood was a key historical phase of the U.S. imperial mood. The full integration of Hawaiʻi into the Union more than compensated for the complete loss of Cuban affi liation and obeisance. Tourist relations between the United States and Cuba were tamped down in the 1950s in response to accounts of political unrest, and they soured completely in 1960 when the Cuban government nationalized all American-held property there.3 Tourists to the Carib-

Fojas-final.indb 94

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Par adise, Hawaiian Style

• 95 •

bean were rerouted to Puerto Rico; Hollywood film and media culture shifted its love affair with all things Cuban to Hawaiʻi. In popular culture, Hawaiʻi was not just a safe and stable tourist destination; the island archipelago presented a new U.S. frontier, one that brought expansive economic opportunities and an “exotic” escape from the workaday life of the mainland United States. It was also the only island in the U.S. imperial orbit to achieve statehood, to reach a level of political development deemed sufficient for assimilation into the national imaginary. Poststatehood Hollywood films set in Hawaiʻi were part of a discourse of celebration of a new era of U.S. hegemony, particularly after the loss in the Caribbean. A number of 1960s tourist features—Blue Hawaii (1961), Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961), Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962), Ride the Wild Surf (1964), Paradise, Hawaiian Style (1966), and Kona Coast (1968)—made Hawaiʻi visible as a site of redemption and imperial defiance; that is, where the newest state was brandished as a sign of U.S. superiority and the gold standard of colonial development. The playboy, beachboy, and surfer protagonists of these films—particularly Gidget and the characters played by Elvis Presley—are all part of rebellious youth subcultures dedicated to the pursuit of pleasure and leisure over conventional domestic interests. Yet these icons of defiant youth culture are framed not as a threat to the mainstream, but as representatives of the maverick spirit that is central to U.S. leadership acumen. Hawaiʻi is at the heart of these representations; of all the colonies, it was exceptional in its fulfi llment of the imperial narrative about mature capitalist development. Hawaiʻi was represented as a future model of the United States, a paradise of prosperity, security, and racial harmony. Prophesying this enduring image of the islands, President Dwight D. Eisenhower endorsed statehood for Hawaiʻi, calling it a place of harmony and integration where “East meets West” and “a unique example of a community that is a successful laboratory in human brotherhood.”4

Hydr a of Villainy: Tourism and Militarism Hawaiʻi boasts not just one of the largest tourist industries in the United States, but also the largest military installation in the nation as home to the U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), which has responsibility for more than half the surface of the earth. But these were not always the islands’ dominant institutions. Before World War II, sugar plantations had ruled them for almost a century. Following the war, sugar began to

Fojas-final.indb 95

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 96 •

Islands of Empire

lose its economic viability, gradually giving way to tourism and militarism.5 Yet these twin industries flourished partly as a result of industrial and political machinations designed to benefit the plantation economy. A key piece of legislation was crucial in this regard. The Reciprocity Treaty of 1875 removed U.S. tariffs on sugar, saving Hawaiian plantations from economic ruin and enabling a major expansion of the industry. For Ralph S. Kuykendall, a renowned and often Eurocentric historian of Hawaiʻi, and A. Grove Day, a compiler of imperial literature about the islands, a small clause in the treaty set the terms for the annexation of the islands and the eventual military build-up on them.6 Those developments, in turn, paved the way for the consolidation of tourism. Ratification of the treaty was dependent upon acceptance of a clause that demanded the island nation not enter into any similar treaties with other nations and that forbade the head of state, King Kalākaua, to “lease or otherwise dispose of . . . any port, harbor, or other territory in his dominions, or grant any special privilege or rights of use therein, to any other power, state, or government.”7 The duration of this agreement was seven years, after which it could be renewed or terminated by either party. The renewal was delayed for a few years, during which time a coterie of mostly U.S. businessmen and planters forced King Kalākaua to sign a new constitution at gunpoint. That document proved more favorable to U.S. economic interests and imperial ambitions. The constitution, called the “Bayonet Constitution,” gave the group of businessmen enough control over the king’s cabinet to guarantee approval of a revised Reciprocity Treaty in 1887. The new version contained an amendment that granted the U.S. exclusive rights to establish a coaling station at Pearl River Harbor (Pearl Harbor). Yet the U.S. never exercised the right.8 Rather, this key amendment was used to leverage U.S. control of the islands, in part, by forestalling possible encroachment by other nations’ colonial ambitions or commercial interests. The control of Pearl Harbor was the foot in the door that helped pry open the way to annexation just over ten years later, in 1898. By 1900, Hawaiʻi had become an incorporated territory—a status retroactively applied as a result of the decisions in the Insular Cases (1901– 1922)—and remained one for fift y-nine years. All that remained was to create or reform local institutions in order to make Hawaiʻi worthy of being a state in the Union, to domesticate the islands and shape them in the image of the mainland. Hawaiian ports were strategic for U.S. attainment (and then maintenance) of an insular empire in the Pacific. Military build-up occurred

Fojas-final.indb 96

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Par adise, Hawaiian Style

• 97 •

on the heels of annexation and continued steadily until World War I. Yet the military base on the island of Oʻahu did not achieve its present size or power until the vital shift in global power dynamics initiated by the bombing of Pearl Harbor during World War II. The attack on Pearl Harbor put a swift end to national debates about isolationism and interventionism and thrust the United States into a global war. The slogan used to unify and invigorate U.S. forces, “Remember Pearl Harbor!” echoed battle cries that arose after the Battle of the Alamo (“Remember the Alamo!”) and the attack on the battleship Maine in Cuban waters just before the outbreak of the Spanish-American War (“Remember the Maine!”). It should be noted that although the explosion onboard the Maine was attributed to Spanish aggression, it may have been caused by a boiler-room fire that ignited stored ammunition.9 This pretext for war with Spain was actually an impetus for a major land grab. For instance, Washington had been wavering about reversing the illegal annexation of Hawaiʻi, as attested by the Blount Report—Commissioner James H. Blount had found the overthrow of Queen Liliʻuokalani to be illegal, and he supported the restoration of the sovereign kingdom of Hawaiʻi—until the events of 1898 overrode all moral concerns.10 Hawaiʻi was a key node in the war, and the other islands became part of a larger strategic military defense plan. The vengeful exhortations to remember earlier conflicts implied a symbolic equivalence between the historical events to which they refer. The battle cries encouraged an attitude of vengeance and defiance at key historical moments of defeat, and were used as well to assert U.S. power. “Remember the Alamo!” became a rallying cry for Texian troops during later battles against Santa Ana, and “Remember Pearl Harbor!” was used to encourage enlistment and to drum up domestic support for U.S. involvement in the war. For Emily Rosenberg, the attack on Pearl Harbor has become a potent icon that returns again and again in popular culture during times of crisis, as could be seen particularly after the attacks of September 11, 2001.11 According to Jon Osorio, Pearl Harbor is a similar reminder for Native Hawaiians: it signifies the dependency of the local economy on the military and symbolizes both U.S. hegemony and Native Hawaiian dispossession.12 In fact, Ke Awa Lau o Puʻuloa, before it became “Pearl Harbor,” was a rich resource for Oʻahu, with thirty-six fishponds and many loʻi kalo, or taro patches. As the Pearl Harbor Naval Complex, it contains 749 contaminated sites and qualifies as a Superfund site because of the massive quantities of various kinds of pollutants released by the military

Fojas-final.indb 97

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 98 •

Islands of Empire

into the harbor, posing a major threat to the native communities that live in areas affected by the polluted waters.13 The idea that the United States is an accidental empire that never intended to police the world can be traced back to surprise attacks on U.S. soil. Pearl Harbor is a major organizing symbol of this imperial reluctance. As a site of vengeance, it was promulgated mostly by World War  II–era media, which in turn shaped popular-culture representations of the U.S.-aligned nations and territories in the Pacific, particularly the Philippines, Guam, and, of course, Hawaiʻi. Hollywood’s affair with the Philippines and Guam was shaped also by U.S. confrontations with the forces of the Japanese Empire. In the postwar period, the United States assumed the role of the “world’s policeman” as part of the Pax Americana. Ernest May describes this shift: “From 1945 on, we were no longer simply the ‘well-wishers’ to the world; we were its champions and vindication as well.”14 Thus rose the imperative for a massive expansion of military capability so that the United States could defy those who might challenge its power. The strategic insular colonies proved crucial to this venture as satellite posts from which to protect the continental U.S. and to develop and project its hegemonic force. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Hawaiʻi became the largest strategic base of U.S. war operations. In fact, the sudden influx of military personnel to wartime Oʻahu led to a major housing crunch in Honolulu and its environs. Military construction included new runways and new barracks, including the Schofield Barracks in central Oʻahu. The Royal Hawaiian hotel—the host of Gidget’s family in Gidget Goes Hawaiian— was completely taken over by the navy, becoming the “Royal Hawaiian Rest and Recreation Center” for the duration of the war.15 The built environment of the wartime infrastructure laid the groundwork for the consolidation of the military-industrial complex in Hawaiʻi, which enabled an expansion of the tourist industry after the war.16 Robert Allen, a major player in the consolidation of postwar Hawaiʻi tourism, cites three major entities responsible for the growth of the industry: airlines, travel agents, and megaresorts.17 Of course, these industries were promoted by mass marketing, consumerism, and popular culture. Airlines brought huge numbers of visitors to the islands in what Allen calls the “volume operation” of the Hawaiʻi visitor industry. While at the peak of its tourist flows between the wars, Havana drew the wealthy—movie stars and mob figures—Waikīkī, at its peak after statehood, afforded the typical middle-class traveler the luxuries and hospitality accorded celebrities and movie stars. Giant hotel chains began to

Fojas-final.indb 98

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Par adise, Hawaiian Style

• 99 •

Advertisement for a luxury cruise to the Hawaiian Islands.

take over in 1959 when the Matson shipping company sold the famous Royal Hawaiian Hotel to the Sheraton Corporation—in Gidget Goes Hawaiian, the iconic “Sheraton” sign is conspicuously placed in the hotel lobby. That same year marked the arrival of the first passenger jet flight to Honolulu, which cut flying time to the islands from the West Coast

Fojas-final.indb 99

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 100 •

Islands of Empire

Tourist postcard of Waikīkī, 1960s.

Tourist postcard of the Hilton Hawaiian Village, 1960s.

in half, to under six hours.18 In 1961, the Hilton Corporation bought the sprawling Hawaiian Village, renaming it the Hilton Hawaiian Village.19 The era of the big hotel-chain annexation of smaller independent hotels had begun. The hotel industry began to work in coordination with the airlines to provide a complete paradise holiday for mainland Americans.

Fojas-final.indb 100

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Pan Am holiday brochure depicting the joys of leisure and native service in Hawaiʻi.

Fojas-final.indb 101

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 102 •

Islands of Empire

By the late 1950s and early 1960s, tourism to Hawaiʻi had been bolstered by the statehood movement, the introduction of jetliners to replace the less reliable DC-6s and DC-7s, and the waning of travel ventures to other parts of the former U.S. insular empire. At the same time, the Hollywood studios delivered mass-media tourism through visual itineraries shaped by the likes of Elvis and Gidget.

State of Empire Today a direct flight to Hawaiʻi from the continental United States takes from five to twelve hours. In the early 1960s, during the first stage of the major rise of tourism to the islands, it could take two to three times as long by air, and up to a week on a Matson liner. Hawaiʻi seemed more distant and foreign than Cuba or Puerto Rico. When the Cuban Revolution put a crimp in travel to Havana, Puerto Rico became the new focus of travel in the region. But Hawaiʻi quickly superseded Puerto Rico in the U.S. imaginary and its popular-culture formations. The campaign for Hawaiʻi statehood changed the perception of the islands from a foreign and distant land to a domestic paradise. Statehood made the archipelago seem closer to home, and popular culture elicited a desire to visit the newest U.S. appendage. The Hawaii Statehood Commission, created in 1947, promoted and generated local support for the statehood movement through informational brochures, booklets, and leaflets about “every phase of Statehood.” In an ironic twist, the commission operated out of the Iʻolani Palace, the symbol of Native Hawaiian sovereignty, which statehood foreclosed. Statehood was resisted at the national level for years. Proposals were submitted to Congress in 1921, 1947, 1950, and 1953. They passed the House of Representatives but not the Senate, which considered Hawaiʻi unfit for statehood. No other potential state was more thoroughly or exhaustively investigated than Hawaiʻi, the record of which is collected in more than thirty congressional hearings and reports. As a noncontiguous area with a majority nonwhite population, Hawaiʻi aroused xenophobic fears and anxieties about potential disruption of the political status quo in Congress.20 In fact, to persuade opponents in Congress, proponents for statehood had to assuage anxieties about Hawaiʻi being an outpost of communist-controlled labor unions and a domain of the East Asian menace.21 Any remainder of such negative images was erased

Fojas-final.indb 102

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Par adise, Hawaiian Style

• 103 •

Hawaiʻi statehood brochure arguing for statehood and aimed at tourists.

by popular-culture depictions of the islands as the newest frontier of entrepreneurial capitalism and racial harmony. Popular culture celebrated statehood as a major sign of imperial prowess; Hawaiʻi was no longer an exotic foreign port, but an integral part of the United States. The islands would become a new cultural target and a lucrative multiplatform market. Numerous writers had weighed in on the virtues of the Hawaiian paradise for hundreds of years, but the average reader would have had difficulty accessing their works. Like travel writers who compiled facts, features, and fancies about the island empire in 1898, two enterprising University of Hawaiʻi English professors organized and compiled mostly Eurocentric and imperial-toned litera-

Fojas-final.indb 103

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 104 •

Islands of Empire

ture about Hawaiʻi. A. Grove Day and Carl Stroven, longtime collaborators, took the lead in compiling and introducing the available literature about the newest state in their volume A Hawaiian Reader, timed to appear in 1959. A. Grove Day (1904–1994), mentioned earlier in relation to his collaboration with Ralph Kuykendall, was a prolific scholar of Hawaiʻi. He sought to popularize writings about Hawaiʻi in order to increase tourism, which he believed would strengthen the statehood movement and deliver Hawaiʻi to its rightful place in the U.S. imaginary. Paul Lyon writes of how Day’s compiling and framing of the literature about Hawaiʻi authorized the Euro-American gaze upon the Pacific in a manner that was more in keeping with the ideological aims of the tourist industry than the critical spirit of intellectual and scholarly inquiry.22 James Michener, who had been writing mythologizing stories about the islands for years, endorsed the Day and Stroven collection of stories about the new “sister state” with a celebratory introduction: “It is wonderfully propitious that this book should reach the American public in the same season that Hawaii becomes an integral part of the United States, for we have all too long thought of these glamorous islands as a legendary paradise rather than as the maturing international society which they in fact are. This admirably timed book can thus serve as an introduction of Hawaii to its forty-nine sister states.”23 Michener might have been tacitly describing his own novel Hawaii, which was published in the same year, or his best-selling Rascals in Paradise (1957), cowritten with Day. He says as much later in the introduction: “I am constantly delighted when some apparent competitor turns out a fine book in a field that I am interested in, because that means that more people will probably want to read what I myself may later write on the same topic.”24 As a literary giant, Michener had a reputation equal to Day and Stroven’s for promoting the Pacific. Tales of the South Pacific (1947) became the basis of the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical South Pacific, which became a film of the same name in 1958. The sequel, Return to Paradise (1951), about a war veteran somewhere in the Pacific, was made into a film (1953) that foregrounds the mixed-race relationship between the lead characters. Interracial relations were also a focal point of Michener’s romance Sayonara (1954), which, in 1957, became a film starring Marlon Brando as a U.S. Air Force major in love with a Japanese woman on the island of Okinawa. The novels and their companion films worked together to produce a vision of the Pacific as a romantic paradise of racial harmony within a network of U.S. military bases. Michener’s stories

Fojas-final.indb 104

12/6/13 1:55 PM

A scene from the film adaptation of James Michener’s Hawaii.

Promotional poster for Return to Paradise, “the great South Pacific adventure.”

Fojas-final.indb 105

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 106 •

Islands of Empire

about Hawaiʻi have a much wider and ambitious scope; for instance, Hawaii narrativizes the entire history of the islands as it passes through various epochs, including prehistory, on its way to statehood. His Hawaiʻibased novels tacitly argue for the full integration of the islands into the political entity of the U.S. as a “maturing international society.” Michener’s attachment to Day and Stroven’s A Hawaiian Reader is quite personal, revealing the authors’ shared ideological dispositions. In the introduction, he admits that before learning of the Day and Stroven collection, he had tentative plans to collect samples of literature about Hawaiʻi for an anthology. After sketching an outline of the project, he proposed it to his friend A. Grove Day, arguing, “Hawaii’s going to become a state pretty soon, and I think Americans ought to know, from the pens of those who did the building and watched it, what happened there.”25 To Michener’s dismay, Day had a complete manuscript on the topic ready for submission to a publisher; Michener was asked to write the introduction to the collection. His contribution clearly establishes the coordinates of reading as well as the cultural capital of the collection’s compilers. Michener groups himself with Day and Stroven as a tastemaker and canonizer of Hawaiian literature; this canon is one of colonized literature that aligns popular literary tastes with tourist desires in the service of statehood. Along with Day and Stroven’s edited collection of stories, Michener’s saga Hawaii satisfied the desires of a reading public seeking a historical narrative of the islands. In fact, the huge novel traces the emergence of the islands through volcanic activity, early habitation, and the ethnic multiplicity of modern Hawaiʻi. We read of the first wave of voyages, the internal struggle among the indigenes, the arrival of the missionaries, World War II, and the multiethnic present of the late 1950s. The novel is replete with subtle Western fantasies about indigenous irrationality and adherence to cruel gods. It passes for history by following the sweep of events that shaped the islands, though it issues the following warning: “This is a novel. It is true to the spirit and history of Hawaii, but the characters, the families, the institutions and most of the events are imaginary—except that the English schoolteacher Uliassutai Karakoram Blake is founded upon a historical person who accomplished much in Hawaii.” The film adaptation of the novel, released in 1966, became a kind of unofficial tourist guide to the “history” of the islands—necessary viewing for potential visitors. The film departs from the long historical arc of the book—which begins with the lava-flow beginning of the islands—

Fojas-final.indb 106

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Par adise, Hawaiian Style

• 107 •

Native Hawaiians greet the first wave of missionaries in Hawaii.

and begins instead with the journey of the early missionaries to the islands, focusing primarily on their story. In fact, the novel and the film are located at different points in the history of statehood—the former tacitly argues for statehood, while the latter affirms it by piquing tourist interest in the islands. The film is decidedly more staid than the tourist beach fi lms that preceded it, though it helped further the mythology of the uncivilized yet welcoming native. As historical fiction, it serves as a counterpoint to the more overt tourist narratives celebrating leisure and luxury for the middle-class visitor. Yet both book and film begin with the prelapsarian myth about the untouched paradise of Hawaiʻi populated with noble savages in depictions that shape tourist expectations and subsequent visual imaginaries of the islands. Though nothing like the Elvis and Gidget films released in the same decade, the cinematic version of Hawaii, like its beach-movie coevals, can be described as a tourist film. Brian Ireland divides Hollywood fi lms about Hawaiʻi into three distinct time periods that correspond to major shifts in the historical trajectory of the colony: films predating Pearl Harbor, films about Pearl Harbor (1942–1955), and films about events leading up to statehood and

Fojas-final.indb 107

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 108 •

Islands of Empire

beyond (1955–1973). The representational transformation detectable in such films moves from the otherness of Hawaiʻi to its incorporation into the U.S. political imaginary to celebration of it as a melting pot of racial integration.26 Robert C. Schmitt chronicles the extensive filmic archive of Hawaiʻi-based films from the inception of film on the islands until statehood. He finds that the period between World War II and statehood witnessed the most changes across the popular-culture landscape of Hawaiʻi. During that time, the Consolidated Amusement Co. installed candy counters in theaters (1947), the first drive-in was opened (1949), and television arrived (1952). The biggest publicity for Hawaiʻi was brought by a number of major motion pictures filmed on the islands, most notably From Here to Eternity (1953)—which won eight Academy Awards (out of thirteen nominations)—and South Pacific (1958).27 In Hawaiʻi-based films, the year 1959 has symbolic resonance that extends beyond actual historical periodization. Poststatehood tourist films presented an ideal model of transformation from colonial appendage to domestic political-economic integration. The tourist films of the 1960s share many features. Most are products of the poststatehood euphoria about the newly domesticated Hawaiʻi as a tourist destination. They offer the lay of the land, providing a visual overview of the features of the tourist locale. New goods, services, transportation possibilities, hotels, and resorts are often featured prominently. The film might act as a tour that stands in for the experience of the place or sufficiently piques enough interest to compel viewers to visit. A major part of the visual tourist experience is that of the “authentic” indigenous performance: hula, chanting, and other forms of expression attributed to native cultures. Overall, the tourist film offers a narrative context for the “tourist gaze,” described by John Urry as the objectification of the host culture by the visitor. He borrows the term from Michel Foucault, who writes of the “medical gaze,” or any set of looks endorsed and authorized by an entire institutional structure, one that organizes and produces knowledge about the gazed-upon object. Urry’s gaze is reminiscent of what Laura Mulvey famously describes as the “male gaze” in cinema, an equally objectifying look that presupposes a passive female or feminized body.28 The gaze in cinema is curious and controlling, in which seeing and knowing are linked proprietarily. Likewise, the tourist gaze is curious; it demands a novel visual experience, a new or exotic set of scenes, objects, peoples, and landscapes. Definitions of the “gaze” work together nicely to describe the function of the tourist-film narrative and its vi-

Fojas-final.indb 108

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Par adise, Hawaiian Style

• 109 •

sual dynamics. The tourist gaze, caught in a dynamic of seeing and being seen, defines what is seen as “other” or as a colonial, often feminized object. Indigenous cultures and peoples are spectacles for the viewer, the tourist. For Urry, the tourist gaze is socially organized; it changes over time and across contexts, impacting space, the peoples who inhabit it, and social practices.29 The tourist film shapes a gaze through objects and peoples on the screen as it creates an imaginary space in which national entities and individual identities are construed. The images of the host location are shaped according to visitors’ desires; the landscape and its peoples are framed in stories that are inviting and pleasurable for the mainstream viewer. In the Americas, the U.S. tourist has long been an agent of empire, an invading force whose pursuit of leisure often requires the commodification of the destination culture and the objectification of its peoples.30 In fact, in other areas of the U.S. imperial orbit, tourism was rightly deemed a threat to sovereignty. The kinds of activities and practices that often accompany tourism—gambling, prostitution, degradation of local culture—were ideological targets of the Cuban Revolution. Though tourism itself was not a consistent target—just after the revolution, Castro identified it as a major economic engine of Cuban society—it became a victim of the revolution when tourists, wary of the volatility and violence created by the revolution, avoided Cuba. After imposition of the U.S. embargo in 1961, American tourism to Cuba came to a virtual standstill.31 And U.S. imperialism was more readily eliminated once its major agent, the tourist, disappeared. The same idea is at work in tourist films, but from a different ideological vantage. In 1960s media representations about Hawaiʻi, tourism is a celebrated site of capitalism and a source of redemption through integration into the mainland economies. Tourism was considered the key to Hawaiʻi’s full domestication and entry into the U.S. imaginary. Popular culture, often an unreliable source of historical information, contributed to a false perception of the islands. Yet it is a reliable symptom of culture, exposing public fantasies. DeSoto Brown, the Hawaiian popular-culture historian mentioned earlier, traces the history of depictions of the islands in mass culture, including tourist motifs in postcards, music, advertisements, fi lms, and promotional literature.32 Brown argues that mainstream U.S. culture tends to produce the “fantasy” of Hawaiʻi as a paradise full of happy natives offering visitors the bounty of the islands. Such images were intended to fuel the tourist industry by generating a desire to visit the islands and experience these

Fojas-final.indb 109

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 110 •

Islands of Empire

fantasies. In fact, the images were created by the very industries that depended on tourism: shipping lines, airlines, car rental companies, restaurants, hotels, and every other conceivable tourist-related venture. The ideology of the happy native has continually been deployed to justify colonialism and to deepen its complex relations of capital through tourism. Haunani Kay Trask, a Kanaka Maoli scholar and activist who speaks not just for Native Hawaiians but for any nation in the orbit of U.S. empire, argues: “No matter what Americans believe, most of us in the colonies do not feel grateful that our country was stolen, along with our citizenship, our lands and our independent place among the family of nations. We are not happy natives.”33 This powerful counterpoint to the charged discourses of tourism reminds us of the violence that tourism can impose on a land and its peoples. And it signals the even more powerful forces behind the surge of tourism in the colonies. As Trask goes on to say: “Burdened by commodification of our culture and exploitation of our people, Hawaiians exist in an occupied country whose hostage people are forced to witness (and, for many, to participate in) our collective humiliation as tourist artifacts for the First World.”34 Tourism is not just an expression of neocolonialism as a capitalist formation—it is also one of its major agents. Part of the fantasy of any capitalist order is rapid economic class ascension through capital accumulation, and the allure of that myth is heightened for imperial cultures in their colonies. Poststatehood Hawaiʻi promised mainland Americans many opportunities for lucrative business ventures and pleasurable leisure activities; the tourist films presented the notion that those two categories could be easily combined as one. One of the earliest examples of poststatehood films, Blue Hawaii (1961), features all the fantasies about the new state and the entrepreneurial possibilities therein while acknowledging, in passing, the militarization of the islands. Concealed in the pleasurable discourse of tourism and its adjunct, entertainment culture is an encouragement to form new capital relations with Hawaiʻi. Elvis is the perfect tour guide; his successful music career made him an icon of the American Dream—the capitalist fantasy of attainment and redemption. Blue Hawaii exploits Elvis as a figure who mediates between cultures and represents the reconciliation between opposing cultures and values. Elvis brokers the neutralization of contradictions and the integration of conflicting sides: between youth and mainstream, native and white, male and female, the continental United States and the islands. The very context of the film depicts this idea. Elvis and his family rep-

Fojas-final.indb 110

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Par adise, Hawaiian Style

• 111 •

resent the integration of two unrelated geographies in the migration of southern plantation culture to Hawaiʻi. In fact, the plantation system, its major signifiers, and its cultural norms are transplanted from a popular-culture imaginary of the Old South onto the modern plantation of Oʻahu. Hawaiʻi is the South within a modern capitalist context. The depiction of the plantation system and all its accoutrements—the southern belle and her patrician husband and their philandering son—could be from any Hollywood film set during the Civil War, providing a familiar template of identification for a mainstream audience. Elvis, as Chad, is the force of change who will reconcile these opposing values and ideas; among other achievements, he will modernize the image of plantation culture by integrating it with a new industrial formation: tourism. Elvis Presley, icon of youth culture, commandeers the new relationship of the imperial outpost to its center, acting as a “personal guide

Hawaiian Airlines tourist brochure depicting a Native Hawaiian woman offering the bounty of Hawaiʻi to prospective visitors.

Fojas-final.indb 111

Movie poster for Blue Hawaii.

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 112 •

Islands of Empire

to America’s exotic Eden, our Polynesian paradise.”35 The extratextual promise leads directly into the work of the plot, in which Elvis overcomes his beachboy lassitude and discovers his “natural” talent for leading tours of Hawaiʻi. The film is both a preface to an island vacation and a stand-in for that same vacation, announcing (in the tagline from the film’s trailer), “Elvis brings you the vacation of your life.” The opening sequence begins with a freeze of a well-known postcard image of Waikīkī framed by the peak of Diamond Head, accompanied by the crooning voice of our tour guide, who sings the eponymous song, originally written for the film Waikiki Wedding (1937). This is followed by a number of alluring, iconic postcard images meant to entice the viewer into turning visual enjoyment into actual experience of the islands: Hanauma Bay, Tantalus, Ala Moana Beach Park, and the Coco Palms Hotel on Kauaʻi. Chad is a soldier returned from peacetime duty who lapses back into his beachboy ways. Blue Hawaii, which plays with many biographical facts of Elvis’s life, forms part of his ongoing relationship to the islands. Like Chad, he had just returned from a two-year stint in the U.S. armed forces in 1959. Soon after learning that the Pacific War Memorial Commission was having trouble raising money for the USS Arizona Memorial in Pearl Harbor, Elvis offered to do a benefit concert for the project in 1961. He returned in the same year to begin filming Blue Hawaii; he filmed Girls! Girls! Girls! a year later and Paradise, Hawaiian Style four years after that. Blue Hawaii depicts the beachboy subculture, musicians and surfers who hung out on the beach all day, each acting as a “one-man tourist bureau”.36 In fact, the beachboy culture was the domain of Native Hawaiians in the Waikīkī surf zone, or poʻina nalu, a popular tourist beach, in the early part of the twentieth century. Isaiah Helekunihi Walker argues that surfing, as a Hawaiian cultural practice, is an assertion of cultural autonomy and resistance to colonial encroachment. Most of the Waikīkī surf boys were Native Hawaiian surfers who were available for hire as surf instructors, tour guides, lifeguards, bodyguards, musicians, and local celebrities. They were popular with haole women (those not descended from the islands’ original Polynesian inhabitants—especially white women), with whom they would openly violate laws against miscegenation and thus assert their anticolonial self-possession. They were sexual agents and entrepreneurs who operated their own businesses and profited from tourist whims.37 Elvis’s Hawaiʻi films exploit and dehistoricize this beachboy phenomenon and, in typical Elvis style, adapt it to mainstream culture, emptying it of its political valence. And un-

Fojas-final.indb 112

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Par adise, Hawaiian Style

• 113 •

like the Hawaiian beachboys, who were deemed a social threat to white women, Elvis is seen as providing necessary services and protection for all women, ones that often cross racial lines without upsetting social norms, given the popular-culture acceptance of interracial relations between white men and brown women. Beachboy and surfer fi lms perpetuate the fantasy of youth subcultures whose quest for personal gratification puts them outside middle-class proprieties and mainstream aspirations to upward mobility. Yet this fantasy is only a passing indulgence for the characters and the viewers who identify with them. The films flirt with the subcultural and nonmainstream desires for sensual indulgence in order to better contain them and channel them into productive pursuits. The protagonists of these tourist fi lms become domesticated in much the same way that the territory where they indulge their pleasures became domesticated in statehood. Their pleasures, and everything else labeled “colonial degeneracy” in turn-of-the-century tourist manuals, are contained and commodified for mainland tourist indulgence. Thus, characteristics that defined the colonial subjects as less skilled than whites, uncivilized, and thus unfit for self-rule—lassitude, leisure, pleasure seeking—became signifiers of the ultimate tourist holiday for U.S. middle-class travelers. The Elvis and Gidget films were meant to be tours of the islands, giving viewers a visual map of the Union’s new state and introducing its cultural dynamics and mores. In Blue Hawaii, Chad’s Hawaiian girlfriend, Maile, introduces the audience to Oʻahu by providing an overview of some main tourist areas of Honolulu: the Pali Highway, Kalākaua Avenue in Waikīkī, and Diamond Head. Maile is the fi lm’s initial tour guide, but she is herself a stop on the cultural tour of the islands. She is hapa haole, of mixed Hawaiian and non-Hawaiian heritage—French and Hawaiian in her case—which causes internal confl ict based on purportedly racially defined biological differences. Through her character, we learn what it means to be Hawaiian. When she catches Chad kissing a flight attendant, she is overcome with jealousy: “My French blood tells me to argue with you, and my Hawaiian blood tells me not to.” Compared to her “French” side, her “Hawaiian blood” makes her more passive and accepting, less interested in conflict or contestation, and more likely to accommodate the offending party. Such stereotypes correspond nicely to colonial portraits of Hawaiians as welcoming the invading forces of U.S. capitalists and subsequently submitting to annexation. It is also a key portrayal of Hawaiians as naturally inclined to offer a welcoming embrace to tourists. Maile and her fellow Hawaiians are happy and hospita-

Fojas-final.indb 113

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 114 •

Islands of Empire

Chad (Elvis Presley) greeting his girlfriend Maile (Joan Blackman) upon returning from military service at the Honolulu International Airport, in Blue Hawaii.

ble natives who, in case any viewer might think otherwise, are excited to meet and greet visitors. In keeping with the Hollywood practice of using a white actor to play the brown member of an interracial couple, the actress who plays Maile, Joan Blackman, is Anglo-American; thus the “interracial” intimacy complied with the Motion Picture Production Code. It was not until Paradise, Hawaiian Style that the interracial couple in an Elvis film actually made up of different races. Maile’s French side is the source of her reason and sense of justice. Yet in her quarrel with Chad, her Hawaiian side wins, which is also a victory for Chad, and she forgives him his transgression. But it is her Euro-Hawaiian heritage (perhaps recalling that of the tragic life of Princess Kaʻiulani) that raises Maile above the other native players in this drama, the background and servile figures who only add color to the story. It opens the possibility for her to become Chad’s aide in his tourism business. Moreover, their relationship signals the racial harmony of

Fojas-final.indb 114

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Par adise, Hawaiian Style

• 115 •

the islands and the state-level collaboration between the white-dominant mainland and Hawaiʻi. Chad is our main tour guide to the fiftieth state, our crooning entertainer, and a protagonist who embodies the conflicts and anxieties brewing for the generation of the 1960s—a time of the Cold War, racial unrest, and a revolution in sexual and gender attitudes. Back in Oʻahu after his military service, he refuses to return to his privileged place in the tony neighborhood of Kahala. He likewise disappoints his parents’ expectations that he will take over the family business, settle into a bourgeois lifestyle, and “marry a girl of [his] own class” (meaning race). This unexpected show of independence registers as part island malaise and lack of ambition and part beachboy, countercultural rebelliousness. It is a crisis likely to be familiar to most audience members, yet it is also something more exotic, a special condition of the tropics. Though Chad is a thoroughgoing mainland boy who, along with his immediate family, is a relatively recent transplant to Hawaiʻi from the South, many of his cultural values, and much of his way of life, are attributed to the tropics. When a befuddled traveler, seeing Chad kissing another woman in front of his girlfriend, asks where he got his basic training, referring to his skilled romantic exploits, the reply is “in Hawaiʻi.” In addition, Chad’s acculturation to the islands gives him a distinct edge as an entrepreneur. A familiarity with local conditions, combined with his appeal to women, helps him build his business. In the logic of the story, what would be a negative sign for Hawaiians is a sign of Chad’s prowess. As in other tourist narratives, including those mentioned earlier in relation to Cuba, the Anglo-American character transforms the negative values of the imperial tropics, lassitude and sensuousness, into virtues. Those qualities were interpreted as signs of the lack of progress, as well as the degenerative status, of the native peoples. Yet by the 1960s, popular culture was featuring dancing, singing, or chanting Hawaiians as key features of the tourist entertainment complex on the islands. In Blue Hawaii, cultural practices are glossed as pure entertainment having the same value as the music and dancing of Elvis. Elizabeth Buck writes of how Western discourses have emptied Hawaiian cultural practices of their meaning by turning them into morally dubious spectacles: “Hawaiians and their symbolic practices were positioned as objects of spectacle and speculation.”38 Tourist interventions in Hawaiian cultural practices partake of Western discourses that denude them of their historical and cultural significance—turning, for example, religious practices into pa-

Fojas-final.indb 115

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 116 •

Islands of Empire

gan rituals, and myth into superstition.39 Thus, Hawaiian characters in tourist films remain trapped in their colonial conditions as props on a visual tour of the islands, or are otherwise sidelined as performers, servants, or sexualized objects. In Blue Hawaii, Elvis embodies the Euro-American reinvention of a tropical vice, sensuality in dancing and singing, as a virtue.40 Just as Elvis successfully appropriated African American musical forms for a mainstream white audience, he delivers a Westernized version of the musical traditions of Hawaiʻi for the same audience. Elvis achieved fame with the song “Hound Dog”—first recorded by Willie Mae Thornton— using a mix of musical styles that drew heavily on gospel and blues “race music” (as described by Billboard magazine).41 Irene Oppenheim complicates the idea that Elvis expropriated African American styles wholesale, seeing instead a series of transactions between mainstream (white) and African American musical cultures. She offers the circulation of “Hound Dog” as evidence: the song was written by a couple of East Coast white boys, but was appropriated by the bandleader Johnny Otis as his own for Willie Mae Thornton. Thus, the white provenance of the song was elided.42 Oppenheim argues that Elvis took this mixed heritage of the tune and gave it his own particular inimitable style.43 Yet there is no doubt whether Elvis brought an ethnic and racialized musical genre to a mass white audience. “Little Richard” Penniman attributes his success, in part, to Elvis: “When I came out, they wasn’t playing no black artists on Top 40 stations. . . . It took people like Elvis . . . to open the door so I could walk down the road.”44 In the 1960s, Elvis translated and anglicized Hawaiian music for mainland white audiences. Like his forays into African American musical styles, his “Hawaiian” tunes used key markers of island musical culture (slide guitars) and thematized the tropics, yet avoided being too “ethnic.” And they elided the historical and cultural significance of the musical style. Many of the songs are featured in his Hawaiʻi-based films. In fact, he sings the famed “Aloha ʻOe,” written by Queen Liliʻuokalani, for whom it was a “love song,” a song about the unity of Hawaiians with the land and the gods, and one that has been interpreted as a farewell to her beloved Hawaiian nation.45 For Elvis, it is a mere romantic love song with a Hawaiian accent and local flavor, and a sign of his “Hawaiianization.” As with his co-optation of African American styles, his foray into Hawaiian music consolidated his star power; in fact, the sound track to Blue Hawaii stayed on the Billboard charts for eighteen months after its release, becoming Elvis’s thirteenth gold record.

Fojas-final.indb 116

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Par adise, Hawaiian Style

• 117 •

State of Tourism For Jon Goss, the narrative of the “touristscapes” of Hawaiʻi follows a cyclical arc of “innocence, corruption, and redemption.”46 This story arc is complicit with the official history of Hawaiʻi from the vantage of the imperial culture: innocent native culture is corrupted by colonialism but redeemed through its attachment to the United States. In the tourist films of Hawaiʻi from the 1960s, redemption is achieved and displayed through the expansion of the tourist industry and, thus, the economic independence of the former colony. And tourist development coincides with individual character development. In Blue Hawaii, Chad describes his refusal to join the family business as his “declaration of independence.” For the mainland viewer, the narrative encodes an allegory about Hawaiʻi as having paradoxically attained independence once it became moored to the United States. In this case, independence is the consequence of ever-more tourism. Chad has to reconcile the conflicts between his desire for pleasurable leisure and his need to earn a living. His desire is complicit with the tourist desire to throw off the yoke of industrialism and find freedom in the experience of pure pleasure. Or as Maile reminds Chad, whom she finds napping on a surfboard: “You can’t spend the rest of your life on a surfboard.” Chad finds a way to bring together the opposing forces of leisure and work by making his leisure into work—just as he integrates a number of other oppositions that he encounters. Instead of raising pineapples with his father, Chad goes to work for a small tour company. His search for a lucrative business of his own allegorizes the shift in Hawaiʻi from the plantation economy to tourism. His maturation to independence allegorizes what is deemed the “economic maturation” of Hawaiʻi. He embodies all the major industries and institutions on the islands: military, agriculture, and tourism. He refuses the first two for the last, asserting, “Hawaiʻi has a big future and I want to be a part of it”—referring to the major expansion of the tourist enterprise in the islands. The opportunities in agriculture, which have been fully tapped, are deemed part of an inert past, whereas tourism promises a range of new possibilities. Chad’s initial refusal to join the family business is revised when he realizes that he can combine both industries and integrate the interests of both generations; he fulfills his father’s expectations and his own entrepreneurial desires by uniting them. He links his tour company with the work of his father’s firm by offering tours to its stateside employees and arranging incentive trips. His idea is to provide

Fojas-final.indb 117

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 118 •

Islands of Empire

reinvigorating island respites for workers so that they can return to the mainland and work more efficiently. Chad initially works for a small tour company, where he learns the ropes of the industry and demonstrates his potential. The first tour he conducts is for a youngish schoolteacher and four of her teenage students—presumably the ideal audience of an Elvis movie. The audience gets a tour of the islands with a short educational introduction about the significance of the island of Oʻahu within the archipelago. The tour goes through central Oʻahu and its pineapple fields. The focus of the group of teenage girls is Ellie, a particularly rebellious and intransigent teen. She is detached, sullen, and resistant. She is both a typical teen and a reminder of the burgeoning youth movement, of which Elvis was a major icon and which questioned authority and undermined the status quo. She stands for the wayward American refusing the beneficent lead of those in power. In an ironic twist, the authority in question is Elvis, who promulgates the ideological work of the story. As it turns out, she is simply misunderstood, and a firm hand by Chad causes her complete rehabilitation and reincorporation into the society of the other teenage girls. Not just a tour guide, he offers moral guidance and discipline for the girls and their caretaker. His maturation and narrative success is dependent on the type of leadership he exhibits. In the process, he proves to Maile that he is mature, dependable, and faithful. The film ends with every conflict resolved and everyone coming together for the impromptu but “authentic Hawaiian” wedding ceremony between Chad and Maile. The ending pulls together all the ideological loose ends under the cover of marriage, allegorizing the complete legal, financial, and cultural integration of the islands—Maile—and the mainland—Chad. For Hawaiʻi, redemption is achieved by adapting to the economics of tourism, not through sovereignty or self-determination.47 Many of the tourist media representations about Hawaiʻi in the 1960s thematized the difficult maturation or coming of age of the protagonist in a story arc that tacitly allegorized the maturation of the Hawaiian colony through the self-abdication of statehood. Maturation is depicted in socioeconomic and psychosexual terms that are deeply gendered and heteronormative. Each protagonist in the imperial drama must resolve a moral crisis whose solution can be found in tourism. In Blue Hawaii, Gidget Goes Hawaiian, and Paradise, Hawaiian Style, the tourist-film genre overlaps with that of the teen surf picture and the rock-and-roll films made popular by Elvis—the Elvis beach films combine all three subgenres. Though these films have protagonists who are part of rebel-

Fojas-final.indb 118

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Par adise, Hawaiian Style

• 119 •

lious subcultures, they are stories with a clear imperial moral about mature economic development. In Blue Hawaii and Paradise, Hawaiian Style, the mark and symbol of U.S. power is the ability to integrate opposites and gloss contradictions, to commingle leisure and work, and private and public spaces, for maximum profit. Thus, Elvis in both fi lms turns his private pleasures into public work for personal gain. In much the same way, the private pleasures of watching a Hollywood film perform the social work of propping up the United States in the Pacific and the world. Gidget’s work is equally symbolic, but on a different scale. If Elvis provides the model for global leadership and entrepreneurial success, Gidget shows us what women can do to promote and support this cause while maintaining the moral rectitude of the family. Gidget Goes Hawaiian provides both a moral compass for girls and women set adrift in a sexually promiscuous tourist-imperial outpost and, as in Blue Hawaii, a resolution to the generational conflict of the era. Gidget (Deborah Walley) is a white middleclass young woman on the verge of adulthood who holds the promise of fulfilling the hopes and ideals of her parents’ generation. She is in a vulnerable position as a member of a youth subculture of surfers renowned for its antiauthoritarian stance. Like many of her generation, she must choose between fulfilling her parents’ expectations and rebelling against them, and the choice is dramatized through Gidget’s careful negotiation of her sexuality. Gidget is a wily teen icon made famous by her exploits as the “queen of the Southern California beach scene” in Gidget (1959). Gidget Goes Hawaiian, the second of the three Gidget films, was released in the same year as Blue Hawaii and follows a similar plotline. Gidget “goes Hawaiian” during the long and directionless summer months of what constitutes “a turning point” in her life. Like Elvis, she turns her lack of direction into a definitive and independent sense of self. Yet whereas Elvis’s cultural fluidity enhanced his business prospects, Gidget’s Hawaiianization puts her sexual propriety at stake. Ilana Nash writes of how the teenage girl’s body in the Gidget series is a site of cultural anxiety upon which issues related to gender, sexuality, and age are played out. Unlike Elvis in Blue Hawaii, Gidget, as a teenage girl, requires the protective care of her father, to guard against not just the men around her but also the pernicious and disruptive forces of permissive Hawaiian culture. Gidget, across the series of novels, television series, and films, is both sexualized and infantilized; she must seek approval from her father to achieve a compromised agency, a combination of independent

Fojas-final.indb 119

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 120 •

Islands of Empire

Gidget (Deborah Walley) goes Hawaiian, dancing while on vacation in Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961).

self-assertion and adherence to gender norms. Her sexual maturation allegorizes the political “maturation” of Hawaiʻi from a colony to a U.S. state. Indeed, Nash describes how adolescence is seen as a liminal stage between childhood and adulthood, the former defined as a “primitive” stage of development, recalling the language used to describe the uncivilized life in the colonial tropics.48 Although Gidget has no exposure to the cultures of Hawaiʻi beyond the tourist zone of Waikīkī, the experience of that exotic location somehow contributes to her sexual degeneration. She matures by learning how to negotiate the sexual codes that put her at a disadvantage. She models proper behavior for Anglo females in the colonies, and her travails become an object lesson for wary parents fearful of the sexual promiscuity that might ensue from a visit to the islands. Not only Gidget’s sexual morality is put to the test on her vacation, but that of her parents and the parents of one of her gal pals is too; and it is Gidget’s job to put everyone back on the right track. In Gidget Goes Hawaiian, Waikīkī is a romantic paradise where passions are ignited and relationships are threatened by infidelity. But if the opening scene in Malibu, California, is a clue, then

Fojas-final.indb 120

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Par adise, Hawaiian Style

• 121 •

we know from the beginning that Gidget is a truly “clean teen.” While other couples are making out on beach blankets, Gidget and her boyfriend, Jeff (James Darren), chastely affirm their commitment to each other, clearly establishing Gidget’s moral decency. The Gidget films were like other teen surf (or beach) fi lms of the 1960s, including Beach Party (1963), Bikini Beach (1964), and Beach Blanket Bingo (1965).49 These were popular films about, according to Beach Party’s director, William Asher, “kids having a good time and not getting in trouble.”50 These comedic, escapist tales were counterpoints to the juvenile delinquent and social problem films of the time; Thomas Doherty calls them “clean teenpics,” or films targeted at teens but “parent approved.”51 In these films, good white kids engage in morally upright activities as part of heartwarming and fun story lines. R. L. Rutsky argues that teen beach films were not simply, as Gary Morris contends, vehicles of reassurance during a turbulent social era. Rutsky finds that they exposed ideological contradictions as much as the high-minded, socially conscious art films of the times did.52 Indeed, surf culture was a teen subculture built on noncomformity and, in the case of the Elvis beach fi lms, premised on the youth counterculture of rock and roll. Thus, Rutsky contends that the insurrectionary, noncomformist potential in surf fi lms was based on the culture of surfing and its roots in nonWestern Native Hawaiian culture. While that proposition is certainly borne out in the films he examines, there is another interpretive possibility in the poststatehood-Hawaiʻi surf films: they engage surfing and other subcultures as signs of U.S. exceptionalism. The core characteristics of surfer culture—risk, adventure, and innovation—are deemed key virtues of U.S. political philosophy. Gidget faces a crisis around her sexuality as she comes of age. She is unevenly developed as a young adult, wavering between adultlike sobriety and teen petulance. That indeterminate status recalls depictions of colonial subjects as underdeveloped and childlike, particularly in Hawaiʻi. At first, Gidget assumes an adult role with her parents, who, she claims, claim authority over her because of “an accident of birth.” She is in a paradoxical position, too old for her age and yet immature. Her transition to adulthood tells some of the story of Hawaiʻi’s transformation from a dependent territory, to a condition of political competence, to national belonging as a U.S. state. Gidget experiences a similar moral learning curve as she becomes an adult among adults, or as an equal of her guardians. The humor of the film emanates from its paradoxes; Gidget’s pun-

Fojas-final.indb 121

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 122 •

Islands of Empire

ishment for acting like an adult is a trip to Hawaiʻi and the demand that she “have fun.” The problem is that her relationship with Jeff in California is more alluring than the trip to Hawaiʻi—one that, her father surmises, is becoming more popular and thus more difficult to attain. But Hawaiʻi has no meaning for her, since she is as devoted to her relationship with Jeff as if it were a marriage: “I’ve been pinned to Jeff for exactly two days and you expect me to go callously off to Hawaiʻi. Wouldn’t that make me the kind of wife who would want separate vacations? Even twin beds? I’m sorry but it’s simply out of the question.” She tries to reason with her father as an adult: “Now, if you’d have asked me, we could have made the trip a later date”—but her intended reasonableness is met with incredulity. Her posturing as an adult is played for comedy as her parents exchange knowing and sympathetic glances. Gidget identifies as an adult but, within the logic of the film, remains immature and underdeveloped. When she “goes Hawaiian,” as the title suggests, she enters the process toward full maturation, with all its attendant travails. Going Hawaiian, as Houston Wood notes, means being tempted to indulge in sexually promiscuous behavior.53 But Gidget resists, remaining a “clean teen” throughout. Going Hawaiian has a number of meanings; in relation to Gidget, it seems to be most significant as a description of a process of development to full maturation. Like Elvis in Blue Hawaii, Gidget travels on a United Airlines jet, but this time the audience is taken inside the plane, to be shown the luxury of air travel. Gidget immediately makes a friend of her seatmate, Abby, who will prove to be the source of rumors about her sexual impropriety. Gidget confides in Abby about her failed relationship with “Moondoggie” (Jeff ’s nickname) and describes going “overboard” (literally falling off a surfboard with him) and “giving herself over completely” to the relationship. Her new friend interprets this as an admission of sexual initiation, which Gidget spends the rest of the plot refuting. Her sexual indiscretion is only imagined, and happens hypothetically in relation to her white boyfriend. Yet the title song seems to indicate otherwise. “Gidget Goes Hawaiian,” which is about her sexual awakening and the passions she stirs while in Hawaiʻi, begins: “It’s not the same down by the sea, / Since the Gidget came to Waikīkī.” In the song, Gidget’s propriety is threatened by a combination of sexual initiation and racial mixing: “You’ll hear the native boys all sighin’ / Way down on Maunalua Bay, / ’Cause when the Gidget goes Hawaiian, / She goes Hawaiian all the way.” And “Now

Fojas-final.indb 122

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Par adise, Hawaiian Style

• 123 •

Gidget getting carried away in Waikīkī.

there’s a rumor on the island, / She flirts with every passerby, / ’Cause when the Gidget goes Hawaiian, / She catches each Hawaiian’s eye.” Yet Hawaiian men never enter into the orbit around Gidget. The song simply ponders the imagined threat of a white woman’s congress with a native man; miscegenation stands in for all the possible troubles of the story, including her sexual activity and her parents’ infidelity. The only way in which she “goes Hawaiian” is by indulging in the sanitized tourist activities available to her. But going Hawaiian also registers as the capitulation to a white, mainland narrative of development, one that for women included restraint and self-reliance. Gidget’s struggle for self-determination and moral purity can be read as allegorizing larger social and political issues. Her moral position is a problem not just of the fi lm or the new state of Hawaiʻi, but also of the nation and the film industry as a tool of global influence. Hollywood in the late 1950s and early 1960s had global appeal for its wholesomeness. According to Geoffrey Shurlock of the Production Code Administration, that moral clarity was key to the success of the industry. In 1956, he asserted that Hollywood films “occupy 70 of the playing time of the screens of the world” because families could go to the movies

Fojas-final.indb 123

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 124 •

Islands of Empire

Gidget exhibiting her waterskiing skills.

“without being embarrassed” by racy content or immoral acts.54 That influence was used to instill imperial sensibilities in domestic audiences, as reflected in the moral of Gidget Goes Hawaiian. Like Blue Hawaii and Gidget Goes Hawaiian, Paradise, Hawaiian Style begins with a trip on a United Airlines airplane. Though a small detail, this common theme was part of the promotion of the travel industry by tourist films. We meet Rick Richards, a recently fired airline pilot, as he returns to Hawaiʻi. Elvis, as Rick, is a bit older than he was in Blue Hawaii, and here he plays a very different role. Rick is a self-centered womanizer who is unable to hold down a job. His playboy exploits are played for laughs and are not treated as seriously disabling. Rather, his many female connections enable him to bounce back from being fired from a major airline to starting a new venture with a friend. Comically, Rick encounters women all over the islands with whom he has had affairs. They all work in the hospitality industry and help promote his new partnership with his friend Danny—called Danrick Airways. Rick embodies what Barbara Ehrenreich describes as the “playboy ethic,” characterized by a refusal to conform to middle-class expectations.55 The playboy was part of the postwar economic boom and a leisured-class sensibility to resist domestic encumbrances for the pleasures

Fojas-final.indb 124

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Par adise, Hawaiian Style

• 125 •

of sexual freedom. He was an embodiment of U.S. economic prosperity who explored the freedom and fun of capitalism. Though the fi lm celebrates the pleasures of the playboy lifestyle and even shows how it can enhance business opportunities, Rick is not allowed to run rampant for too long. In the end, he must find a way to model the proper kind of playboy disposition, one that is only temporary and that eventually leads to his reformation. Like its predecessors, Paradise, Hawaiian Style uncovers an ideal liberal democratic order through a new social formation: mixed-race relationships. Rick’s business partner Danny, played by the famed Asian American actor James Shigeta, is initially loath to partner with Rick because his large family is dependent upon his income. When we meet his family, it turns out that he and his blonde wife have five mixed-race children—played by Asian and white kids, though Danny, we are to believe, is Hawaiian. By the year this popular tourist film was released, 1966, mixed-race issues were part of the popular-culture landscape. Released a year before Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, it is unique in its normative depiction of mixed-race relations as simply the status quo in Hawaiʻi.

Rick (Elvis Presley) in Paradise, Hawaiian Style (1966).

Fojas-final.indb 125

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 126 • Islands of Empire

In 1967, the landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision in Loving v. Virginia overturned any remaining state laws against interracial marriage, inaugurating what Maria P. P. Root calls the “bi-racial baby boom.”56 Indeed, Danny’s family was a major part of that boom. The most prominent “mixed-race” kid, Jan, gets top billing in the film, and is featured in several song-and-dance routines. Donna Butterworth, who played Jan, was born in Pennsylvania, moved to Hawaiʻi when she was young, and learned to sing and to play the ukulele. Unlike Maile of Blue Hawaii, who embodied the conflict between her white and Hawaiian selves, Jan occupies a role similar to that of Elvis as Chad. Both embody the collaboration and harmony between the races and prove that Hawaiʻi is a future vision of the United States as an exemplary site of the triumph over racial discord. Paradise, Hawaiian Style introduces new aspects of a maturing tourist industry that had grown exponentially by the late 1960s.57 By the mid1960s, new tourist ventures involved risk and large amounts of capital in order to compete in a glutted market. Within an established industry, any new enterprise has to target a niche market and experience, and to deliver something that others will not or cannot offer. Rick asks Danny to gamble on a partnership that would offer helicopter tours and short interisland trips delivering people, animals, and goods on relatively short notice. In one instance, Rick delivers several uncrated dogs to a dog show on another island; the canines interrupt his ability to fly, causing injury to the dogs and himself and seriously ruining his female passenger’s hairdo. But the company also offers a specialized tour that is advertised as a sign of prestige and attainment. Rick gets the idea about the potential symbolic value of such tours when he shuttles a businessman to a meeting on a neighboring island. The man, Mr. Cubberson, became wealthy by selling alligator-skin shoes, promoting them as a “symbol of prestige, of wealth, of importance.” Danrick Airways is thus able to separate its excursions from the volume tours targeting mainstream tourists, instead selling something “prestigious,” and with a higher profit margin. The new venture involves risk, since the partners must borrow to finance it, but the gamble could bring new cultural capital in the form of “prestige.” Though the risk seems great, Rick exhibits standard U.S. virtues of being adventurous, risk taking, optimistic, and confident—all aspects of the imperial sensibility. At one point he says, “Where would we be if Captain Cook hadn’t taken a chance?” Even as he suffers blows to his ego, losing his job and career, he never admits defeat and redoubles

Fojas-final.indb 126

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Par adise, Hawaiian Style

• 127 •

his efforts to attain his goals. Like Chad, he turns his vices into virtues, and his leisure into work. His womanizing aids his business success; he uses each woman as a networking opportunity, allowing him, as he tells one woman, to “combine work with the pleasure of seeing” her. Women serve also as stops along the visual tour of the film; they are outposts, island colonies of Rick’s playboy empire. The ancillary status of women harks back to the classical structure of narrative and plot as masculine, premised on the journey of Ulysses and the tumescence, climax, and detumescence of plot. In visual tourist narratives, woman is the destination; her body stands in for the natural bounty of the land and offers a pleasurable site of visual exploration. Jane C. Desmond has written of tourism as destination culture based on the display of bodies, particularly that of the “ideal native,” who is racialized as brown and gendered female.58 Rick is the consummate playboy, repaying women for their business help with the pleasure of his sensual company. His constant refrain, which comes back to haunt him, is “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours.” The crisis of the story occurs when the exchange relationship is broken and Rick’s misadventures catch up with him. Rick flies one of his new girlfriends and his business partner’s daughter, Jan, to a picnic on a secluded beach. The girlfriend, using a technique Rick employed with her, throws the helicopter keys away to buy more time with him. Unable to locate the keys, they are all stuck on the beach for the night, causing Rick to miss his business obligations and distressing his partner, Jan’s father. It is a fatal mix of business and pleasure. The aim of the film is to reestablish a productive relationship between capital and leisure. In many ways, the film is an allegory of Rick’s refrain (“You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”), the primary exchange being between Hawaiʻi’s tourist-industry giants, particularly the Polynesian Cultural Center (PCC) and the transportation industry, and the film itself. It is no accident that Blue Hawaii, Gidget Goes Hawaiian, and Paradise, Hawaiian Style each opens in the same manner: with the main character flying in on a United jetliner. The films publicize and promote all forms of transportation communication from the continental United States to the islands. Rick’s refrain signals the sorts of reciprocal transactions relied on by agents of industries that objectify native culture as exchangeable goods. Rick gives his time and attention to women who can deliver tourist dollars to his company. In return, the tourist viewers of the film receive all the delights that the islands have to offer. Rick, for his misadventure during the picnic, is stripped of his pilot’s

Fojas-final.indb 127

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 128 •

Islands of Empire

license, but he chooses to fly without it in order to search for his partner and eventually save him. In a move typical of the U.S. sensibility, the ends justify the means. He breaks the law in order to do the right thing. He is rewarded for his sense of justice. He seeks out an agent of the Island Aviation Bureau, Mr. Belden, to ask for the reinstatement of his license—not for personal gain, but to save the company that he created with Danny. He makes his plea, and his adventurous spirit and assertion of risk is framed as both a cardinal virtue and the guiding moral of the narrative. Mr. Belden agrees to reinstate his license: “If a man risks his entire future to save a friend, he can’t be all bad.” Elvis, as Rick, is rewarded on more than one front. He ends up securing the love of the only unavailable woman around him; she had claimed to be married as a ruse to throw him off. He does not just get the girl; he sings a song about it as hula dancers perform the lyrics in a performance that takes place at the PCC.

Tourist Par adise A central focus of the latter part of the fi lm is the indigenous performances that take place at the Polynesian Cultural Center, although the location is not identified until the very end of the film. At the time of the film’s release, the PCC, a tourist destination about forty miles away from Waikīkī in Lāʻie, on the windward side of Oʻahu, was in its third year. Founded in 1963 by the Mormon Church and Brigham Young University (BYU) as a tax-exempt “cultural theme park,” it serves a joint educational and entertainment purpose. The PCC exhibits performances from seven Polynesian cultures: Hawaiian, Tongan, Tahitian, Marquesan, Samoan, Maori, and Fijian; they center on “traditional” practices, including daily activities, singing, and dancing, in theatrical form. In fact, the actors are BYU students recruited from the cultures whose customs they are meant to perform. The result is a romanticized, staged authenticity of precontact indigenous cultures that reinforces the notion of Hawaiʻi and the Pacific as populated by happy and simple natives. Hokulani K. Aikau examines this phenomenon from the vantage of the workers. She explores the context of their participation in this venture and finds that the overall structure of the institution demands their complicity in perpetuating colonial portraits of native peoples. The church demands the workers’ loyalty and participation in its business practices as part of their faith and adherence to religious principles. There is no boundary be-

Fojas-final.indb 128

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Par adise, Hawaiian Style

• 129 •

tween work and religion, or between tourism and spirituality.59 The performances reinforce rather than challenge stereotypical notions about indigenous cultures. The overlap between the space of the film and that of the PCC lends insight into how indigenous cultures of the Pacific are framed and how mass audiences interpret them. Max E. Stanton, a professor emeritus at Brigham Young University– Hawaii, contends that the PCC was created with three interrelated aims: to provide income opportunities for students isolated in a community with few such opportunities, to generate income for BYU, and to preserve Polynesian cultures.60 For Stanton, the failures of representation are attributable to tourists’ time limitations and preferences: “Tourists are on a vacation—they are seeking a change from the routine or ordinary and want to experience the ‘unusual.’ However, they generally lack the time and the depth of experience to understand the more complex and intricate aspects of Polynesian culture.”61 The PCC, in his estimation, is a successful model of collaboration between tourism and an educational institution, one that profits both parties. Critics such as Theodore Brameld and Midori Matsuyama, writing eleven years before Stanton, see the educational opportunities of the PCC to be severely compromised by the curtailed academic freedom associated with BYU, which employs a supermajority of Mormon-identified faculty members, who adhere to a strict moral code in teaching and personal disposition. Terry Webb, a prolific author on PCC matters, has decoded a Mormon ideological narrative in the structure of the center. Andrew Ross finds a sinister colonial tether that subordinates the PCC to Salt Lake City, which he describes as the command center of the Mormon empire.62 Aikau finds as well that Lāʻie is a node of the expanding Mormon empire, but one that is challenging its white center with a diverse and racialized population that represents the “global face of contemporary Mormonism”.63 For the first few years of its existence, the PCC did not make a profit. Then, fortuitously, Hollywood stepped in with a proposition similar to the one that Elvis offered his many women in Paradise, Hawaiian Style: a mutually beneficial exchange. In fact, as Rick is setting up his contacts, he visits a performer at the PCC to make such an arrangement. Perhaps as a result of its major role in Paradise, Hawaiian Style, the PCC finally, in 1967, turned a profit.64 This kind of product placement seems to conflict with the tax exemption the center enjoys, but more significantly, it points to the consumption model of tourism propagated by both entities. The PCC is not overtly cited in the story line but is given prominent billing in the credits, with no ambiguity about how to find it: “Our grat-

Fojas-final.indb 129

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 130 •

Islands of Empire

itude to the Peoples of the Pacific at the Polynesian Cultural Center— Laie, Oahu, Hawaii.” In the end, the entire cast of Paradise, Hawaiian Style converges on the PCC, which is referred to simply by the event that takes place there, the “Polynesian Welcoming Festival.” In this spectacle, which showcases all that the PCC has to offer, Elvis takes part in each of the seven cultural performances on display. The end of the film coincides with the final show of the day at the PCC; after touring each type of native village, visitors take part in a lūʻau and watch a flashy show that gathers all the indigenous groups in a summary performance. The film narrative and the PCC narrative are perfectly coordinated and integrated. As each Polynesian culture is showcased, Elvis serves as the focal point, signaling the conflation of the two representational spaces. But even before the finale, the PCC was used not as a space of performance of culture, but as a representation of the culture of Hawaiʻi itself. That is, there is no separation between the song-and-dance routines we come to expect from Elvis and the space of the theme park populated by peoples in native garb. Both are displayed as part of the pure visual pleasure of the narrative. The spectacle with Elvis at the center fully Americanizes these performances and exhibits Rick’s victory over his own base desires. He transforms his failures and weaknesses into virtues; the last scene is a showcase of his success and leadership, allegorized in his position as the focal point and lead of the spectacular finale. As in Blue Hawaii, Elvis here proves that he can, through determination, reform his ways and be a successful entrepreneur. In many ways, Elvis’s Hawaiʻi films are colonial narratives that tacitly reflect upon the role of colonies in U.S. empire. That is, these are stories about how to turn wayward colonial conditions into new industrial formations, making Hawaiʻi a model of the prosperous U.S. future. The idea of forging success from abject conditions is the very stuff of the American Dream. There was no better protagonist to express the rags-to-riches embodiment of the American Dream than Elvis Presley, who transcended his working-class roots to become a major popular-culture icon and movie star. In Blue Hawaii, Chad is upper class from the start, as can be seen in his family’s tony Hawaiʻi Kai house, which is replete with Asian butlers and servants. Yet he aspires to be a self-made man and to take his own route to career success. He is the embodiment of youthful defiance as a key element of the portrait of U.S. exceptionalism and of the ideal American as a maverick capitalist. In Paradise, Hawaiian Style, Elvis’s Rick is beset by his weakness for women and pleasure seeking. But he trans-

Fojas-final.indb 130

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Par adise, Hawaiian Style

• 131 •

forms these failures into a defiant success by turning his personal relationships into business connections. Even when he errs too much on the personal side, he proves his mettle and his humane spirit by risking his career to save his friend. Gidget, as a young woman, has a different trajectory and moral crisis. She must defend her propriety, which is under attack on all sides. Her resistance to sexual experimentation and her alliance with the surfing subculture show that she is capable of maturity without conformity. Her spirit of righteousness, independent thinking, and spunky self-assertion is a cornerstone of the U.S. imperial sensibility. These films exhibit U.S. exemplarity through their protagonists: Elvis in Blue Hawaii is business minded and diplomatic; Gidget goes Hawaiian but remains moral and competent; and the slightly older Elvis of Paradise, Hawaiian Style finds redemption through his entrepreneurial spirit. Each protagonist faces problems and conflicts and solves them in a way that provides guidance for audiences and proves the capacity for world leadership of the culture that produced them. In these tourist films, Hawaiʻi is promoted as a sign of the power and messianic duty of the United States to assume global leadership. It represented Hawaiʻi as the best of all that the country has to offer, a place where the issues plaguing the mainland have already been resolved. While the rest of the United States spent the 1960s dealing with the violence of social unrest and adolescent deviance, Hawaiʻi, particularly in the Elvis films, was a paradise of racial harmony where rebellious youth cultures are assets to the dominant culture. Hawaiʻi was a model colony, compared to which others fell short; its popular-culture status as mature, developed, entrepreneurial, and amenable to tourists’ desires gave it an edge over the rest of the islands in the U.S. imperial orbit. It was rewarded with statehood and a steady flow of tourist dollars.

Fojas-final.indb 131

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Chapter Four

Tropical Metropolis West Side Stories and Colonial Redemption

There are only three places that are of value enough to be taken, that are not continental. One is Hawaii and the others are Cuba and Porto Rico. Secr etary of State James Blaine to Pr esident Benjamin Harrison, 1891

T

he Elvis and Gidget films celebrated and deployed youth cultures to enhance the global position of the United States, but a film contemporary with those tourist films vilified youthful rebellion and the colony from whence some of the unruly youth emerged. The Hollywood film version of West Side Story (1961) is the popular-culture primal scene of Puerto Rican and Anglo-American intimacy; it produced the imaginary of Puerto Ricans in the United States. A primal scene is a terrifying and fascinating encounter with a spectacle of origins. It contains traumatic material about the form and meaning of intimate congress—in this case, it offers a pessimistic view of interracial relations as leading to a fateful end. Maria and Tony’s mixed-race encounter intensifies a conflict between two racially defined communities that ultimately leads to death for both Puerto Rican and Anglo characters. Although the film was produced at the height of the cultural preoccupation with teen delinquency, Anglo teenagers received a representational reprieve from that characterization in the beach fi lms and “clean teen” films of the 1960s.1 Puerto Ricans did not fare so well. In a number of Hollywood film and media productions, they continued to be associated with urban problems related to crime, poverty, gangs, teenage de-

Fojas-final.indb 132

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Tropical Metropolis

• 133 •

linquency, and “terrorism” in the form of a transnational independence movement. In the decades that followed the release of West Side Story, Puerto Ricans were afforded the opportunity for redemption in cultural productions in which they dramatized the transformation of deficits into assets. In a number of stories featuring bootstrap narratives of development, they were instrumentalized to serve the ends of empire by offering lessons in proper colonial comportment. In U.S. popular culture, Puerto Ricans illustrate how to transform colonial conditions into productive and generative activities, and are thus redeemed as icons of national values and initiatives. In an imperial narrative turn, they are depicted as actively channeling and transforming the negative aspects of urban culture into productive pursuits; if this goes awry, a cautionary tale ensues. Even within these triumphant and redemptive stories, representations of Puerto Ricans tend to be circumscribed by conditions that define colonial subjects through tropical malaise, exoticism, and physicality, relying heavily on corporeal activities like dancing, singing, and boxing—in portraits reminiscent of those found in the imperial guidebooks of 1898. Thus, they are given a particular role and place in the American Dream as sensual imperial subjects who turn coloniality into embodied achievement. Though not immigrants, Puerto Ricans are aligned with U.S. exceptionalist ideas via notions often associated with immigrant cultures: entrepreneurial spirit and resourcefulness. In West Side Story, Fame (1980), Do the Right Thing (1989), Girlfight (2000), El Cantante (2007), and Feel the Noise (2007), Puerto Rican story lines, characters, actors, and major cultural figures are showcased as key features of U.S. national identity. These characterizations justify the continued colonial status of Puerto Rico by suggesting that Puerto Ricans thrive under U.S. tutelage; they are part of the imperial myth that sovereignty can be achieved within coloniality. These stories show how popular culture further entrenches the colonial status of the island, keeping it in indefinite limbo as an unincorporated territory of the United States. Just as the reduced cost of airfare brought tourists to Hawaiʻi, the availability of air travel brought Puerto Ricans to the continental United States. Many landed on the East Coast, primarily in New York City. Puerto Ricans gained mass visibility in the 1950s and 1960s during the largest wave of labor migration from the island; publicity about their arrival in the United States was enhanced by a few high-profile independentista, or nationalist, attacks in San Juan and Washington, D.C., in the early 1950s.

Fojas-final.indb 133

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 134 •

Islands of Empire

In 1950, a group of Puerto Rican nationalists waged a suicide attack on La Fortaleza (the governor’s residence in San Juan) in an attempt to assassinate Governor Luis Muñoz Marín, known for his industrialization program, Operation Bootstrap. One day later, two nationalists travelled to Washington to carry out a failed assassination attempt on President Harry S. Truman. A few years later, nationalists stormed the U.S. Capitol once again, shooting at members of the House of Representatives and wounding five people. These events put the country on high alert; security forces were marshaled, and intelligence operations were aimed at these Puerto Rican groups. During the era of West Side Story, these high-profile attacks were part of the popular-culture unconscious that nourished the association of Puerto Rican youth with all manner of urban problems. In late 1974, when a new group of nationalists exploded five bombs in Manhattan, Jaime Benítez, a former president of the University of Puerto Rico and then delegate to the U.S. Congress, reflected on the impact of these events on the awareness of Puerto Ricans in the United States. He argued that since the attacks of the 1950s, the public had become unable to fully distinguish the ordinary Puerto Rican from the terrorist, adding that the nationalists of the 1950s were vastly different from the “terrorists” in the 1970s. By the 1970s, there was an interconnected network of “international political terrorism” that shared common experiences of U.S. hegemony and exhibited sophisticated techniques and recruitment practices. Benítez contends that the bombings by the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN) in 1974 were responsible for the bad reputation of Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rico: “For months and even years, millions of radio listeners and television viewers will vaguely link Puerto Rico with terrorism and independence.”2 The cultural memory of those attacks and the message they conveyed about U.S. imperial overreach fueled social anxieties about the islands and their peoples—ones that Benítez tried to assuage with the rhetoric of accommodation and assimilation: “Puerto Rico’s commonwealth association with the United States, in spite of misunderstandings and ambiguities arising from the complexities of a novel political status, has been valuable, strengthening, and mutually rewarding.”3 Popular attitudes about Puerto Ricans in the 1970s can be traced back to the origins of the nationalist movement in the 1950s, and in both eras the consequences were the same: suspicion and fear. While there is not perfect alignment between the nationalists of the 1950s and the juvenile delinquents of West Side Story, they are pieces of a whole that con-

Fojas-final.indb 134

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Tropical Metropolis

• 135 •

stitute the Puerto Rican “problem.” Taken together, they elicit a sense of cultural urgency to encourage Puerto Rican assimilation in order to neutralize and contain the perceived threat of disruption to the social order. Puerto Ricans gained visibility in U.S. popular culture as urban problems. Neither fully of the United States nor dismissible as foreign migrants, they would be redeemed as part of the U.S. national story of triumph over adversity—and through narratives of assimilation. West Side Story is the origin story of the new urban social formation that spawned other urban narratives about wayward youth. Fame, Do the Right Thing, Girlfight, El Cantante, and Feel the Noise associate Puerto Ricans with urban culture, but in a representational upgrade: they transform urban problems—poverty, violence, racial conflict—into avenues of success. They also set the conditions for the eventual redemption and integration of Puerto Ricans and Puerto Rico with the United States, but on fairly limited terms. That is, in these ambivalent depictions, while Puerto Ricans are both social problems and signs of redemption, their colonial status remains unresolved. Of all the colonies gained in 1898, Puerto Rico, like Guam, remains in limbo as neither independent nor fully politically integrated with the United States. It remains a problem yet to be resolved; it is, in the words of José Trías Monge, the “oldest colony in the modern world.”4 It is, paradoxically, eternally foreign in its domesticity. There is a long political history about this indeterminate position, accompanied by an ongoing struggle over it; but as West Side Story and other media depictions of Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans attest, popular culture maintains the status of the island and its peoples by presenting political limbo as a virtue and as an enabling condition for self-actualization. Juan Flores describes the present state of Puerto Rico as “lite colonial” for its resonance with the term “late colonial”; the latter is inflected with the temporality of capitalism in its late form and with the era following the global decolonization process. “Colonial lite” also contains a hint of levity to contrast it with the gravity and violence of earlier colonial forms. Indeed, U.S. colonialism in Puerto Rico appears benign, making it more pernicious and harder to dismember. It is a colonization that has adapted to the contemporary conditions of the island; it is flexible, much like the capital formations that emanate from the imperial center. Instead of direct colonial control, the United States wields the soft power of cultural influence with a transnational reach that extends from the island to the continental United States.5

Fojas-final.indb 135

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 136 •

Islands of Empire

Like Hawaiʻi, Puerto Rico was in line to become a model of colonial economic development, but through different means. Washington supported the implementation of an industrialization program, Operation Bootstrap, designed to alleviate the island’s overpopulation and unemployment problems and pave the way for political independence. The Puerto Rican government sought outside investors who would increase manufacturing and export production and diversify agricultural production after the postwar decline of the sugar industry—similar to the downturn experienced in Hawaiʻi in the same era. The majority of private investment, which came from the United States, was used to set up labor-intensive industries that required little overhead. The unintended result was the failure to develop a fully integrated industrial sector. When production declined, the companies moved their factories to places with more favorable conditions. Operation Bootstrap was a modest success for a short time, but in the long term it failed to make good on its promise to pave the way for economic self-sufficiency and subsequent political independence. Unemployment rates remained high despite the massive emigration of laborers in schemes modeled on the Bracero Program, which brought Mexican workers to the United States.6 The economy did not improve enough to create a stable basis for further development. Puerto Rico continued to be dependent on foreign investment and remained fi xed to the United States as one of its major colonial client states, a fate much like that of the Philippines.7 Operation Bootstrap’s deliberate reference to the idea of “pulling yourself up by your bootstraps” suggests that individual initiative, rather than governmental or social programs, is the avenue to economic independence—an idea that was dramatized in the Elvis tourist films set in Hawaiʻi. Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s similarly named “bootstraps model” analysis of ethnicity may lend insight into the racial ideology of the Puerto Rican industrialization program. The bootstraps model of ethnicity calls attention to the social imperatives of Operation Bootstrap, which, in turn, was symptomatic of the colonized status of Puerto Rico. The success of this model of development is dependent on individual adaptation to mainstream norms. Those who adapt perform well. Adaptation, or “structural assimilation,” means the denaturing or negation of cultural identity and its corresponding values.8 In Puerto Rico, Operation Bootstrap created widespread social and industrial conditions for local cultural negation and the wholesale adoption of U.S. ideological values. In fact, U.S. economic advisers shaped the development program and guided its implementation. A continental

Fojas-final.indb 136

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Tropical Metropolis

• 137 •

U.S. form of modernization and consumerism was imposed as U.S. companies were invited to set up shop, requiring workers to adapt to mainstream values and norms. In fact, the program’s main engineer, Governor Muñoz Marín, the first governor of Puerto Rico (1940–1964), was lionized in the U.S. popular press, particularly Time and Life, as bringing the American way to Puerto Ricans.9 Like Ford’s catastrophic failure to do the same in Brazil with Fordlandia, where workers did not adapt well to U.S. cultural hegemony, Operation Bootstrap did not achieve the success imagined by its engineers.10 By 1959, Washington had turned its focus to the world-changing events in Cuba, and the economic gains of the Bootstrap program dwindled. It did, however, succeed in shaping a model of development that was exported to the rest of Latin America. Teodoro Moscoso, in charge of the implementation and promotion of Operation Bootstrap, became the head of President Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress. That program, developed in response to the threat of the Cuban revolutionary government and based on similar principles to those of Operation Bootstrap, set the terms of U.S. policy toward Latin America in the 1960s. The idea was that economic development would create the conditions necessary for independence—and in the case of the Alliance for Progress, stave off the spread of Cuban (communist) influence.11 The injunction to “pull yourself up by your bootstraps” fails to consider the circumstances of nondominant groups that may hinder the fulfillment of this imperative. For Puerto Rico, Operation Bootstrap mimed the colonial conditions that it was meant to diminish. The process was not one of enabling the historical and cultural conditions of Puerto Rico to flourish, but of imposing an “Americanization” fueled by short-term investment and the desire to create new markets for U.S. goods. During the heyday of Operation Bootstrap, West Side Story was released— featuring the song “America,” which could serve as the anthem of the bootstrap ideology in U.S.-made Puerto Rico. The film mythologized the Puerto Rican condition as part of the immigrant narrative of the United States. This key popular-culture moment contributed to cultural amnesia about the historical conditions of the colony in limbo.

R acial Dystopia The Broadway musical version of West Side Story debuted in 1957 and was an instant blockbuster. The story, loosely following the tragic

Fojas-final.indb 137

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 138 •

Islands of Empire

story line of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, is about two gangs of delinquent teens, the Anglo-American Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks. The tension between the gangs erupts when Tony, from the Jets, falls in love with Maria, the sister of a Shark. Drawing on the Broadway success, the film version of West Side Story was released in 1961 to equal acclaim. While the film version was a clear hit, the market expectations created by other teen films ensured its success. The film targeted a very different market from the Broadway show. Rather than a tony New York audience, it was addressed to a public immersed in teen-rebellion feature films such as Rebel without a Cause (1955), Blackboard Jungle (1955), Teenage Rebel (1956), Untamed Youth (1957), Juvenile Jungle (1958), Riot in Juvenile Prison (1959), or in rock-and-roll films such as Rock, Rock, Rock (1956), Don’t Knock the Rock (1956), Carnival Rock (1957), and Go, Johnny, Go! (1959). During the late 1950s and early 1960s, teenagers were targeted as social problems that, as these films attest, emanated from their participation in subcultural or subgroup formations, including gangs and alternative groups antagonistic to mainstream culture.12 The topic of teenage delinquency was a major preoccupation among psychologists, sociologists, and members of the popular press—a concern made light of in the song “Gee, Officer Krupke,” in which the Jets sing that they are not really delinquents but just “misunderstood.” West Side Story intensified the obsession with wayward teens, but added a new element: the Puerto Rican “problem,” one that is as complex as it is manifold. In keeping with the logic of the musical, the characterizations of Puerto Ricans in West Side Story are split between good and bad, along a gendered divide. These ambivalent depictions invest the future potential of the colonial subject in the women, while the men are part of cautionary stories. The negative depiction of Puerto Rican men corresponds to the prevailing notions in the 1950s and 1960s about Puerto Rican degeneracy, in contradistinction to immigrants deemed assets to the host culture. Laura Briggs describes how the work of the anthropologist Oscar Lewis set the terms for discussions of Puerto Ricans as “problems” during this first wave of migration to the East Coast. Lewis describes Puerto Ricans as immersed in a “culture of poverty” that was evident in a number of conditions and characteristics, including absent fathers, matriarchal families, violence, poor work habits, and hypersexuality.13 Unlike idealized immigrant groups, Puerto Ricans were thought of as bringing their “culture of poverty” to the colonial center, causing a ruination of mainstream culture rather than an enhancement of it. This bad reputation is evident in West Side Story when Lieutenant Schrank maligns

Fojas-final.indb 138

12/6/13 1:55 PM

The Jets in West Side Story (1961).

The Jets and the Sharks face off.

Fojas-final.indb 139

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 140 •

Islands of Empire

Puerto Ricans by claiming that they will “turn the whole town into a stinking pigsty.” Such ideas circulated in mass culture through news media programming that popularized the ideological work of social scientists focused on the Puerto Rican “problem.” On May 5, 1957, the television program See It Now broadcast an episode titled “The Puerto Ricans: Americans on the Move.” The chainsmoking Edward R. Murrow narrated the story of Puerto Ricans in New York City and on the island (“for years it was the slum of the Caribbean”), disabusing viewers of some myths about Puerto Rico and Puerto Ricans while allowing others to persist. The program begins with an exposé of Puerto Rican slums in New York City, showing a family of ten in one room, and a four-room apartment housing fifteen people in abject conditions—clearly linking the “slum” of the Caribbean to the migrants’ transnational destination. Apartments are shown in advanced states of disrepair, infested with insects and vermin; there is an inflammatory story about a baby being bitten by a rat. The Puerto Rican slums are called “the natural home of vagrancy, juvenile delinquency, crime, narcotics, and drunkenness.” The stories are framed and contextualized by a panel of “experts,” “not professional do-gooders” but “people who must live with this problem”—and who endorse the dominant narrative about Puerto Rican colonial inadequacies. While the hour-long program ends with the idea that the slums predate the arrival of Puerto Ricans, the powerful images of Puerto Rican degeneracy eclipse this final note. Yet the images are used to fuel an optimistic message about the transformation of colonial deficits into imperial virtues. The final installment of the story takes us to the origin of Puerto Rican migration and marks the role of the island in the imperial narrative as the “showcase for the forces of freedom in the Caribbean.”14

R ace and National Belonging In West Side Story, the combination of music, dance, interracial romance, and references to the tropical islands associated with the United States could describe another film released in the same year: Elvis’s Blue Hawaii. In fact, the actor Jose De Vega, who plays Maria’s Puerto Rican betrothed, Chino, also plays one of Elvis’s Hawaiian beachboy sidekicks in Blue Hawaii. De Vega, of mixed Filipino and Colombian heritage, a uniquely transcolonial subject in popular culture, adopted various crossethnic and racialized roles in Hollywood films and television. His ap-

Fojas-final.indb 140

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Tropical Metropolis

• 141 •

Doomed interracial love between Maria (Natalie Wood) and Tony (Richard Beymer).

pearances in these two films tacitly reveal the interchangeability of sites and peoples of the U.S. tropical empire. De Vega’s multiple racialized castings also show how Hollywood constructs race and ethnicity according to a set of styles and behaviors adaptable to any actor. A comparison of Blue Hawaii with West Side Story reveals the imagined place of each colonial outpost in terms of its racial configuration, itself a symptom of national belonging. Whereas Blue Hawaii is a story of interracial romance as the basis of new capital relations between Hawaiʻi and the continent, it is also a drama about the future racial harmony of the United States, in which Hawaiʻi is a paradise of democracy and prosperity. West Side Story is a pessimistic tale of the tragic fate of mixed-race romances between Puerto Ricans and Anglo-Americans, a depiction that only intensifies the racial unrest in New York City that emanates from xenophobia about the influx of Puerto Ricans from the island. Hawaiʻi is viewed as a distant paradise whose racialized popu-

Fojas-final.indb 141

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 142 •

Islands of Empire

lation—Hawaiians and the multiracial mix of Asian and Pacific peoples—engages in harmonious relations with visiting and residing AngloAmericans. The racialized populations of Hawaiʻi are not depicted as mobile peoples who might migrate from the island archipelago to the continental United States. Puerto Rico, by comparison, is too close for comfort and within easy access to the metropolitan center and its economic opportunities. Thus, Puerto Ricans fare very differently in popular culture, portrayed as colonial problems and the purveyors of conflict and tension in cities of the eastern United States. There are a number of reasons for the major difference in racial ideology between Blue Hawaii and West Side Story. They lie on different points of the racial axis, with Hawaiʻi representing a more evolved social and racial order than Puerto Rico. Hawaiʻi makes good on the promise that colonial holdings will bring prosperity to the metropolitan center. Interracial relations flourish in the sunny and distant climes of the Pacific. Generic differences between the films notwithstanding, the mixedrace story of Blue Hawaii is an uplifting sign of progress and of the optimal conditions for entrepreneurial success. In various depictions in popular culture, Puerto Ricans are a source of unrest and a sign of racial disorder and backward colonial conditions transplanted to urban spaces. They represent the colonial regression of the inner city and a fateful sign of the degradation of an imagined harmony in the largest metropolitan center of the United States. In a typical immigrant narrative, they gain from their association with the United States, not as in Hawaiian tourist films, in which the U.S. traveler gains experience or wealth from the former colony turned state. In popular culture, there is only immigration to Hawaiʻi, not emigration from it; for Puerto Rico the inverse is true. The flow of tourists to Puerto Rico is virtually invisible in the popular-culture imaginary. West Side Story depicts actors of non–Puerto Rican heritage, such as Natalie Wood as Maria or George Chakiris as Bernardo, using accented English and brownface (for Chakiris) to enhance the portrayal of racialized ethnics. These roles conform to the idea that a racial and ethnic group must be performed in a particular manner, regardless of the identity of the actor—as was the case for the Puerto Rican actress Rita Moreno, who, like her non–Puerto Rican counterparts, had to use an accent and play to the expectations of the “spitfire” role of Anita. The use of a non–Puerto Rican actor for the lead role of Maria was a consequence of Hollywood studio racism; it also forestalled censorship of mixed-race intimacy and exploited the influence of a major Hollywood star. These

Fojas-final.indb 142

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Tropical Metropolis

• 143 •

Anita (Rita Moreno) in West Side Story.

ethnic performances were fictions of an overwrought Anglo imaginary of “Puerto Ricanness,” which makes the film, according to Frances Negrón-Mutaner, a “drag ball” that has nothing to do with the histories or sociocultural realities of being Puerto Rican in the United States. Instead, the story is an allegory about the role of race, gender, and sexuality in the U.S. social order.15 In West Side Story, race is a sign of social unrest. From the beginning, from Tony’s first ballad, the ill-fatedness of the doomed interracial relation is established. That mood is established after his close friend and Jet affi liate Riff (Russ Tamblyn) fails to convince him to return to the gang he abandoned, but succeeds in getting him to attend an intergang dance. The scene ends with Tony (Richard Beymer) singing “Something’s Coming,” a hopeful ballad about his desire for something new and inspiring that nonetheless foretells his untimely end. His decision to go to the dance signals his reintegration into the gang activities of the Jets, which seals his fate. A sense of doom inspires the message of the story, which is that gangs are the source of social ills and racial mixing begets conflict. The sense of doom sets in when Tony arrives at the dance and locks eyes

Fojas-final.indb 143

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 144 •

Islands of Empire

Tony and Maria embracing.

with Maria. The interracial romance is bound to fail because of their differing gang affi liations and the racial significance of each. Racial harmony between the Puerto Ricans and the Anglo-Americans is not an option in the story, though it is in one of its possible futures, which is the topic of the ballad “There’s a Place for Us,” a tune that returns as Tony dies in Maria’s arms. In 1961, Puerto Rico offered a good substitute for the off-limits topic of Cuba. It was a test case for the projection of the imperial myth that sovereignty can be found within the confines of coloniality. The Cuban Revolution profoundly and spectacularly contested that myth and became a beacon for other decolonization movements. Thus, Cuba was deemed a dangerous threat to the United States and its principles of free-

Fojas-final.indb 144

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Tropical Metropolis

• 145 •

market capitalism. The colonial status of Puerto Rico is rarely a topic of discussion in the fi lms under discussion here—except for a brief aside in the youth-oriented Feel the Noise. Rather, by aligning Puerto Ricans with immigrant cultures, these films both erase and encourage forgetting of the colonial past and the enduring consequences of imperialism. The immigrant story is a troubled one in which the United States is promised land and refuge as well as a restricted and controlled labor market. Of course, Puerto Ricans are not immigrants, having been granted citizenship by the Jones-Shafroth Act of 1917. The migration of Puerto Ricans to the metropolitan center created conditions similar to those experienced by immigrant groups—though in the 1960s they were deemed inferior to those groups. But the legal conditions of migration and their status as colonial subjects make Puerto Ricans’ sojourn distinct; they are, according to Jorge Duany, migrant citizens.16 Yet throughout West Side Story, Puerto Ricans are continually referred to as “immigrants,” for instance, when one Puerto Rican character says about another: “Once an immigrant, always an immigrant.” The idea for setting the story amid racially antagonistic gangs originated in the creative collaboration between two of the creators of the musical—Leonard Bernstein (score) and Arthur Laurents (book). When Bernstein happened upon headlines in Los Angeles papers about a gang riot, the gang angle became the basis of story. Thus the original story, which was about conflict between Catholics and Jews on the East Side of Manhattan, shifted to the racially mixed West Side and its Puerto Rican gangs. Laurents commented that the new play “would have Latin passion, immigrant anger, shared resentment.”17 West Side Story contributes to the continual elision of distinction between immigrants and Puerto Rican migrant citizens; defining Puerto Ricans as immigrants ensures that their colonial condition remains unresolved and unresolvable. Though the characters are described as immigrants, there is also reference to Puerto Rico being “in America.” Like West Side Story, Fame is a musical—both have had long runs as revivals. Yet Fame is perhaps better known as part of Hollywood film and television culture. It began as a movie in 1980, was spun off into a television series that ran from 1982 to 1987, was reinvented as a competition reality television show in 2003, and was remade as a movie in 2009. Like West Side Story, Fame is based in multiethnic New York and features Puerto Ricans prominently. The story is about several teenagers who successfully audition for places in a prestigious high school, the High School of Performing Arts, which was based on the Fiorello  H.

Fojas-final.indb 145

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 146 •

Islands of Empire

LaGuardia School of Music and Art and Performing Arts. The narrative centers on a group of teens that includes two compelling Puerto Rican characters, Ralph Garci and Coco Hernandez. Ralph is a comic actor who idealizes Freddie Prinze—the mixed-race Puerto Rican comedic actor who, unable to handle his sudden fame, died tragically in his twenties from a cocaine overdose. Ralph is a bright spot in the story because of his magnetic personality and humorous interjections, though, as with Prinze, there is a dark underside to his self-presentation, which is revealed when he becomes a popular comedy club act. The other Puerto Rican character, Coco, is played by Irene Cara, who sings many of the major solos in the film, including the titular “Fame,” “Hot Lunch,” and the chart-topping “Out Here on My Own.” Coco is obsessed with fame, making her vulnerable to unsavory characters and disillusionment. Cara achieved stardom from her role in the fi lm, earning top spots on the Billboard charts and recognition at the Golden Globes and the Academy Awards. Her rich and charismatic voice transformed her into a pop star, and she got the opportunity to sing the title song of another major dance film, Flashdance. Many of the films discussed in this chapter are musicals (West Side Story and Fame) or near musicals. El Cantante is a musical biopic, and Feel the Noise is a “making of the artist” story. Jane Feuer has described the musical as a genre that is “formally bold” yet conservative. Musicals are often self-reflexive; they are about themselves or the world of entertainment. They entertain by showing singing and dancing while they reflect on the nature of the business. It is a genre that privileges and extols Hollywood entertainment, and does so compellingly.18 The musical, for the qualities identified by Feuer, is the epitome of U.S. entertainment culture as a key purveyor and promoter of Americanism. For Feuer, the musical is “Hollywood writ large.”19 Fame is a key example of the selfreflexive musical in its dramatization of a group of aspiring entertainers. We meet Ralph and Coco during the admission auditions and get a brief lesson in the paradoxes of Puerto Rican racial identity, which shifts across the island and mainland contexts. In the United States, being white has a different history and meaning than whiteness does on the island—and in much of Latin America. Ralph and Coco represent different racial and ethnic identifications within the Puerto Rican transnational arc of identities. The story imagines a polarized and hierarchical racial imaginary for Puerto Ricans that divides along a black-white axis, privileging whiteness. At the audition, Coco tells Ralph that there is an unspoken quota

Fojas-final.indb 146

12/6/13 1:55 PM

The cast of Fame (1980) stopping traffic while singing and dancing to the title song.

Coco Hernandez (Irene Cara) and Bruno Martelli (Lee Curreri) combine their talents.

Fojas-final.indb 147

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 148 • Islands of Empire

system and that being an ethnic minority can help: “Your chances are better if you’re black or Puerto Rican or everything, like me.” Cara describes herself as being of Cuban and Puerto Rican heritages and appears to be as mixed race as the character she represents. Ralph initially represents the assimilated Puerto Rican who doesn’t relate to his given name, Raul Garcia, preferring the anglicized version of it. The actor who plays Ralph, Barry Miller, reads visually as Euro-American. Race is not what is there, but what you see. That is, Ralph is constructed as white because he is framed in that way from the beginning through his name and appearance. Yet Ralph responds to Coco with “I am Puerto Rican,” to which she expresses her disbelief by referring to his very Anglo name. He falls on the side of the racial divide that aligns him with white mainstream culture, which is emphasized by his intimate relation with his white girlfriend. Coco is more closely aligned with African American culture, which is marked by her relation to Leroy (Gene Anthony Ray). The divergent characterizations of Coco and Ralph are what Jorge Duany calls the paradox of Puerto Rican racialization, in which race signifies both white and brown simultaneously, depending on the context of interpretation, and each racial meaning has political and cultural resonance. Fame is a cautionary tale for all the characters, particularly, or more emphatically, for those of Puerto Rican heritage. Those characters, like all the teenage aspirants, do not suffer failure, but encounter the possibility of it. For example, Coco’s multiple talents and high aspirations make her central to the story. She claims she is just “killing time” at the performing arts high school while waiting for her major opportunity in show business. Of her own star quality, she remarks, “How bright our spirits go shooting out into space depends on how much we contributed to the earthly brilliance of this world. And I mean to be a major contributor.” But her obsession with stardom makes her vulnerable to exploitation; she is seduced by a pornographer posing as a European director and learns a lesson that puts her vanity and blind ambition in check. Instead of instant fame, she learns that stardom is personal and takes time. As she sings in the final scene: “In time we will all be stars.” Coco redeems herself through the mature self-reflection evident in her final solo. She is also the real “star” of the film, with her numerous solos, presciently remarking within the story line that she and her songwriter will be “all over the charts one of these days”—as was the case with Irene Cara and Michael Gore, who wrote the music for Fame. Fame ends in a group performance in which the teachers and students are part of a radiant spectacle of community. The transgressions of

Fojas-final.indb 148

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Tropical Metropolis

• 149 •

Coco and Bruno in Fame.

each character are forgiven, and conflicts are resolved. The tone of the final song is much like what Angela McRobbie, in her analysis of the television series spin-off of the movie, describes as “hymnal”: “Like religious singing, the song and dance routines in Fame are constructed so as to seem to bind people together, uniting young and old, teachers and taught, performers and audiences in an expression of celebration.”20 This moment of communion, which McRobbie describes as “American-ness,” is very much a celebration of the culture that generates the talent showcased in the final anthem. Americanness based in a culture of competition and individualism is the basis of the story. The impact of Fame cannot be underestimated. It continues its long life on Broadway in revivals and casts a long shadow on other cultural productions of a similar kind, most recently the television show Glee— which has featured songs from Fame—and the plethora of competition talent shows such as American Idol, The Voice, The X Factor, So You Think You Can Dance, and Dancing with the Stars. In Fame, the voice we hear above all others is that of Irene Cara. While the elevation of the Puerto Rican stars in this ensemble cast may not have been the overt intention of the producers and director, it nonetheless affects the imaginary of Puerto Ricans in popular culture. While

Fojas-final.indb 149

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 150 •

Islands of Empire

all the protagonists in the ensemble cast are working class, only those of color—Leroy, Coco, and Ralph—are identified with inner-city urban culture. Coco’s origins are erased, since she tries to pass herself off as upper middle class and the audience is given little insight into her actual home life. At one point she does remark in passing that the High School of Performing Arts is a much better choice than the school to which she was assigned, since “you don’t get raped in the hallways.” By comparison, Ralph is clearly from the Bronx, and Leroy is placed in the abject conditions of his inner-city community. Ralph is closely associated with the values of family as a sign of his cultural heritage, and his failures occur when he falls short of culturally defined expectations and does not make family his priority. The only time he shirks his familial responsibility as a surrogate father to his young siblings, his five-year-old sister is “attacked” by a drug addict in their building vestibule—she encounters her attacker while looking for her absent brother. Ralph is linked to a Puerto Rican family portrait that is repeated continually in other media representations: a single parent raising kids in the inner city. In fact, he describes his mother as a typically Puerto Rican woman beset by the backward notions of her ethnic heritage. For example, he criticizes the backwardness of her Old World values, which dictate that she take his sister to a church instead of a hospital after she is attacked. Of all the characters, only Ralph has a home life that becomes a major focal point, providing the raw material for his comedic routines. Ralph’s initial covering of his ethnic heritage is framed as a source of creative blockage. Once he overcomes this dis-identification, he turns his Puerto Rican heritage into the material for a successful career as a comedian. Thus, his representation conforms to those typical for Puerto Rican characters as symbols of industriousness and inventiveness, transforming the negative aspects of their colonial conditions into productive pursuits. He is able to take the abject experience of inner-city life and turn it into a pleasurable experience for a downtown audience. For example, he achieves success in the same comedy club that launched Freddie Prinze’s career, with jokes that emanate from his cultural heritage: “I live in the South Bronx. That’s the country just north of Harlem and west of Puerto Rico.” Ralph identifies too closely with Freddie Prinze and begins a dark descent into drug addiction to quell his demons and fuel his talent. Yet the opposite occurs: drugs sap his talent, and his personal life implodes. Ralph hits bottom when his comedy act bombs from a drug-induced lack

Fojas-final.indb 150

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Tropical Metropolis

• 151 •

of timing. He learns a lesson about the pitfalls of excess, but that is not the end of his story. Instead, the next scene shows the preparations for senior graduation, at which Ralph is redeemed as having renewed his potential. The final scene, the group graduation performance, is a hopeful reminder that he and his cohort still retain all the promise of youth. The final performance brings everyone together in an uplifting showcase of the many talents of the graduating seniors. Performance, particularly music and song, brings communion to the diversity of those in attendance and overcomes the differences that mark them outside this space. In Fame, despite the impossible odds of success, show business is hospitable and forgiving and there is always the opportunity to begin again. Coco and Ralph face disappointment but find a renewed sense of purpose through the force of their aspirations. The message of Fame, transmitted via the Puerto Rican characters, is that of the redemptive power of U.S. entertainment culture and, by extension, the power of U.S. culture to guide and nurture its colonial charges.

Fight the Power In the 1990s, Rosie Pérez was one of the most visible Latinas and Puerto Ricans in Hollywood film and media culture. She has had a varied film and television career, often cast as a spitfire and as an uncouth and tough Nuyorican. She made her way into the spotlight as a dancer on Soul Train, and a choreographer and dancer on the show In Living Color (Fox, 1990–1994), a sketch-comedy program much like Saturday Night Live but with a hip-hop sensibility and a multiethnic, multiracial cast.21 Pérez was one of the Fly Girls, or dancers, who opened the show with energetic routines set to hip-hop. Before her appearance on In Living Color, she had much the same role in Do the Right Thing, an independent production written and directed by Spike Lee, who maintained control over the content and representation, which separated it from typical Hollywood fare. The film opens with a solo dance routine by Pérez to the politicized, black-power-inflected “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy. The opening song is a call to fight against systems of oppression besetting ethnic and racialized communities, particularly African Americans. In this depiction, dance is less spectacle than physical and political expression. This opening number sets the mood for a fi lm that is about confrontation and opposition between Italian Americans and African Americans, in which the conflict between cultures is infused with rac-

Fojas-final.indb 151

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 152 •

Islands of Empire

Spike Lee as Mookie in Do the Right Thing (1989).

ism. The dance takes place against backdrops representing Brooklyn, where Pérez is from. Pérez also changes garb throughout the sequence, including a boxing outfit that addresses the lyrics of the song and acts, however unintentionally, as a reminder of the role of Puerto Ricans in the Brooklyn boxing world. The depiction of Pérez as a loud, energetic, and foul-mouthed Latina raises questions about the mainstream representation of Latinas in general and Puerto Rican women in particular. For Angharad N. Valdivia, Pérez is the perfect case study for exploring the politics of representation. She asks, “Does she really speak like that, or do they make her do it? Why does she always play the same role? Can’t they find other roles for her? Will they ever portray a Latina like us (we are not at all alike, so we’ll take any one of us)? Why is she somehow seductive? Does she transgress to our liking?”22 Valdivia is not optimistic about Pérez’s potential to disrupt the Hollywood depiction of Latinas. Charles Ramírez Berg expounds on Valdivia’s analysis by applying his unique way of interpreting Latina and Latino performers who have resisted the force of Hollywood stereotyping. Assessing the agency of actors is difficult, since their creativity is often curtailed by the racialized and cultural expectations of the industry. Berg does, however, locate artistic creativity and

Fojas-final.indb 152

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Tropical Metropolis

• 153 •

the potential to disrupt representation through a grid of elements that includes animation, comedy, costume, and voice. Through these elements, performers have the potential to exceed stereotype and subvert it from within, to undo it by overdoing it. Yet he agrees with Valdivia’s assessment that Pérez’s roles tend to be overly identified with a fi xed notion of Latina identity as working class, brash, and sexualized. He finds that stereotypes are defied and destabilized when audiences are given more information, when depictions are nuanced and complex. Yet Pérez did not add anything compelling to her early roles in Hollywood film and risked intensifying stereotype rather than diminishing its force. He finds that by virtue of her shrill voice and hyperactivity, “she becomes the irritating Other rather than an interesting one.”23 But there is hope for Pérez; when she is cast outside of type, she gives more complex portrayals, as in her work in The 24 Hour Woman (1999) and more recent work in television series and small film parts.24 In Do the Right Thing, she offers a complex contribution to the story: her opening dance sequence sets the tone, and her role as the main character’s girlfriend contributes to the directive in the title, exhorting him to “do the right thing,” in this case by visiting her and their son more often and demanding his due at work. Do the Right Thing challenges racial depictions as it engages an overarching polarized imaginary that puts black and brown folks against

Mookie and Pino (John Turturro).

Fojas-final.indb 153

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 154 •

Islands of Empire

Mookie with girlfriend Tina (Rosie Pérez).

white folks. Sharon Willis argues that this contrast is an artificial outcome of the “white gaze” and has energized critiques claiming that the film incites audiences to engage in racialized violence.25 In the social dynamic of the story, Puerto Ricans are aligned with African Americans, immediately signaled by Rosie Pérez’s opening sequence and her intimate relationship with Mookie, played by Spike Lee. The story is a twenty-four-hour snapshot of intensifying racial and ethnic tensions in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Pérez plays a special role in the film by being both outside the narrative and its moral center. Her opening dance draws attention to the force of her ambiguous position, her body signifying a flexible gender code. Angela McRobbie describes the liberatory potential of dance as self-expression that is “temporarily out of control, or out of the reaches of controlling forces.”26 In fact, Pérez’s performance happens outside the confines of the narrative and its linearity. It is a performance of complete abandon and yet muscular force, an energetic and defiant expression of resistance and opposition—in short, a perfect allegorical preface for the antiracist work of the fi lm narrative. In the role of a boxer, she asserts a new opportunity for visually contesting normative gendered expectations for Puerto Rican women, one that was fully realized by Michelle Rodriguez in Girlfight. Yet within this upending of

Fojas-final.indb 154

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Tropical Metropolis

• 155 •

gender norms is the reductive association of Puerto Ricans with urban environments in domains characterized by racialized forms of bodily performance. Though many of her early roles partook of the reductive representational imaginary of Latinas, Pérez has maintained a high profile in recent years as a community activist and critic of the U.S. role in Puerto Rico. In 2000, she was arrested for “disorderly conduct” while protesting military testing on the island of Vieques.27 This biographical fact, like her dance sequence in Do the Right Thing, occurred outside the controlling mainstream narrative of her more normative and often limited roles in Hollywood. Her act of disobedience signaled the potential for Puerto Rican identity to be defined through a critical rapport with U.S. culture through the specter of “terrorism” instead of via the acculturating forces of a celebratory binational collaboration and accommodation. More recently, Pérez expressed her political commitment to exposing the colonial conditions of the island, along with a critical engagement with the history of U.S.-Puerto Rican relations, in the documentary ¡Yo Soy Boricua, Pa’Que Tú Lo Sepas! (I’m Boricua, Just So You Know!) (2006), which she directed and produced. Pérez begins the documentary with the Puerto Rican Day parade, which functions as the framing device for the story. The story interweaves personal and sociopolitical narratives; she interviews members of her family to address the issue of Puerto Rican pride and discusses the history of Puerto Rico and its peoples, partly through her own family history. For instance, she discusses her role in the protest against the U.S. military in Vieques that led to her arrest, and that introduces the story of how Vieques has been used as a bomb site and testing ground for the military—much like another site in the U.S. imperial circuit, the island of Kahoʻolawe, Hawaiʻi. The protest was part of a history of protests that eventually, in 2003, led to the closing of the naval base on Vieques. The documentary disabuses U.S. audiences of misconceptions and misapprehensions about Puerto Ricans in a transnational context and, like the Puerto Rican Day parade featured prominently in the film, makes visible the contributions of Puerto Ricans to the United States. Feel the Noise (2007) uses the parade as a framing device also, but mostly to promote and showcase the film’s producer, Jennifer Lopez, and her then husband, Marc Anthony. Pérez maintains the political and social impact of the parade, which was inaugurated in 1958 and, according to the organization that manages it, “was born of the imperative necessity of translating Puerto Rican achievements into a visible demonstration

Fojas-final.indb 155

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 156 •

Islands of Empire

of the dynamism of the Puerto Rican community, in order to achieve Puerto Rican unification and support all the other Spanish-speaking people.”28 Pérez does not shy away from exploring the work of nonmainstream Puerto Rican culture, particularly the nationalists on the island and the Young Lords (a Puerto Rican nationalist group) in the United States. Yet her discourse is not entirely on the side of those seeking independence from the United States. Rather, she attributes her Hollywood success to her own perseverance and aligns herself with family members who express their gratitude for the opportunities afforded U.S. citizens. While the narration about the island and its peoples is often critical of U.S.-Puerto Rican relations, part of Pérez’s personal discourse engages a larger, overarching narrative about the Puerto Rican ascension in the United States through hard work and self-sufficiency. This is evident in the final message of the documentary, in which Pérez likens Puerto Ricans to a child’s toy, the Weebles: “You can push a Puerto Rican down a hundred times and we will come right back up, right back up.” The remark eclipses the more critical discourse of the film and uses a U.S. popular-culture figure to associate Puerto Ricans with the indomitability of U.S. will and determination. The discourse of the Weebles leads nicely into another genre that includes an abundance of Puerto Rican figures, the urban boxing film.

Urban Tr ansformation Like West Side Story, Fame, and Do the Right Thing, Girlfight takes place in New York City, specifically in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Diana, a senior in high school, seeking a means for both expressing her rage and escaping her fate in Red Hook, does what many poor urban minorities before her have done: she trains to be a prizefighter. She becomes a masterful boxer who wins every bout in her division, gaining the recognition and confidence she needs to be “somebody.” Along the way, she meets a fellow boxer and love interest, Adrian—who coincidentally shares the name of Rocky Balboa’s girlfriend. When there are no more women in her division to match her skill, Adrian and Diana must enter the ring together for a powerfully dramatic culmination of their love story. The film presents a new vision and version of female sexuality within heterosexuality, one based on a lack of visual difference, an indifference to gender, physical prowess, and, not incidentally, of race—though not nec-

Fojas-final.indb 156

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Tropical Metropolis

• 157 •

Diana Guzman (Michelle Rodriguez) and Adrian Sturges (Santiago Douglas) as lovers in Girlfight (2000).

essarily of ethnic or national markers. Like Coco in Fame, Diana is ethnically unmarked visually. We know Adrian is Puerto Rican, with an abundance of flags and other prideful signifiers, and that Diana is Latina, but she lacks any trademark signifiers of Puerto Rican identification. Like Irene Cara, Rodriguez is of mixed heritage, in her case half Puerto Rican and half Dominican. In the story, she reads as Puerto Rican; her brother, Tiny, is played by Ray Santiago, whose biography is limited to his place of birth, the Bronx—a known transnational destination for Puerto Ricans. Perhaps the best clue to Diana’s heritage is in the casting of the renowned Puerto Rican actor Paul Calderon to play her father. Girlfight uses a boxing film to tell a story about individual success in which Puerto Rican characters embody the will and determination to rise above their racialized communities. Boxing stories make the dangerous urban environment the training ground for the boxer. As in the colonial narrative of bootstrapping in Puerto Rico, the insufficiencies of the inner city are framed as virtues that provide the raw materials for success. In keeping with the logic of imperial limbo, Diana’s aspirations are achieved by virtue of the degraded colonial conditions of the inner city, not despite them. In this gendered, liberal-democratic narrative, Puerto Rican women have an equal opportunity to achieve self-

Fojas-final.indb 157

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 158 •

Islands of Empire

Director Karen Kusama with Michelle Rodriguez while filming Girlfight.

determination within coloniality. Paradoxically, it is the internally colonized urban space of Red Hook that affords these opportunities. Robert Singer finds that many of the films that take place in Red Hook share similar features, most notably a preoccupation with urban squalor and the struggle for survival, for example, Last Exit to Brooklyn and Straight Out of Brooklyn.29 This characterization of Red Hook is a consequence of its economic and social history, which in turn contributes to the overarching cultural narrative that associates Puerto Ricans with inner-city hardship and immigrant cultures. Before 1900, Red Hook was a center of shipping and of considerable industry, which made it a target settlement area for immigrants. After World War II, deindustrialization took hold, leaving the area riddled with abandoned lots and warehouses. The decline in industry led to a decrease in labor opportunities and a struggle over scarce resources that bred corruption and poverty; white flight led to an influx of Latinos and African Americans, now the dominant populations of the neighborhood. Red Hook became a symbol of urban blight and poverty, breeding what Singer calls “new racial and class-based parameters for the experience of grinding deterministic forces.”30 The unique position of Red Hook intensifies its exclusion from the center of the metropolis: it is the only Brooklyn neighborhood surrounded on three sides by water, and as a result, it lacks a direct sub-

Fojas-final.indb 158

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Tropical Metropolis

• 159 •

way line.31 Diana is contextualized within this abandoned urban space and depicted in a manner congruent with other protagonists of immigrant tales of aspiration and attainment—though she, like all Puerto Ricans, is not an immigrant. Initially, Red Hook is a space that Diana has to overcome, against which she is literally fighting. Depicted as dark, confining, and rigid, her part of the city is unhappy—she traverses gloomy neighborhoods and abandoned lots and navigates through her prison-like high school and generic housing project. From the beginning, Diana is depicted as dwarfed and almost consumed by the city. When her father sends her out to an abandoned industrial area to pay for her brother’s boxing lessons, she is shown walking under large cement structures, and the overhead shots establish her relative powerlessness and alienation. This part of Brooklyn seems abandoned by city services, in a state of postindustrial decay and noirishly framed as dangerous and dark. But Diana’s story ends hopefully; she maneuvers her way into the all-male space of the gym and the larger world of boxing; her place in the city is not as “grindingly” deterministic as those of other cinematic and literary Red Hook inhabitants. Thus, for Singer, Girlfight reflects the changes that have taken place in Red Hook while also pointing to a more hopeful outcome for Brooklyn, evident in a rise in the standard of living. Diana, he claims, “represents a distancing of the pervasive ideology of class and gender restrictions endemic to cinematic representations of the hood.”32 Her depiction breaks with the typical “contemporary Brooklyn film narrative” and points to a future in which one’s tenure in the projects is not tantamount to a hopeless struggle for survival.33 But Girlfight is part Red Hook narrative and part boxing film, and the latter can be interpreted as the undoubted reserve of the bootstrap story. Diana, through her initiative and aspiration, through work and dedication, turns her colonial condition into a remunerative career. In this way, the Puerto Rican story line in Hollywood film and media culture is congruent with the plot of boxing films. Films about boxing share similar features: they take place in inner cities and ghettos; they are a masculine and masculinist genre; they mythologize violence and its transformative energies; and they focus on the rise and commercial success of extraordinary talent, a plotline dovetailing nicely with the Puerto Rican story in Hollywood. In boxing films, the implicit violence of the city is mapped onto the body of one of its inhabitants, and aggressiveness, typically viewed negatively, is prized within the ring. The urban violence harnessed through box-

Fojas-final.indb 159

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 160 •

Islands of Empire

ing is both actual and symbolic. It is the violence associated with exclusion from local resources, dilapidated housing projects, unemployment, undercapitalization, and the postindustrial abandonment of the inner city. But it is also the violence associated with the consequences of informal economies, such as underground commerce in illicit drugs and prostitution, that thrive whenever city and social services drop off. The government has slashed federal funding for social programs in order to prioritize programs like the “war on drugs,” which overwhelmingly targets the racialized inner cities. Social services have been replaced by the more restrictive and punitive policies of prohibition and punishment for drug commerce, all of which contributed to and deepened existing cycles of urban violence. Boxing films rarely reflect on the larger social and political implications of such environmental conditions and instead veil them behind stories of singular achievement. The films depict volatile urban conditions as necessary for the creation of a prizefighter. Much like Ralph and Tina, Diana takes the discontent of her urban environment and transforms it into “athletic” prowess. Many boxing films offer tacit critiques of social inequities drawn across urban space. In most cases, the prizefighters are from the outskirts of the city or the abandoned inner cities, places offering few options for upward mobility; escape from those areas may register as rejection of the conditions left behind. Yet these narratives have their limitations: they fail to imagine alternative means of upward mobility, and they revisit the same tired associations of ethnicity, race, and muscular physicality. The depiction of Diana is a major representational shift for women, but reinforces a limited typing for Puerto Ricans. Diana’s triumph over gendered expectations signals a powerful gain for Latinas in Hollywood, but her connection with the inner city and its woes reinforces the long-standing link between Puerto Ricans and urban problems. It continues the association of Puerto Ricans with bootstrap narratives or with the idea that (economic) sovereignty may be attained within colonial conditions.

Nuyorican Productions Like Rosie Pérez, Jennifer Lopez made her start on the show In Living Color as one of its resident dancers. Lopez recalls that her desire to become a dancer emanated from her youthful fascination with West Side Story and her aspiration to play the role of Anita and, later, Maria. For

Fojas-final.indb 160

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Tropical Metropolis

• 161 •

Frances Negrón-Mutaner, this, among other examples, confirms how the movie has become a major part of Puerto Rican identity formation in the United States.34 Significantly, Lopez became another major coordinate in this formation across several different types of media, including film, television, and popular music. Both Feel the Noise and El Cantante, released in the same year, had the then-married couple Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony at the artistic helm. Lopez produced both films via her production company, Nuyorican Productions. The pair is featured in El Cantante, sharing top billing with the famed exiled Cuban director Leon Ichaso. Ichaso is renowned for telling stories of Caribbean artists in New York City, or, as he describes it, stories of those who “brought a piece of the tropics with them” and carry “the pain of their ambulant island.”35 Both Feel the Noise and El Cantante feature transnational Puerto Rican artists who travel between the continental United States and Puerto Rico, and both films focus on the opportunities created by a creative collaboration between Puerto Rico and the United States. El Cantante follows a narrative arc about the rise and fall of an artist and his redemption by a woman— which may recall the story around Ralph Garci in Fame. While both stories are about the rise of a transnational artist, the one prominently featuring Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony is aimed at a larger market and audience than Feel the Noise. Yet the latter is one of the only films under discussion here to directly address the status of Puerto Rico as a colony, even if it is done in passing and without expounding on the idea. Compared to the other films, Feel the Noise is more ambitious in its interethnic expression and in showing the life of the island—and therefore more politically charged. Feel the Noise was produced after the success of two major popular cultural phenomena: 8 Mile (2002), featuring the story of rapper Eminem, and reggaeton, a mix of reggae and salsa rhythms that is often accompanied by Spanish lyrics. The opening scene of Feel the Noise recalls 8 Mile and the idea that stardom can be achieved by winning a rap contest in a club; but in this case the rapper in question, Rob, is shot at by an avenging gang member—Rob stole his rims to fund his entry into the contest. Like Ralph in Fame or Diana in Girlfight, Rob is from a singleparent home in New York City. In yet another revision of the story of single parenthood, his father lives in Puerto Rico. His mother, to protect him from the gang members, sends him to Puerto Rico, where the story begins again on new ground. In Puerto Rico, he meets his half-brother, Javi (Victor Rasuk), a reggaeton artist who aspires to “make it” in New

Fojas-final.indb 161

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 162 • Islands of Empire

York City; this plot point recalls the story line of Leon Ichaso’s Crossover Dreams (1985). The two collaborate on a new musical form that combines hip-hop and reggaeton. The story is one of hybrid formations, of artistic productions that emerge from the mixing of two cultural forms. This diverges from the conflict and competition between cultures shown in, for example Do the Right Thing, which pits rap against salsa. Feel the Noise attempts to go in a different direction from that of the cultural phenomena that preceded it, particularly in the effort to create a new transnational aesthetic form—one inspired by and grounded in the unique sound of the national animal of Puerto Rico, the coquí, or little chirping frog. The frog is so identified with Puerto Rican culture that it has become one of its major icons. It is described in El Cantante as unique to Puerto Rico and as being unable to survive elsewhere—an allegory about transnational dislocation. That idea, however, runs counter to the current condition of the frog, which was brought illegally to the island chain of Hawaiʻi, where it thrives—much to the dismay of local environmental agents. This transplantation is just one more example of the transfer of peoples, animals, and goods among the island colonies of the United States—the largest of which occurred during the economic heyday of the sugar plantations, when a substantial number of Puerto Rican workers migrated to Hawaiʻi, enabled by the free movement accorded them as colonial subjects of the United States. Feel the Noise is about the return migration from the continent back to the island; but only for a brief stint, since, in the logic of the story, real opportunity resides in the metropolitan center. The same lesson is apparent in El Cantante when Hector Lavoe (Marc Anthony) returns to Puerto Rico to give a concert; it is so poorly organized and promoted that there are only a few people in the audience, and inclement weather forces the entire show to end. When Hector complains, he is reminded that he is not in New York, implying that he must accept that things work less efficiently on the island. It is then no surprise that the rest of the film takes place back in the environs of New York City, where his career is solidified. Similarly in Feel the Noise, Rob gathers raw materials in Puerto Rico for his eventual success in the continental United States. These materials include not just the collaborations that generate his unique contribution to the industry, but also his Puerto Rican love interest, who reflects his ambitions: she wants to study dance in New York. The story of Rob’s development as an artist is a cautionary tale with a clear lesson about proper comportment. His ambition for success and his lack of means compel him on two occasions to steal in order to fund

Fojas-final.indb 162

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Tropical Metropolis

• 163 •

his endeavors. Both times, he faces extralegal justice. When a family heirloom goes missing, he is not directly accused of taking it, but the suspicion and distrust that ensue weigh on him. These instances show how the film cautions against a path to success that is not paved by work or, in the colonial parlance, by pulling oneself up by the bootstraps. This cautionary message is apparent from the first scene, in which he does not win the contest in the New York nightclub, a victory that would have garnered easy success. Instead, he is forced to work to attain success, in a manner that is deemed unique and requires a return to the roots of his heritage. The story is one of accommodation to the mainstream, of the addition of a Puerto Rican “flavor” to the American Dream. Feel the Noise adds a new dimension to U.S. stories of attainment rather than contesting them or starting a new narrative. Rob embodies and enhances the bootstrap model; he brings it into the twenty-first century and delivers it to a younger audience. As in the Elvis films set in Hawaiʻi or Fame, Feel the Noise ends with a large ensemble number, absorbing the characters in the forty-ninth annual Puerto Rican Day parade. The parade is led by Jennifer Lopez and Marc Anthony, who appeared and performed in the actual parade that year. The parade is deployed to elevate the cultural status of the film itself. In fact, the Puerto Rican Day parade is a major symbol of the Puerto Rican diaspora, publicizing and celebrating the culture and politics of its peoples. The story reaches toward verisimilitude by showing the producing team of the film as major figures in the parade and thus as significant arbiters of Puerto Rican culture—this also contributes to the couple’s pervasiveness at the time as cultural icons of Puerto Ricans in the United States. It might have reminded viewers of the appearance earlier that year, 2007, of another collaboration between these major stars in the film El Cantante. Like Feel the Noise and Fame, El Cantante is a tale of aspiration with a cautionary message. Like Freddie Prinze, Hector Lavoe was a brilliant artist from Puerto Rico who, unable to handle the pressures of a public life, resorted to drug use, the complications of which lead to his death. Puchi (Jennifer Lopez), Hector’s Nuyorican wife, tells his story in an interview format interspersed with flashbacks. The story is hers to tell, and she conveys her proprietary hold on her deceased husband, based on their twenty-year marriage; the format privileges her in the story and, by extension, privileges the U.S.-based perspective. While Puchi’s narrative about the wayward path of her husband is that of a spurned and often angry wife, the story of Hector tends toward

Fojas-final.indb 163

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 164 •

Islands of Empire

the cautionary. As in the case of the Freddie Prinze–like Ralph in Fame, Hector is example of the vulnerable state of the colonial subject. Yet Hector Lavoe—born Hector Martínez—is depicted as being negatively shaped by the deleterious urban culture of Manhattan. The cautionary aspect of the story involves the proper way to channel the negative influences and energies of the inner city into creative pursuits. The characterizations of Rob in Feel the Noise, Diana in Girlfight, Tina in Do the Right Thing, and Ralph and Coco in Fame offer lessons about proper comportment by colonials and about the embodiment of the American Dream as it is mythologized in West Side Story. That film set the terms and the representational matrix for portraying Puerto Rican characters as split between the good and the bad. The good characters—mostly women—believe in the promise of America, and they sing its praises, particularly for the “industrial boom” and the availability of housing—both of which were lacking in Puerto Rico in the 1950s. The division between men and women is in line with the facile morality of musicals. But it also points to the association of women with progress and the good life, making them the moral backbone of the family and the community. This idea is evident throughout later representations, in which men are often wayward colonial subjects and women are their salvation as benevolent agents of modernity. For instance, in El Cantante, Puchi is associated with Manhattan and the progress and promise of the mainland United States— in particular, fame and success—while Hector is associated with the island. As a colonial subject, he is deemed more vulnerable to the excesses of the continental United States; a refrain throughout the story is the bitterness of Hector’s father at the “loss” of his son to New York. This is repeated later when Hector’s sister, critical of mainland U.S. acculturation, rebukes Puchi as the cause on his downfall and the reason their father did not want Hector to leave the island. El Cantante reminds viewers of Hector Lavoe’s talents and educates a mainstream audience about his place in the history of salsa.36 Feel the Noise does similar work, teaching audiences about the musical difference between hip-hop and reggaeton before combining those styles to form a new, hybrid genre. Both fi lms show versions of the collaboration between the colony and the metropolitan center, whether the mixing of styles or significant transnational collaborations like that between the artists Willie Colón and Hector. Their partnership is described as “destiny,” just as the colonial status of Puerto Rico is mythologized as “destiny,” expressed by Colón as the idea that “destiny brought us to this

Fojas-final.indb 164

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Tropical Metropolis

• 165 •

continent.” Both films are part of a triumphant narrative of the American Dream in which the colonial status of the island, a state of imperial limbo, is rendered invisible. Instead, the fi lms persist in delivering a bootstrap model of individual development that emanates from the successful collaboration between the imperial center and its colonial subjects. Characters adjust to their colonial status by integrating it into their career paths, and imperial inequity and coercion are imagined as representing a freely chosen relation between equals. Though Hector Lavoe failed to rid himself of his demons, he is redeemed in the mythologizing of El Cantante. He died at a young age from complications of AIDS after years of drug abuse, but remains a vital icon of Puerto Rican culture in the United States. The story ends with his funeral and an epigraph that denotes his resurrection in popular culture: “Hector’s legacy beats in the hearts of millions. His music lives on forever.” Hector did not triumph over adversity, yet El Cantante transforms his story of hardship into a triumph, aligning it with the belief that the United States is a nation of immigrants who attain success by overcoming difficulties. Though Puerto Ricans are not immigrants, they are visible through the discourse of immigration and the ideal of the United States as a nation of newcomers. They are depicted as exemplars of the American way, in part to foreclose on their political difference and forestall any territorial claims to nationhood. The films discussed in this chapter, by focusing on Puerto Ricans in the United States as domestic subjects even when they are on the island, render invisible the colonial status of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rican characters reside in inner cities beset by crime, poverty, gangs, and a lack of resources. Yet they achieve redemption by rising above their conditions, like ideal immigrants, and transforming them into productive pursuits. They exhibit U.S. characteristics of inventiveness and resourcefulness, and achieve success outside of national, state, or local institutions and without the assistance of other members of their community. They are model bootstrap individuals who defy the odds and achieve their goals on the basis of their strength of character and assertion of will. Unlike Filipinos, Guamanians, and Hawaiians, who remain adjuncts and accessories in major Hollywood films, Puerto Ricans are given top billing as protagonists in their own stories. (Cubans experience both poles of this representational schema: they are protagonists, as in Scarface or The Perez Family, and adjuncts, as in Havana or Cuba.)

Fojas-final.indb 165

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 166 •

Islands of Empire

These roles as protagonists are symptomatic of the imperial imaginary that accords Puerto Ricans pivotal roles in the drama of empire. They are embodiments of the American Dream and models for other ethnic and racialized groups in U.S. inner cities, but their colonial status remains unresolved, and they remain in indefinite imperial limbo.

Fojas-final.indb 166

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Chapter Five

The Guam Doctrine Colonial Limbo in the Pacific

Guam has been groomed as a military watchdog—the alert eyes and ears of the Western Pacific . . . The Guam watchdog has deadly teeth. It can strike toward the Orient with lightning speed and infallible accuracy at any moment. Charles Beardsley, Guam: Past and Present (1964)

We’re at the bottom of the Marianas but I feel like I’m on top of the world. Jane Goody in Max Havoc: Curse of the Dr agon (2004)

A

s colonies and former colonies of the United States, the Philippines, Guam, and Hawaiʻi form a strategic military trio in the Pacific in which Guam is an invisible bridge between the two other locations. It is no coincidence that Guam is identified with U.S. global wars, particularly the spectacle of the triumphant contest with Japan in World War II. After the war, Guam became a key militarized colony in the Pacific, second only to Hawaiʻi. Like the Philippines, Guam experienced the imperial domination of Spain, Japan, and the United States because of its strategic location in the Pacific; like Hawaiʻi, it is dominated by the hydra of tourism and militarism—though it is much more defined by militarism; and like Puerto Rico, it remains an unincorporated territory, though it is on the list of non-self-governing territories. Guamanians, mostly indigenous Chamorros and Filipinos, are U.S. citizens who do not have the right to vote in federal elections; they are, like the rest of the formal U.S. empire, foreign domestics, but unlike the

Fojas-final.indb 167

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 168 •

Islands of Empire

rest (except Puerto Rico), they remain in imperial limbo, with few in the continental United States aware of their condition. Guam is the largest island in the Marianas, but as a U.S. colony, it has been isolated from the rest of the archipelago. Scholars often examine Guam by itself, not in relation to the rest of the archipelago or its imperial kin. Keith L. Camacho argues that the divided history of the Marianas should be acknowledged and addressed, particularly in relation to the wars that contributed to the political dispersal of the archipelago.1 Guam is the least visible of all the colonies or neocolonies acquired in 1898, and has received the fewest number of references in U.S. popular culture. There is only passing reference to Guam in the guidebooks of empire published on the heels of the Spanish-American War. Part of this neglect had to do with Washington’s interest in maintaining Guam as a strictly command economy or a U.S. military outpost, with little or no regard for other forms of economic development on the island until the 1960s. In popular culture, there are a couple of notable exceptions to this blanket invisibility. Two Hollywood films take place or are depicted as taking place entirely on Guam: Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon (2004) and No Man Is an Island (1962). The latter is a World War II film that propagates the idea of the island as a command post of the U.S. military; the more recent fi lm is a promotional vehicle for tourism to the islands. In both, Japanese characters constitute the enemy forces— reflecting the status of Japan as a competing empire in the Pacific—and a triumphant Anglo-American character heroically challenges the East Asian bogeymen and protects local characters, commanding their gratitude. Regardless of genre, these films emit continual reminders of the U.S. role in ending the Japanese occupation, the unmarked consequence of which is the persistence of U.S. colonial rule. For imperial Spain, Guam was a stop along the galleon trade routes that included a route from Manila to Acapulco and overland to Veracruz, with a final stop in Havana before reaching Spain. Guam remains a vital nodal point in an imperial matrix. The proximity of Guam to the Philippines sealed the former’s fate as a dependent territory often hitched to the latter in the U.S. imaginary. Before World War II, Guam served as something of a supplement to the Philippines; in fact, during the war with Spain, U.S. marines en route to Manila were ordered to capture Guam along the way. Guam, a stopover point between Hawaiʻi and the Philippines, is a large part of the strategic holdings of the United States in the Pacific. It is largely invisible to the mainland center as anything

Fojas-final.indb 168

12/6/13 1:55 PM

The Gua m Doctr ine

• 169 •

but a military outpost and a former pawn of world powers seeking control of the Pacific. With Puerto Rico, it shares the status of being one of the oldest colonies in the world, but receives less publicity on that score; both remain in imperial limbo, with independence or statehood as possible but improbable futures. The U.S. military, particularly the navy, was responsible for the construction of Guam as primarily a U.S. military outpost. In fact, the official navy report from Guam to Washington in April 1946 baldly states the plan to hinder any economic development not related to the military: “The economic development [of Guam] must be geared to meet the demands of these service and service connected personnel and cannot be geared to the financial, technical, or business ability of the Guamanian entrepreneur.”2 The economic priority of the military over individual enterprise was intended to stall inflation, protect enterprising individuals from economic exploitation by outside investors, and forestall Guamanian demands for limits to the military build-up. The island was kept in sustained imperial limbo through the curtailment of individual liberties; for years after the war, Guam was under the strict control of the navy. Strict security procedures meant that only military personnel were granted unrestricted access to the island. As with Hawaiʻi, the major infrastructural build-up and strengthening of the economy was the result of the intensity of military investment; in fact, many businesses were collaborative efforts by U.S. military personnel and local Guamanians.3 The model of development on Guam roughly follows that of Hawaiʻi in that the tourist industry (temporarily) supplanted the major economic engine that preceded it—in this case, the military. Yet this turn of events occurred much later in Guam, decades after the same economic transformation took place in Hawaiʻi. The military hegemony over the economy and politics of Guam remained until local demand for a civilian government was finally met with the Organic Act of Guam in 1950—after 277 years of rule under three major imperial powers. The law granted Guamanians U.S. citizenship (though Congress reserves the power to revoke citizenship at will) and established the separation of powers and a bill of rights. The navy continued to control travel clearances until 1962, the era of global decolonization movements.4 The Organic Act also legalized military land takeovers that resulted in military ownership of a third of the island. The shift of economic and political power back to the military began in 2009 with the announcement of the intent to transfer thousands of military personnel from Okinawa to Guam. The transfer

Fojas-final.indb 169

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 170 •

Islands of Empire

was accompanied by billions of dollars of investment in infrastructure and has led to a boom in the local economy that is out of step with the global economic downturn.5 Because of the size of the island and its history of military rule, Guam continues under the shadow of the military and U.S. hegemony. It is a prime location for the projection of imperial strategy and status, a place where the formation of empire as military capacity can be traced. Specifically, renewed military build-up on Guam enables the United States to deploy troops more readily to Afghanistan and Iraq and to reassert the island’s role as the “watchdog” of the Pacific against post–Cold War threats emanating from North Korea and China. It is under the shadow of U.S. military hegemony that the film No Man Is an Island was imagined. The story is based on events surrounding the Japanese occupation of Guam during World War II and the experiences of George Tweed of the U.S. Navy, who evaded capture by the invading forces for years, until the United States liberated the island. The story tells of Tweed’s isolation and the aid he received from Guamanians.  He symbolizes U.S. resilience and the promise, echoed elsewhere in the Pacific theater of war by General MacArthur, of a return of U.S. forces to the country’s occupied colonies. This war film is imbued with the exhortation of the military to fortify its outposts and prepare for a state of permanent war. Colonel James A. Donovan of the Marine Corps, in his patriotic tome Militarism, U.S.A., aptly calls this the “Pearl Harbor Syndrome.” He writes that the losses in the Pacific during the early part of World War II led to the revitalization of the doctrine of readiness as the top priority of the military.6 The Pearl Harbor Syndrome is an exhortation to avenge and redeem. The desire to heal the traumatic wound of Pearl Harbor led to a rehabilitated and reinvigorated national military body—the musculature of which was most apparent in the Pacific. Neglected by the U.S. military in the years leading up to World War II, Guam lacked the necessary armature for self-defense. It was another victim of the attack on Pearl Harbor, leading to Japanese control of the island until its recapture in 1944. No Man Is an Island begins on the heels of that attack. It was released in 1962, the same year that Washington ended travel clearances to Guam and that control of the island shifted from the navy to the Department of the Interior. The film was a tacit reminder of the mythologized role of navy seamen as saviors in heroically rescuing Guam from the cruelty of the Japanese—echoing sim-

Fojas-final.indb 170

12/6/13 1:55 PM

The Gua m Doctr ine

• 171 •

ilar claims about the cruelty of Spain in Cuba and emphasizing the evil of other empires. It was also a timely reminder of the U.S. role in releasing Guam from the grip of the Japanese, and was thereby meant to temper the rising tide of anticolonialism on the island. By the early 1960s, Chamorros and civilian Guamanians had begun to seek redress from U.S. rule through reformist means, engaging with the political system to wage their demands. Though the Organic Act seemed to pave the way for decolonization, the island’s governor was still appointed by Washington, which severely curtailed Guamanian political representation. Guamanians pushed for the right to elect the governor locally and finally achieved success on that front in 1968 with the Guam Elective Governor Act, which also amended the Organic Act.7 That change paved the way for reform and inspired hope for the transformation of the colonial condition of Guam. No Man Is an Island was released during the rise of the political struggle for better local representation. But the story suggests that Guamanians flourish as wards of the United States. It follows the solitary route of one of the last U.S servicemen remaining in Japanese-occupied Guam as he finds solace and redemption in his intimacy with a Guamanian woman. The promotional materials for the film show the main character, George Tweed, played by Jeffrey Hunter, engaged in a shielding embrace of his lover—an allegory of the protective care shown by the United States to its embattled territory.

The Guam Doctrine In the 1960s, Guam was a key geopolitical site in the Pacific during the U.S.-Soviet arms race, which lasted for the duration of the Cold War; with the rest of the archipelago, it acted as a buffer between the Soviet Union, China, and the United States. U.S. nuclear strategy was founded on an interrelated system called the Single Integrated Operational Plan, which coordinated three nuclear weapons systems with global launch trajectories: long-range bombers, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and intercontinental ballistic missiles. Guam was the only location that held two of the three weapons systems, making it a prime target for the Soviet Union. Guam also housed important military intelligence, support, and communications systems. Each time the United States is on security alert during armed conflict or possible military threats, Guam is

Fojas-final.indb 171

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 172 •

Islands of Empire

inordinately affected, politically, economically, and culturally; the entire island is given over to the war effort. This was particularly the case during the Vietnam War. It is thus appropriate to Guam’s role in U.S. imperial formations that Nixon in 1969 chose the island to announce his foreign policy principle called alternately the Nixon Doctrine or the Guam Doctrine. He chose the Top of the Mar Officers Club on Nimitz Hill to assert that he would no longer send U.S. troops into the conflicts of other nations and would use ground forces only to protect its interests, in a tacit acknowledgment of the moral and political failure of the Vietnam intervention. Nations under outside threat would thenceforth have to defend themselves, since the United States would limit its participation to arms or aid, anything other than ground troops. Indeed, after he gave the speech, the number of B-52 bomber missions to Vietnam from Guam increased dramatically; the reduction of ground troops led to war strategies aimed at reducing the potential loss of U.S. service members’ lives.8 Released on September 20, 1962, No Man Is an Island encountered a cultural atmosphere of anxiety and uncertainty about the intractability of communism after the failed Bay of Pigs mission to oust Fidel Castro from power in Cuba. In October, public fears about the nuclear threat from the Soviet Union intensified when Soviet missiles were detected on Cuba, installed partly to defend the vulnerable nation from the colossus of the North but mainly to leverage the Soviet position in the arms race. The standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union—resolved when President Kennedy secretly agreed to remove missiles from Turkey—brought the globe to the brink of World War III.9 No Man Is an Island reminded audiences of U.S. military victories over Japan and reinvigorated Washington’s hegemonic aspirations after the failure at the Bay of Pigs. That message, issued from another node in the insular empire, renewed hope for a successful end to the potential nuclear conflict brewing just ninety miles off U.S. shores. No Man Is an Island put Guam on the popular-culture radar, bringing it out of isolation and back into the imperial circuit of the United States. Within the matrix of empire in the Pacific, Guam is often rendered a stepchild of the Philippines, as its former penal colony, and it is overshadowed by Hawaiʻi as a model military base and tourist destination. The film gives Guam status as a major military site in its own right. The story repeats a lesson of imperial security that all colonial holdings be strategically developed to prepare for a state of permanent war.

Fojas-final.indb 172

12/6/13 1:55 PM

The Gua m Doctr ine

• 173 •

Reel Filipino Labor After World War II, the U.S. military began doling out contracts for new construction projects on Guam. To meet labor demands created by those initiatives, the U.S. and Philippine governments made an agreement in 1947 to recruit Filipino contract workers to Guam, as depicted in the documentary project Under the American Sun. The laborers found themselves at the very bottom of the labor market, receiving lower wages and fewer benefits than Guamanians or workers from the continental United States. Guamanians and Chamorros resisted what they found to be the unfair competition posed by Filipino workers, who, at the time, made up over half of the workforce—by 1950, 65 percent of the workers were nonnative, mostly Filipino. When the construction projects were completed in the 1950s, the numbers of Filipino contract workers diminished. In 1959, in response to a resolution of the Guam legislature, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) ordered a three-year phase-out plan for all alien workers, starting in 1960. That plan ended the influx of Filipino workers until the 1970s, when they returned to meet to new labor demands.10 Filipinos, as the U.S. military quickly surmised, constituted an undervalued and readily exploitable workforce, unlike the Chamorros. Following that logic, the fi lming of No Man Is an Island took place entirely in the Philippines, with an all-Filipino cast playing Chamorros and even the Japanese characters. This was due to both economic expedience and an unchecked aesthetic norm in Hollywood that regularly interchanges races, preferring to posit “race” as a set of features and performable characteristics. Filipinos and the Philippines continue to be an economically accessible stand-in for other Asian and Pacific groups— as was the case for another war film, Apocalypse Now (1979), filmed in the Philippines with Filipinos as Cambodians. Moreover, No Man Is an Island makes no effort to conceal that the supposedly local language, Chamorro, spoken by the Guamanians is a Filipino dialect. Presumably, Filipinos were not the intended audience of the film, since they would have detected this incongruence. Guam has a history of ethnic and racial diversity, resulting from contact between the indigenous inhabitants and the Filipinos brought to Guam during Spanish colonialism. That history further confuses the racial and ethnic composition of Guam as depicted in the film. Though there is a large population of Filipinos on Guam, there is no effort to disaggregate or disambiguate the depiction of the two ethnic groups.

Fojas-final.indb 173

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 174 •

Islands of Empire

No Man Is an Island alludes to the circuit of exchange among Spanish colonies when Chico Torres (Ronald Remy), a Latino from the continental United States, remarks that the food a hospitable Guamanian gives him, “arroz y frijoles” (“rice and beans”), is “just like home.” This brief interlude of multiethnic solidarity is part of the larger collaborative efforts in the wartime U.S. alliances across the Pacific. The story line shifts to the trauma of Japanese invasion, which is shared by Guam, the Philippines, and Hawaiʻi; that geopolitical formation inspires the solidarity of the colonies with the mainland United States. For instance, the Chamorros listen to Radio Corregidor, a U.S. military transmission about the war efforts in the Philippines, which announces U.S.-Filipino solidarity through combined forces and ideological purposes; this is a solidarity born of imperial formations. Likewise, the film depicts how wartime naming inaugurated the formation of discrete colonial identities. The use of the term “Chamorro” was prevalent before the war. The war led to the invention of Guamanian identity as a territorially based identity rather than an ethnic designation (Chamorro) or the nonspecific term “native.” U.S. soldiers began using the term “Guamanian” to differentiate between Chamorros on Saipan and those of Guam—two major sites in the Pacific theater of war.11 On the other side of the racial matrix of the fi lm are the Japanese, who were played by Filipino actors and actresses. As in other World War II films, the Japanese are the cruel invaders and enemy forces from whom the United States will liberate subjugated Asians and Pacific Islanders. The Japanese are continually depicted as ruthless and violent soldiers who habitually violate the norms and codes of warfare. For instance, when a U.S. prisoner of war attempts to surrender by waving his white shirt as a flag, the Japanese soldiers fire at him excessively. In other scenes, the Japanese torture prisoners of war and bully and beat civilians with obscene enjoyment. Japanese cruelty is a counterpoint to Guamanian hospitality and kindness. And the contrast inspires trust and faith in members of this U.S. outpost, bringing them into closer proximity to mainland politics. The film reflects wartime attitudes toward foreign Japanese, but it attempts to present a nuanced portrayal of local Japanese by showing how some remained loyal to Guam and the United States— this was not the case for World War II films produced during the war, which maintained a stereotyped image of the Japanese. No Man Is an Island is based on a true story, yet it is also an allegory about the isolation of Guam in the Pacific. It opens with a solitary man, George Tweed, atop a mountain as the eponymous John Donne medita-

Fojas-final.indb 174

12/6/13 1:55 PM

The Gua m Doctr ine

• 175 •

tion is voiced over: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main. . . . Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in Mankind.” Visually, at least initially, Tweed is isolated, but the narration contradicts that condition by pointing out the ideological aim of the story: to connect the island exterior to the mainland center. Donne’s meditation reflects on the unity of humanity and the interconnectedness of the world. The mood of isolation that initiates the story slowly shifts to reveal the role of Guam as a vital node in U.S. global military strategy. Initially, Guam was isolated and secondary to other insular holdings, but it became a focus of national security in the Pacific. That new state of affairs remedied the failures leading up to World War II; Guam had been virtually ignored in favor of Hawaiʻi and Pearl Harbor, enabling enemy forces to gain a strong foothold in the Pacific. The build-up of Guam after the war sealed its indispensability to U.S. military operations. The film works to shift the sense of isolation around Tweed and, by extension, Guam. As the story progresses, we discover that Tweed is anything but alone as he finds himself in an ever-expanding community of Chamorros who work together to ensure his safety. The film shows a smooth collaboration between Tweed and the Chamorros, whereas the actual Tweed, who kept a journal of his experiences, documented his desire to be extracted from Chamorros’ interests and intrigues, which he found to compromise his safety. His comments about “Chamorro gossip” are inflected with a distrustful colonial attitude about the childish irrepressibility and excitement of the “natives.”12 Yet in the film, his protection is represented as a matter of national security, and the attempt to secure his location is deemed an act of patriotism and loyalty. When Tweed asks one of his aids, “Why are you doing this for me?” the Chamorro character responds, “This is the way I can help my country.” Keith L. Camacho argues that the actual Tweed used his symbolic position as “liberator” to exploit Chamorro hospitality, or inafaʻmaolek, in order to obligate Chamorros to provide for his survival at the risk of capture.13 Tweed is not alone; he is among fellow “Americans,” Chamorros, whose efforts to protect him are deemed part of their national duty. The United States is imagined as an integral part of Guam, and vice versa. Even in solitude, the main character is enacting the will of his country and of the world. In such a context, isolation carries another meaning. It suggests that Washington made an intentional move away from isolationism by adopting a cosmopolitan ethics of interdependence and global responsibility, instead of the idea that the United States was

Fojas-final.indb 175

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 176 •

Islands of Empire

George Tweed (Jeff rey Hunter) convalescing under the care of Chamorros in No Man Is an Island (1962).

dragged into World War II by a surprise attack on its territory (“Any man’s death diminishes me because I am involved in Mankind”). Also, the events of World War II drew U.S. imperial ambitions into sharper relief and foregrounded the role played by the strategic insular bases in the victory over Japan and the attainment of superpower status. Before the invasion by the Japanese, George Tweed had intended to leave the armed forces and the tropical island, to the surprise of a colleague who refuses to believe that he would leave a “South Sea island paradise” that boasts “sunshine all year round.” The story begins with his announcement that he will leave that very day, December 7, 1941, the same day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. But for Guam, twenty hours behind Hawaiʻi, the attack took place on December 8. The date on its own signals doom, but for the uninformed, the sound track delivers significantly ominous music. The scenario repeats a similar one in They Were Expendable, when Lieutenant Rusty’s (John Wayne’s) decision to leave his platoon is cut short by the attack on Pearl Harbor. These scenes reinforce the sense of surprise and traumatic encounter represented by

Fojas-final.indb 176

12/6/13 1:55 PM

The Gua m Doctr ine

• 177 •

the attack; they also emphasize the authenticity of the characters’ heroism and ability to act according to patriotic duty. Following the events in Hawaiʻi, the Japanese attacked and occupied Guam. The film shows how readily the Japanese were able to wrest control of the island. They evacuated all U.S. soldiers, with orders to eliminate by gunfire or behead any remaining holdouts. Tweed and his colleagues had to choose between surrender—which meant instant death—and escape in the hills; their only real choice was the latter. As in other World War II films that take place in the Japanese-occupied Pacific, notably Bataan (1943), the men face a perilous journey in their search for safety, and as the beginning of the story foretells, only one man makes it. Wartime events in the Philippines have a tremendous impact on Guam. In fact, Bataan is a major point of reference in the story and a site of the reconvening of Filipino and U.S. troops for the return of General MacArthur. News of the events at Bataan reaches the lonely soldier from a resurrected military radio, reinvigorating his efforts to survive and providing material for his newspaper. The radio broadcast reminds us that Guam is sandwiched between Pearl Harbor, a symbol of surprise attack, and Bataan, the place where the battle of vengeance gathered force. Moreover, Guam, like Tweed, is solitary and unprotected, awaiting a fate dependent on the outcome of battles elsewhere in Asia and the Pacific. Yet No Man Is an Island suggests that even within Tweed’s isolation from U.S. military forces, he is a major part of its operations. He showcases his industriousness and ingenuity by creating an underground newspaper, the Guam Eagle, based on actual events, to send the news of U.S. advances to Guamanians. The periodical is a source of information with a strategic purpose: it gives a sense of the vast presence of the U.S. military in Guam, even though Tweed acts “alone,” that is, with help from Guamanian civilians but not the military. Tweed, the film suggests, played a pivotal role in the successful outcome of the war for the United States, a testament to the singularity and solitude of U.S. power. He staves off a major Japanese attack on the navy by using a mirror and light to send a coded message to a U.S. ship intent on landing at Guam. His ingenuity saves the entire fleet. In a suspenseful end, he narrowly escapes the Japanese as he swims out to be saved by a navy vessel. One of the first things he does, while showering, is down two glasses of milk—a true sign of the persistence of his American ways. After living for years without shoes, he is given a pair by a fellow sailor,

Fojas-final.indb 177

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 178 •

Islands of Empire

who remarks: “One white man on an island thirty-one months and with nothing but a bunch of fishheads.” This racially charged statement deeply offends Tweed, who glares at the man while returning the shoes, saying significantly, “It doesn’t fit.” The xenophobia and racism are not congruent with the new political formation that comes at the end of the war. The United States formed a renewed relationship with Guam, and that meant embracing the racial differences of the islanders within a portrait of the country as a liberal democratic leader. The depiction of George Tweed’s experience during World War II in No Man Is an Island is at odds with that of Robert Roger’s history of Guam. While the film focuses some attention on Japanese soldiers’ abuse of Chamorros in their obsessive search for Tweed, it frames native compliance as fidelity to the United States. By contrast, Rogers describes the widespread bloodshed and terrorism experienced by Chamorros because of Tweed. Even his friend Agueda Johnston pleaded with him to surrender to the Japanese. According to Johnston, he not only refused to surrender but also threatened revenge by the United States against anyone who turned him in. B. J. Bardallo, whom the Japanese charged with finding Tweed under punishment of death, was reported as saying: “Knowing that people were being killed or maimed, if Tweed had really been a hero, he would have turned himself in so that the wholesale brutalization of our people would cease.”14 In these Chamorro accounts, Tweed is a symbol of terrorism rather than a national hero.15 As a whole, U.S. World War II films are equally boosterish and chauvinistic. In the films about the war in the Pacific, there is little reference to the help or assistance provided by other major Allied powers, and numerous depictions of the welcome embrace, gratitude, and alliance of the colonized peoples in Asia and the Pacific. This is often shown via an intimate relationship between an Anglo protagonist and a local civilian—as in Back to Bataan. In No Man Is an Island, it is “Joe” (Josefina), a young Chamorro girl who becomes George Tweed’s aide, cook, and moral support. Joe and George settle into a platonic domestic routine akin to marriage. Perhaps because of Production Code bans on interracial congress, they do not share any intimate moments beyond a significant exchange of gazes. When the war ends, he returns to collect her and thus seal the intimate connection between the mainland United States and its insular exterior. Tweed’s tale is readily cinematic. He was mythologized on the island and became an enduring symbol of U.S. heroism and resourcefulness. His role in the film symbolizes U.S. friendship and collaboration with

Fojas-final.indb 178

12/6/13 1:55 PM

The Gua m Doctr ine

• 179 •

Tweed sharing a semidomestic relationship with “Joe” Cruz (Barbara Perez).

Guamanians; he is supported by many hospitable civilians, and the connection to Guam is sealed by his domestic congress with a native Chamorro. The mythos of Tweed includes a story about Guamanian loyalty and the inevitability of Guam’s place in the U.S. orbit of power.

Tourist Routes: From Hard to Soft Power In 1964, the travel writer Charles Beardsley published a guidebook to Guam. As he was living among Guamanians, he began to search for information about “the aboriginal peoples, the known history,” and “the American possession of the territory from 1898 to the present time”; he discovered that “no general handbook about the island of Guam exists.”16 These topics form the basis of Beardsley’s Guam: Past and Present, which culminates in a full accounting of the role of Guam in World War  II, from its occupation to its recapture by U.S. forces. The same year that Beardsley’s book came out, Paul Carano and Pedro C. Sanchez published their Complete History of Guam.17 Both texts were written for the general reader (and claim to be meeting an urgent demand by the public),

Fojas-final.indb 179

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 180 •

Islands of Empire

though the latter was intended for use in Guam’s public schools. Sanchez and Carano examine the history of Guam in relation to the Spanish and U.S. empires and pay less attention to the creation of the island as a military base, a major focus of Beardsley’s text. In her “health historiography” of Guam, Anne Perez Hattori finds that many of the official histories of Guam are complicit with the navy’s deployment of public health as a means of social control. She targets Carano and Sanchez’s work, along with that of Robert Rogers, for its uncritical assessment of the navy’s role in “improving” health and hygiene on the island. These accounts do not acknowledge how the Western medical interventions eroded local cultural practices, nor do they recognize the work of local health-care givers. Hattori explores how the military, via its public health initiatives, deepened the colonial relation of Guam to the United States. Thus, these histories of Guam tend to be complicit in a colonial ideology by expressing gratitude toward the navy and, by extension, the United States for their role in the “improvement” of the colony.18 Guam: Past and Present is meant to be a popular book that might engage a wide readership; in fact, Beardsley notes that it was written not as “an academic study” but “to heighten the reader’s interest and understanding of a compact subject.”19 The travel guide gives information that locates Guam in the U.S. imaginary through its military history and that is intended to develop interest in the island as a tropical paradise. In fact, after a lengthy discussion of island topography that opens the book, he concludes that Guam offers a “healthy holiday climate most of the year,” with “all the essential elements of a tropical haven.”20 Chamorros do not suffer permanently the indifference of the imperial gaze. Beardsley brings them into the representational matrix of native indolence and embodied leisure activities established in imperial handbooks published after 1898: “By nature the Chamorros were a carefree, laughing people, very fond of festive dancing and singing, of storytelling and legend-spinning, of contests of strength and skill.”21 Beardsley adds that they are also productive and hospitable—“the Chamorro sense of hospitality was (and still is) exceptional”—two key characteristics of a good colonial subject. The text reads like a prelapsarian myth imbued with imperial nostalgia; he describes the Chamorros as “powerless to resist the intrusion and gradual dissolution of their paradise” by Western forces.22 Beardsley’s account, like No Man Is an Island and Sanchez and Carano’s popular history, puts Guam on the popular-culture radar, bringing the island out of isolation. It justifies the U.S. role in

Fojas-final.indb 180

12/6/13 1:55 PM

The Gua m Doctr ine

• 181 •

Guam and transforms the island from a site of indifference to an indispensable part of the U.S. strategy for global power: “Guam now serves as indispensably as Gibraltar in terms of the endless, shift ing cold war with Russia, and, more recently, with China.” Guam could be overpowered again, so he agrees with Admiral Nimitz’s post–World War II assertion that it should be further developed, since it is “vital to our prosecution of the war and .  .  . equally vital to our defense in the future.” Beardsley notes the need for other kinds of development and ends by describing Guam as both a “watchdog” of the Pacific and a “recreational paradise,” much like Hawaiʻi.23 The word “watchdog” defines Guam and its peoples in subordinate terms: the mainland United States is the colonial master, and Guam is the subhuman servant protecting the master’s turf from the periphery. In Beardsley’s treatise, Guam further serves its imperial master by offering tropical leisure possibilities, though these are only vaguely referred to. In the mid-1960s, the tourist possibilities of the island were more fully explored and promoted by the U.S. Department of the Interior. The consolidation of the tourist industry was rapid. In 1963, the Guam government formed a tourist commission; by 1966, construction of the luxury Guam Hilton had begun. The hotel was completed in 1972. In fact, President Nixon’s plane landed in Guam minutes before the Hilton’s ribbon-cutting ceremony—the same trip during which he announced the Guam Doctrine. Also that year, Guam allowed unrestricted access to the international airport terminal at the naval air station— though the move was opposed by the federal government. Yet Washington had to bow to the airport demand created by increased tourism, particularly since Guam had become a desired destination for Japanese visitors. By 1970, private business on the island was driven by tourism.24 In 1966, Stewart L. Udall, secretary of the interior, and Ruth G. Van Cleve, the department’s director of the Office of Territories, published an informational brochure about Guam called America’s Day Begins in Guam . . . U.S.A. The pamphlet was a popular version of a report Udall had issued that year to Congress about the economic development of Guam. In that report, the chairman of the Federal-Territorial Commission for Development of a Long-Range Economic Plan for Guam, Robert M. Mangan, noted that the major factors affecting Guam’s development were “distance and isolation,” reflecting the cautionary mood of No Man Is an Island in exhorting audiences to pay attention to this insular outlier.25 During the same era, the slogan “America’s Day Begins in Guam,” borrowed from Wake Island, and the pamphlet were used in a collabor-

Fojas-final.indb 181

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 182 •

Islands of Empire

ative campaign by the Guam Visitor’s Bureau and Continental Airlines to draw more tourists to the island. Guam had been notable as a stopover on flights to other parts of the Pacific; thus, the campaign targeted Guam as the Pacific’s “stop-over shopover” for duty-free goods. The message was promoted with posters proclaiming “America’s Day Begins in Guam, U.S.A.,” which were globally distributed by Rex Willis, then executive secretary of the Guam Tourist Commission, and Jose D. Leon Guerrero, director of the Guam Department of Commerce.26 When the Guam pamphlet was distributed, Guam, along with the Virgin Islands, American Samoa, and the Trust Territories of the Pacific Islands, was under the jurisdiction of the Department of the Interior. Created in 1849, the Department of the Interior, according to America’s Day Begins in Guam .  .  . U.S.A., “is concerned with the management, conservation, and development of the Nation’s water, wildlife, mineral, forest, and park recreational resources. It also has major responsibilities for Indian and territorial affairs.” The nation’s “principal conservation agency,” it was created to ensure that resources “make their full contribution to the progress, prosperity, and security of the United States— now and in the future.”27 Although Guam was the site of a major buildup in the nuclear arms race and the place where Nixon announced a pivotal Cold War doctrine, the island was promoted as a tourist destination in the overall visual and verbal rhetoric of the pamphlet. From the cover image, a beach scene replete with palm trees, to the back cover, which shows a couple strolling on the sand, there is no mistaking the ideological intent of the brochure to shift the military emphasis of the island to its tourist possibilities. The image of the couple also reflects the growth of the wedding market and the promotion of Guam as a honeymoon destination.28 As the easternmost boundary of the United States, lying on the other side of the international date line, Guam is far from the U.S. mainland imaginary. Guam’s motto, “Where America’s Day Begins,” puts it into the daily time line of the mainstream United States, making the island seem closer to domestic politics. Likewise, the Department of the Interior pamphlet aspires to bring Guam into the rhetorical sphere of the United States through analogy to the mainland and through the discourse of tourism typically attributed to Hawaiʻi. The description of the landscape of Guam unleashes poetic musings reserved for travel narratives: “The upper elevations of the island bring to mind the varicolored hills of America’s Southwest.” Guam is described primarily through its intensely vivid colors: “An area of intense greens, splashed with the bril-

Fojas-final.indb 182

12/6/13 1:55 PM

The Gua m Doctr ine

• 183 •

Department of the Interior brochure about Guam, highlighting its tourist possibilities, 1962.

liant red and magenta of bougainvillea . . . Guam is set in a variegated sea, which blends from jade within the protective reef . . . through the turquoise of the middle depths, into the dramatic blues and purples of the deep ocean. At sunset, the island and its surrounding waters are a symphony of fiery reds, soft yellows, lavenders, and grays.”29 This expressionistic and poetic language is surprising in a government pamphlet; it reveals the boastful extravagance of an imperious narrator surveying the riches of his or her spoils. It, along with the visual assistance of the cover art, sets the tone for the rest of the pamphlet, turning the reader’s attention to the potential of the island as an exotic tourist destination. In the 1980s, Guam gained publicity through a media event that shifted the focus from militarism, in a strict sense, and tourism to the plight of Chamorros in search of unity, sovereignty, and selfdetermination. This visibility came via the trial of then-governor Ricardo “Ricky” J. Bordallo, a prominent supporter of Chamorro rights and Guamanian statehood who was charged with seventeen counts of federal corruption on the eve of his reelection campaign in 1986. Peter DeBenedittis examined the coverage of this trial from a critical vantage that is also that of a press insider; he was the press secretary for Bor-

Fojas-final.indb 183

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 184 •

Islands of Empire

dallo’s Democratic challenger, Carl T. C. Gutierrez and later a producer of television commercials endorsing Bordallo.30 DeBenedittis uses the trial to show how U.S. hegemony operates in one of its long-held colonies. The reporting about Bordallo served U.S. interests in maintaining sovereignty over Guam by showing the colony’s lack of preparedness or sufficient maturity for political self-rule. The concept of hegemony functions well in this context because of its explicit reflection on the role of media in the consolidation of political power. This hegemonic analysis explores the role of the audience in consenting to its own subordination, and enables DeBenedittis to reflect on his own shifting role from complicit to critical participant. The trial and the media coverage surrounding it were fortuitous for the United States, which wanted to maintain control over its colony. By the mid-1980s, Guam experienced a tourism boom fueled by Japanese visitors’ expenditures and investment—in an ironic twist, Japan achieved the (economic) control of the island it lost during the war. Guam’s economic climate became more tied to Japan than to the United States—so much so that it remained unaffected by the stock market crash in 1987. It was also a time of unprecedented representation of Chamorro interests at the state level in the administration of Ricky Bordallo. Bordallo was elected on a platform stressing the importance of self-rule and representation by achieving commonwealth status. His long-term plans—admitted only to his close advisers—included the unification of the Marianas and, by extension, the Chamorros; then commonwealth status; and ultimately, statehood for the Mariana Islands. The Hawaiian archipelago was a major point of reference and model for this plan, since the unification of Native Hawaiians—achieved through King Kalãkaua’s confederation of the islands—later strengthened the argument for Hawaiʻi’s integration into the United States.31 The surge in tourism in the 1980s caused Bordallo’s administration to make some unsavory decisions in support of continued economic growth in construction, earning him a reputation of being “the builder.” A flurry of speculation, rumor, and multiple news reports resulted in an investigation by a federal grand jury in 1986 into financing schemes behind this construction. Robert Rogers described the federal grand jury in colonial terms, as being “like Spanish inquisitions of old.” Bordallo, reading a statement, called it “a Republican conspiracy to oust him from power” and a “political lynching.”32 The governor, after refusing to respond to the grand jury’s questions, was indicted on eleven counts that included “extortion, bribery, obstruction of justice, witness tampering,

Fojas-final.indb 184

12/6/13 1:55 PM

The Gua m Doctr ine

• 185 •

and various conspiracy and wire fraud charges.” This was later superseded by an indictment that included seventeen such counts.33 He was further indicted in the media and lost the reelection campaign. Overall, Bordallo was implicated in enabling a bond fraud that resulted in the loss of an estimated fourteen to twenty million dollars for Guam taxpayers.34 After a series of appeals, some successful, and on the day that he was to be sent to a federal penitentiary, Bordallo ended his own life in a politically charged fashion that sent a message about the need for Chamorro cultural and political preservation. He planted himself, wrapped in the Guam flag, before the statue of the indigenous leader Kipuhá (translated by the Jesuits to Quipuha and often spelled Kepuha) and shot himself in the head, leaving behind the words: “I regret that I only have one life to give my island.”35 Kipuhá is a historical figure who, like La Malinche for the Mexicans, mediated between cultures; he is often interpreted ambivalently for his role in assisting and translating for the imperial Spanish forces, but also for representing and negotiating for indigenous peoples. For Vicente M. Diaz, Bordallo represented the plight of Chamorros, who are constantly forced to negotiate their identities in relation to outside forces, particularly Roman Catholicism and U.S. liberal democracy. In that way, Bordallo was a unifying figure; supporters and opponents alike describe him as one of the greatest political leaders of Guam for, among other things, sacrificing himself to achieve publicity for the cause of Chamorro cultural preservation. Diaz notes: It is as if Bordallo, a Chamorro rights champion and a dreamer, saw in the Kepuha memorial a way to fuse the power of Christian and national martyrdom with the iconic representation of a proud ancient Chamorro society. His “suicide” at this particular spot had less to do with simply wanting to mobilize an anti-American sentiment . . . than with imagining (in a hybridization of “traditional” Chamorro, Spanish Catholic, and American ideas) a way to “link” spatially and temporally the enduring spirits of Chamorro people with one another for a “better future.” (emphasis in the original)36

The negotiation of imperial legacies also took the form of the Catholic Church’s refusal to interpret his sacrifice as anything but sacrilege, and the U.S. justice system’s imposition of a uniform legal code on Chamorro practices.37 Kipuhá’s statue marks the place where he met the first Spaniards who landed on Guam, linking the colonial history of the past to the pres-

Fojas-final.indb 185

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 186 •

Islands of Empire

ent and, as Rogers notes, presenting a future quandary and an imperial spectacle of Guam’s destiny. In fact, Rogers ends his cultural and political history of Guam with Bordallo’s political act as a way to reflect on the destiny of the Chamorros and the island colony in which they live: “Like Quipuha, Ricky Bordallo was overcome by a tragic destiny imposed from without and abetted from within. This destiny challenges the belief that history’s movement is linear or that there is a difference between past and present. Both men failed their people, but the people themselves go on with a sovereignty of spirit and a sturdy sense of community that have always redeemed them despite the failures of their leaders and of the island’s governments during three centuries of colonial rule.”38 Bordallo’s final act as a public servant linked an early colonial moment to the present and declared his aspiration to unify Chamorros both geographically and politically; he symbolized the demand for the decolonization of Guam.

State Tourism and Imperial Spectacles While the U.S. government promoted tourism to Guam in part to unseat the economic dominance of Japan, most tourists to the Pacific colony came from East Asia. The pamphlet created by the Interior Department in 1966 was intended for a limited audience, but it captures the mood of the island in the desire to turn away from an economy dominated by militarism. It is no wonder that the next Hollywood film, albeit a B movie, that takes place in Guam (almost forty years later) is entirely embedded in a tourism discourse and supported by the state institutions involved in promoting travel to the island. Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon is a poorly constructed mixed-martial-arts film about a former muay thai champion, Max Havoc (Mickey Hardt), who becomes a photographer in Los Angeles after he inadvertently kills one of his opponents—a fact that haunts him throughout the fi lm. Havoc is sent to Guam by a major hotel to create all its promotional materials for an advertisement campaign. Havoc, like Tweed in No Man Is an Island, is a solitary traveler diverted from his assignment. He is interrupted by an encounter with his former kickboxing opponent, who is part of a Japanese organized crime unit lead by an ominous yakuza (David Carradine). He encounters two sisters, Christy and Jane Goody (Tawney Sablan and Joanna Krupa), who, upon meeting, he saves from a near collision in the water, firmly establishing his heroic demeanor. He is the An-

Fojas-final.indb 186

12/6/13 1:55 PM

The Gua m Doctr ine

• 187 •

glo hero who will eventually save these same women from the clutches of the Japanese yakuza. The entire film is a promotional vehicle for the tourist industry, and it is less interesting for the convoluted plot, unconvincing acting, and weak characterization than for the manner in which Guam is put on display for a mainstream audience. Indeed, this was likely the charge given to the filmmaker, Albert Pyun, and his production team by the Guam government through the Guam Economic Development and Commerce Authority. The latter lent funds totaling $800,000 so that the producers could secure a bank loan. The film did so poorly at the box office that it did not yield even a fraction of a return on its investment, thus causing the loan to default and miring its producers in legal controversy.39 The poor quality of the acting makes the story line unconvincing and plodding; the appeal, if any, for audiences is in the spectacular quality of the skillful fight scenes against the backdrop of the beaches and nightlife of Guam. Viewers are introduced to Agana through a framing of its tourist sites in a typical portrait of tropical sun, surf, and beach. The story also shows film crews working as the main characters stroll about Agana; this is to generate the idea that the island government is hospitable to the movie industry. Despite these efforts, Max Havoc failed to boost the island’s fledgling film-production scene or to promote the island for tourism, but it did renew local interest in creating the conditions for consolidating a new industry around filmmaking and to create better and more compelling productions. Max Havoc begins in Riverside, California, where Max is taking pictures of a dirt bike race for Sports Illustrated. But the film is not about photography; picture taking is immediately eclipsed by the spectacle of skilled martial-arts fights. For example, immediately after the race, Max gets into a bar brawl with a group of toughs and fells all of them with his muay thai skills. After the fight, Havoc tells his boss that he needs a break. He is promised as much for the assignment in Guam: “tropical island, laid back, no sweat” in the “Paris of the Pacific,” where he can “relax and take a few pictures.” And initially, that is what he and the audience finds. Though the story begins in Southern California and moves to Tokyo, the visual plot begins when the characters converge on Agana, Guam, where everything is framed for a tourist gaze. Havoc’s exploration of Guam and his promotional work for the hotel coincide with the film’s overt purpose to promote tourism to the island. Guam is introduced through a montage of images of the tourist sites and activities: a shoreline view of the hotels, water sports, and leisurely beach

Fojas-final.indb 187

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 188 •

Islands of Empire

activities. The tourist montage forms the transition between a number of scenes, emphasizing the initial framing of Guam as a “paradise” and the “Paris of the Pacific.” Some of the major tourist signifiers are reminiscent of the more prominent tourist destination of Hawaiʻi, where many of the companies originate, including ABC convenience stores and the Outrigger Hotel. There is a long visual aside of Max and Jane as they scuba dive, allowing the audience to experience scenes of spectacular marine life around the island. Viewers are also treated to cultural attractions like the Guam museum where our Anglo protagonists learn about Chamorro culture. Above all, the film is a guide to the island loosely framed by a weak plot. In fact, Max’s love interest, Jane Goody, is not native to Guam, but as a frequent visitor, she is able to show him the major points of interest on the island. Like Elvis in Blue Hawaii, Jane is a tour guide who offers Max and the fi lmic audience a visual experience of Agana. Jane is part tourist and part entrepreneur, wandering the Pacific in search of artifacts for her Los Angeles gallery. Her character reveals opportunities for tourism along with possibilities for entrepreneurial ventures. While the film shows nothing of the major U.S. military presence on Guam, it does retain the Japanese enemy of earlier times. The yakuza and his organized-crime unit, the Black Dragons, operate out of Tokyo, with a reach that extends across the Pacific. The story is focused on a “jade dragon” that was stolen out of the yakuza’s office in Tokyo and that contains the ashes of one of his major operatives, Yoshita. The theft of the dragon puts “the honor of all the Black Dragons at stake,” and the entire operation is focused on recovering this object. During their search, the Black Dragons put the safety of Max Havoc and his associates in jeopardy. In one of the final scenes, after a flurry of tourist montages and sustained views of leisure sites, Max battles it out with one of the Black Dragons and demonstrates his superior skills, saving the life of the sisters and gaining Jane’s full affection. The story ends happily for all the mainland-based characters. The sisters are given an Endo period Japanese sword in exchange for the recovered jade dragon; the sword is appraised at much more than the item they relinquished, thus securing their futures. The film concludes like a tourism promotion, with Max and the sisters bidding fond farewell to the local peoples and promising to return promptly. The loving couple embrace on the beach against the sunset, forming a silhouette typical of tourist promotional materials. The film ends on this frozen image, fi xing the image of Guam as a tourist destination. In popular culture, Guam shuttles between two poles of significa-

Fojas-final.indb 188

12/6/13 1:55 PM

The Gua m Doctr ine

• 189 •

tion: tourism and militarism. It remains in the shadow of other places in the U.S. imperial orbit, often reflecting aspects of larger colonial outposts in the Pacific. The existence of Guam as a U.S. colony fails to register in any significant way in local or global geopolitics, even as it faces a major military build-up in the wake of the September 11th attacks and the dismantling of bases on Okinawa—much of which is being administered and deployed from Hawaiʻi. The increased military expenditures will exceed ten billion dollars in the years to come, shifting the economic balance back to militarism after the brief rise of the tourist industry, which has experienced the same downturn as the rest of the global economy.40 The impact of this massive build-up will be wide ranging, negatively affecting the environment, putting civilian and Chamorro populations at risk, and threatening a rollback of the decolonization movement. In the U.S. imaginary, Hawaiʻi has been the gold standard of Pacific economic development, its massive military infrastructure aiding the development of an equally massive tourist industry. Yet the balance between those industries was never established in Guam, which continues to be defined almost entirely by the military and to suffer under its oppressive hegemony. In popular discourse, particularly through the sole major Hollywood feature film about the island, civilian Guamanians and Chamorros are depicted as grateful for this state of affairs.41 This discourse of the welcoming native happily accepting the fate of colonization continues to inform and justify the U.S. relationship to members and former members of its insular empire.

Fojas-final.indb 189

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Afterword

Whither Empire? The Colonial Complex of U.S. Popular Culture

I

n recent years, a number of events converged to create an enabling context for a popular confrontation with U.S. chauvinism and imperial overreach. The most compelling example was the global movement to occupy Wall Street and resist U.S.-directed capitalism and the enabling of wealth accumulation among the very rich. The movement was inspired in part by Washington’s history of tax cuts for the wealthy, excessive military and war spending, and the deregulation of the financial industries, which lead to the collapse of the mortgage and credit industries in the United States and all over the world. The movement was preceded by the global exasperation with and mistrust of the U.S. government that began during the presidency of George W. Bush and was directed primarily at his doctrine of unilateral and at-will interventions in foreign affairs. The growing resentment toward a rapacious capitalism endorsed by Washington found expression in self-reflexive and critical discourse in popular culture in films like Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), Casino Jack (2010), Inside Job (2010), and Margin Call (2011). A good example of this critical shift is evident in a comparison of the original Wall Street (1987), produced during a U.S. economic boom, and Oliver Stone’s remake of 2010; the former expounds on the virtues of greed and capital expansion, and the latter reveals the nightmarish atomization and dehumanization of capital. Along with the usual spectacles of empire, and narratives that depict the destruction of enemy states and their adjuncts, are glimpses of another history and a possible future, one that questions and examines the presumptions and attitudes of popular imperialism. But as the critique of Wall Street wanes, it might be time to recognize that the reality

Fojas-final.indb 190

12/6/13 1:55 PM

W hither Empir e?

• 191 •

of U.S. global power rests as much on its “empire of bases” and its insular acquisitions as on its role as an economic power based in Lower Manhattan.1 Islands of Empire returns to the sites of empire, to the U.S. colonial and semicolonial holdings gained in 1898—Hawaiʻi, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Guam—to examine the role each has played in the cultivation of an imperial sensibility in popular culture. Even the most seemingly benign story about each of these sites harbors a message about the role of the United States in the world that justifies its continued colonial and imperial coercion. Empire demands a story, and stories demand protagonists, objects, and spaces. There are no better imperial-complex narratives than those that take place in the former formal U.S. colonial and protocolonial holdings. Popular narratives about these imperial outposts express and elicit a panoply of imperial moods, attitudes, and affects—longing, defiance, redemption, affi liation, and desire—that shape and determine the rapport between each island and the continent. Stories about Havana are imbued with nostalgia to the point of mourning. World War II stories in the Philippines and Guam are replete with a sense of U.S. heroism and vengeance. Puerto Rico remains in colonial limbo as an embodiment of the American way. Hawaiʻi weighs in as the colonial gold standard, awarded with statehood and overlaid with tourist fantasies and desires for redemption from mainland social unrest. All these sentiments build an imperial mood that energizes the major story lines of U.S. global power and influence. The Anglo U.S. hero, whether stoically masculine (John Wayne) or of reconstructed masculinity (Elvis Presley), is a key agent and coordinate of imperialism. Popular culture is deeply embedded in the geopolitics of empire. The representational matrix that emanated from the media documenting “our island empire” in 1898 persists more than a century later as the symbolic origin of the imperial schema. The U.S. imperial imaginary gained a cohesive and definitive form during the first epoch of expansion beyond the continent. The places drawn into the U.S. force field at the end of the nineteenth century have each occupied the center stage of popular culture at different moments, often in relation to one another— even if only tacitly so. The logics of interchangeability, representational indifference, and racial homogeneity across each island outpost are major features of U.S. imperial soft power; each place stands in for the others, and is depicted as sharing the same or similar cultural, social, and geographic condi-

Fojas-final.indb 191

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 192 •

Islands of Empire

tions. This illusion of similitude across diverse locations facilitates a control, or at least the perception of the management, of diversities that often masquerades as political or economic expediency. An example of this representational indifference can be found in the production history of the short-lived ABC medical series Off the Map (2011), about a group of mostly U.S.-origin doctors practicing in the developing world. The series initially was fi lmed in Puerto Rico, but capital conditions were more favorable on Oʻahu, where ABC could use the facilities left behind by the popular series Lost and exercise its exclusive rights to the state film studio at Diamond Head. Both places were intended to reflect a location “somewhere in South America.” The switch of locations offers a short lesson on the circuits of empire, where the tropical islands of the United States are viewed as similar and interchangeable. The show’s creator, Jenna Bans, was much more enthusiastic about the new location through its relation to Lost: “I was a Lost fan and the look of Lost always stuck with me. It was the exact look I imagined for this show so I always had this in my head while writing.” There is no mention of the fact that Lost takes place somewhere in the South Pacific—already a form of representational indifference—and that the landscapes and peoples of these geographically distinct locations are vastly dissimilar. One of the executive producers, Betsy Beers, remarked on the location switch: “It’s a very different feel than what we had access to while we were shooting in Puerto Rico. I think this was just all around a better fit.”2 No matter that the new location had an entirely different terrain and cultural history than the unspecified location in South America, or that the shots of the location looked very much like promotional tourist images of Hawaiʻi’s waterfalls and beaches. The tacit interchangeability of Puerto Rico and Oʻahu (and “South America”) is a consequence of imperial indifference, the pursuit of profit, and, in the case of characterization, an abiding aesthetic practice of Hollywood film and media culture to present ethnicity and race as a set of reproducible characteristics. Rather than an accident of expediency and economic prudence, this switching of locations is a major aspect of the soft power of imperialism and its ability to represent, aggregate, and homogenize, and thus control and subdue potentially disruptive populations.

Fojas-final.indb 192

12/6/13 1:55 PM

W hither Empir e?

• 193 •

Repeating Islands: Reproducing Empire, Reproducing R ace Of all the actors in these imperial dramas, Filipinos are the most hardworking. Filipinos and the Philippines receive less publicity in U.S. popular culture than most of the other peoples and places in the imperial orbit. They often appear in popular stories by passing as other ethnicities and racial groups. Some of these instances were noted earlier; for instance, Filipinos act as Guamanians in No Man Is an Island; the mestizo Filipino Jose De Vega plays a Puerto Rican gang member in West Side Story and a Native Hawaiian sidekick to Elvis in Blue Hawaii. Nia Peeples plays the Hawaiian girlfriend of a haole surfer in North Shore (1987). Another mestizo Filipino, Lou Diamond Philips, is well known for taking on Latino and other ethnic roles; he played a Chicano gang member in Stand and Deliver (1988), a Puerto Rican agent undercover as an independence activist in A Show of Force (1990), and a Native American in Sioux City (1994). In Aloha Summer (1988), set in Hawaiʻi during the optimistic aftermath of statehood in the summer of 1959, several well-known Filipino actors—Andy Bumatai and Tia Carrera—play Native Hawaiians. Filipinos have long performed as surrogates for other peoples in the imperial matrix. That could be taken as a sign of their position in the racialized hierarchies of the global labor market, that is, as being more economically accessible; or it could be viewed as a result of a long colonial history of racial mixing that makes them potentially racially flexible and thus adaptable to various contexts. While Filipinos act as proxies for other racial groups, two key locations, Cuba and Puerto Rico, tend to be imagined together as interchangeable locations. Moreover, many of these islands share the same problems resulting from the incursion of the United States through tourism, militarism, and popular culture. Cuban and Puerto Rican locations and actors experience mutual representational indifference: Puerto Rico often stands in for Cuba, and many Puerto Rican actors have undertaken roles as Cubans or figures associated with Cuba. For instance, Raúl Julia plays the role of the Cuban Arturo Duran in Havana, and the Puerto Rican Benicio del Toro plays Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the Argentine member of Castro’s inner circle. Puerto Rico and Cuba are linked in the U.S. imaginary for a number of reasons, not least because of U.S. leisure travel shifted its focus from Havana to San Juan in 1959. One text that follows this shift is The Rum Diary, which Hunter S. Thompson began writing in 1959, though it is set in 1958, and published

Fojas-final.indb 193

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 194 •

Islands of Empire

in 1998. In 2011, the story was resurrected in the film of the same name, with Johnny Depp embodying the role of the protagonist, a journalist named Paul Kemp, who takes a job at the new English-language paper in San Juan, the Daily News. Depp, a good friend of Thompson, was instrumental in getting the novel published, and thus was an appropriate choice for the lead as someone familiar with its cultural and production context. The novel documents the tourist rush into Puerto Rico at a time when the industry was just beginning to thrive and every opportunist was seeking to make it big, many of them seeking refuge from the political changes taking place in Cuba. When Kemp arrives in Puerto Rico, he stops in the airport coffee shop, where he perceives the meaning of the island for other new arrivals: “After ten minutes of half-hearted listening I suspected I was in a den of hustlers. Most of them seemed to be waiting for the seven-thirty flight from Miami, which—from what I gathered of the conversations—would be bulging at the seams with architects, stripmen, consultants, and Sicilians fleeing Cuba.”3 These are all types associated with the tourist boom, who are on the island to build a new tourist arena for the U.S. visitor. They are following Conrad Hilton; as the narrator describes it: “Conrad had come in like Jesus and all the fish had followed. Before Hilton there was nothing; now the sky was the limit.”4 The film version of the story offers a morality tale about a rapacious U.S. capitalist who presents Kemp with a dilemma, creating a moral stance that does not exist in the novel. Kemp in the novel has murkier and less principled motivations and evades being implicated on either side of the colonial moral divide. This is evident in the contrasting alliances of the main character’s love interest, Chenault. In the novel, she is the girlfriend of Yeamon, a critical outsider who refuses to relinquish his ideals in order to accommodate the crass materialism of the businessmen on the island. Hollywood makes Chenault the lover of the unrepentant capitalist Sanderson—who was unattached and rumored to be gay in the novel. Her shift of attention to Kemp from Sanderson is a sign of her moral sensibility rather than, as it is in the novel, the inverse. This is complicated by Yeamon’s episodic abuse of Chenault, though Kemp also mistreats her. In the film, Kemp arrives in Puerto Rico, not to escape New York City, as in the novel, but with the nobler intention of exposing corrupt and colonial U.S. capitalist enterprises. His is a moral story about whether to join in Sanderson’s lucrative enterprise or to pursue the higher purpose of undermining it. Both novel and film engage imperial nostalgia about the pure landscape of the island that will be

Fojas-final.indb 194

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Surfing in Aloha Summer (1988), set in the summer of statehood.

Filipina Tia Carrera as a Native Hawaiian in Aloha Summer.

Fojas-final.indb 195

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 196 •

Islands of Empire

destroyed by a major resort. But the film goes further on that score, advancing a form of U.S. imperial benevolence, one that is indifferent to its object and more concerned about the moral superiority of the main Anglo character. Another, similar transposition of the imperial stratagem in popular culture is the shift from the novel by Kaui Hart Hemmings, The Descendants (2007), and the 2011 film of the same name directed by Alexander Payne. Like The Rum Diary, the film put a major Hollywood star (George Clooney) in its top role in an attempt to ensure its box-office success—though Depp did not bring in audiences. The Descendants is perhaps the most mainstream fi lm to depict Hawaiʻi and aspects of the history of land-rights disputes critically—a far cry from the discourse of Blue Crush (2002), in which a character remarks cavalierly that Hawaiians are testy about their land. But the film follows the ideological line of the filmic Rum Diary in that the hero of the story faces a moral dilemma posed by colonialism. Clooney as Matt King, who traces his heritage to a royal line with a land trust on Kauaʻi, can either sell the land for the construction of resorts, and make millions, or hold onto it for future generations. This scenario is based on Kaui Hart Hemmings’s family history. She is a descendant of George Wilcox, one of the first missionaries sent to the islands, who owned Hawaiʻi’s first sugar plantation, Grove Farm, and left it to his nieces and nephews, who sold it to the former CEO of AOL, Steve Case, in 2000.5 Like The Rum Diary, The Descendants is about the use of land by capitalist industries, set against a backdrop of imperialist nostalgia for a “purer” time before colonialism. But rather than an Anglo or white protagonist, King is of Native Hawaiian heritage. Yet he is an adjunct of the white hegemony, calling himself “almost haole”—almost white or foreign nonnative—admitting no relation to Hawaiian culture, peoples, or language. He eventually does right by local (not necessarily native) desires to preserve the land against further imperial intrusion. King knows he has no actual “right” to land that is simply his in name, but retains the right to “keep” it even after the trust lapses in seven years. (Though trusts in Hawaiʻi can now continue in perpetuity.) The question of selling the land is discussed in broad strokes and avoids the political quagmire of land rights and ownership engendered by the great mahele—or division of lands for ownership—that destroyed communal land tenure in 1848.6 The Descendants is about apologies and forgiveness, which have a significant resonance in Hawaiʻi. Set mostly in Oʻahu, the seat of the state’s government, the story opens with what might be read as an alle-

Fojas-final.indb 196

12/6/13 1:55 PM

W hither Empir e?

• 197 •

One of the female surfers of Blue Crush (2002).

gory about apologizing. King’s daughter Scottie (Amara Miller) has been generally terrorizing another classmate. The classmate’s mother, Barb Higgins (Karen Kuioka Hironaga), calls Matt and demands that Scottie make a formal face-to-face apology to her daughter, Lani (Carmen Kaichi). Barb finds Scottie’s halfhearted apology insufficient, claiming, “She doesn’t really mean it.” The story reflects on what it means to “really mean it” and whether apologies are sufficient remedy for historical suffering. This scene is reminiscent of the signing of the Apology Resolution to Native Hawaiians by then-president Bill Clinton in 1993. The res-

Fojas-final.indb 197

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 198 •

Islands of Empire

olution recognizes and apologizes for all the U.S. imperial transgressions that resulted in the state of dispossession to which Native Hawaiians find themselves. But it ends with the disclaimer that “nothing in this Joint Resolution is intended to serve as a settlement of any claims against the United States.”7 The apology, like Scottie’s apology, does nothing, has no tangible outcome except to hinder further inculpation of the accused by the offended party. The apology has no political efficacy, and thus Washington could be accused of “not really meaning it.” As Matt King is departing the scene of apology, Barb, acting as a representative of the local voice, implores him not to sell the land on Kauaʻi. He brushes her off and redirects his thoughts to his personal troubles. In the novel, the events transpire differently. The tone and content of Scottie’s bullying of Lani are specified more clearly as elitist or as class based and normative, particularly regarding female body image—it is directed at Lani’s extra weight and lower-middle-class apparel. Also, Matt’s response to Barb is not indifference, as it is in the film, but a discourse about his heritage and the history of his land claims, accompanied by images and articles from Scottie’s scrapbook. After this scene, again in the novel, when Matt asks Scottie whether she will stop her bullying, she responds imperiously: “I’ll try . . . But it’s hard. She has this face that you just want to hit.”8 And her father empathizes: “I know what you mean.” The King family, though of royal lineage and of the dispossessed native population, is beset by a class-based sense of entitlement that is directed at others through social cruelty—in this way, they are aligned with the colonial powers on the islands. Like Kemp in The Rum Diary, the cinematic Matt King faces a dilemma; he must either submit to his desire for personal wealth or rethink his relation to the land. In the novel, his identity as Native Hawaiian is much more nuanced and negotiated, but his decision is the same. As he deliberates, he thinks: “I don’t like what’s happening. I want all this land to go to a good home, and I don’t like our decision, or any of the options in front of me, and neither would my father.”9 His thoughts move to the real political and cultural concerns around the decision about what to do with the land: I’m thinking of the princess. When she died, she wanted the land to be used to fund a school for children of Hawaiian descent. This was her spoken wish that she failed to put into a contract. I have no interest in this wish, in a Hawaiian-only school. There are already a few of them, and they’re completely elitist, not to mention unconstitutional.

Fojas-final.indb 198

12/6/13 1:55 PM

W hither Empir e?

• 199 •

But now I find myself not wanting to give it up—the land, the lush relic of our tribe, the dead. The last Hawaiian-owned land will be lost, and I will have something to do with it. Even though we don’t look Hawaiian, even though our constant recombining has erased the evidence of our ethnicity, sharpening our flat faces, straightening our kinky hair, even though we act like haoles, going to private schools and clubs and not having a good command of pidgin English, my girls and I are Hawaiian and this land is ours.10

Matt King expresses his politically conservative views about Native Hawaiian sovereignty and entitlements (Hawaiian-only schools are “completely elitist, not to mention unconstitutional”), which reflects a mainstream haole, continental—and ahistorical—view. But his role as an adjunct of U.S. hegemony shifts in both versions of the story; each is about Matt’s transformation from imperial subject to native anticolonialist. The film glosses much of the history around Hawaiian land claims, and the critical discussion of native identity might be eclipsed, for some audiences, by the persistence of George Clooney’s whiteness in the role of King. The film also poses the question of land rights as an apolitical consequence of individual choice. Yet as a mainstream film and popular novel, The Descendants gives massive publicity to Native Hawaiian political issues, tacitly critiquing the weak political gesture of the apology and showing what kind of action, with realizable outcomes, might be taken to address native dispossession.

New Geogr aphies of Empire The imperial guidebooks of 1898 were overt about the interchangeability of the islands in the U.S. orbit; each place was described in the same manner, and each indigenous group suffered the same tropical malaise and lassitude. The peoples of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, and Hawaiʻi (again, Guam is conspicuously absent) were depicted as childlike and immature and thus incapable of self-rule. They were infantilized subjects awaiting the directives and salubrious influence of the colonial master from the United States. Popular culture depicts colonial discontent or the rebellions afoot in those locations as anything but a serious threat. The Cuban Revolution is portrayed as a scene of romantic and idealistic possibility, the Philippine-American War as nothing but a forgotten nuisance, Native Hawaiian dispossession as ameliorable by an

Fojas-final.indb 199

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 200 •

Islands of Empire

apology, the Puerto Rican colonial condition as a source of redemption, and Guam as a loyal watchdog of the Pacific. Each place is represented as politically immature in order to justify continued imperial paternalism, but portraying these locations as similar may serve other ideological aims. Each island in this study is a designated site of the global antimilitarization movement, which shares a diverse slate of political aims with a common anti-imperial purpose. While each island is geographically distant from the other, an examination of their political similarities and connections is instructive. The image of an interconnected U.S. empire, projected via its imaginary boundaries, might be used to transform imperial indifference into vital global movements for social justice. Popular culture pulls a veil over the workings of imperialism in each island location. The stories of empire deflect from the realities of U.S. intrusions and infringements, distracting audiences with fanciful tales of teen delinquents, surfers and beachboys, gamblers and tourists, and military heroes. As an antidote, it might make sense to refocus attention on the shared injuries of imperial overreach. For example, U.S. military strategy, as applied to each place, creates collateral damage through land expropriation, environmental hazards, labor exploitation, sexual exploitation, and compromises of native self-determination and sovereignty. The commonalities of native and local complaints are a function of a global strategy of military readiness through the creation of a network of interchangeable locations. Even within an examination of locations in the U.S. tropical empire as separate entities, a hidden complex continually emerges. The global network has typically served its command center, but its interconnectedness has recently offered new routes to political publicity for global social-justice movements, particularly those that share an antimilitarism platform. For antimilitarism activists, Guantánamo Bay, Cuba; the island of Vieques, Puerto Rico; and sites in the Philippines, Hawaiʻi, and Guam are parts of a whole representing the system of U.S. imperialism through its military bases. Within the globalized demilitarization movement, Guam is no longer an afterthought but a key site of political activism as the newest target of the U.S. military build-up in the Pacific. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe how the forces of empire might be turned against it: “Our political task, we will argue, is not simply to resist these processes but to reorganize them and redirect them to new ends. The creative forces of the multitude that sustain Empire are also capable of autonomously constructing a counter-empire, an alternative political organization of global flows and exchanges. The struggles to

Fojas-final.indb 200

12/6/13 1:55 PM

W hither Empir e?

• 201 •

contest and subvert Empire, as well as those to construct a real alternative, will thus take place on the imperial terrain itself—indeed, such new struggles have already begun to emerge.”11 This brings us back to the examples mentioned earlier, The Rum Diary and The Descendants, and their significance within the U.S. popular-cultural imaginary. The Rum Diary is about the tourist build-up of the island of Vieques, which was used by the U.S. military for bombing practice. While the story is about the moral superiority of the Anglo protagonist who “does the right thing” by blocking the developer, it veils a sinister military reality: the bombing of Vieques during sixty years of control by the U.S. Navy left the island devastated. Likewise, The Descendants signals the return of land-rights issues in Hawaiʻi made palatable for a mainstream audience. Behind all depictions of the “pure” beauty and landscape of the islands of Hawaiʻi is the obscene hidden reality not broached in visual media: the U.S. military bombing and subsequent total devastation of the island of Kahoʻolawe and other areas in the islands. Those unseen places, of which there are many in the U.S. empire of bases, reveal the real consequences of imperial overreach.12

Whither the Islands of Empire? The status of each piece of the U.S. insular empire is in constant question. Only Cuba, once a semicolony, is a sovereign nation, though the opening-up of relations may usher in the U.S. tourist class that was shut out after the revolution. And the perpetuity of the lease at the military colony of Guantánamo is a thorn in the side of the Cuban state. In 2012, Puerto Ricans voted yet again in a referendum about their status, with a two-part question: would they like to remain a U.S. territory, and would they prefer statehood, independence, or “sovereign free association.”13 For a public with little exposure to Puerto Rico beyond the fare produced by Jennifer Lopez’s production company, island politics might seem distant and even irrelevant. Particularly since Puerto Ricans do not have the right to vote in presidential general elections and do not have a voting representative in Congress, though they have voting delegates in the primaries. The vote registered in November 2012 for statehood might seem like a move toward a change in status, but other forces on the island have a grip on political outcomes. Puerto Rico is squarely in the U.S. empire of bases, which maintains control of the island and takes part in shaping its political culture.

Fojas-final.indb 201

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 202 •

Islands of Empire

From the earliest days of the nationalist independence movements, the FBI has engaged in endless hours of surveillance of politically dissident groups and has gathered massive amounts of data. Its efforts buttress the military presence on the islands and are meant to coerce Puerto Ricans into adapting to the U.S. security state. A social mood of obligation and complicity may affect popular attitudes about status debates. In Puerto Rico, the military creates what Keith L. Camacho identifies as a culture of loyalty that is commanded in exchange for the privileges of U.S. citizenship, security, employment, and redemption from outside forces. In Guam, redemption took the form of retaking or liberating the island from the Japanese, as was the case in the Philippines; in Hawaiʻi, the defense build-up after the attack on Pearl Harbor secured it against the Japanese empire. All these ideas and attitudes inform the major story lines about each place in Hollywood film and television productions. In popular culture, the major agents of colonial story lines command audiences’ loyalty because they, like Kemp, act heroically to liberate the “natives” from imperial tyranny. The idea that U.S. security forces are a welcome presence, protecting the natives and providing economic opportunities, is the ideological core of the current slate of police dramas. The return of Hawaii Five-0 in 2010 followed the cycle of industrial boom of its original series (CBS, 1968–1980). In 1986, Jack Lord, who played Detective Steve McGarrett, remarked in an interview that the series inaugurated the film and television industry on the islands. The show was filmed at the Hawaiʻi Film Studio at Diamond Head, where Lost (ABC 2004–2010), Fifty First Dates (2004), Baywatch Hawaii (1999–2001), Magnum, P.I. (CBS, 1980– 1988), and Blue Crush (2002), among other films and shows, were shot. Lord notes: “We took some terrible blows in the beginning. There were editorials saying we were going to ruin the image of Hawaiʻi because this was a crime show. A few years later the tone was reversed. That was when they found out that 25 percent of the tourists coming to Hawaiʻi said they had been influenced by Five-0.”14 The resurrected show seems to have had a similar effect on the popularity of the islands as a tourist destination, with tourist visits steadily increasing since 2010 despite a global economic downturn. It is, after all, a show about bringing down the bad guys circulating in the Pacific, which coincides with President Obama’s new focus on the region and the U.S. Pacific Command center of operations in Hawaiʻi. The show is a symptom and sign of militourism, or the mutually constitutive workings of one industry with the other. The future of militourism in Hawaiʻi however is uncertain. The late

Fojas-final.indb 202

12/6/13 1:55 PM

W hither Empir e?

• 203 •

senator Daniel Inouye, a World War II veteran and military icon, was a major force behind the dizzying expansion of the military industrial complex on the islands. As chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee, he secured a steady and healthy flow of dollars to Hawaiʻi for military projects. For instance, costly Interstate H-3, which links the Marine Corps base in Kāneʻohe to Pearl Harbor, was highly contested for its exemption from most environmental laws and its traversal of native burial grounds. During Inouye’s tenure in Washington, which was almost as long as Hawaiʻi’s history of statehood, the military grew exponentially, with military personnel and their dependents representing 20– 25 percent of the population and exceeding the Native Hawaiian population.15 William Aila, the Waiʻainae harbor master and leader in the movement to protect Makua Valley, predicted that the end of Inouye’s Senate career would see a 30 percent decline in federal funding.16 The withdrawal of troops from Iraq and Afghanistan may reduce funding even more. Kathy Ferguson and Phyllis Turnbull argue that the state will have to adapt to the conditions of a shrinking military, which could open opportunities to explore sources of revenue oriented toward public and social services.17 In a 2011 speech to the Australian Parliament, President Barack Obama, often called the “Pacific president,” declared, “The United States is a Pacific power, and we are here to stay.” This focus on the region has led to the build-up on Guam and in the rest of the Mariana Islands, which together constitute a new militarized border of the U.S. and a fortified platform for the war on terror.18 There is a similar surge in the U.S. military presence in the Philippines—a step backward after a coalition of activist groups secured the closing of U.S. Naval Base Subic Bay and Clark Air Base in 1991. Just over ten years later, the Pentagon exploited its client-state relationship with the Philippines and docked a major part of its fleet at the Subic and Clark bases, a move justified by the purported need for global security against terrorism. The idea that Filipinos are now a roving transnational security threat is the foundation of Alex Gilvarry’s novel From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant, in which an innocent Filipino fashion designer, through his association with a benefactor, ends up at the Guantánamo detention facility. As in World War II–era Hollywood films, the Philippines and Guam are spaces occupied and imagined by U.S. wars, in this case the war on terror. Audience’s fascination with war films, with the glory culture of the military, most spectacularly displayed in Katherine Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012), dampens potential criticism of the global empire of bases.

Fojas-final.indb 203

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 204 •

Islands of Empire

Stories about police and military forces parading around U.S. colonies and former colonies to bring bad guys to “justice” are vital touchstones of the imperial landscape. Why look for empire in popular culture? How will this change the way audiences experience mass-cultural entertainment? The experience is not just in the looking, but in the story and the panoply of feelings it elicits. These emotions and moods fuel audiences’ ideas and ideologies, making them feel unassailable. Such feelings may inspire a desire for cooperation or assimilation, or they might be reframed in order to issue a more critical reflection of the manipulations of popular media. Awareness of how a story works on us opens the possibility of changing our viewing experience from one that is passive to a more active engagement. At the very least, by making the imperial story visible, we might encourage a shift in consciousness toward one that resists the colonizing processes of mass media. And to resist the imperial story is to take one step toward ending or reshaping it.

Fojas-final.indb 204

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Notes

Introduction . See Fojas, Border Bandits, 113. . Ibid., 25. . Johnson, Sorrows of Empire, 45. . The title Islands of Empire coincides with that of on online game in which players accrue geopolitical power through strategy and military skill. The game elucidates the structures of power in discourses of empire through the imbrication of the military with popular-culture modes while it engages the very technologies of military strategy. . Grandin, Empire’s Workshop. . Merrill, Negotiating Paradise. . Skwiot, Purposes of Paradise, 1. . McCoy, Policing America’s Empire, 4–5. . San Juan, U.S. Imperialism and Revolution, xi–xii. . Grandin makes a similar claim in Empire’s Workshop, but this is not the crux of his argument. . Crowdus, “Birth of an Empire,” 46. . Dorfman and Mattelart, Para leer al pato Donald; see also Dorfman, Empire’s Old Clothes. . Fraser, Weapons of Mass Distraction. . Chapman and Cull, Projecting Empire. . Burnett, Foreign in a Domestic Sense, xiii. . Quoted in Bacevich, American Empire, 7. . Steel, Pax Americana, 15. . Bacevich, American Empire, 9. . See N. Ferguson, Colossus, i–ix. . Cited by Fred Rosen in the introduction to Rosen, Empire and Dissent: The United States and Latin America, 1.

Fojas-final.indb 205

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 206 •

Notes to Pages –

. N. Ferguson, Colossus, 8. . Though Niall Ferguson makes note of the “peculiarities” of U.S. empire, he argues that it is not “exceptional” or different, but that it is simply one empire among others (Colossus, 2). The distinction he makes is strategic, part of a conscious effort not to shore up U.S. exceptionalism—the idea that the United States is different and thus exceptional. Instead, he argues that the country should embrace its imperial role in order to become a “conscious” and ethical empire. . Calhoun, Cooper, and Moore, Lessons of Empire, 1–15. . Bacevich, American Empire. . Stoler, “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty,” 127–128. . N. Ferguson, Colossus, 29. . Ibid., xxvii. . Grandin, Empire’s Workshop, 1–9. . Williams, Empire as a Way of Life, ix. . Ibid., xi. . R. Flores, Remembering the Alamo. . Rosenberg, Date Which Will Live, 7. . Thompson, Imperial Archipelago. . Teaiwa, “Reading Paul Gaugin,” 251. . Ninkovich, The United States and Imperialism, 14. . I am grateful to Lori Pierce for pointing out the connection of these images with the travel writings on the island empire. . Thompson, “Representation and Rule,” 3. . Morris, Our Island Empire, ix. . Ibid., x. . Adams, “Cuba,” 10. . Olivares, Our Islands and Their People, 44. . Ibid., 23. . Ibid. . Ibid. . Ibid., 559. . Ibid. . Ibid., 274. . Ibid., 311, 326. . Ibid., 347. . Burnett and Marshall, Foreign in a Domestic Sense, 20. . Morris, Our Island Empire, 288. . Olivares, Our Islands and Their People, 471. . Ibid., 463. . Ibid. . See Proto Rights of My People. . Olivares, Our Islands and Their People, 521. . Ibid., 519.

Fojas-final.indb 206

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Notes to Pages – . . . . .

• 207 •

Ibid., 487. Silva, Aloha Betrayed, 1–3. Johnson. Dismantling the Empire, 111. Ibid., 109–119. Williams, Empire as a Way of Life, 14.

Chapter One . Campomanes, “Casualty Figures,” 138–140; see also the documentary fi lm Memories of a Forgotten War (2002), directed by Camilla Griggers and Sari Raissa Lluch Dalena. . For a review of Japanese and U.S. fi lms and television shows featuring Pearl Harbor, see Rampell and Reyes, Pearl Harbor in the Movies. . Amy Kaplan writes of the importance of women in the settling of the West as agents and symbols of a domesticated frontier. She argues that the discourse of Manifest Destiny became conflated with that of domesticity, or what she calls “manifest domesticity,” in antebellum U.S. culture. . The concordance between Chicago—the ur-city of the Burnham corpus— and Manila was commemorated in an exhibition held at at the Newberry Library in 2009, celebrating the centennial of the Burnham plan of Chicago; the exhibition places Burnham’s plans within their complex historical context, one that was rife with the conflict between Filipino nationalists and U.S. imperialists. . Connaughton, MacArthur and Defeat, 3–4. . Fojas, Cosmopolitanism in the Americas, 85–86. . Quoted in Connaughton, MacArthur and Defeat, 4. . Brody, Visualizing American Empire, 140–141. . Schatz, “World War II and Hollywood.” . Schatz, Hollywood Genres, 6. . Altman, Film/Genre, 13–31. . Slocum, Hollywood and War, 2. . U.S. Office of War Information, Manual for the Motion Picture Industry. . Ibid., n.p. . Koppes and Black. Hollywood Goes to War, 22. . Ibid., 45. . Office of War Information, Manual for the Motion Picture Industry, n.p. . Ibid. . Ibid. . Ibid. . Ibid. . Hawley. “You’re a Better Filipino than I Am,” 389–390. . Nugent, “Hollywood’s Favorite Rebel,” 270. . Ibid., 261.

Fojas-final.indb 207

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 208 •

Notes to Pages –

. Bogdanovich, “Tribute to John Ford,” 10. . White, They Were Expendable, vi. . Bogdanovich, “Tribute to John Ford,” 10. . Nugent, “Hollywood’s Favorite Rebel,” 269. . Fojas, Border Bandits, 27–82. . Fielding, American Newsreel, 1–3. . Ibid., 4. . Ibid., 19–24. . Deocampo, “Imperialist Fictions.” 225. . Ibid., 233. . Schatz, “World War II and Hollywood,” 149. . Hearst Metronome newsreel, News of the Day, vol. 16, no. 254, 1944. . Ibid. . Hearst Metronome newsreel, News of the Day, vol. 13, no. 254, 1942. . Kennedy, “Victory at Sea,” 55–56. . R. Flores, Remembering the Alamo, 10. . Koppes and Black, Hollywood Goes to War, 258–259. . Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics, 6. . Delmendo, Star-Spangled Banner, 87. . Basinger, “World War II Combat Film,” 30. . Sylvania Television Awards, 1952, “Citations,” Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Madison. . An interesting sidenote: in the Salomon Archives at the Wisconsin Historical Society is a box of rejection letters from various newsmagazines and literary agents—the Atlantic, New York Times, Saturday Evening Post—for his historical articles and fiction, which generally were fi lled with too much historical description. In a letter from the Saturday Evening Post, E. N. Brandt finds that Salomon’s work suffered from “too much solid history” (July 28, 1949); Alice E. Sheehy of the New York Times found his work “rather factual and uncolorful in its approach.” (October 23, 1948). Salomon hit his stride with the long historical series about the war. . United Press, “British Take Potshots at U.S. ‘Victory at Sea,’” March 11, 1953. . Bartone, “Victory at Sea,” 115. . Richard Hanser, “Memo for the Participants in the 1957 Seminar Workshop,” University of Denver, 1957, n.p., Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, Madison. . This invisibility is pervasive and enduring. Even in contemporary popular culture, Filipino and mestizo Filipino actors typically pass as some other ethnicity or racialized population in order to win roles. . The demands and concerns of a group of Filipino terrorists—members of the militant Islamic group Abu Sayyaf—are depicted within the context of Filipino poverty and struggles for self-determination in the bilingual (English and Tagalog) crossover fi lm Cavite (2005), directed by the Filipino Americans Neill Dela Llana and Ian Gamazon.

Fojas-final.indb 208

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Notes to Pages –

• 209 •

Chapter Two . Pérez Firmat, Havana Habit, 120–122. . Sanders and Gilbert, Desilu, 14. . Ibid., 199. . Merrill, Negotiating Paradise, 173. . Quoted in Schoultz, United States and the Cuban Revolution, 101. . In keeping with the imperial overlap among these locations, many fi lms based in Cuba are fi lmed in Puerto Rico. . Rosaldo, Culture and Truth, 68–69. . Ibid., 68. . Ibid., 86. . Fortuitously, in Rosaldo’s analysis of imperialist nostalgia, the case study is the Philippines, another site in the popular imperial imaginary of this study and a good point of reference from which to examine Cuba. The Philippines is the perfect site of nostalgia, or imperial yearning, since it remains yoked to the U.S. sphere of influence as a client state. . See Pérez Firmat, Havana Habit; Pérez, Cuba in the American Imagination; Schoultz United States and the Cuban Revolution. . Moruzzi, Havana before Castro, 6. . Ibid. . Though U.S. tourists still frequented the island after the revolution, new regulations and reforms, in tandem with the increasing animosity between the United States and Cuba, caused a downturn in tourism that eventually was cut off by the embargo; see Merrill, Negotiating Paradise, 170–174. . Ibid., 251. . Pérez Firmat, Havana Habit, 4–5. . Ibid., 53–54. . Chanan, Cuban Cinema, 462. . López, “Cuban Cinema in Exile.” . Deutschmann and Shnookal, Fidel Castro Reader, 220. . See López, “Cuban Cinema in Exile,” 53. . See Wright, Era of the Cuban Revolution, 202–203. . See Schoultz, United States and the Cuban Revolution, 346–347. . The term “ugly American,” which comes from the 1958 novel of the same name by Eugene Lederer and William Burdick, about U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia, has been adopted to describe ill-mannered Americans abroad; see Merrill, Negotiating Paradise, 145. . Deutschmann and Shnookal, Fidel Castro Reader, 140. . Grandin, Empire’s Workshop, 111–112. . Strange, Casino Capitalism, 2. . Ibid. . Ana M. López classifies Ichaso as a “second generation” director who was

Fojas-final.indb 209

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 210 •

Notes to Pages –

born in Cuba but trained in the United States (“Cuban Cinema in Exile”). The “second generation” is characterized as always “crossing over.” . “Wait Wait .  .  . Don’t Film Me,” a segment of “383: Origin Story,” This American Life, National Public Radio, June 19, 2009, http://www.thisamericanlife .org/radio-archives/episode/383/origin-story?act=3. I am grateful to Caryn Murphy for alerting me to this episode.

Chapter Thr ee . Quoted in Coff man, Nation Within, 127. . Quoted in Holden and Zolov, Latin America and the United States, 9. . Schwartz, Pleasure Island, 203. . Quoted in Meinig, Shape of America, 4:205. . Farrell, Hawaii, the Legend That Sells, 16. . Kuykendall and Day, Hawaiʻi, 149. . Quoted in ibid., 151. . Ibid., 160; see also Rosenberg, Date Which Will Live. . Coff man, Nation Within, 295. . Ibid., 142. . Rosenberg, Date Which Will Live. . Osorio, “Memorializing Puʻuloa and Remembering Pearl Harbor,” 5. . Kajihiro, “No Peace in Paradise,” 274–275. . May, Imperial Democracy, 4. . R. Allen, Creating Hawaiʻi Tourism. . See Farrell, Hawaii, the Legend that Sells, for the impact of tourism and development on the landscape and population. . R. Allen, Creating Hawaiʻi Tourism, 29–30. . Meinig, Shape of America, 4:206. . R. Allen, Creating Hawaiʻi Tourism, 29–30. . Bell, Last among Equals. . Pratt and Smith, Hawaiʻi Politics and Government, 42–43. . Lyon, “Scholarship, Criticism, and Desire.” . Michener, introduction to Day and Stroven, Hawaiian Reader, xi. . Ibid., xiii. . Ibid., xii. . Ireland, U.S. Military in Hawaiʻi, 133–169. . Schmitt, Hawaiʻi in the Movies, vi–vii. . Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” . Urry, Tourist Gaze, 1–2. . See Merrill, Negotiating Paradise. . Ibid. . Brown, Hawaii Recalls.

Fojas-final.indb 210

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Notes to Pages –

• 211 •

. Trask, From a Native Daughter, 2. . Ibid., 23. . From the fi lm’s trailer. . R. Allen, Creating Hawaiʻi Tourism, 16. . Walker, Waves of Resistance, 70–73. . Buck, Paradise Remade, 138. . Ibid. . Early guidebooks to Hawaiʻi, particularly the one by Olivares cited in the Introduction, found the slothful Hawaiians “passionately fond of music and dancing” (471), which accounted for their colonial condition. . Oppenheim, “Rocking the American Dream,” 22. . Cited in ibid. . Ibid. . Cited in ibid. . H. Allen, Betrayal of Queen Liliuokalani, 399. . Goss, “‘From Here to Eternity,’” 154. . It was not until the television series Hawaii Five-0 that some of the political issues vexing native populations were given some, but never sufficient, airtime— within the constraints of a prime-time drama. . Nash, “‘Nowhere Else to Go.’” . Rutsky, “Surfing the Other,” 12. . Quoted in ibid. . Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics, 153. . Rutsky, “Surfing the Other,” 13. . Wood, Displacing Natives, 111. . Quoted in Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics, 145. . Ehrenreich, Hearts of Men. . Root, Multiracial Experience, xiv. . Farrell, Hawaii, the Legend That Sells, 16. . Desmond, Staging Tourism, 5. . Aikau, Chosen People, Promised Land, 124–125. . Stanton, “Polynesian Cultural Center,” 248. . Ibid., 251. . Ross, Chicago Gangster Theory of Life, 45. . Aikau, Chosen People, Promised Land, 5. . Ibid., 45.

Chapter Four . Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics. . Jaime Benítez, “In Puerto Rico, Live and Let Live,” New York Times, November 30, 1974.

Fojas-final.indb 211

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 212 •

Notes to Pages –

. Ibid. . See Trías Monge, Puerto Rico, 4. . J. Flores, From Bomba to Hip-Hop, 37. . L. Fernández, “Of Immigrants and Migrants.” . Rivera-Batiz and Santiago, Island Paradox, 8–11; Ayala and Bernabe, Puerto Rico in the American Century, 187–197. . Omi and Winant, Racial Formation, 21–22. . Time, “Bard of Bootstrap”; Time, “Muñoz: Energetic Idealist.” . See Grandin, Fordlandia. . Merrill, Negotiating Paradise, 212. . Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics, 36–38. . Briggs, Reproducing Empire, 163. . Edward Murrow, “The Puerto Ricans: Americans on the Move,” See It Now, May 5, 1957. . Negrón-Mutaner, “Feeling Pretty,” 92. . Duany, Puerto Rican Nation, 166–184. . Quoted in Wells, “West Side Story,” 32. . Feuer, Hollywood Musical, x. . Ibid., ix. . McRobbie, “Dance and Social Fantasy,” 152. . Valdivia, Latina in Hollywood. . Ibid., 90. . Ramírez Berg, Latino Images in Film, 106, 107. . Ibid., 108. . Willis, High Contrast, 163. . McRobbie, “Dance and Social Fantasy,” 134. . “Rosie Perez Arrested in Protest,” Rome News Tribune, January 7, 2000. . http://www.nationalpuertoricandayparade.org/history.html. . Singer, “‘What Grows in the Hood?’” . Ibid., 63. . Ibid., 57–58. . Ibid., 68. . Ibid., 69. . Negrón-Mutaner, “Feeling Pretty.” . Mirta Ojito, “The Scorsese of Salseros in New York,” New York Times, July 29, 2007. . For a discussion of the role of gender in the construction of Puerto Rican cultural identities through salsa, see Aparicio, Listening to Salsa.

Chapter Five . Camacho, Cultures of Commemoration, 3. . Quoted in Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall, 209.

Fojas-final.indb 212

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Notes to Pages –

• 213 •

. Ibid., 210. . Ibid., 220–221, 225. . Marsh and Taitano, “Guam,” 131. . Donovan, Militarism, U.S.A., 82. . Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall, 242. . Ibid., 241. . Ferguson, Colossus, 104. . Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall, 217, 218, 232, 239. . Ibid., 200. . Camacho, Cultures of Commemoration, 166. . Ibid., 165. . Quoted in Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall, 174. . Tweed is often singled out as an icon of U.S. individualism, survivalism, and perseverance, even in the absence of national support. Yet in the 1960s and 1970s there was considerable media coverage of Japanese “stragglers” living in the jungles of Guam and refusing to “surrender”. The most famous case was that of Soichi Yokoi, who was discovered in January 1972 and called the last zanryusha, or “straggler.” He had been hiding out for twenty-eight years, only to finally “surrender” to two fisherman; see Go, Where America’s Day Begins, 73–79. . Beardsley, Guam, 15. . Some twenty years later, Pedro C. Sanchez wrote Guahan Guam, a history about and for the Chamorros, with the aim of preserving the indigenous culture and history of Guam. . Hattori, Colonial Dis-Ease, 9. . Beardsley, Guam, 15. . Ibid., 30. . Ibid., 79. . Ibid., 87. . Ibid., 247, 248. . Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall, 240. . U.S. Congress, House, Economic Development of Guam, xii. . Go, Where America’s Day Begins, 162. . Udall and Cleve, America’s Day Begins in Guam, n.p. . Go, Where America’s Day Begins, 165. . Udall and Cleve, America’s Day Begins in Guam, n.p. . DeBenedittis, Guam’s Trial of the Century. . Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall, 271–272. . Ibid., 277, 279; cited in DeBenedittis, Guam’s Trial of the Century, 6. . Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall, 278, 280. . Ibid., 282. . DeBenedittis, Guam’s Trial of the Century, 15. . Diaz, “Pious Sites,” 318–319. . One of the counts against Ricky Bordallo involved accepting donations that exceeded the amount acceptable for political campaigns, which he defended as

Fojas-final.indb 213

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 214 •

Notes to Pages –

the practice of chenchulé, or giving at traditional family gatherings. Clotilde Gould, the head of the Chamorro language commission, describes it as a “traditional way of giving, something you’re not expected to do, but you give whatever in terms of money, that you wish to give. However, if you cannot afford to give monetarily, you can provide labor in preparation for the party, or give other things to help” (quoted in DeBenedittis, Guam’s Trial of the Century, 105). . Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall, 289. . Gaynor Dumat-ol Daleno, “Guam Spends $800,000 on Film, Gets $9,000 Back,” Pacific Daily News, December 13, 2006. . Marsh and Taitano, “Guam,” 132. . I use these terms separately, since there is a sizable Chamorro population in the U.S. military. As Keith L. Camacho and Laurel A. Monnig have written, these two identities are not necessarily mutually exclusive; that is, many Chamorro soldiers are also part of the decolonization movement; see Camacho and Monnig, “Uncomfortable Fatigues,” 147–148.

Afterword . See Johnson, Sorrows of Empire. . Mike Gordon, “‘Off ’ to a Running Start: Hawaiʻi Plays South America in the New ABC Medical Series titled ‘Off the Map,’” Honolulu Star-Advertiser, December 3, 2010. . H. Thompson, Rum Diary, 11. . Ibid., 13. . Jacobs, “Clooney Makes Estate Planning Sexy.” . See Chen, Great Mahele. . http://www.hawaii-nation.org/publawall.html. . Hemmings, The Descendants, 37. . Ibid., 228. . Ibid., 229–230. . Hardt and Negri, Empire, xv. . See K. Ferguson and P. Turnbull, Oh, Say, Can You See? . Almost half a million voters left the second part blank, which may have skewed the numbers in support of statehood. . Quoted in Reyes, Made in Paradise, 26. . Kajihiro “Resisting Militarization in Hawaiʻi,” 299. . K. Ferguson and P. Turnbull, “The Military,” 47. . K. Ferguson and P. Turnbull, “The Military.” . Camacho “After 9/11,” 686.

Fojas-final.indb 214

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Works Cited

Adams, John Quincy. “Cuba: ‘An Apple Severed by the Tempest from Its Native Tree.’” In Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History, edited by Robert H. Holden and Eric Zolov, 9–13. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011. Aikau, Hokulani K. A Chosen People, a Promised Land: Mormonism and Race in Hawaiʻi. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2012. Allen, Helena G. The Betrayal of Queen Liliuokalani: Last Queen of Hawaii, 1838– 1917. Glendale, Calif.: Clark, 1983. Allen, Robert. Creating Hawaiʻi Tourism: A Memoir. Honolulu: Bess Press, 2004. Altman, Rick. Film/Genre. London: British Film Institute, 1999. Aparicio, Frances. Listening to Salsa: Gender, Popular Music, and Puerto Rican Cultures. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1998. Ayala, César J., and Rafael Bernabe. Puerto Rico in the American Century: A History since 1898. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2007. Bacevich, Andrew. American Empire: The Realities and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2002. Baker, Aaron. “A New Combination: Women and the Boxing Films.” Cineaste 25, no. 4 (2000): 22–26. Bartone, Richard C. “Victory at Sea: A Case Study in ‘Official Telehistory.’” Film and History 21, no. 4 (1991): 45–129. Basinger, Jeanine. “The World War II Combat Film: Definition.” In The War Film, edited by Robert Eberwein, 30–52. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2005. Beardsley, Charles. Guam: Past and Present. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1964. Bell, Roger. Last among Equals: Hawaiian Statehood and American Politics. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaiʻi Press, 1984. Benítez-Rojo, Antonio. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1996. Bogdanovich, Peter. “A Tribute to John Ford.” In John Ford in Focus: Essays on the

Fojas-final.indb 215

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 216 •

Islands of Empire

Filmmaker’s Life and Works, edited by Kevin L. Stoehr and Michael C. Connolly, 7–13. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008. Briggs, Laura. Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 2002. Brody, David. Visualizing American Empire: Orientalism and Imperialism in the Philippines. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2010. Brown, DeSoto. Hawaii Recalls: Selling Romance to America; Nostalgic Images of the Hawaiian Islands, 1910–1950. Honolulu: Editions Limited, 1982. Buck, Elizabeth. Paradise Remade: The Politics of Culture and History in Hawaiʻi. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1993. Burnett, Christina Duff y, and Burke Marshall, eds. Foreign in a Domestic Sense: Puerto Rico, American Expansion, and the Constitution. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2001. Calhoun, Craig, Frederick Cooper, and Kevin W. Moore, eds. Introduction to Lessons of Empire: Imperial Histories and American Power. New York: New Press, 2006. Camacho, Keith. “After 9/11: Militarized Borders and Social Movements in the Marianas Islands.” American Quarterly 64, no. 4 (2012): 685–713. ———. Cultures of Commemoration: The Politics of War, Memory, and History of the Mariana Islands. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011. Camacho, Keith, and Laurel A. Monig. “Uncomfortable Fatigues: Chamorro Soldiers, Gendered Identities, and the Question of Decolonization in Guam.” In Militarized Currents: Toward a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, edited by Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, 147–179. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2010. Campomanes, Oscar. “Casualty Figures of the American Soldier and the Other: Post-1898 Allegories of Imperial Nation-Building as ‘Love and War.’” In Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899–1999, edited by Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, 134–162. New York: New York University Press, 2002. Carano, Paul, and Pedro C. Sanchez. A Complete History of Guam. Tokyo: Tuttle, 1964. Chanan, Michael. Cuban Cinema. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2004. Chapman, James, and Nicholas J. Cull. Projecting Empire: Imperialism and Popular Cinema. London: Tauris, 2009. Chen, Jon J. The Great Mahele: Hawaii’s Land Division of 1848. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1958. Coff man, Tom. Nation Within: The History of the American Occupation of Hawaiʻi. Kihei, Hawaiʻi: Koa Books, 2009. Connaughton, Richard. MacArthur and Defeat in the Philippines. Woodstock, N.Y.: Overlook, 2001. Crowdus, Gary. “The Birth of an Empire: An Interview with John Sayles.” Cineaste 37, no. 1 (2011): 44–48.

Fojas-final.indb 216

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Works Cited

• 217 •

DeBenedittis, Peter. Guam’s Trial of the Century: News, Hegemony, and Rumor in an American Colony. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1993. Delmendo, Sharon. The Star-Spangled Banner: One Hundred Years of America in the Philippines. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 2004. Deocampo, Nick. “Imperialist Fictions: The Filipino in the Imperialist Imaginary.” In Vestiges of War: The Philippine-American War and the Aftermath of an Imperial Dream, 1899–1999, edited by Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia, 224– 236. New York: New York Univ. Press, 2002. Desmond, Jane C. Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1999. Deutschmann, David, and Deborah Shnookal, eds. Fidel Castro Reader. Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2007. Diaz, Vicente M. “Pious Sites: Chamorro Culture between Spanish Catholicism and American Liberal Individualism.” In Cultures of United States Imperialism, edited by Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease, 312–339. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1993. Doherty, Thomas. Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 2002. Donovan, James A. Militarism, U.S.A. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1970. Dorfman, Ariel. Empire’s Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2009. Dorfman, Ariel, and Armand Mattelart. Para leer al pato Donald: Comunicación de masa y colonialism. Mexico City: Siglo XXI Editores, 1972. Duany, Jorge. Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2002. Ehrenreich, Barbara. The Hearts of Men. London: Pluto, 1984. Farrell, Bryan H. Hawaii, the Legend That Sells. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaiʻi Press, 1982. Ferguson, Kathy E., and Phyllis Turnbull. “The Military.” In The Value of Hawaiʻi: Knowing the Past, Shaping the Future, edited by Craig Howes and Jon Osorio, 47–52. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaiʻi Press, 2010. ———. Oh, Say, Can You See? The Semiotics of the Military in Hawaiʻi. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 1999. Ferguson, Niall. Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004. Fernández, Lilia. “Of Immigrants and Migrants: Mexican and Puerto Rican Labor Migration in Comparative Perspective, 1942–1964.” Journal of American Ethnic History 29, no. 3 (2010): 6–39. Fernández Retamar, Roberto. Caliban: Apuntes sobre la cultura en nuestra América. Mexico City: Diogenes, 1971. Feuer, Jane. The Hollywood Musical. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1993. Fielding, Raymond. The American Newsreel, 1911–1967. Norman: Univ. of Oklahoma Press, 1972.

Fojas-final.indb 217

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 218 •

Islands of Empire

Flores, Juan. From Bomba to Hip-Hop: Puerto Rican Culture and Latino Identity. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 2000. Flores, Richard R. Remembering the Alamo: Memory, Modernity, and the Master Symbol. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2002. Fojas, Camilla. Border Bandits: Hollywood on the Southern Frontier. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2008. ———. Cosmopolitanism in the Americas. West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue Univ. Press, 2005. Fraser, Matthew. Weapons of Mass Distraction: Soft Power and American Empire. New York: St. Martin’s, 2003. Go, Janet G. Where America’s Day Begins: A Reporter in Guam and Micronesia. U.S.: Xlibris, 2001. Goss, Jon. “‘From Here to Eternity’: Voyages of Re(dis)covery in Tourist Landscapes of Hawaiʻi.” In Hawaiʻi: New Geographies, edited by D. W. Woodcock, 153–177. Manoa: Univ. of Hawaii Press, 1999. Grandin, Greg. Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism. New York: Metropolitan, 2006. ———. Fordlandia: The Rise and Fall of Ford’s Forgotten Jungle City. New York: Metropolitan, 2009. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 2000. Hattori, Anne Perez. Colonial Dis-Ease: U.S. Navy Health Policies and the Chamorros of Guam, 1898–1941. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaiʻi Press, 2004. Hawley, Charles V. “You’re a Better Filipino than I am, John Wayne: World War II, Hollywood, and U.S.-Philippines Relations.” Pacific Historical Review 71, no. 3 (2002): 389–414. Hemmings, Kaui Hart. The Descendants. New York: Random House, 2011. Holden, Robert H., and Eric Zolov, eds. Latin America and the United States: A Documentary History. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 2011. Ireland, Brian. The U.S. Military in Hawaiʻi: Colonialism, Memory and Resistance. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Jacobs, Deborah L. “George Clooney Makes Estate Planning Sexy.” Forbes.com, February 23, 2012. http://www.forbes.com/sites/deborahljacobs/2012/02/23/the -descendants-buries-estate-planning-lessons-in-george-clooney-drama/. Johnson, Chalmers. Dismantling the Empire: America’s Last Best Hope. New York: Metropolitan, 2010. ———. The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic. New York: Metropolitan, 2005. Kajihiro, Kyle. “No Peace in Paradise: The Military Presence in the Hawaiian Islands.” In The Superferry Chronicles, edited by Koohan Paik and Jerry Mander, 272–283. Kihei, Hawaiʻi: Koa Books, 2009. ———. “Resisting Militarization in Hawaiʻi.” In The Bases of Empire: The Global

Fojas-final.indb 218

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Works Cited

• 219 •

Struggle against U.S. Military Bases, edited by Catherine Lutz, 299–331. New York: New York Univ. Press, 2009. Kaplan, Amy. “Manifest Domesticity.” In The Futures of American Studies, edited by Donald Pease and Robyn Wiegman, 111–134. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2002. Kennedy, David. “Victory at Sea.” Atlantic Monthly, March 1999, 51–76. Koppes, Clayton R., and Gregory D. Black. Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies. Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1987. Kuykendall, Ralph S., and A. Grove Day. Hawaiʻi: A History from Polynesian Kingdom to American Statehood. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1976. López, Ana M. “Cuban Cinema in Exile: The ‘Other’ Island.” Jump Cut 38 (1993): 51–59. Lyon, Paul. “Pacific Scholarship, Literary Criticism, and Touristic Desire: The Specter of A. Grove Day.” Boundary 2 24, no. 2 (1997): 47–78. Marsh, Kelly G., and Tyrone J. Taitano. “Guam.” Contemporary Pacific 22, no. 1 (2010): 130–137. May, Ernest. Imperial Democracy: The Emergence of America as a Great Power. New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1961. McCoy, Alfred W. Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 2009. McRobbie, Angela. “Dance and Social Fantasy.” In Gender and Generation, edited by Angela McRobbie and Mica Nava, 130–161. Bath, UK: Pitman, 1984. Meinig, D. W. The Shape of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 Years of History. Vol. 4, Global America, 1915–2000. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2004. Merrill, Dennis. Negotiating Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in TwentiethCentury Latin America. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2009. Michener, James A. Introduction to A Hawaiian Reader, edited by A. Grove Day and Carl Stroven, xi. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1959. Morris, Charles. Heroes of Progress in America. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1919. ———. The Marvelous Career of Theodore Roosevelt. Philadelphia: Winston, 1910. ———. Our Island Empire. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1899. Morris, Charles, and Oliver H. G. Leigh, eds. With the World’s Great Travellers. Vol. 1. New York: Du Mont, 1901. Moruzzi, Peter. Havana before Castro: When Cuba Was a Tropical Playground. Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2008. Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In Film and Theory, edited by Robert Stam and Toby Miller, 483–494. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000. Nash, Ilana. “‘Nowhere Else to Go’: Gidget and the Construction of Adolescent Femininity.” Feminist Media Studies 2, no. 3 (2002): 341–356.

Fojas-final.indb 219

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 220 •

Islands of Empire

Negrón-Mutaner, Frances. “Feeling Pretty: West Side Story and Puerto Rican Identity Discourses.” Social Text 63 (2000): 83–106. Ninkovich, Frank. The United States and Imperialism. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2001. Nugent, Frank S. “Hollywood’s Favorite Rebel.” In John Ford Made Westerns, edited by Gaylyn Studlar and Matthew Bernstein, 261–271. Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 2001. Olivares, José de. Our Islands and Their People as Seen with Camera and Pencil. St. Louis: Thompson, 1899–1900. Omi, Michael and Howard Winant. Racial Formation in the United States. New York: Routledge, 1994. Oppenheim, Irene. “Rocking the American Dream: Elvis Presley and Bruce Springsteen.” Threepenny Review 8 (Winter 1982): 22–23. Osorio, Jon Kamakawiwoʻole. “Memorializing Puʻuloa and Remembering Pearl Harbor.” In Militarized Currents: Towards a Decolonized Future in Asia and the Pacific, edited by Setsu Shigematsu and Keith L. Camacho, 3–14. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2010. Paik, Koohan, and Jerry Mander, eds. The Superferry Chronicles: Hawaii’s Uprising against Militarism, Commercialism, and the Desecration of the Earth. Kihei, Hawaiʻi: Koa Books, 2009. Pérez, Louis. Cuba in the American Imagination: Metaphor and the Imperial Ethos. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2008. Pérez Firmat, Gustavo. The Havana Habit. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 2010. Pratt, Richard C., and Zachary Smith. Hawaiʻi Politics and Government: An American State in a Pacific World. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2000. Proto, Neil Thomas. The Rights of My People: Liliuokalani’s Enduring Battle with the United States, 1893–1917. New York: Algora, 2009. Ramírez Berg, Charles. Latino Images in Film: Stereotypes, Subversion, Resistance. Austin: Univ. of Texas Press, 2002. Rampell, Ed, and Luis I. Reyes, eds. Pearl Harbor in the Movies. Honolulu: Mutual, 2001. Reyes, Luis I. Made in Paradise: Hollywood’s Films of Hawaiʻi and the South Seas. Honolulu: Mutual, 1995. Rivera-Batiz, Francisco L., and Carlos E. Santiago. Island Paradox: Puerto Rico in the 1990s. New York: Sage, 1996. Rodó, José Enrique. Ariel. Edited by Belén Castro. Madrid: Cátedra, 2000. Rogers, Robert F. Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaiʻi Press, 1995. Root, Maria P. P. The Multiracial Experience: Racial Borders as a Significant Frontier in Race Relations. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1996. Rosaldo, Renato. Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis. Boston: Beacon, 1993.

Fojas-final.indb 220

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Works Cited

• 221 •

Rosen, Fred, ed. Empire and Dissent: The United States and Latin America. Durham: Duke Univ. Press, 2008. Rosenberg, Emily S. A Date Which Will Live: Pearl Harbor in American Memory. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2003. Ross, Andrew. The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life: Nature’s Debt to Society. London: Verso, 1994. Rutsky, R. L. “Surfing the Other: Ideology on the Beach.” Film Quarterly 52, no. 4 (1999): 12–23. Sanchez, Pedro C. Guahan Guam: The History of Our Island. Agana, Guam: Sanchez, 1988. Sanders, Coyne Steven, and Tom Gilbert. Desilu: The Story of Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. New York: Morrow, 1993. San Juan, E., Jr. U.S. Imperialism and Revolution in the Philippines. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System. Philadelphia: Temple Univ. Press, 1981. ———. “World War II and the Hollywood ‘War Film.’” In Hollywood and War, edited by J. David Slocum, 147–155. New York: Routledge, 2006. Schmitt, Robert C. Hawaiʻi in the Movies, 1898–1959. Honolulu: Hawaiian Historical Society, 1988. Schoultz, Lars. The United States and the Cuban Revolution: That Infernal Little Republic. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 2009. Schwartz, Rosalie. Pleasure Island: Tourism and Temptation in Cuba. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1997. Silva, Noenoe K. Aloha Betrayed: Native Hawaiian Resistance to American Colonialism. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 2004. Singer, Robert. “‘What Grows in the Hood?’ Projects, People, and the Contemporary Brooklyn Film.” In The Brooklyn Film, edited by John B. Manbeck and Robert Singer, 51–69. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2003. Skwiot, Christine. The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawaiʻi. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Slocum, J. David, ed. Hollywood and War: The Film Reader. New York: Routledge, 2006. Stanton, Max E. “The Polynesian Cultural Center: A Multi-Ethnic Model of Seven Pacific Cultures.” In Hosts and Guests: The Anthropology of Tourism, edited by Valene L. Smith, 247–262. Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1989. Steel, Ronald. Pax Americana. New York: Viking, 1967. Stoler, Laura Ann. “On Degrees of Imperial Sovereignty.” Public Culture 18, no. 1 (2006): 125–146. Strange, Susan. Casino Capitalism. Oxford: Blackwell, 1986. Sudgen, John. Boxing and Society. Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1996. Teaiwa, Teresa K. “Reading Paul Gaugin’s Noa Noa with Epeli Hauʻofa’s Kisses in the Nederends: Militourism, Feminism, and the ‘Polynesian’ Body.” In Inside

Fojas-final.indb 221

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 222 •

Islands of Empire

Out: Literature, Cultural Politics, and Identity in the New Pacific, edited by Vilsono Hereniko and Rob Wilson, 249–263. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. Thompson, Hunter S. The Rum Diary. New York: Simon and Shuster, 1998. Thompson, Lanny. Imperial Archipelago: Representation and Rule in the Insular Territories under U.S. Domination after 1898. Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2010. ———. “Representation and Rule in the Imperial Archipelago: Cuba, Puerto Rico, Hawaiʻi, and the Philippines under U.S. Dominion after 1898.” American Studies Asia 1, no. 1 (June 2002): 3–39. Time. “The Bard of Bootstrap.” June 23, 1958, 32–39. ———. “Muñoz: Energetic Idealist.” March 11, 1957, 80–84. Trask, Haunani Kay. From a Native Daughter: Colonialism and Sovereignty in Hawaiʻi. Monroe, Me.: Common Courage, 1993. Trías Monge, José. Puerto Rico: The Trials of the Oldest Colony in the World. New Haven, Conn.: Yale Univ. Press, 1997. Udall, Stewart L., and Ruth G. Van Cleve. America’s Day begins in Guam . . . U.S.A. Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, Office of Territories, 1966. Urry, John. The Tourist Gaze. London: Sage, 2002. U.S. Congress. House. Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs. Economic Development of the Territory of Guam. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1966. U.S. Office of War Information. Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry. Washington, D.C.: Office of War Information, Bureau of Motion Pictures, 1942. Valdivia, Angharad. A Latina in the Land of Hollywood, and Other Essays on Media Culture. Tucson: Univ. of Arizona Press, 2000. Walker, Isaiah Helekunihi. Waves of Resistance: Surfing and History in Twentieth Century Hawaiʻi. Honolulu: Univ. of Hawaiʻi Press, 2011. Wells, Elizabeth A. “West Side Story”: Cultural Perspectives on an American Musical. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 2011. White, W. H. They Were Expendable. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1942. Williams, William Appleman. Empire as a Way of Life: An Essay on the Causes and Character of America’s Present Predicament along with a Few Thoughts about an Alternative. New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980. Willis, Sharon. High Contrast: Race and Gender in Contemporary Hollywood Film. Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1997. Wood, Houston. Displacing Natives: The Rhetorical Production of Hawaiʻi. Oxford: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999. Wright, Thomas C. Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1991.

Fojas-final.indb 222

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Index

Note: Italic page numbers refer to illustrations. Abu Sayyaf, 208n51 Adams, Brooke, 72, 72 Adams, John Quincy, 19, 94 advertisements, and U.S. imperialism, 8–9 Affair in Havana (1957), 67, 68 Afghanistan war, 6, 7, 170, 203 Aikau, Hokulani K., 128 Aila, William, 203 Akana, Leo Anderson, 93 Alamo, 14, 25, 38, 41, 45, 47–48, 97 Alaska, 9 Aldrich, Robert, 45 Alicia en la pueblo de Maravillas (1989), 70 Allen, Robert, 98 Allende, Salvador, 73 Alliance for Progress, 12, 137 All in the Family (1971–1979), 73 Aloha Summer (1988), 27, 193, 195 Altman, Rick, 35 American Dream: Elvis Presley as icon of, 110, 130; fantasy of, 86, 89, 110; and Puerto Rico, 28, 133, 163, 164– 166; values of, 81, 130 American Idol (2002–), 149 American Samoa, 182

Fojas-final.indb 223

America’s Day Begins in Guam . . . U.S.A. (Udall and Van Cleve), 181–184 Amigo (2011), 7 Anthony, Marc, 155, 161, 162, 163 Apocalypse Now (1979), 173 Apology Resolution, 197–198 Argentina, 1, 2, 28, 73 Arkin, Alan, 82 Arnaz, Desi, 47, 60–64, 61, 67 Asher, William, 121 Associated Press, 15 Au, Jeff rey, 93 Babauta, Leo, 25 Bacevich, Andrew, 11 Back Door to Hell (1964), 25 Back to Bataan (1945): and American way of life, 33; claims to verisimilitude, 49–50; failed missions depicted in, 44, 45; and Filipino participation in war effort, 48–49; guidelines for narrative of, 25, 49; love story of, 51, 178; racial symbology of, 48; scenes from, 44, 49, 50, 52; and wartime propaganda, 50–51, 54; and western fi lm genre, 35, 45

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 224 •

Islands of Empire

Bad Boys II (2003), 26, 90, 91, 92 Ball, Lucille, 60, 61, 62–63, 63, 64 Balsam, Martin, 75, 77 Bans, Jenna, 192 Bardallo, B. J., 178 Bartone, Richard C., 56 Basinger, Jeanine, 54–55 Bataan (1943): and American way of life, 33; failed missions depicted in, 45, 47–48; guidelines for narrative of, 25, 48; and heroism, 48; and perilous journey, 177; scene from, 55; and wartime propaganda, 54–56; and western fi lm genre, 35, 47 Batista, Fulgencio: representation in fi lm, 72, 74, 75, 77, 79, 82, 84–85, 89; repression under, 70, 79; U.S.-puppet government of, 64 The Battle of Midway (1942), 38 Baywatch Hawaii (1999–2001), 202 Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), 121 Beach Party (1963), 121 Beardsley, Charles, 179–181 Beers, Betsy, 192 Bender, Lawrence, 87 Benitez, Jaime, 134 Benítez Rojo, Antonio, 7 Berlin, Irving, 67 Bernstein, Leonard, 145 Bernstein, Matthew, 35–36 Beymer, Richard, 141, 143 Bigelow, Katherine, 203 Bikini Beach (1964), 121 Black, Gregory D., 47–48 Blackboard Jungle (1955), 138 Blackman, Joan, 114, 114 Blount, James H., 97 Blount Report, 97 Blue Crush (2002), 27, 196, 197, 202 Blue Hawaii (1961): and beachboy subculture, 112–113, 117, 140; and capitalism, 110, 111, 115, 130, 131, 141, 142; and contradictions, 119, 126; and eth-

Fojas-final.indb 224

nic casting, 193; and interracial romance, 141, 142; movie poster for, 111; and plantation system, 111; scene from, 114; sound track of, 116; and tourism, 95, 110, 111–112, 113, 114–115, 116, 117–118, 122, 124, 127, 188; and U.S. fantasy of Hawaiʻi, 110; and U.S. militarism, 110; and youth subcultures, 27, 111–112, 117, 118, 130 Bogdanovich, Peter, 38, 40 Boot, Max, 11 Bordallo, Ricardo J. (“Ricky”), 183–186, 213–214n37 Brameld, Theodore, 129 Brando, Marlon, 104 Brandt, E. N., 208n46 Brazil, 1, 2, 28, 137 Breen, Joseph, 36 Briggs, Laura, 138 Brigham Young University, 128–129 British Empire, 8 Brody, David, 34 Brown, DeSoto, 93, 109 Bryan, William S., 17 Buck, Elizabeth, 115 Bulkeley, John, 39, 41 Bumatai, Andy, 193 Burdick, William, 209n24 Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP), 36 Burnett, Christina Duff y, 10 Burnham, Daniel, 34, 207n4 Bush, George W., 6, 11, 190 Butterworth, Donna, 126 Cabrera Infante, Guillermo, 71, 84 Calderón, Paul, 157 Calhoun, Craig, 11 Camacho, Keith L., 168, 175, 202, 214n41 capitalism: and Cuba, 65, 75, 76, 78– 81, 82, 145; and Guam, 169, 170, 181, 184; and Hawaiʻi, 23, 95, 96, 103, 109, 110, 115, 117, 119, 124–128, 130, 131, 141, 142, 169, 189, 196; and overthrow of

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Index Hawaiian monarch, 22, 27, 94, 96; and Puerto Rico, 135, 194. See also entrepreneurialism Capitalism: A Love Story (2009), 190 Cara, Irene, 146, 147, 148, 149, 157 Carano, Paul, 179–180 Carmichael, Hoagy, 67 Carnival Rock (1957), 138 Carradine, David, 186 Carrere, Tia, 193, 195 Casablanca (1942), 75–76 Case, Steve, 196 Casino Jack (2010), 190 Castro, Fidel: on artists and intellectuals, 70; and Bay of Pigs mission, 172; on casino system, 81; in fi lm, 75, 76, 78, 79, 80, 82, 83, 89, 193; on imperialism, 75; and prerevolutionary Cuba, 71; and Sandinistas, 73; on tourism, 109; 26th of July Movement, 84; U.S. descriptions of, 62; U.S. efforts to oust, 87 Cavite (2005), 208n51 Chakiris, George, 142 Chanan, Michael, 70 Chapman, James, 8 Che (2008), 26, 75 Chicago, Illinois, 34, 207n4 Chico and the Man (1974–1978), 73 China, 170, 171 Chinatown (1974), 73 citizenship rights: and Guam, 169; and Puerto Rico, 202; racial discourses guiding policy initiatives, 19–20, 21 Clinton, Bill, 197–198 Clinton, Hillary, 59 Clooney, George, 196, 199 Cold War, 115, 171, 181, 182 Colón, Willie, 164–165 colonialism: anticolonialism, 17–18, 20, 51, 171, 200–201; and assimilation narratives, 135, 145; and bootstrap model of development, 28, 133, 165;

Fojas-final.indb 225

• 225 •

justification of, 14–15; and morality, 120, 164; narratives of, 130, 145, 161, 164–165; and native characteristics, 110, 128, 211n40; neocolonialism, 110; and popular culture, 133; and tourism, 109, 110, 113, 116. See also U.S. imperialism Complete History of Guam (Carano and Sanchez), 179–180 Connery, Sean, 71, 72, 77 Consolidated Amusement Co., 108 Cooper, Frederick, 11 Corregidor (1943), 25, 33, 35, 45, 51–52, 53, 54 Council on Foreign Relations, 11 Crossover Dreams (1985), 162 Cruz, Joe, 178, 179 Cuba: and Bay of Pigs mission, 172; and capitalism, 65, 75, 76, 78–81, 82, 145; colonial portrayals of Cubans, 62; cruelty of Spain in, 171; and foreign domestics, 33, 62; and grief and mourning, 65, 66, 69–70, 78, 79, 83, 84, 85, 89, 92; Hawaiʻi compared to, 102; Mafia associated with, 26, 92; and Mexico, 73; and native characteristics, 18, 19, 21–22, 23, 65, 115, 199; and nostalgia and yearning, 26, 64, 65–66, 71, 74, 76, 78, 82–84, 86– 89, 91–92, 191; and popular culture, 9, 26, 28, 60–67, 69, 71, 76–77, 91, 191, 193; postrevolutionary portrayals of Cubans, 64–65; prerevolutionary Cuba depictions, 71; as protocolony, 5, 15; Puerto Rico as location for fi lms on, 193, 209n6; Puerto Rico linked with, 13, 194; rejection of U.S. hegemony, 9–10, 26; shift ing alignment with U.S., 9; sovereignty of, 19, 23, 201; sugar industry of, 19; and terrorism, 59; and tourism, 5, 6, 15, 19, 63, 64, 65, 66–67, 67, 69, 71, 76, 78, 82, 87, 88, 91, 94, 109, 115, 193, 201,

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 226 •

Islands of Empire

Cuba (continued) 209n14; travel writing on, 17, 18, 19, 23, 199; U.S. ambivalence toward, 65, 91–92; and U.S. fantasy, 62, 65, 69– 78, 91; and U.S. foreign policy, 71, 144–145; and U.S. imperialism, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 13, 19, 24, 62, 63, 94, 137, 191, 193, 200. See also Havana, Cuba Cuba (1979): contrasting national representations in, 74–75, 89; Cubans as protagonists in, 165; love story of, 72, 75–78, 79, 84, 85, 86; and narrative of politics, 71–75, 76, 84, 88; and narrative of U.S. tourism, 26, 71, 76; and popular culture, 76–77; scenes from, 72, 74, 77; and self-examination, 73, 74; time period as context of, 69, 71, 91–92 Cuba Mine (movie script), 87 Cuban Revolution: and decolonization movements, 144; and fi lm, 26, 69– 70, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81–82, 84, 86, 89; political meaning of, 10, 66, 94; and popular culture, 23, 63–64, 199; and tourism, 102, 109, 209n14; U.S. ambivalence toward, 91–92 Cugat, Xavier, 60 Cull, Nicholas J., 8 Curreri, Lee, 147 Dancing with the Stars (2005–), 149 Dandridge, Ruby, 52 Darren, James, 121 Day, A. Grove, 96, 104, 106 DeBenedittis, Peter, 183–184 December 7 (1943), 38 DeGeneres, Ellen, 31 Delmendo, Sharon, 51 del Toro, Benicio, 193 Deocampo, Nick, 43 Depp, Johnny, 194, 196 The Descendants (2011), 196–199, 201 The Descendants (Hemmings), 196, 198

Fojas-final.indb 226

Desmond, Jane C., 127 De Vega, Jose, 140–141, 193 Dewey, George, 57 Diaz, Vicente M., 185 Dirty Dancing (1987), 88 Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights (2004): love story of, 87–89; narrative of politics, 84, 88, 89; narrative of U.S. tourism, 26, 71, 76, 87, 88; time period of, 69, 83, 87, 91–92 Disney, Walt, 7–8 Dmytryk, Edward, 45 Doherty, Thomas, 121 Dole, Sanford, 93 Donne, John, 174–175 Donovan, James A., 170 Don’t Knock the Rock (1956), 138 Dorfman, Ariel, 7–8 Do the Right Thing (1989): and colonialism, 164; and competition between cultures, 162; and interracial relations, 151–154; scenes from, 152, 153, 154; setting of, 156; and systems of oppression, 151; and urban-migrant narrative, 27, 133, 135, 155 Douglas, Santiago, 157 Duany, Jorge, 145, 148 Easy Rider (1969), 73 Ehrenreich, Barbara, 124 8 Mile (2002), 161 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 95 El Cantante (2007), 27, 133, 135, 146, 161, 162, 163–165 El siglo de las luces (1982), 70 El Super (1979), 86 Eminem, 161 entrepreneurialism: and Guam, 169, 188; and Hawaiʻi, 103, 110, 112, 115, 117, 119, 130, 131, 142; imperialism associated with, 14, 18; and Puerto Rico, 133. See also capitalism Europe, imperialism in, 15

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Index Everything about Our New Possessions, 17 failure, cultural resignification of, 45 Fame (1980): and Americanness, 149; and colonial subject, 164; and ethnic heritage, 148, 150–151, 157; and interracial relations, 148; scenes from, 147, 149; as self-reflexive musical, 146, 148; setting of, 156, 161; and urban-migrant narrative, 27, 133, 135, 145–146, 149–150, 151, 163 Fame (TV series, 1982–1987), 145, 149 Fame (2009), 145 Fantasy Island (ABC 1978–1984), 26 Farrell, Colin, 2, 2, 29 Faye, Alice, 68 Feel the Noise (2007): and colonialism, 145, 161, 164–165; and hybrid formations, 162, 164; as “making of the artist” story, 146, 162–163; and Puerto Rican Day parade, 155, 163; and transnational Puerto Rican artists, 161, 162, 164; and urban-migrant narrative, 27, 133, 135 Ferguson, Kathy, 203 Ferguson, Niall, 11–12, 206n22 Feuer, Jane, 146 Fielding, Raymond, 42–43 Fifty First Dates (2004), 202 fi lm: and Cuba, 67–70, 95; Cuban-exile cinema, 69–71, 84; and Cuban Revolution, 26, 69–70, 75, 76, 77, 79, 80, 81–82, 84, 86, 89; and ethnicity in casting, 13, 140–143, 148, 152– 153, 157, 164, 165, 173, 174, 192, 193, 199, 208n50; function of genres, 35–36; and Guam, 25–26, 98; and Hawaiʻi, 26–27, 35, 92, 93–94, 95, 102, 104, 106–108; imperial sensibility in story lines, 4, 8, 9; and morality, 123–124; and Philippines, 25, 34–38, 98; and Puerto Rico, 28; and

Fojas-final.indb 227

• 227 •

Spanish-American War, 3; and teen delinquency, 132–133; tourist fi lms, 108–109, 113, 116, 117, 118, 125, 131, 132, 136, 142; wartime censorship of, 36– 37. See also war fi lms; western fi lm genre; and specific films Flashdance (1983), 146 Flores, Juan, 135 Flores, Richard R., 14, 45 Ford, Henry, 137 Ford, John, 35, 38, 39, 40–41, 45 Foucault, Michel, 108 Foxx, Jamie, 2, 2, 29 Fraser, Matthew, 8 Frawley, William, 63 Frei, Eduardo, 73 Fresa y chocolate (1994), 70 From Here to Eternity (1953), 108 From the Memoirs of a Non-Enemy Combatant (Gilvarry), 203 Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), 134 Galindez, Rick, 93 Gamazon, Ian, 208n51 Garai, Romola, 87 Garcia, Andy, 71, 83, 84 Garnett, Tay, 45 gaze, of tourist, 108–109 gender: and narrative structure, 127; and politics of representation, 152, 153, 154–155, 160; and racial politics, 113; and settling of West, 207n3; and urban-migrant narratives, 138, 143, 157–158, 159, 164; and youth subcultures, 119–120, 121 The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show (1950–1958), 60 Gershwin, George, 67 Gidget (1959), 119 Gidget Goes Hawaiian (1961): and morality, 119, 120–121, 124; and Royal Hawaiian Hotel, 98, 99; scenes from,

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 228 •

Islands of Empire

Gidget Goes Hawaiian (continued) 120, 123, 124; and tourism, 95, 118, 123, 124, 127; and youth subculture, 27, 95, 119–122, 132 Gilvarry, Alex, 203 Girlfight (2000): and colonialism, 164; and gender expectations, 154; scenes from, 157, 158; setting of, 156, 161; as urban boxing fi lm, 156–157, 159–160; and urban-migrant narrative, 27, 133, 135, 157–159 Girls! Girls! Girls! (1962), 27, 95, 112 Glee (2009–), 31, 149 Go, Johnny, Go! (1959), 138 The Godfather: Part II (1974), 26, 92 Goldwyn, Samuel, 37 Gore, Michael, 148 Goss, John, 117 Gould, Clotilde, 214n37 Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry, 36–37, 40, 49 Grandin, Greg, 6, 12, 205n10 Graves, Leonard, 57 Guam: and anticolonialism, 171; and capitalism, 169, 170, 181, 184; and Chamorros, 13, 25, 167, 171, 173, 174, 175, 178–179, 180, 183–186, 188, 189, 213n17, 213–214n37, 214n41; and Filipinos, 167, 173; and foreign domestics, 33, 167–168; Hawaiʻi compared to, 10, 15, 25, 167, 169, 172; and Japan, 25, 32, 167, 168, 170–171, 172, 174, 177, 184, 186, 188, 202, 213n15; and native characteristics, 167, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 177, 180; Philippines linked with, 13, 25, 32, 168, 172, 177; and popular culture, 9, 25, 28, 98, 168, 172, 180, 188–189, 191; resources of, 23; and Spain, 167, 168, 173, 180, 185–186; and Spanish-American War, 5, 168; stereoscopic image of mission home grounds during U.S. Navy rule of,

Fojas-final.indb 228

16; and tourism, 25, 94, 167, 168, 169, 172, 180, 181–183, 183, 184, 186, 187– 188, 189; travel writing on, 17, 168, 179–181, 199, 200; as unincorporated territory, 167; and U.S. imperialism, 3, 4, 7, 10, 12, 13, 24, 63, 167–169, 180– 181, 183, 184, 189, 191, 200; and U.S. militarism, 23, 25–26, 167, 168–172, 173, 175, 177, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 189, 202, 203; and U.S. Soviet arms race, 171–172; and World War II, 25, 26, 32, 41–42, 167, 170, 177, 179, 191 Guam Doctrine, 172, 181 Guam Eagle (newspaper), 177 Guam Elective Governor Act, 171 Guam: Past and Present (Beardsley), 179–181 Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1966), 125 Guevara, Ernesto (“Che”), 26, 75, 80, 193 Gutierrez, Carl T. C., 184 Hammett, Dashiell, 67 Hanser, Richard, 56, 57 Hardt, Michael, 200–201 Hardt, Mickey, 186 Hart, John Mason, 6 Hattori, Anne Perez, 180 Havana, Cuba: and popular culture, 5, 26, 64, 92, 191; as site of criminal collaboration, 5, 28–29; as synecdoche of Cuba, 86–87; and tourism, 15, 26, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 76, 84, 88, 92, 94, 98, 102; U.S. administration of, 19; and U.S. imperialism, 7, 19, 46, 66, 191 Havana (1990): and capitalism, 78–81, 82, 88; Cubans as protagonists in, 165; and ethnicity in casting, 193; and gambling, 78–79, 80, 81, 82, 89; love story of, 78, 79–80, 82–83, 84, 85, 86, 89; and narrative of U.S. tourism,

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Index 26, 71, 76, 79, 82; and native characteristics, 81; time period of, 69, 79, 91–92 Havana Before Castro (Moruzzi), 66 Hawaiʻi: annexation of, 22–23, 26–27, 94, 95, 96, 97; assimilation into U.S. hegemony, 9–10; “Bayonet Constitution,” 96; capitalist development of, 23, 95, 96, 103, 109, 110, 115, 117, 119, 124–128, 130, 131, 141, 142, 169, 189, 196; capitalist overthrow of reigning monarch, 22, 27, 94, 96; leasehold system of landownership, 22; mythologizing of, 94, 107, 110; and native characteristics, 18, 21–22, 23, 27, 102, 106, 107, 108, 109–110, 112, 113– 116, 117, 127, 128–131, 165, 199, 211n40, 211n47; and Native Hawaiian dispossession, 97–98, 110, 115–116, 196–200; Philippines linked with, 13; plantations of, 95–96, 111, 117, 162, 196; and popular culture, 9, 26–27, 28, 94, 95, 98, 102, 103, 108, 109, 115, 131, 191, 192; Puerto Ricans migrating to, 162; Puerto Rico compared to, 10, 15, 102, 136, 192; statehood of, 10, 23, 26, 27, 94, 95, 96, 98, 102–104, 103, 106, 107– 108, 110, 113, 114–115, 118, 120, 121, 131, 191, 203; and tourism, 6, 9, 10, 15, 25, 26–27, 92, 94, 95, 96, 98–100, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 106, 107, 108–110, 111, 111, 112–116, 117, 118, 124, 128–131, 142, 167, 169, 172, 182, 188, 189, 191, 202–203; travel writing on, 17, 18, 21–23, 103– 104, 199; U.S. fantasy of, 106, 109–110, 113; and U.S. imperialism, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 12, 13, 24, 57, 94, 95, 96, 117, 126, 191, 192, 196–197, 200; and U.S. militarism, 15, 22, 23, 25, 27, 95–98, 110, 117, 155, 167, 169, 172, 175, 189, 201, 202– 203. See also Pearl Harbor, Hawaiʻi Hawaii (1966), 27, 105, 106–107, 107 Hawaii (Michener), 27, 104, 106–107

Fojas-final.indb 229

• 229 •

A Hawaiian Reader (Day and Stroven), 104, 106 Hawaii Five-O (1968–1980, 2010), 27, 202, 211n47 Hawaii Statehood Commission, 102 Hawley, Charles V., 37, 38 Hemmings, Kaui Hart, 196 Hilton, Conrad, 194 Hilton Hawaiian Village, 100, 100 Hironaga, Karen Kuioka, 197 Hitler, Adolph, 46 Hunter, Jeff rey, 171, 176 Ichaso, Leon, 86, 161, 162, 209–210n29 I Love Lucy (1951–1957), 47, 60–64, 61, 63, 64 Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), 173 In Living Color (1990–1994), 151, 160 Inouye, Daniel, 203 Inside Job (2010), 190 Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográficos (ICAIC), 70–71 Insular Cases (1901–1922), 4, 15, 96 The Insular Empire: America in the Mariana Islands (2010), 25–26 Iraq War, 6, 7, 14, 15, 45, 170, 203 Ireland, Brian, 107–108 Islands of Empire (online game), 205n4 Jansen, Joanne, 87 Japan: and Guam, 25, 32, 167, 168, 170– 171, 172, 174, 177, 184, 186, 188, 202, 213n15; Pearl Harbor bombing, 36, 40, 41, 46, 47, 56, 97, 98, 174, 175, 176– 177, 202; and Philippines, 32, 39, 41, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 57, 58, 98, 174, 202 Japanese Americans, internment of, 46 Johnson, Chalmers, 28 Johnston, Agueda, 178 Jones Act of 1916, 20 Jones-Shafroth Act of 1917, 21, 145

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 230 •

Islands of Empire

journalism, and U.S. imperialism, 8– 9, 15–16 Julia, Raúl, 79, 193 Juvenile Jungle (1958), 138 Kaʻialani, Princess, 93–94, 114 Kaichi, Carmen, 197 Kalākaua, King, 96, 184 Kaplan, Amy, 207n3 Kelly, Robert, 41 Kennedy, John F., 137, 172 Kipuhá (indigenous leader of Guam), 185, 186 Kona Coast (1968), 95 Koppes, Clayton R., 47–48 Korean War, 45 Kruger, Otto, 52 Krupa, Joanna, 186 Kusama, Karen, 158 Kuykendall, Ralph S., 96, 104 La Malinche, 185 Landi, Elissa, 52 Last Exit to Brooklyn (1989), 158 Latin America: and development of U.S. imperial strategy, 6; and popular culture, 7–8; and racial politics, 146; U.S. capitalist expansion in, 4, 12; U.S. policies toward, 12, 137 Laurents, Arthur, 145 Lavoe, Hector, 162, 163–165 Lavoe, Puchi, 163–164 Lawrence, Martin, 90 Lawton, Henry, 20 Lederer, Eugene, 209n24 Lee, Spike, 151, 152, 154, 154 Leon Guerrero, Jose D., 182 Lewis, Oscar, 138 Liliʻuokalani, Queen, 22, 27, 94, 97, 116 Lista de espera (2000), 70 literature: and U.S. imperialism, 8–9. See also specific books

Fojas-final.indb 230

Little Big Star (talent show), 31 Llana, Neill Dela, 208n51 López, Ana M., 70, 209–210n29 Lopez, Jennifer, 155, 160–161, 163, 201 Lord, Jack, 202 Lost (2004–2010), 192, 202 The Lost City (2005): love story of, 69, 78, 85–86, 87, 89; narrative of politics, 83–86, 88; narrative of U.S. tourism, 26, 76, 83, 84, 85, 87; and popular culture, 83, 84, 85, 89; script for, 71; time period of, 69, 83, 91–92 Loving v. Virginia (1967), 126 Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (1957–1960), 62 Luna, Diego, 88 Lyon, Paul, 104 MacAllister Lin, Brian, 7 MacArthur, Arthur, 32, 34 MacArthur, Douglas: in Australia, 42, 44, 49; battle cry attributed to, 41, 44–45, 54, 170; heroism signified by, 25, 40, 43–44; and Philippines, 32, 34, 41–42, 43, 50–51, 177; and war fi lms, 38, 39, 40, 41 Mafia, Cuba associated with, 26, 92 Magnum, P.I. (1980–1988), 202 Maine, 97 The Maltese Falcon (Hammett), 67 Mangan, Robert M., 181 Manifest Destiny, 207n3 Manila, Philippines: and Guam, 168; and newsreels, 43–44; stereoscopic image of the Intramuros district of, 16; urban and bureaucratic design of, 34, 207n4; and U.S. imperialism, 7, 34, 39, 57, 58 Mann, Michael, 1, 28 The March of Time (newsreel series, 1931–1945), 25, 33 Margin Call (2011), 190

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Index Mariana Islands, 32, 168, 184, 203. See also Guam The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970– 1977), 60 Matsuyama, Midori, 129 Mattelart, Armand, 7–8 Max Havoc: Curse of the Dragon (2004), 25, 168, 186–188 May, Ernest, 10, 98 McCoy, Alfred W., 6–7 McRobbie, Angela, 149, 154 Memories of Underdevelopment (1968), 81, 86 Merrill, Dennis, 6 Mexican Americans, 35, 58 Mexican War (1848), 4 Mexico, 1, 4–5, 6, 73 Miami, Florida, 1–2, 69 Miami Vice (1984–1989), 1, 3, 5, 26, 28, 92 Miami Vice (2006 fi lm): and Cuba, 5, 9, 91; reinvention of, 27; scenes from, 2, 29; and U.S. imperialism, 1–3, 28–29 Michener, James, 27, 104, 105, 106 Middle East, 6, 7 Militarism, U.S.A. (Donovan), 170 Miller, Amara, 197 Miller, Barry, 148 Miranda, Carmen, 68 The Momentary Enemy (2008), 7 A Moment in the Sun (Sayles), 4, 7 Monnig, Laurel A., 214n41 Montgomery, Robert, 40 Moore, Kevin W., 11 morality: and fi lm, 123–124; and gender, 164; and narrative of politics, 89; and native characteristics, 18, 81; and tourism, 118–119, 194, 196; and youth subcultures, 118, 119, 120–121, 123, 131 Moreno, Rita, 142, 143 Morris, Charles, 17–19, 21–22

Fojas-final.indb 231

• 231 •

Morris, Gary, 121 Moruzzi, Peter, 66 Moscoso, Teodoro, 137 Motion Picture Production Code, 114 Mount Pelée, eruption of, 43 Mulvey, Laura, 108 Muñoz Marín, Luis, 134, 137 Murrow, Edward R., 140 Mussolini, Benito, 46 Napoleon, Nanette, 93 Nash, Ilana, 119–120 Native Americans, 33, 35, 58 native characteristics: and colonialism, 110, 128, 211n40; and Cuba, 18, 19, 21–22, 23, 65, 115, 199; denial of reality of, 27; and evolutionary rhetoric, 18; and Guam, 167, 170, 171, 173, 174, 175, 177, 180; and Hawaiʻi, 18, 21–22, 23, 27, 102, 106, 107, 108, 109– 110, 112, 113–116, 117, 127, 128–131, 165, 199, 211n40, 211n47; and morality, 18, 81; and narratives of U.S. imperialism, 14, 17, 19–23, 81; and Philippines, 18, 19, 21–22, 33, 199; and Puerto Rico, 18, 21–22, 23, 133, 199; racial discourses guiding policy initiatives, 19–20; simplistic language describing, 14; stereoscopic images of, 17, 129 Negri, Antonio, 200–201 Negrón-Mutaner, Frances, 143, 161 News of the Day (newsreel series), 25, 33, 43–44 newsreels: characteristics of, 42–43; and Spanish-American War, 3, 17, 24, 43; and war fi lms, 42; and World War II, 25, 38, 43–44, 54 New York City, Puerto Rican urbanmigrant narratives of, 27–28, 133, 140, 141–142, 156, 162 Nicaragua, 73

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 232 •

Islands of Empire

Nigh, William, 45 Nimitz, Chester, 181 9/11 terrorist attacks, 1, 14, 97, 189 Ninkovich, Frank, 15 Nixon, Richard M., 172, 181, 182 Nixon Doctrine, 172, 181 No Man Is an Island (1962): and Chamorros, 173, 174, 178–179; love story of, 171, 178; and narrative of isolation, 174–176, 177, 181, 186; and popular culture, 172, 180; and racial politics, 177–178, 193; scenes from, 176; and U.S. militarism, 168, 170, 172, 175, 177; and World War II, 25, 168, 170–171, 176 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 1 North Korea, 170 North Shore (1987), 193 Nugent, Frank S., 39 Obama, Barack, 202, 203 Occupy Wall Street movement, 190 Office of Strategic Services, Field Photographic Branch, 38 Office of War Information (OWI), 24, 25, 36–38, 40, 48, 49, 58 Off the Map (2011), 192 Okihiro, Gary, 7 Okinawa, 25, 104, 169–170, 189 Olin, Lena, 79 Olivares, José de, 17–21, 22, 211n40 Omi, Michael, 136 Operation Bootstrap, 134, 136–137 Operation Pacific (1951), 35 Oppenheim, Irene, 116 The Oprah Winfrey Show (1986–2011), 31 Organic Act of Guam, 169, 171 Osorio, John, 97 Otis, Johnny, 116 Our Island Empire (Morris), 17–19, 21–22 Our Islands and Their People (Olivares), 17–21, 22, 211n40

Fojas-final.indb 232

Our Man in Havana (1959), 71 Our New Possessions, 17 Paar, Jack, 83 Pacific War Memorial Commission, 112 Pacino, Al, 90 Paradise, Hawaiian Style (1966): and capitalism, 124–128, 130–131; and contradictions, 119; interracial couple in, 114, 125; scene from, 125; and tourism, 95, 112, 118, 124, 125, 126– 127, 128, 129–130; and youth subculture, 27 Paraguay, 2, 28 Pax Americana, 1, 11, 98 Payne, Alexander, 196 Pearl Harbor, Hawaiʻi: and the Alamo, 41, 97; and fi lm, 107, 112; Japanese bombing of, 36, 40, 41, 46, 47, 56, 97, 98, 174, 175, 176–177, 202; Pearl Harbor Syndrome, 170; as Superfund site, 97–98; in U.S. memory, 14; U.S. rights to coaling station at, 96; and war fi lms, 9, 32, 36, 38, 40, 57 Peeples, Nia, 193 Pempengco, Charice, 31 Penniman, “Little Richard,” 116 Perez, Barbara, 179 Pérez, Louis, 66 Pérez, Rosie, 151–156, 154, 160 The Perez Family (1995), 165 Pérez Firmat, Gustavo, 66 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 34 Philippine-American War (1899–1902): liberation movement leaders, 51; and popular culture, 15, 20, 37, 199; and U.S. imperialism, 7, 32, 35, 58 Philippines: ambivalent state of, 15; Americanization of, 48; and Americanness of former colonial subjects, 31; and Battle of Corregidor, 38–42, 45, 47, 54; as client state, 20, 24, 48, 58, 203, 209n10; devaluation of, 20;

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Index and ethnicity of Filipino actors, 13, 140–141, 165, 173, 174, 193, 208n50; Filipinos as colonial subjects, 35, 38, 43, 48, 50–51; Filipinos as racialized primitives, 19–20, 33, 37, 43, 48; Filipinos depicted as minority in armed forces, 47–48; Filipinos portrayed sympathetically, 38, 48, 58; Filipinos treated as foreign, 33, 34, 42, 46, 48, 58; Filipino terrorists depicted in fi lms, 208n51; and foreign domestics, 24–25, 31–34, 40, 42, 46–47, 48, 51, 52, 57, 58–59; Guam linked with, 13, 25, 32, 168, 172, 177; Hawaiʻi linked with, 13; Iraq compared to, 6; and Japan, 32, 39, 41, 46, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 54, 57, 58, 98, 174, 202; and native characteristics, 18, 19, 21–22, 33, 199; and nostalgia, 209n10; and popular culture, 9, 24, 25, 26, 28, 33, 48, 98, 191, 193; psychological proximity to U.S., 32–33; resistance to U.S. occupation, 20, 51; and Spanish-American War, 5, 32, 48, 49, 57, 59; travel writing on, 17, 19–20, 199; and U.S. imperialism, 3, 4, 6–7, 10, 12, 13, 24, 43, 49, 51, 57, 63, 174, 191, 200; and U.S. militarism, 23, 58, 167, 202, 203; and war fi lms, 25, 32, 34, 35, 38–42, 47–52, 54– 58, 176, 191; and western fi lm genre, 34–35, 38, 45–48; and World War II, 15, 24–25, 26, 32–33, 34, 35, 38–42, 44– 45, 47–52, 54–58, 191. See also Manila, Philippines Philips, Lou Diamond, 193 Pinochet, Augusto, 73 Plana, Tony, 81 Platt Amendment, 5, 63 Polynesian Cultural Center (PCC), 127, 128, 129–130 popular culture: and Cuba, 9, 26, 28, 60–67, 69, 71, 76–77, 91, 191, 193; and Cuban Revolution, 23, 63–64, 199;

Fojas-final.indb 233

• 233 •

and Guam, 9, 25, 28, 98, 168, 172, 180, 188–189, 191; and Hawaiʻi, 9, 26–27, 28, 94, 95, 98, 102, 103, 108, 109, 115, 131, 191, 192; imperial sensibility projected by, 4, 8, 9, 12, 13, 28, 191–192, 194, 196–200, 204; and insular holdings, 6, 15; and Philippines, 9, 24, 25, 26, 28, 33, 48, 98, 191, 193; and political status, 9, 10, 18–19; and Puerto Rico, 9, 27, 28, 133, 134, 135, 137, 142, 149–150, 156, 191, 192, 193; texts and ephemera of, 4, 8–9; and travel writing, 17, 18–19; and U.S. imperialism, 3–4, 7–8, 24, 29–30, 45 Porter, Cole, 67 Presley, Elvis: and African American musical forms, 116; and beachboy subculture, 112–113, 115, 118, 121, 140; Hawaiian music of, 116, 128; Hawaiʻi fi lms of, 27, 92, 102, 107, 110–113, 111, 114, 114, 115–116, 124–125, 125, 129, 130, 131, 163, 193; and integration of conflicting sides, 110–112, 115, 116, 118, 119, 130; and tourism, 110–112, 115, 122, 124, 130, 136, 188; and U.S. imperialism, 191; and youth subculture, 95, 111–112, 118–119, 132 Princess Kaiulani (2010), 27, 93–94 Prinze, Freddie, 146, 150, 163, 164 Production Code Administration (PCA), 36, 123, 178 promotional brochures, and U.S. imperialism, 9 public opinion: on Cuba, 62–63; and narratives of U.S. imperialism, 15–16; and U.S. foreign policy, 16, 190 Puerto Rican Day parade, 155–156, 163 Puerto Rico: and American Dream, 28, 133, 163, 164–166; Americanization of, 137; and assimilation narratives, 134, 135, 136, 148; and bootstrap model of development, 28, 133, 134, 136–137, 156, 157, 159, 160, 163, 165;

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 234 •

Islands of Empire

Puerto Rico (continued) and bootstrap model of ethnicity, 136; and capitalism, 135, 194; Cuba linked with, 13, 144, 194; documentaries on, 155; and foreign domestics, 33; Hawaiʻi compared to, 10, 15, 102, 136, 192; industrialization program in, 136; as location for films based in Cuba, 193, 209n6; and nationalists, 133–135, 156, 202; and native characteristics, 18, 21–22, 23, 133, 199; as nonstate state, 21, 23, 27, 28, 133, 135, 167; and popular culture, 9, 27, 28, 133, 134, 135, 137, 142, 149–150, 156, 191, 192, 193; and Spanish-American War, 5; and statehood, 201–202, 214n13; and teen delinquency, 132–133; and tourism, 6, 26, 92, 94–95, 102, 142, 193, 194; travel writing on, 17, 21, 23, 199, 200; and urban-migrant narratives, 10, 27–28, 132, 133, 135, 137, 138, 140, 141–142, 145–146, 149–150, 151, 155, 156, 157–159, 162, 163, 164, 165; and U.S. imperialism, 3, 4, 7, 10, 12, 13, 19, 24, 63, 94, 133, 134, 135, 140, 145, 155, 161, 165–166, 169, 191, 192, 193, 201; and U.S. militarism, 155, 193, 202; and U.S. national identity, 133 Pyun, Albert, 187 Quezon, Manuel, 37 Quinn, Anthony, 52 racial politics: and citizenship rights, 19–20, 21; and Cuba, 65, 88; and gender, 113; and Guam, 173, 177–178; and Hawaiʻi, 95, 103, 104, 108, 112–115, 122–123, 125–126, 127, 131, 141–142; and Philippines, 19–20, 33, 37, 43, 48, 193; and popular culture, 76; and Puerto Rico, 132, 136, 141–142, 143, 145, 146, 148, 151–154, 157; and U.S. imperialism, 191–192

Fojas-final.indb 234

Radio Corregidor, 174 Ramírez Berg, Charles, 152–153 Range Busters series (1940–1943), 45– 47 Rascals in Paradise (Michener and Day), 104 Rasuk, Victor, 161 Ray, Gene Anthony, 148 The Real Glory (1939), 37 Rebel Without a Cause (1955), 138 Reciprocity Treaty of 1875, 96 Redford, Robert, 79 reggaeton, 161–162, 164 Remember Pearl Harbor (1942), 32 Remy, Ronald, 174 Return to Paradise (1953), 104, 105 Return to Paradise (Michener), 104 Ride the Wild Surf (1964), 95 Riot in Juvenile Prison (1959), 138 Rock, Rock, Rock (1956), 138 Rodgers and Hammerstein, 104 Rodriguez, Michelle, 154, 157, 157 Rogers, Robert, 178, 180, 184, 186 Roman Empire, United States compared to, 1 Romeo and Juliet (Shakespeare), 138 Romero, Cesar, 68 Roosevelt, Franklin, 36–37, 58 Root, Maria P. P., 126 Rosaldo, Renato, 65, 209n10 Roseanne (1988–1997), 60 Rosenberg, Emily, 14, 32, 97 Ross, Andrew, 129 Rota, 32 The Rum Diary (2011), 194, 196, 198, 201 The Rum Diary (Thompson), 193–194, 196 Rutsky, R. L., 121 Sablan, Tawney, 186 Sagal, Peter, 87 Said, Edward, 14 Saipan, 32, 174

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Index Salomon, Henry, 56, 57, 208n46 Samoa, and U.S. imperialism, 5 Sanchez, Pedro C., 179–180, 213n17 Sandinistas, 73 Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), 35 San Francisco, California, earthquake of 1906, 43 San Juan, E., Jr., 7 Santa Ana, Antonio López de, 45, 97 Santiago, Ray, 157 Sarandon, Chris, 76 Sarkesian, Sam, 80 Saturday Night Live (1975–), 151 Sayles, John, 4, 7 Sayonara (1957), 104 Sayonara (Michener), 104 Scarface (1983), 26, 90, 92, 165 Schatz, Thomas, 35 Schmitt, Robert C., 108 Schoultz, Lars, 66 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 45 See It Now (1951–1958), 140 September 11, 2001. See 9/11 terrorist attacks Shakespeare, William, 138 Sheehy, Alice E., 208n46 Shigeta, James, 125 A Show of Force (1990), 193 Shurlock, Geoff rey, 123–124 Silva, Noenoe K., 23 Singer, Robert, 158, 159 Single Integrated Operational Plan, 171 Sioux City (1994), 193 Skwiot, Christine, 6 Smith, Adam, 80 Smith, Will, 90 Soul Train (1971–2006), 151 South Pacific (musical and fi lm), 104, 108 Soviet Union, 171 So You Think You Can Dance (2005–), 149 Spain: alleged cruelty toward colonies,

Fojas-final.indb 235

• 235 •

10, 18, 171; and Guam, 167, 168, 173, 180, 185–186; and Havana, 66; islands ceded to U.S., 4, 5; U.S. purchase of Florida from, 2 Spanish-American War (1898): and Cuba, 63; and foreign domestics, 33– 34; and Guam, 5, 168; and Hawaiʻi, 97; and Maine, 97; and narratives of imperial status, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19; and newsreels, 3, 17, 24, 43; and Philippines, 5, 32, 48, 49, 57, 59; rhetoric of, 14; and U.S. imperialism, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 14–15; and World War II, 57 Stand and Deliver (1988), 193 Stanton, Max E., 129 Steel, Ronald, 10–11 Stephens, Edwin W., 34 stereoscopes, and scenes from colonies, 16, 17 Stevens, John, 94 Stoler, Ann Laura, 11 Stone, Oliver, 190 Straight Out of Brooklyn (1991), 158 Strange, Susan, 81 Stroven, Carl, 104, 106 subalterns, homogenization of, 14 surf fi lms, 121 Taft, William Howard, 32, 34 Tales of the South Pacific (Michener), 104 Tamblyn, Russ, 143 Tarantino, Quentin, 87 Taxi Driver (1976), 73 Teaiwa, Teresia, 15 Teenage Rebel (1956), 138 teen beach fi lms, 121 Tejanos, and foreign-domestic question, 33 television: and U.S. imperialism, 9. See also specific TV shows Texas to Bataan (1942), 25, 33, 35, 45– 47, 52

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 236 •

Islands of Empire

They Were Expendable (1945): and American way of life, 33; and control of Philippines, 38–39; guidelines for narrative of, 25, 40; and heroism, 39– 41, 45; and Pearl Harbor attack, 176; racial typology of, 48; scenes from, 41, 42; and U.S. imperialism, 39; and western fi lm genre, 35, 38 They Were Expendable (White), 39 Thompson, Hunter S., 193–194 Thompson, Lanny, 14–15 Thornton, Willie Mae, 116 Tinian, 32 Tjioe, Roy, 93 Too Late the Hero (1970), 25, 45 Too Many Girls (1940), 62 tourism: and Cuba, 5, 6, 15, 19, 63, 64, 65, 66–67, 67, 69, 71, 76, 78, 82, 87, 88, 91, 94, 109, 115, 193, 201, 209n14; and Cuban Revolution, 102, 109, 209n14; and Guam, 25, 94, 167, 168, 169, 172, 180, 181–183, 183, 184, 186, 187–188, 189; and Havana, 15, 26, 64, 65, 66, 67, 69, 71, 76, 84, 88, 92, 94, 98, 102; and Hawaiʻi, 6, 9, 10, 15, 25, 26–27, 92, 94, 95, 96, 98–100, 99, 100, 101, 102, 104, 106, 107, 108–110, 111, 111, 112–116, 117, 118, 124, 128–131, 142, 167, 169, 172, 182, 188, 189, 191, 202–203; and Puerto Rico, 6, 26, 92, 94–95, 102, 142, 193, 194; and tourist gaze, 108–109; and U.S. imperialism, 4, 6, 17, 109; and U.S. insular empire, 6, 15 Trask, Haunani Kay, 110 travel writing: and control over locations, 14, 18; on Cuba, 17, 18, 19, 23, 199; on Guam, 17, 168, 179–181, 199, 200; on Hawaiʻi, 17, 18, 21–23, 103– 104, 199; ideology of, 18; on Philippines, 17, 19–20, 199; on Puerto Rico, 17, 21, 23, 199, 200; and U.S. imperialism, 3, 8–9, 10, 13–14, 16–18, 199 Trías Monge, José, 135

Fojas-final.indb 236

tropical landscapes, 4, 18, 66 Truman, Harry S., 134 Trust Territories of the Pacific Islands, 182 Turnbull, Phyllis, 203 Turturro, John, 153 Tweed, George, 170–171, 174–179, 186, 213n15 The Twenty-Four Hour Woman (1999), 153 Udall, Stewart L., 181 UMAPS (Unidades Militares de Ayuda de Producción; Military Units to Aid Production), 70–71 Under Fire (1990), 80 Under the American Sun (2008), 25, 173 United Press, 15 U.S. Department of Interior, 181, 182, 186 U.S. Department of State, 59, 94 U.S. foreign policy, 8, 16, 71, 190 U.S. imperialism: as accidental, 10–13, 98; and anticolonialism, 17–18, 20, 51, 171, 200–201; as benevolent, 3, 14, 29, 48, 196; boundaries of U.S., 4–5, 6, 9, 11, 33, 182, 200; and Cuba, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, 12, 13, 19, 24, 62, 63, 94, 137, 191, 193, 200; and definition of empire, 10, 11– 12; and democracy, 3, 12, 13, 56, 88; European imperialism compared to, 15; and global law enforcement, 1–3, 6, 29, 98; and global superiority, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 18, 45, 56, 58; and grief, 65; and Guam, 3, 4, 7, 10, 12, 13, 24, 63, 167–169, 180–181, 183, 184, 189, 191, 200; and Hawaiʻi, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 12, 13, 24, 57, 94, 95, 96, 117, 126, 191, 192, 196–197, 200; imagined frontier of, 4–8, 13; imperial sensibility in popular culture, 4, 8, 9, 12, 13, 28, 191–192, 194, 196–200, 204; and influence, 24; insular empire, 5–7, 9, 15, 17, 18, 23–

12/6/13 1:55 PM

Index 24, 96–97, 98, 102, 172, 189, 191, 199– 204; and myth of reluctant superpower, 11; narratives of, 8–10, 13, 14, 57; and nostalgia, 65; origin stories of, 13–17; and paternalism, 200; and Philippines, 3, 4, 6–7, 10, 12, 13, 24, 43, 49, 51, 57, 63, 174, 191, 200; popular confrontation with, 190; and Puerto Rico, 3, 4, 7, 10, 12, 13, 19, 24, 63, 94, 133, 134, 135, 140, 145, 155, 161, 165–166, 169, 191, 192, 193, 201; and Spanish-American War, 3–4, 5, 6, 7, 10, 14–15; and U.S. exceptionalism, 121, 130, 133, 206n22 U.S. militarism: and demilitarization movement, 200–201; and doctrine of readiness, 170; and fi lm, 39, 45; and Guam, 23, 25–26, 167, 168– 172, 173, 175, 177, 180, 181, 182, 183, 186, 189, 202, 203; and Hawaiʻi, 15, 22, 23, 25, 27, 95–98, 110, 117, 155, 167, 169, 172, 175, 189, 201, 202–203; and insular holdings, 6, 23, 28, 200; nuclear strategy, 171–172; and Philippines, 23, 58, 167, 202, 203; planetary matrix of, 11; and Puerto Rico, 155, 193, 202; and Spanish-American War, 3, 4 U.S. Pacific Command (PACOM), 95, 202 U.S. Supreme Court, 4, 15, 126 University of Hawaiʻi, 103–104 Untamed Youth (1957), 138 Urry, John, 108, 109 USS Arizona Memorial, 112 Valdivia, Angharad N., 152, 153 Vance, Vivian, 63 Van Cleve, Ruth G., 181 van den Bruck, Arthur Moeller, 80 Velasco Shaw, Angel, 7 Velázquez, Diego, 19 Victory at Sea (1952–1953), 25, 32–33, 54, 56–58

Fojas-final.indb 237

• 237 •

Vieques, 155, 200, 201 Vietnam War, 6, 7, 14, 45, 172 Virgin Islands, 182 The Voice (2011–), 149 Waikīkī, 98, 100, 112, 120 Waikiki Wedding (1937), 112 Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me! (radio show, 1998–), 87 Wake Island, 181 Walker, Isaiah Helekunihi, 112 Walley, Deborah (Gidget), 119, 120 Wall Street (1987), 190 Wall Street (2010), 190 war: and U.S. imperialism, 14. See also specific wars war fi lms: and capitalism, 35; and heroism, 39–40; and newsreels, 42; and Pearl Harbor, 9, 32, 36, 38, 40, 57; and Philippines, 25, 32, 34, 35, 38–42, 47–52, 54–58, 176, 191; and U.S. imperialism, 203–204; and western fi lm genre, 35, 58; and World War II, 9, 32, 34, 35, 36–45, 49, 54–58, 176, 191 war on terror, 15, 24, 59, 203 Washington, D.C., 34 Wayne, John: and war fi lms, 38, 40–41, 41, 44, 44, 45, 49, 49, 50, 52, 176, 191; and western fi lm genre, 35, 45 Webb, Terry, 129 Weekend in Havana (1941), 67, 68 western fi lm genre: and heroism, 25; patriotism of, 39; and Philippines, 34– 35, 38, 45–48; and war fi lms, 35, 58 Weston, Jack, 73, 74 West Side Story (1961): and American Dream, 164; and bootstrap model of development, 137; and ethnicity in casting, 140–143, 193; and interracial relations, 132, 140, 141–144, 145; as musical, 146; and popular culture, 134; and Puerto Rican identity formation, 160–161; scenes from, 139,

12/6/13 1:55 PM

• 238 •

Islands of Empire

West Side Story (1961) (continued) 141, 143, 144; setting of, 156; and teen delinquency, 132–133, 134, 135, 138, 140; and urban-migrant narratives, 27, 132, 135, 137, 138, 145 West Side Story (musical), 137–138, 145 We Were Strangers (1949), 67 Wheeler, Joseph, 17 When It’s Cocktail Time in Cuba (Woon), 67 White, W. L., 39 Wilcox, George, 196 Williams, William Appleman, 13, 29 Willis, Rex, 182 Willis, Sharon, 154 Winant, Howard, 136 Wood, Houston, 122 Wood, Natalie, 141, 142 Woon, Basil, 67 The World at War (1973–1974), 25, 33 World War I, 23–24, 97 World War II: and democratic values, 38, 47, 48–51, 54, 56, 58; documentaries on, 56–58; and Guam, 25, 26, 32,

Fojas-final.indb 238

41–42, 167, 170, 177, 179, 191; and isolationists, 36, 46, 97; and newsreels, 25, 38, 43–44, 54; and 9/11 terrorist attacks, 14; and Philippines, 15, 24–25, 26, 32–33, 34, 35, 38–42, 44–45, 47–52, 54–58, 191; and popular culture, 9; propaganda of, 24, 36–37, 38, 39, 43, 50–51, 54–56, 58; rhetoric of, 14; and Spanish-American War, 57; and U.S. as global power, 12; and U.S. imperialism, 176, 191; and war fi lms, 9, 34, 35, 36–45, 49, 54–58, 176, 191 The X-Factor, 149 Yokoi, Soichi, 213n15 ¡Yo Soy Boricua, Pa’Que Tu Lo Sepas! (I’m Boricua, Just So You Know) (2006), 155, 156 You Are There (CBS radio and TV series), 25, 33 Zero Dark Thirty (2012), 203

12/6/13 1:55 PM