Immigration Blues

When she returns, Monica takes some of the grocery bags and heads for the kitchen. It is clear that she and Alipio have agreed to marry. Zafra says she is her elder sister, but Alipio thinks she looks younger. Monica is thin and very shy.

Immigration Blues Summary & Study Guide Description

She has never been married. In the Philippines, she works as a teacher. She is in the United States on a tourist visa and is desperate to find a way of permanently staying in the country. She and her sister therefore approach Alipio with the intention of convincing Alipio to marry Monica. Since he is an American citizen, marriage to him will entitle her to permanent resident status in the United States. At first when she meets Alipio she is too shy to speak, but she later finds her tongue and makes sure he knows how admiring and how helpful she will be to him.

Alipio Palma is an old Filipino man who has lived most of his life in California. Since the death of his wife Seniang, he has been lonely. He is also still suffering from the ill-effects of a car accident that happened shortly after his wife died. He was bedridden for a long time as a result, and now can walk only with some difficulty.

Few of his friends are left to visit him, and sometimes he does not have enough to do to keep him busy. He watches television and sits out on the porch and observes the passersby. He reminisces about the friends of his youth and wonders where they all are now. The marriage he had to Seniang was a happy one, even though it was undertaken only so that Seniang could stay in the country.

He has no real desire to marry again, but when he realizes what Monica and her sister have in mind, he seems ready to accede to it. Seniang is the deceased wife of Alipio. They had a happy marriage, and he recalls her with fondness. He calls her his good luck. When they first met, it was she who approached him, because she already had marriage in mind.

She needed to marry an American citizen to avoid deportation. Antonieta Zafra is the Filipino wife of Carlito and sister of Monica. She and Monica visit Alipio, whom they have never met, in order to arrange for Monica to marry him. The idea is Mrs. Zafra's, and it is she who eggs on Monica. Zafra is a big woman who does most of the talking.

Immigration Blues

Before she met Carlito, she was a nun at a convent in California. But about six years before the story takes place, she left the convent. The religious lifestyle no longer suited her. But this meant that she was no longer entitled to remain in the United States. Threatened with deportation, she persuaded Carlito to marry her in the nick of time. Carlito is the husband of Mrs. He does not appear directly in the story, but he is described by his wife and is also recalled by Alipio, who is his old friend. Alipio and Carlito came to America at the same time as young men.

Carlito never had much interest in women, being more interested in cultivating his fighting cocks. Zafra approached him, wanting marriage to secure her own status in the United States, Carlito agreed to the marriage, which turned out to be a reasonably happy one. They are now retired and live in Fresno, California, raising chickens and hogs. Even though he has lived in the United States since he was a young man and is now a U.

He gives the impression that he is not fully at home in America, in a culture so different from the one in which he grew up. His memories of the Philippines remain powerful. In the second sentence of the story, when he first sees his two female visitors, they remind him of the country girls in the Philippines "who went around peddling rice cakes. He used to tell his wife, "across that ocean is the Philippines, we're not far from home. When he invites the women to take merienda "picnic, afternoon tea" , he says, "And I don't mean snacks like the Americans.

There is a tone of wistful regret in Alipio's voice as he says, "We all gonna be buried here. As an old man who lives alone following the recent death of his wife, Alipio is lonely. He often thinks of his wife, and few friends come to visit him. On the day the two women visit, he has not talked to anyone all week, nor has his telephone rung. He spends a lot of his time listening to the radio or watching television. He admits his house is a mess, since he has no reason to keep it tidy.

Often he has nothing to do. Sometimes he just sits on the porch for hours, nodding to passersby. He looks back fondly on the days of his youth and wonders where all his friends from the past are. In his reflections there is a poignant sense of the passing of time. Alipio also has his share of the infirmities of age. He is hard of hearing; he cannot walk well. This portrayal of Alipio's loneliness makes him a sympathetic figure to the reader. The story highlights the precariousness of the temporary immigrant especially the female immigrant to America, who must keep on the "right" side of immigration authorities.

Although the story often hints at the difficulty of life in America as a Filipino immigrant, it also emphasizes the unwillingness of the immigrants to return home. Zafra explains the plight of many Filipinos in a situation similar to the one that she faced and Monica now faces. They are forced to hide like criminals from the immigration agents. Those who are caught and forced to return to the Philippines have to cope with the "stigma of failure in a foreign land.

So whatever the difficulty of living in a land and culture not their own, the Filipino immigrants still feel this feat is preferable to returning home. Although the story is a study in loneliness and a kind of cultural alienation, it ends on a note of hope. Alipio will marry Monica. She will look after him and see to his needs. He did nothing to bring this situation about; it just happened to him.

Alipio appears to be a religious man, and several times he suggests that life is in the hands of God "God dictates". God has been merciful to him in sending him a young wife. This suggests that even in unpromising circumstances, life may always take a turn for the better. The diction is simple, and there is little use of figurative language.

Introduction & Overview of Immigration Blues

The story unfolds in one scene only, in the same place, over the course of only a few hours. Embedded within a simple frame are many stories, including that of Mrs. Zafra and her marriage of convenience to escape deportation, as well as the reminiscences of Alipio about his youthful adventures with his friend Carlito and his obviously happy marriage to his wife.

It is largely through this technique of using memories related by the characters, rather than through anything Alipio does or says in the present, that the story creates empathy in the reader for its main character. Alipio's conversation is ordinary, but his memories have power to charm—memories of how he and Carlito were young gallants who wowed the girls with their cooking or how Seniang used to wear his jacket and his slippers when he was at work because "you keep me warm all day.

The first Filipino literature published in English in the United States was in the early s, a decade before Santos's arrival in the country. Tales of the Philippines and Others. Villa lived in the United States, and his short stories, which were highly praised by critics, were included in Best American Short Stories of and Best American Short Stories of Despite the success of his fiction, however, during the s Villa decided to write only lyric poetry.

Topics for Further Study

His Selected Poems and New was published in Although scholars acknowledge the merits of his pioneering work, Villa is little read today. In the s, poet and short-story writer Carlos Bulosan — came to the forefront of Filipino writers. His stories appeared mainly in magazines such as the New Yorker. His book of satirical, humorous poems, The Laughter of My Father, was published in by Harcourt, Brace and was warmly received by readers. It was followed by the autobiographical America Is in the Heart , which remains an influential work today. Also in the s, Filipino immigrant N. Gonzalez — began publishing short stories, some of which appear in book form in Children of the Ash-Covered Loam and Selected Stories Like Santos, Gonzalez portrays the lives of Filipinos in the United States, although Gonzalez writes mainly of graduate students and other young or middle-aged people who visit but do not remain in the United States.

In the late s, Linda Ty-Casper — began publishing. Her novel The Peninsulars is about the influence of Spanish colonization on the Philippines in the mid-eighteenth century. Ty-Casper has since published a total of ten novels and three short-story collections. During the s and s, Santos wrote some of his best work, but it was published mainly in the Philippines. Much Filipino work published in the United States deals with the problem of Filipino identity.

Filipinos are a people with a colonial past, having been ruled by Spain for years, followed by half a century of American rule. Filipinos who immigrated to the United States had to face issues of exile, isolation, and racism. They had to forge an identity for themselves that could bridge the gap between their cultural and racial heritage as Filipinos and their new status as Filipino Americans , living in a culture very different from their own. The first wave of Filipino immigration to the United States occurred between and , when Filipinos were recruited to California as agricultural workers.

Alipio and his friend Carlito in "Immigration Blues" probably arrived in California during this period, although no details are given of their occupations. Filipinos also immigrated to Hawaii, where they worked on sugarcane plantations, and in the s many immigrated to the Pacific Northwest. Although "Immigration Blues" does not mention it, the fact that Alipio received his U.

Army, although it is possible he would have been too old to serve. A new wave of Filipino immigration to the United States began after the passage of the Immigration Act of , which loosened restrictions on immigration from Asia. Between and , , Filipinos entered the country in "Immigration Blues," this is the period during which both Mrs. Zafra and Monica secure their immigration status by marrying American citizens.

The rate of immigration increased in part because of political and economic uncertainty in the Philippines. This wave of immigration is sometimes called the "brain drain," because it consisted mainly of professionals, including doctors and lawyers.

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Filipino Americans have at all periods faced discrimination because of their national origins. Many have been confined to low-status, low-in-come jobs. This is his experience:. To a new citizen, work meant many places and many ways: A timeless drifting; once he tended a rose garden and took care of a hundred-year-old veteran of a border war.

As a menial in a hospital in Cook County, all day he handled filth and gore. In the early days of Filipino immigration to California, Filipinos were sometimes banned from hotels, restaurants, and swimming pools. In antimiscegenation laws were passed in California that banned Filipinos from marrying white women. This kind of prejudice is apparent in some of Santos's stories. In " Ash Wednesday ," for example published in You Lovely People , a Boston family turns their daughter Muriel out of the house when she decides to marry a Filipino.

Prior to World War II and as late as the s, the Pilipino immigrant was unwanted wherever he went, in the big and the small cities of the United States. As Pilipinos came in increasing numbers, they caused mounting resentment, particularly on the Pacific Coast where riots against them flared, which gave rise to violence and accusations. In it was listed as an honorable mention in Best American Short Stories. Anthony Tan, writing in Silliman Journal, calls the stories in Scent of Apples "emotionally poignant" and says "Immigration Blues" is "a story of understated pathos and the very human and selfish motive of marriage for convenience.

Tan argues that the stories fall short of greatness because the characters are left groping in states of isolation, denied a moment of illumination that would enable them to make sense of their lives. Bernad, writing in Bamboo and the Greenwood Tree: Essays on Filipino Literature in English,. The language is simple but weighted with emotion. It is pitched in low key, but the emotion is implicit in the tone, atmosphere, narrative tempo, length or brevity of sentence, the rhythm that sometimes approaches musicality, and the sparing but carefully chosen imagery.

Aubrey holds a Ph. In this essay, Aubrey discusses "Immigration Blues" as a study in old age and assesses the degree to which the story embodies or rejects the negative stereotypes of the old that are common in American culture. Santos is known in the United States as a writer who chronicled the difficult lives of Filipino immigrants, especially those "old timers" as they became known who came to the country from the s through the s. The old timers remained in the United States for the rest of their lives, but they never lost their sense of exile from the Philippines, and they were often lonely and isolated.

The protagonist Alipio is an old timer who lives alone in California and still thinks often of his homeland. But more than being a study of a Filipino immigrant from a certain era, "Immigration Blues," as well as other stories by Santos, are studies in old age. In American culture, the elderly do not generally occupy positions of honor and respect. In a society that values youth, success, and material productivity, the old are relegated to a position on the sidelines of life. What they contribute to society is not so easily measured as it is for those in the prime of life.

In addition, popular culture, in everything from television to jokes the cognitive lapses of the elderly often being the subject of humor , creates negative stereotypes of old people. Numerous studies of attitudes to the elderly on the part of the young as well as the middle-aged suggest that old age is viewed as a time of helplessness, loneliness, dependence, senility, and passivity.

Old people spend most of their time sitting around and doing nothing—or so many people appear to believe.

Not all the studies suggest such a negative view, and over the last twenty years, as people live longer, more healthy, and more productive lives, this view of the old could well be slowly changing. But it remains deeply ingrained. The term "ageism" was coined to describe such biased attitudes to the old.

With that background in mind, how does Santos depict his old characters? Does he reflect the negative stereotype or does he undermine it? The first thing to note is that Alipio is a character drawn realistically from life. When at the age of eighty-two Santos wrote his memoir Memory's Fictions: A Personal History , he confessed that in his old age he had come in some respects to resemble Alipio.

Like his character he spent much of his time alone, and also like Alipio he was given to reminiscing, wondering whether his friends all over the world were well and knew he was still alive. In his article "Pilipino Old Timers: Fact and Fiction," he again quotes a passage given to Alipio in "Immigration Blues" and uses it to point out that there is no difference between the "old timer" in real life and his fictional representation. So what is the nature of that real life fictional representation?

An examination of Alipio seems in some ways to suggest a negative picture of old age, one that confirms the kind of stereotypes that researchers in aging and advocates for the elderly deplore. He even prepares lunch early because he has nothing else to do. He spends a lot of his time sitting on his porch watching construction work and nodding to strangers as they pass.

He has few visitors, and he hardly speaks to anyone as there is no one to whom he wants to speak. Gerontologists those who study the aging process sometimes call this kind of withdrawal "retreatism" or "disengagement. There is a deep sadness about Alipio. He still broods over his wife's death, and since he has no children, he is truly alone in the world.

When it transpires that often he whiles away the time by watching television or listening to the radio until he falls asleep, the impression given is of a man who has given up on life. This is a sign of what gerontologists call "alienation.

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Alienation is an extreme form of maladaptation, characterized by the feeling that "there is just no point in living," by feelings of regret over the past, by the idea that "things just keep getting worse and worse," and by abandonment of all future plans. Those at risk for developing an attitude of alienation include those who, like Alipio, have recently lost a spouse. Being a husband or a wife is a major role in life, like that of having a productive occupation, which keeps people engaged in the world and sustains their morale, their sense of usefulness.

What it is like to be old and have neither of these things is also apparent from another of Santos's stories, "The Day the Dancers Came," which appears in Scent of Apples. The main character is a Filipino called Fil. He is fifty years old, which may not seem very old, but it is his age that is emphasized.

He looks old, and he feels old. Old age has prematurely come upon him. This is how he experiences it:. A weariness, a mist covering all things. You don't have to look at your face in the mirror to know that you are old, suddenly old, grown useless for a lot of things and too late for all the dreams you had wrapped up well against a day of need. Fil lives in a Chicago apartment with another old timer named Tony, who is dying of a wasting disease. Fil is excited because a troupe of dancers from the Philippines is coming to Chicago.

He plans to introduce himself to them, give them a tour of Chicago, and then invite them back to his apartment for a Filipino meal. But what happens when he tries to put his plan into action is nothing like what he imagined. When he arrives at the hotel where the dancers are to perform, they and their entourage are already milling around in the lobby.

Fil feels unwel-come in the midst of all these beautiful young people. He is conscious of how old his face looks, and his "horny hands. The little speech he had rehearsed in his apartment now strikes him as foolish; they would only laugh at him. He eventually plucks up the courage to invite two of the young male dancers to his apartment, but they just walk away with hardly a word. Fil tries again, and is ignored again. He might as well be invisible. Fil's story is a sad one, made even sadder by the fact that his friend Tony is dying.

Soon Fil will be entirely alone. Can the old timers be redeemed? Is there anything about them that offers hope, or is old age everything the cultural negative stereotypes present it to be? The answer is yes, there is redemption, of a kind. Let us return to Alipio.

Alipio is a religious man. His explanation for the loss of his wife is that God took her. And in his eyes it was a matter of God's will regarding whether he would walk again after his car accident. Monica notices and comments on his strong belief in God. Toward the end of the story, Alipio twice uses the phrase, "God dictates. He is aware that life flows on, controlled by some force which he chooses to call God that is beyond the petty strivings of the individual.

Individuals may have their plans and their designs, but there is a larger pattern at work too, the working of the divine in the world. Alipio is aware of this. One might call it wisdom. When many other things have departed forever, wisdom is there for the old. In this respect, despite his many failings, Alipio offers a glimpse of the archetype of the wise old man, the man who has lived long and knows the way things are. And in this lies his salvation. Look at how he reacts when Monica suddenly comes into his life. His response could not have been predicted from what has been shown of him up to this point.

He had no thought of taking another wife, but when Monica arrives and her intentions become known, he goes along with what God sends. He has won a new lease on life. This story's ending shows that Alipio defies the stereotypical notion that the old are rigid and stuck in their ways. The message is clear: Life is eternally unpredictable, and as Alipio shows, the old can be as swift as the young to adapt to new circumstances and accept what comes to them.

Alipio deserves his new young wife. She may not be another Sensiang, his first wife, but one senses that he will no longer be falling asleep watching television, or aimlessly sitting around the house doing nothing. In "Immigration Blues," then, Santos presents both sides of the coin, negative and positive images of old age. He shows that life is many-sided and cannot be put in a box with only one label.

In the following essay, Tan discusses the stories in Santos's Scent of Apples and their common theme of expatriation and its effects. A Collection of Stories Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, , pages is Bienvenido N. Santos's first book to be published in the United States, but fifteen of the sixteen stories in this collection have appeared before in two books published in the Philippines: Thus, all the stories in this new collection are familiar to Filipino readers except the first one, "Immigration Blues," whose significance in the book, apart from its own separate virtue as a story of understated pathos and the very human and selfish motive of marriage for convenience, is that it brings to the present decade the continuing story of Filipinos in America.

The common themes of these stories about Filipinos in America are universal themes of exile, loneliness, and isolation. Into these themes Santos has folded the special flavor of Filipino nostalgia for home, which, for the exiles, meant also the past. When Santos achieves a perfect blending of the universal themes and the indigenous sensibility, the results are such emotionally poignant works as the title story and the prize-winning "The Day the Dancers Came," two stories in which nostalgia accentuates the sense of exile and isolation.

For one reason or another Santos's Filipino expatriates stay on in America even when their dream of success in the land of plenty has finally vanished. Ambo, the narrator in many stories, has attempted to return, only to be disappointed at home, not so much by the yearly typhoon that plagues his home in the Bicol region as by the betrayal of a friend whom he used to help in Washington, D.

So he seeks another passage, perhaps a final one, back to America. Celestino Fabia can never return to his native shore in the Visayas because, having stayed twenty years on a remote farm in Michigan, no one will remember him. His only link with the Philippines is a faded picture of a Filipina he does not even know. Filemon Acayan can only make a symbolic return by welcoming and attempting to entertain the Bayanihan Dancers in Chicago.

When they turn down his offer to drive them around the city and to eat at his apartment, he makes what seems a desperate effort at preserving the last moorings with his country: However, when he plays the tape recorder at his apartment for the benefit of his dying friend, another Filipino exile, Filemon presses the wrong button, and in one clumsy moment erases what he has tried so hard to preserve—his last link with his people and country—thus making his isolation more devastating and complete. Many more like him never return, even symbolically, and many do not even dream of returning.

Lost and confused in strange cities among strange people, they drift aimlessly, and to forget a weariness which is more than physical they play poker or billiards, and drink and seek momentary solace in the faithless arms of women. They have become spiritual drifters, suffering as much ruin as the warravaged Philippines. In a sense, they are the people to whom the words of Father Ocampo in "For These Ruins" accurately apply: But there are ruins other than the eyes can see.

It is the mark of Santos's genius as a fictionist to have portrayed these ruins in story after story, to have given a spiritual and cultural counterpart to the physical ruins suffered by the Philippines during the last war. To be sure, the stories of Santos in this collection are not about the Filipinos in the Philippines who, having suffered the physical effects of war, have also suffered its spiritual effects. The scarred psyche caused by the war remains for other Filipino writers to record, and many have attempted to do so.

Having spent the war years in America, Santos could only write about those who have been, literally, far from battlefronts. Yet, it is a further measure of his genius that his stories are no less memorable and true, his characters no less lonely, for that fact. If the outbreak of the war gave Santos the personal opportunity to travel and lecture extensively in America and enabled him to meet many Filipino expatriates, the consequent occupation of the Philippines by the enemy gave him the artistic fulcrum to elevate reality into art. It fired his imagination so that he began to see the war as one more dimension in the isolation of the expatriates.

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It became for him as a writer, if not as a man, the ultimate symbol of the lostness of his countrymen in America. I say this notwithstanding the fact that in the present book only three stories have something to do with the war, and even here the war is a mere backdrop: In exploring the many dimensions of the isolation of the expatriates, Santos, however, has not stopped with the war.

War, after all, is a historically contained event, and although a people may suffer its consequences long after it is over, the isolation it imposes on its victims comes from the outside and from foreign enemies. Besides, the Filipinos about whom Santos has written were not direct victims of the war. If they suffered from isolation from their country as a result of the war, their isolation is somehow lessened by their own helplessness and by a great deal of historical inevitability.

What is more painful is that isolation for which they were responsible and which to a certain degree they could prevent. In almost all the stories this is the kind of isolation that Santos has tried to explore. There are at least four sources of this isolation. One is excessive nostalgia for the homeland.

Another is betrayal by fellow men, by fellow-Pinoy. The third is the death of a dream of success, ironic in that the dream dies in the land which has caught the imagination of the world, and of Filipinos especially, as the land of promise, the land of opportunity. The characters of Santos, after a brief fling with the ideal, wake up one morning to find that America has turned out to be the land of unfulfilled promises, of lost opportunities. The last source of isolation is the confusion brought about by trying to live in two culturally different worlds.

Two of the best stories in this collection explore the pathos of nostalgia. In "Scent of Apples," Celestino Fabia travels thirty miles from his farm to the city just to listen to a Filipino talk about the Philippines. This certainly is not bad, but his keeping a picture of a Filipina when in fact he is married to an American is something else. It is not fair to his wife, to say the least. Find showtimes, watch trailers, browse photos, track your Watchlist and rate your favorite movies and TV shows on your phone or tablet!

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