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VILLA'S SPECTERS: TRANSCOLONIAL AND PATERNAL HAUNTOLOGIES IN

FOOTNOTE TO YOUTH: TALES OF THE PHILIPPINES AND OTHERS

Article  in  Philippine Social Sciences and Humanities Review · January 2014

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36 CASTILLO

VILLA’S SPECTERS: TRANSCOLONIAL

AND PATERNAL HAUNTOLOGIES
IN FOOTNOTE TO YOUTH:
TALES OF THE PHILIPPINES AND OTHERS
LAURENCE MARVIN S. CASTILLO

Philippine Humanities Review

Volume 16 Number 1, 2014, pp. 36-68
ISSN-0031-7802
©2014 University of the Philippines
 PHILIPPINE HUMANITIES REVIEW 37

VILLA’S SPECTERS: TRANSCOLONIAL

AND PATERNAL HAUNTOLOGIES IN
FOOTNOTE TO YOUTH:
TALES OF THE PHILIPPINES
AND OTHERS

LAURENCE MARVIN S. CASTILLO

University of the Philippines
<[email protected]>

Jose Garcia Villa’s sole short story collection, Footnote

to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others, was released
in 1933 as his pronounced effort to penetrate the
American modernist canon. Villa’s literary move was
principally characterized by his aestheticist self-
fashioning as a “beautiful soul” whose artistic practice
transcended his native roots and biographical
specificities. This essay suggests that, despite this self-
fashioning, the collection ushers in the ghosts of the
historical and personal realities that he sought to
obscure. First, the essay argues that Villa’s intense
devotion to the apolitical and ahistorical tenets of
aestheticism, or the doctrine of art for art’s sake, was in
itself conditioned by his biographical circumstances and
historical location within the American colonial milieu,
particularly by his rebellion against his own anti-
American father and against the paternity of his country.
Second, it elaborates how Villa’s attempt at paternal
surrogacy in the United States fed him to the discursive
38 CASTILLO

operations of ethnocentrism inherent in American

modernism, and how his choice to work within the
mimetic genre of fiction rendered his disavowed ethnic
identity bare and vulnerable to the predations of
modernist racism. Third, employing Derrida’s notion
of hauntology, the essay analyzes the collection as
conjurers of the transcolonial and paternal specters that
haunted Villa’s artistic practice.

Keywords: Jose Garcia Villa, hauntology, colonialism, art

for art’s sake, modernism

In 1933, Charles Scribner’s Sons published Jose Garcia

Villa’s Footnote to Youth: Tales of the Philippines and Others.
The first Filipino-authored collection of short stories to
be released in the United States (US), the book consisted
of twenty-one short stories set in the Philippines and the
US, most of which initially saw print in several American
periodicals. The publication of the collection came three
years after Villa arrived in the United States, with the
intention of leaving behind a relatively successful literary
career in the Philippines and penetrating the American
literary scene. While the collection was rejected by several
publishers and later on greeted with lukewarm critical and
commercial response in the US, its publication was
celebrated back home as an event that beckoned Villa’s entry
into the American modernist canon.

Footnote to Youth also marked Villa’s final foray to

fiction. In his essay “The Making of Jose Garcia Villa’s
Footnote to Youth,” Jonathan Chua while tracing the book’s
publication history analyzes how it was published and
received within a modernist racialized framework set within
the colonial relations between the US and the Philippines.
Weaving through correspondences, documents pertinent to
the publication of the stories, and the stories in the
collection, Chua argued that Villa’s work is positioned in
 PHILIPPINE HUMANITIES REVIEW 39

“an ambivalent situation which both challenges and

reinforces the colonial condition” (2013-2014, 30). In so
doing, he suggested that Villa’s attempt to penetrate the
American literary circle by fashioning himself as a universal
writer and contemporaneously erasing his socio-political
roots was eventually foiled by the collection’s publication.

From this sug gestion, this paper argues that the

collection works to usher in the presence of historical
realities and biographical specificities that Villa endeavored
to obscure. The release of these “ghosts” operates
according to the deconstr uctive notion of hauntolog y
introduced by Jacques Derrida in The Specters of Marx.
Hauntology, or “the logic of haunting” (Derrida 1994, 10),
is a modality in which the absence of the unwritten,
silenced, or dead returns to haunt the ontological structure
that renders the presence of the written, articulated, and
alive.

It is necessary to mention here that the hauntological

workings in Footnote to Youth operated within the context
of transcolonial politics. The term transcolonial suggests
that “the delineated boundaries of influence by colonial
empires were not as fixed as one might believe” (Taylor-
Garcia 2011,13). The specters in the short story collection
are in fact contingent on the conditions of transcoloniality
that afflicted Villa’s milieu, here manifested in the transitions,
overlaps, and confluences of the American and Spanish
colonial powers in the early twentieth century Philippines,
and in the colonialist politics that hounded him and
positioned him as migrant colonial subject upon his
movement to America.

This essay will present the historical and biographical

“conditions of possibility” for Villa’s adherence to a
deliberately apolitical and ahistorical literary practice, the
40 CASTILLO

historical cartography of the discursive operations of

ethnocentrism in modernism during his arrival to America,
and finally an analysis of the collection as conjurer of the
transcolonial and biographical specters that haunt Villa’s
artistic practice—his paternal trauma and his inarticulated
engagement with the confluent symbolic powers of the
Spanish and American colonizers.

The Ghosts of Villa’s Self-Fashioning

Villa’s historical exorcism constituted a self-fashioning

move informed primarily by the idea that the artist and his
practice are divorced from history, a notion integral to the
“art for art’s sake” dictum. He openly dismissed the socio-
political function of art, particularly literature, extolling
above all the work’s aesthetic virtue and its eternal and
universal value. He rejected the integrality of literary practice
to the nationalist cause, announcing that “the nation is merely
adjectival to true art: the noun is art and ever the universal
humanity that it contains” (Villa 2002, 168). When berated
by his colleague Salvador Lopez for “having been unmoved
by the ‘stress of times,’” Villa responded, “I do not mix
my politics and economics with my art…I do not believe
the economic readjustment of society to be the function
of literature” (ibid., 178).

Villa’s aesthetic purism must be understood as a

disposition haunted by his personal engagements with his
socio-political milieu. When Villa was born in 1908, the
Philippines had been relinquished by Spain to the new
imperial master, the US via the Treaty of Paris. With the
country’s recover y from more than three centuries of
Spanish colonialism subsequently replaced by a new
colonizer, the country was positioned within a transcolonial
phase. Villa would have been undoubtedly well-acquainted
 PHILIPPINE HUMANITIES REVIEW 41

with the political climate of the era, as his father, Col. Simeon
Villa, served as physician to Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo, the
president of the First Philippine Republic. As recorded in
his diaries, the older Villa was part of the company that
joined Aguinaldo’s odyssey during the Filipino-American
War to escape from American forces before his eventual
capture in Palanan, Isabela. According to Agustin Espiritu
(2005, 76), Colonel Villa was profoundly anti-American,
resenting the US invasion of the country.

Villa grew up in a time when Filipinos were engaged

in fierce anti-imperial and nationalist resistance against the
American military and civilian forces—Macario Sakay’s
Tagalog Republic, the Moro resistance forces, the Colorum
insurrectos, the Sakdalista, to the then newly-established
Communist Party of the Philippines. As the brutality against
the subversive natives intensified, Manuel Quezon and other
members of the Philippine oligarchy sought to assert
independence through parliamentary and legal ways, before
eventually succumbing to compromises with the Americans
(San Juan 2010, 15-16). The struggle for independence also
found expression in literary productions, as signaled by the
emergence of seditious nationalist works in various
genres—political plays of Aurelio Tolentino, poetry of
Fernando Ma. Guerrero and Cecilio Apostol, novels by
Lope K. Santos and Faustino Aguilar. Subsequently, these
expressions of nationalist resistance were contained by the
invasive Americanization throughout the country, particularly
through public education (Villa 2002, 10).

Public education system exposed the students to

Western culture, with literature studied in relation to the
history and culture of the Anglo-Saxon world (Hosillos
1968, 39). This consequentially conditioned Filipino
sensibilities to regard Filipino literary works with disdain,
dismissing their historically conditioned qualities as didactic
42 CASTILLO

and propagandist. Along with the entry of the New Critical

framework which focused on literature’s autonomy from
history, the Filipino student’s literary taste was habituated
according to Western aesthetic standards. In addition, the
mode of American instruction taught Filipino writers a new
language, and subsequently, a new direction for literary
practice. As such, the emergence of Filipino writers in
English like Villa shifted the imperatives of literary practice
from commitment to nationalism to the emulation of
Western literature and the endorsement of Western literary
aesthetics. Nationalist sentiments were exorcised from the
province of literature, so to speak.

While Villa can indeed be regarded as what Chua

refers to as “the apotheosis of the epistemic reengineering”
of colonial education (Villa 2002, 12), his assimilation to
American culture could have been possibly furthered by
his estranged relationship with his anti-American father.
Staunchly antipathetic toward his son’s literary interest,
Colonel Villa pressured him to pursue a medical profession.
The younger Villa submitted to his father’s will and enrolled
in a degree in medicine, and then in law, without abandoning
his literary practice by persistently writing fiction. In the
University of the Philippines (UP), he, together with other
students, founded the UP Writers’ Club, which adhered to
the credo “art shall not be a means to an end but an end it
itself.” From 1927 to 1929, Villa vigorously contributed to
the literary section of the Philippines Herald, and gradually
established his reputation as an influential voice of his
generation. However, in 1929, a Manila court charged him
of obscenity for the series of poems “Man Songs,”
published in Herald and a short story “Appasionata” which
appeared in Philippine Collegian. Most controversial in the
“Man Songs” series was “Song of Ripeness,” particularly
with its vivid comparison of coconuts to a woman’s breasts.
“Appasionata” is a story about a seductress who permits
 PHILIPPINE HUMANITIES REVIEW 43

young men to see her naked body through a peephole.

Conceding to the charges for the newspapers’ sake, Villa
paid a fine of 50 pesos, but eventually had to face a special
disciplinary committee of the university, headed by Jorge
Bocobo, dean of the School of Law. Villa defended
himself in a statement invoking literary license and
expressing that there is no connection between art and
morality. Villa deemed that “Philippine audiences had
misunderstood him,” and were too blinded by conventional
morality to appreciate his artistic vision (Espiritu 2005, 76-
81). Subsequently, Villa was suspended for one year. During
the same year, he was awarded first prize Philippine Free
Press literary contestfor the short story “Mir-i-nisa,” and
used the prize money to migrate to the United States in
1930 and search for greater opportunities as a writer.

These personal predicaments, along with the epistemic

conditioning brought about by his exposure to American
culture, constituted “conditions of possibility” (San Juan
2010, 14) that elicited his direct disavowal of what he
perceived was the “philistine, Victorian society of colonial
Philippines” (ibid., 6), his rebellion against his father, and
his cultivation of the American dream. Epifanio San Juan,
Jr. writes that “his rebellion against god and surrogate
authorities, against literal and symbolic patriarchs, and his
refusal to belong to any physical/real country may be an
expression of his fear, dreams and hope of liberation from
all family entanglements and sociopolitical constraints” (ibid.,
19). Villa’s act of rebellion was clearly an expression of
the artist’s bourgeois tendency to alienate himself from
historical and political realities and to search for a
metaphysical self, “a spirit that the human body and worldly
reality cannot fully realize” (ibid., 23). Governing this
tendency is the idea that “the singular identity of the poet
transcends time and space, biographic particulars,
44 CASTILLO

sociohistorical specificity” (San Juan 2009, 18). This is

particularly evident in his bio-note in Edward O’Brien’s
selection Best Short Stories of 1923:

Born in Manila, Philippine Islands. His father is a

physician, and wanted him to follow a medical
career. He finished his pre-medical course but
could go no further….. Was expelled from the
University of the Philippines in 1929 because it
was claimed, he says, that his writing was
immoral….. He is very unacademic because he
believes academism cramps the soul. As for the
Philippines, he cannot stand the old-maidishness
of its outlook on things. (O’Brien 1932, 293)

As Chua (2013-2014, 23) points out that the bio-note,

which belied certain facts in Villa’s life, signifies a self-
fashioning move to romantically construct the author as “a
victim of the establishment,” “a rebel against convention,”
and “a vanguard.” His movement to America then was an
effort to establish that he did not belong to his country,
that his artistic “spirit” transcended the socio-historical
realities of his country in particular. In the words of San
Juan:

[Villa] struggled to fashion in words and deeds

‘a beautiful soul’ not in Europe or North
America but somewhere in between, in the ‘occult
zone of instability’ (to quote Fanon) inhabited
by diasporic artists, exiles, émigrés, deracinated
or déclassé intellectuals wandering the arcades of
the metropoles’ culture-industry and subterranean
art-world. (San Juan 2010, 6)

Eventually, Villa’s “beautiful soul” would be haunted

by the specters of his socio-historical subject-position when
 PHILIPPINE HUMANITIES REVIEW 45

he moved to America, where the seemingly distant colonial

realities of his renounced country loomed like a ghost over
the ethnocentric logos of modernism.

The Colonial Specters of Modernism

Arriving in 1930, Villa entered the University of New

Mexico, which he attended for two years, and founded a
short-lived mimeographed quarterly publication called Clay:
A Literar y Notebook, which published the early works of
William Saroyan, William Carlos Williams, and Eugene Joffe
(Hosillos 1968, 120-121). His attempt to enter the American
literary circle was however conditioned by the economic
and cultural atmosphere that blanketed American society.

The America that Villa set foot on was being

tormented by the damages of the First World War and
plagued by the enormous economic slowdown during the
third decade of the century. The period of his arrival was
also marked by the massive entry of Filipinos in the United
States, some were pensionados or scholars who came from
the local elite allied to the American colonial government,
some were self-supporting students like Villa, while the
others were blue-collar workers hired to supply labor force
in plantations and canneries. These laborers arrived in the
US only to experience oppressive labor conditions
propelled by racism, inciting them to engage in labor
activism. This situation was contemporaneous with the labor
unrest back in the Philippines where American colonial
intrusion translated to the oppressive restructuring of the
local economy. With the closure of canneries, harsh wage
cuts, oversupply in plantation labor, and attempts to
repatriate Filipino laborers during the Great Depression,
the plight of the migrant laborers severely worsened. By
46 CASTILLO

the late 1920s and early 1930s, white hatred toward many
Filipinos, whose growing population presented them as
competitors for labor, became widespread. Single Filipino
men were regarded as sexual threats to white and Mexican
women in taxi-dance halls, and violent race riots intended
to push Filipinos away from several communities broke
out (Espiritu 1995, 11-13).

Racism likewise saddled Villa’s attempt to penetrate a

highly competitive literary market that was also suffering
from the economic crash. Villa, who was then virtually
unknown in America and had to compete with established
authors, encountered extreme difficulty in publishing his
short stories in American periodicals. Despite his signifying
moves to present himself as universal writer, Villa could
never escape the haunting of his ethnicity. Ironically, his
ethnicity conditioned his publishing potential in ambivalent
terms. While Kyle Crichton cited his ethnic background as
one factor for the rejection of his works in Scribner’s
magazine, the ethnic flavor of some of his stories attracted
editors of little, non-commercial magazines. Even more
difficult was looking for a publishing house that would be
willing to release his first collection of stories. Scribner
turned down the manuscript of Footnote to Youth several
times, until Villa himself volunteered to shoulder the
production expenses (Chua 2013-2014, 13-19).

The presence of this racialized violence confirmed the

specter of colonialism that hounded modernist thought.
Instituted on the liberal philosophy that emerged during
the nineteenth century, modernism served as the West’s
response to the political and economic upheavals during
the early decades of the twentieth century. Owing to the
Reformation movement’s dismantling of feudalism and
clericalism, and the consequent discourse that invoked the
scientific individual, not God, as the mover of history, the
 PHILIPPINE HUMANITIES REVIEW 47

Western world steered toward the path of scientific

progress and massive industrialization. In the United States,
the impact of the First World War and the rapid economic
growth followed by the subsequent economic slowdown
during the Great Depression intensified the impulse to build
industries, engage in massive urbanizing projects, and
embark on technological ventures. Amidst the speedy
operations of industrialization and technologization that
enabled Western powers to expand their economic and
political exercises across non-Western territories, modernism
as a philosophical, political, and cultural framework
responded to the imperative of constructing the modern
We s t e r n s e l f a g a i n s t t h e r e s t o f t h e wo r l d — a n
epistemological procedure founded on an ethnocentric
ethos that was haunted by the oppressive reality of
colonialism.

From its construction in the feudal imagination as the

Christian imperative to save the “native heathens from the
ev i l s o f t h e i r g o d l e s s p r i m i t iv i t y,” c o l o n i a l i s m wa s
rediscursified by modernism as a remedy to what the West
perceived as the backward, uncivilized, traditional character
of non-Western societies. Supplemented by the invasive
discursive proliferation of the dichotomy between the
modern and traditional, the West was constructed in the
global imaginary as the center of progress. It was on this
modernist imaging of the Western self as the purveyor of
civilization that the imperialist discourses of “benevolent
assimilation” and “manifest destiny” instrumentalized by
the Americans in colonizing the Philippines were predicated.

The ethnocentric ethos naturally found its way in the

realm of artistic practice, which was likewise severely
altered with the entry of the modernist age. With the
diminution of feudalism, Western artistic practice was finally
freed from the tradition of patronage. The artist was able
48 CASTILLO

to pursue individual practice, and hence, to engage in artistic

experimentation and personalization (Barrett 1997, 20).
Moreover, the imperative to create something new surfaced
as a response to the changing capitalist market. The
modernist artist was promptly disposed to differentiate his/
her work from “cheap” popular cultural artifacts consumed
b y t h e e m e rg i n g m a s s u r b a n s o c i e t y, a n d t o
contemporaneously pursue an artistic practice that would
never be carried away by the commodifying climate of the
period. Such disposition explains the supervening alienation
of the artist from the currents of the political and economic
situation. The doctrine of aestheticism or “art for art’s sake”
thus burgeoned, and the view of “art (or what is sometimes
called ‘high art’) as a source of esoteric value, separate from
the everyday values of commercialism, morality, and any
other sort of instrumental or practical purpose” proliferated
(Carroll 2000, 352). In literature, this doctrine found its
critical vanguard in the emergence of the new critical
framework. This mode of literary analysis was responsible
for defining the Western canon on strictly formal, literary
grounds. The project of American cultural imperialism in
colonies like the Philippines propagated these twin
doctrines, hammering in the minds of the native intellectuals
the superiority of Western literature and alienating them
from their own literary traditions. So to speak, aesthetic
standards valorized by the West were universalized as
parameters of literariness through the pedagogical and
cultural workings of colonization.

Villa’s artistic practice was definitely founded on these

accepted doctrines of modernist literature. He in fact turned
to Western literary figures for inspirations in his creative
and critical ventures. Two of whom were reputedly highly
influential in Villa’s literary career: Sherwood Anderson
whose W inesbur g , Ohio (originally published in 1919)
 PHILIPPINE HUMANITIES REVIEW 49

convinced Villa that he wanted to be a writer, and Edward

O’Brien, Villa’s patron who included his stories in his annual
anthology of best short stories and whose critical appraisal
of artistic merit influenced the young author in his
subsequent critical work (Chua 2013-2014, 14).

Ultimately, despite his attempt to craft universal

literature by employing experimentations and emulating the
literary techniques of Western writers like Anderson, his
first bid for literary fame failed, especially since he chose a
literary genre that rendered him vulnerable to the discursive
violence of modernist racism—the short story. The genre
necessitates the evocation of a fictional world, “a unique
system separate from, although dependent on the cultural-
historical reality in which it is created and with which it
holds more or less obvious affinities” (Ronen 1994, 15).
This mimetic quality of the short story was not diminished
by modernist innovations, and was even highlighted with
the introduction of realism and the decline of romanticism.
Any attempt to completely exorcise socio-historical
specificities in fiction was thus bound to fail because
narration is integral to the genre’s mechanism of expressing
temporal and spatial reality. As such, the genre is one of
“the immanent forms that somehow fail to achieve rising
to the level of transcendence” (San Juan 2009, 18) on which
Villa’s illusion of transcendent ar tistic destiny wa s
parasitically reliant. In Footnote to Youth, Villa transcribed
his metaphysical explorations on the meaning of human
life in identifiable contexts—the rural outskirts of colonial
Philippines and the desolate spaces of Depression-era
America. How these mimetic worlds evoked in the stories
serve as haunting spaces of Villa’s exorcised history will be
explored in the succeeding portions of this essay.
50 CASTILLO

Tales of the Haunted Fatherland

In his introduction to the collection, O’Brien remarked

that Villa’s literary practice was “deeply rooted in the
country life of the Philippine Islands” (in Villa 1933, 3).
Villa naturally made maximal use of local ethnographic
details as the setting of twelve of his stories in the service
of creating a literature of universality. Nevertheless, while
his works were propelled by an overt lack of political
agenda, these ethnographic constructions brought forth
historical specters that he tried to bury under his obsessive
adherence to aestheticism.

The agrarian landscape of the rural country against

which Villa imposed his existentialist narratives is rendered
by him in passionate and romantic descriptions. The tales
of the Philippines are indeed brimming with ornate,
carefully observed images of the tropical countryside—
from the ground “broken up into many fresh wounds and
fragrant with a sweetish earthy smell” in the title story, to
the field of flowers that “was like a mantle of gold and
white…a lake of flowers…revealing dimples of all colors”
in “Yet Do They Strife.” These are in fact spectral traces
of Euro-Hispanic literature that proliferated during the
colonial period and wielded an influence on the country’s
literary productions until the first half of the American
colonial era (Lumbera and Lumbera 1997, 89), the eventual
haunting of which O’Brien recognized when he remarked
“the strong Spanish sense of for m and color” in the
collection (in Villa 1933, 3).

The spectral mood of Spanish costumbrismo hovers

over Villa’s Philippine stories, smoothening the overall
texture of their narrative styles even when they are set in
different temporalities spread out across Philippine history.
“Malakas” and “Kamya,” for instance are set in the distant
 PHILIPPINE HUMANITIES REVIEW 51

past. The first is a folkloric love story apparently situated

in the precolonial period as evinced by non-Christian
character names that are visibly borrowed from the local
creation legend, and, as Timothy Yu (2006, 33) pointed
out, by its narration that echoes “the style of a traditional
oral perfor mance” even while evincing the narrative
aesthetics of Spanish romanticism. The latterperiodng their
early colonial conquests in Manila is also a tale of tragic
love temporally structured within a few decades before
the entry of Spanish colonial power, signified by the
mention of Rajah Soliman who refused to submit to
Spanish sovereignty during their early colonial conquests in
Manila. The rest of the stories are populated by characters
bearing Christian names and structured on Catholic
temporal signifiers (e.g., Christmas and Easter Sunday) that
situate them within the later colonial epochs.

The reality of Spanish colonialism likewise prowls the

countryside of Villa’s imagination through the spectral
ushering of the Spanish reduccion system. From this spatial
technology of colonial power emerged the epistemological
production of identities according to the territorial binary
of urbanity versus rurality. The reduccion discourse ramified
the enduring view of the countryside as the space of the
tulisanes and the barbarians, owing to the fact that the rural
landscape is usually the setting of colonial resistance and
agrarian struggles. That the stories of Manila-bred Villa
are remarkably silent and oblivious about this reality could
affirm the workings of reduccion discourse in segregating
the more “civilized” city dwellers from the rural
“barbarians.” Rehearsing his romantic evocation of the
countryside from his position as cosmopolitan outsider
exposed to the cultural ramifications of American
colonialism, Villa appropriated his visioning of the
countryside from Sherwood Anderson whose works
52 CASTILLO

exposed the “dichotomy of cosmopolitan/provincial” (Yu

2006, 37) in a manner that privileges character development
over plot structure. Attended by his poetic evocation of
the pastoral landscape to universalize the narrative milieu,
Villa adopted the Andersonian narrative mode with the
intention of focusing on universal themes rather than on
the material realities of his characters.

In the story “Footnote to Youth,” which Leopoldo

Yabes (1997, xxiii) distinguished as “a remarkable example
of the Anderson story transplanted to Philippine soil,” a
young farmer Dodong asks for his father’s consent to marry
the barrio lass Teang. Eventually, Dodong encounters the
hardships and sorrows of married life and regretfully
realizes that his early marriage has taken his youth away
from him too soon. Soon, he finds himself in his father’s
position when his eldest son, Blas, decides to marry his
childhood sweetheart. Whipped by years of embitterment
and disillusionment over his fate, Dodong muses, “Youth
m u s t t r i u m p h … n ow. L ove m u s t t r i u m p h … n ow.
Afterwards…it will be Life” (Villa 1933, 21). Here, the
capitalization of the first letters of the words Youth, Life,
and Love throughout the story distills universal themes/
ideals from the ethnographic specificities occupying the
narrative. The emphatic positioning of these ideals as
extracted from the rural backdrop, while framed to clearly
articulate Villa’s existential statement on the oppressive cycle
of human life only highlights the dialectics of the human
condition and the socio-economic reality that contains it.
In fact, the distillation of these ideals does not really serve
to obscure the story’s ethnographic background. What is
achieved instead is these ideals acquiring meaning from,
within, and through the rural context. As such, while Villa
clearly resorted to abstractions and philosophical musings
to give shape and weight to the forfeiture of Dodong’s
 PHILIPPINE HUMANITIES REVIEW 53

youth, he, owing to the exigencies of narrative worlding,

also rendered these ideals visible and concrete in the
episodes of peasant life—early marriage, unbridled
childbirth, domestic travails, and hardships of farm work.
It is precisely through such narrative and semantic operation
that one may fully interpret “Footnote to Youth” as a story
of a young man’s confrontation with the oppressive
cyclicality of peasant life in the agrarian countryside.

As the reader further moves through Villa’s provincial

stories, one encounters characters similar to Dodong in that
their existential ruminations are distilled from the material
contradictions that afflict peasant life. Nevertheless, as in
the case of the title story, these ruminations cannot fully
disavow the historical and economic base they are situated
in. In fact, Villa’s consistent representation of rural life as
an oppressive cycle of birth, youth, marriage, and death is
attuned to the repetitive rhythms of agrarian activity in the
countryside.

In the second story “The Fence,” Villa made use of

the titular image to describe the oppressions wrought by
this rural order. A woman builds a fence to isolate herself
from the neighbor impregnated by her estranged husband,
and in the process, condemns her son Iking to incurable
solitude within the confines of their nipa hut. The
omniscient narrator alludes to this exile as a behavior
corollary of the feudal religion.

His mother would pray. Could she pray? His soul

asked… He stood motionless. And then he saw
the fence – the fence that his mother had built
and strengthened – to crush his soul. He ran
weakly, groggily, to it – allured by its forbidding,
crushing sternness. (35-36)
54 CASTILLO

Moreover, the narrator mentions this detail in the

woman’s house: “A Biblia was on the table, but no one read
it; they did not know how to read” (35). More than imbuing
the narrative with the temper of a Christian morality tale,
this detail temporally situates the story within the American
occupation when Tagalog translations of the bible were
finally made available to the Filipinos. The presence of the
bible and the mention of illiteracy in the story however
release the specters of Spanish colonialism, conjuring the
theological and pedagogical machinery of the earlier
colonizers. Here, one could detect Villa suggesting the link
between rural backwardness and the enduring feudal
impositions of the Spanish colonizers.

Villa’s anti-Spanish suggestion could be understood

both as an effect of the anti-Spanish propaganda
disseminated by the Americans toward the end of the
nineteenth century, and as a rebellion against the Voice of
the Father, as the elder Villa reportedly spoke Spanish and
no English (Park 2013, 125). In his renunciation of rural
life as a ramification of Spanish colonialism, Villa then
spectralized a preferable image that he himself was familiar
with—that of the city moving linearly toward the
industrializing direction of modernity. In an age when “to
be ‘Fil-Hispanic’ meant being old-fashioned; (and) to speak
English, to be ‘Americanized,’ meant being modern” (de la
Peña 2008, 105), this is a modernity founded on the
American colonial order—a modernity that moves to
exorcise the feudal ghosts of the Spanish colonial system.

Nevertheless, in the eyes of Tona, a mother abandoned

by a man who fathered her child in the story “Death into
Manhood,” this modernity, signified by the public school
where she enrolled her son Berto, by the Red Cross pin her
son wore, and finally by the cine (moviehouse) to where he
decides to take his girlfriend Maria, is a cause for
 PHILIPPINE HUMANITIES REVIEW 55

trepidation, akin to her own fear toward her son’s eventual

journey to manhood. Fearing that Berto might eventually
become like his father, Tona approaches Maria’s mother,
telling her to convince her daughter never to go out with
her son again. Here, Tona’s anxiety to accept the movement
of time—its vertical passage toward modernization—is
depicted as a traumatic consequence of the rural cycle. This
representation of the rural psyche is undoubtedly consistent
w i t h V i l l a ’s p e r c e p t i o n o f t h e c o n s e r va t i s m a n d
backwardness of his country of origin.

In this story and in “The Fence,” one would notice

that Villa’s rural female characters are afflicted by a counter-
progressive rural mindset. In contrast, his male characters
are the ones who leave the countryside for the city, similar
to Anderson’s George Willard in Winesburg , Ohio whose
eventual departure from the small town of Winesburg
embodies the possibility of escape from the snares of rural
life. After the death of their infant, Ponso in a “Given
Woman” suddenly decides to leave Flora, a servant woman
with whom he lived, to go to the city. Even though unsure
why he should leave, he decides to find a surrogate who
would be willing to live with the submissive Flora before
he takes off. With the city functioning as a signifier
historically haunted by the political and economic
ramifications of modernity, Ponso’s impulse to embark on
this journey clearly suggests his infatuation with the the
cosmopolis, yielding to which entails that he must abandon
Flora. In the eyes of Ponso, the woman is the antithesis of
the city.

The image of the woman as staple rural presence

likewise finds expression in “Valse Triste” wherein the
narrator’s Uncle Berto remembers Tinang, the woman
whom he was forced to abandon in San Diego in order to
follow to his father’s wishes and study in Manila. When he
56 CASTILLO

returns to the barrio years later, the lovers cross paths again
and the woman confesses to him that she killed their unborn
child. Shocked by her crime, he bids her a sorrowful
goodbye, leaving Tinang to realize from this brief reunion
that the beloved boy who abandoned her has finally
transformed into a man. Evidently, these stories usher in
specters of the patriarchal order prevalent in rural familial
dynamics, primarily by constructing women as domestic
fixtures in rural territories. The female characters in the rural
stories are in fact commonly represented in proximal
reference to their nipa huts. In contrast, the men are
itinerant, capable of moving from the cyclical trap of the
countryside to the linear progress of the city. In the case
of namesakes Berto in “Death into Manhood” and Uncle
Berto in “Valse Triste,” modernity signifies manhood. The
masculinization of young Ber to’s body becomes his
mother’s temporal marker for the entry of modernity
(signified, among others, by the cine ) in their rural
community. In the eyes of his abandoned lover in the rural
village of San Diego, Uncle Berto’s sojourn in the city and
his implied encounter with the cosmopolitan realities of
Manila turn him into a man. The urban versus rural binary
is hence rendered in heteronormative significations. The
city is rendered as masculine space, headed toward the
phallic direction of modernity, while the countryside is
feminized territory, confined in the cycle of domestic
conservatism. Haunting this heteronormative binary is Villa’s
transcolonial disposition, in which the backward, feudal
patriarchy imposed by the Spanish colonialism is
contemptuously contrasted with the favored white male
norm of US modernity.

Complementing Villa’s transcolonial imagination of

patriarchy is the spectral image of the repressive father that
looms over the countryside. From the spectral father who
 PHILIPPINE HUMANITIES REVIEW 57

may possibly haunt his son in “Death into Manhood” to

the violent fathers of “Resurrection,” “Stor y for my
Country” and “Yet Do They Strife,” Villa’s regression from
his estranged relationship with his father is hauntologically
intertwined with the suffocating entrapments of rural life.
In some stories, the desire for the ideal father becomes
figured in the image of the national hero Jose Rizal. In the
“Story for My Country,” a boy named Jose Rosal escapes
from the brutal custody of his father. Gazing at Rizal’s
monument, the persona, Jose’s younger brother soon
imagines his lost brother as the national hero incarnate,
spectralizing his older brother in the Rizalian cult. Roughly
continuing the trope of escape is the closing story “Yet
Do They Strife,” which tells of another boy’s escape from
his wife-beating father, leading him to an eventual encounter
with a wounded man. This episode is haunted by the
narrative of the meeting of Elias and Basilio in Rizal’s Noli
Me Tangere.

As noticeable in these two stories and the other Rizal

narratives—”The Son of Rizal,” “Daughter of Rizal,” and
“The Man Who Looked Like Rizal”—the national hero
becomes positioned as a surrogate for inadequate father-
figures. In his essay “Unbecoming Rizal: José Garcia Villa’s
Biographical Translations,” Philip Holden (2009, 287) argues
that these stories insert the lives of ordinary Filipinos into
the official biographies of the national hero “to encourage
readerly identifications with their subaltern protagonists.”

Undoubtedly, these narratives conjure and echo the

Philippine state’s canonization of Rizal. It merits mention
however that Rizal’s official enshrinement in national
consciousness is clearly a neocolonial project endorsed by
the US empire, as comprehensively exposed by Renato
C o n s t a n t i n o i n h i s e s s ay “ Ve n e r a t i o n w i t h o u t
Understanding.” In the hands of the Americanized Villa,
58 CASTILLO

the national hero’s presence as the surrogate for the brutal

father and the proverbial fatherland—specters that
condense in the images of domestic violence breaking out
in the r ural space—merely affir ms the hegemonic
mystifications of the US sponsorship of Rizalian heroism.
The image of Rizal is therefore haunted by the phantom
of the “imperial Father.”

The haunting of American paternity, amplified by the

insertion of the anti-Hispanic and American-sponsored
Rizal, in the Philippine stories possesses Villa’s desire to
sever his connection with his own country, which shelters
the ghosts of Spanish colonialism, as well as his connection
with his own Spanish-speaking father. Consequently, the
haunting mythified his sojourn in America where he aspired
to supplant his renounced paternity with the imperial Father.
Eventually, as the following analysis will demonstrate, this
attempt at surrogacy would usher in phantoms of the
disavowed fatherland.

Specters of the Homeland

In “Untitled Story,” the narrator begins with an

evocation of his father’s cruelty: “Father did not understand
my love for Vi, so Father sent me to America to study
away from her. I could not do anything and I left” (in Villa
1933, 73). The father in this story is strikingly similar to the
father in “Valse Triste” who sends his son Berto away to
Manila to preempt his relationship with a country girl.

This story, together with the other two parts (“White

Interlude” and “Walk at Midnight: A Farewell”) of the
“White and Blue Flame” trilogy, as well as the other two
i n d e p e n d e n t s t o r i e s o f a F i l i p i n o w r i t e r ’s m i g r a n t
experiences (“Song I Did Not Hear” and “Young Writer
 PHILIPPINE HUMANITIES REVIEW 59

in a New Country”) are filled with autobiographical details

that conjure the specter of Villa’s father. The narrator,
similar to Villa, goes to study in New Mexico. His venture
to “the gorgeous purple flower” (80) of poetry is treated
as a rebellion against his father who disparages any form
of artistic practice. In one instance, the narrator muses “I
had no money and I prayed to God to send me money
because I knew I could not get it elsewhere. But God never
answered” (96), referring to an episode when Villa’s father
declined to give financial support to his impoverished son
in America (Espiritu 2005, 76). Despite his move to encode
his narratives in the stylistic mystifications of modernist
experimentations particularly evinced in the psalm-like
numbering of paragraphs, the stories visibly resist this
poetic erasure of mimesis and release the ghosts of Villa’s
history.

The ghost of the father is a bisemic image in these

stories – more than a personal figure, it spectralizes the
abandoned home country. Every ushering of the father’s
g h o s t e vo ke s t h e n a r ra t o r ’s d i s t a n t m e m o r y o f t h e
country—from the thwarted love affair to anecdotes of
domestic cruelty. In fact, this phantom is evoked through
romantic significations transplanted from the pastoral
landscape of the country. The narrator thus ruminates:

…I took with me the tree of my father, my new

love, to the new land – America…In America, I
nourished the tree of my father till his love had
branches and although I had never played before
under the gentleness of his shade now I played
in fancy under the coolness of his branches. (94)

In contrast to the spectral paternal hate that floods

the rural narratives, Villa’s persona evokes yearning in the
immigrant stories. This newfound desire is aroused in the
60 CASTILLO

very moment of his departure from his homeland and his

separation from his father:

Before my father touched my hands on the boat

that was to take me to America, I was whole.
But when he clasped my hands and said, “Good
luck to you, son,” love flowed from me into the
father I had never loved and my wholeness was
lost. (93)

The absence of the father, whose presence has been

earlier regarded with disdain, now becomes the source of
incompleteness. Villa the writer tried to respond to this
unwholeness through what O’Brien treats as an effort “to
impose the ascetic pattern of the American desert upon
his memories and, in so doing, upon his writing as well”
(3). This recourse is indubitably haunted by Villa’s aestheticist
disposition as literary artist, particularly by his faith in the
transcendental potential of art to go beyond the exigencies
of historical specificities and traumatic biographical
memories.

One expression of Villa’s recourse to the realm of

the imagination is his persona’s imposition of the spectral
presence of his abandoned homeland against the alienating
wilderness of America. He particularly spectralizes his father
in the foreign land. For instance, in “Walk at Midnight,” he
sees his father come to him in the classroom while the
professor lectures, the old man apologizing for a previous
cruelty (108), while in “Song I Did Not Hear,” his Jewish
roommate Joe Lieberman transforms into an image of his
furious father (246).

Inevitably, Villa’s visionary evocation of alienation and

yearning in the American landscape registers snippets of
life during the Great Depression, as signified temporally
 PHILIPPINE HUMANITIES REVIEW 61

by the reference to then-President Hoover. While his

political obliviousness toward the new country is
pronounced, as in the line “I saw President Hoover’s home
in Palo Alto but I did not care for President Hoover” (74),
his obser vations conjure the specter of this present
economic misery—from the image of the crippled street
seller, the insertion of a character named David who, unable
to shoulder the expenses, leaves school, to episodes of the
narrator’s own destitution in the big city. Severely alienated
by this atmosphere of economic despair, the narrator is
haunted by the ghost of his homeland in “Young Writer in
a New Country:” “America is cold, for the moment that is
my thought. In the homeland – never any snow. In the
homeland, greenness. O green, O warmth, O bamboos
unforgotten” (301). Here, Villa’s mythology of American
paternity is shattered by his firsthand exposure to the
desolation of the new country. The imperial ideal which he
anticipated would be a departure from the oppressive
confines of his homeland becomes demystified when he
realized that America is a wasteland of economic misery.

In spite of his indubitably dismal predicament in

America, the persona’s evocations clearly pronounce his
desire for assimilation and acceptance in this new country.
Imagining such acceptance to be akin to someone picking
a handkerchief on the road, the persona, still haunted by
the traumatizing memory of his homeland, welcomes the
idea of surrogacy, while rejecting the thought of returning
to his father: “Who would my picker be? – I want him to
have kind eyes because I am hungry for kind eyes, God.
Do not let him have my father’s eyes” (97). Moreover, Villa’s
persona prefers the “desert of my white birth” over the
homeland where “I was young” (303). This contrastive
articulation is haunted by the relationship between the
Philippine colony and the American empire, as Villa
conjured what Neferti Tadiar obser ves as the colonial
62 CASTILLO

infantilization of the Filipino nation. Since “America, in turn,

becomes the Philippines’ masculine ideal” (Tadiar 2004, 47),
the imperial dynamics of the US-Philippine relations
eventually takes on patriarchal terms, with the colonizer
positioned as the doting ‘Fatherland,’ the Filipinos, the
‘imperial sons’ (ibid., 53).

This hegemonic construction of the image of the

White Father then becomes, for a colonial subject trapped
in the alienating landscape of the empire, instrumental to
the discursive operations of paternal surrogacy. Interestingly,
for Villa’s persona, the desired American paternity must
supplant not just the absence of the homeland and the
father, but also the thwarted consummation of erotic
desire—the frustrated desire for his childhood sweetheart
Vi in the faraway country. Consequently, the persona
develops queer desire for the ideal White Male, figured on
the character of a poor American boy named Jack Wicken.
In narrating the persona’s first interaction with Jack, Villa
pr onounces the persona’s alterity, and in so doing,
immediately positions him within the matrix of racial
relations in the colonial center: “There was a boy Jack
Wicken ate at the dining hall who would give me ugly
glances because I was a foreigner and when I reached home
I felt I hated him and could not let him know about it”
(99).

Conjuring the reality of racism prevalent during Villa’s

arrival in the United States, the persona’s ethnicity signifies
his removal from Jack, and in effect, from the possibility
of having his adoration reciprocated by the object of desire.
The desire for integration and acceptance is visibly impeded,
precisely because the persona’s identity as Filipino/foreigner
marks him off as a neocolonial subject, nominalized through
the spectral reality of colonialism that constitutes the
primary encounter between his homeland and the surrogate
country.
 PHILIPPINE HUMANITIES REVIEW 63

The racial distance conceived by this colonial condition

further intensifies his desire for Jack, until it ultimately
becomes articulated in theological significations. In “Walk
at Midnight,” the persona confesses that it was his mother
who introduced him to the Christian faith: “My mother
taught me to pray. I went with her to churches and at night
we prayed before the picture of God. God had a beard in
the picture but when I was in God’s arms I felt only the
warmth and gentleness of His fold, I could not tell if He
had a beard” (118).

This memory, a specter of Spanish colonial theology,

haunts the dynamics of the persona’s desire. This very image
of the bearded God in Christian iconography is the one
the persona implores to in his desire to be taken “back
into my mother and back into His (God’s) arms so there
should be no more loneliness for me” (118). The specter
of the Christian God provides the persona with an imagined
resolution to his incompleteness, even though the persona’s
entreaty takes on a somewhat secular temper with his
symbolic non-recognition of the bearded image. This
infatuation with the image of divinity is similarly
demonstrated in “The Woman Who Looked Like Christ,”
a story of a young man who falls in a love with a woman
whose face resembles a young Christ. Queerly conjured,
the male character’s romantic (erotic) desire is imposed on
the sacralized masculine image, prompting the woman to
fly into a rage over the comparison to a male face.

Quite amusingly, the persona’s desire for the image

of the White Father, Jack, is seemingly reconciled with the
specter of the Hispanic God when he implores, “God, let
him love me even as I love him” (122). It turns out,
however, that Villa’s persona in the autobiog raphical
narratives constructs a modernist theological revision
founded on mythifying the figure of the desired White
64 CASTILLO

Father (Jack) as someone “who could crush God’s whisper

in his hands” (114), an effort evidently intended to exorcise
the obvious theological ramifications of Hispanic patriarchy.
The modernist patriarchy, the white male norm of American
colonial discourse, therefore displaces the traditional feudal
deity in the process of violent hierarchy.

Accompanying this exalting vision of the mythical

white male is the persona’s realization that he will eventually
have to accept suffering from this unrequited adoration.
Nevertheless, upon Jack’s departure, he exclaims, “I want
to see Jack. I want him always to be in my life…even if it
hurts. I am ready to be hurt” (258). These emotional
articulations of the narrator chart the allegorical narrative
of the country’s masochistic relationship with the US
empire, and more particularly, of the Filipino migrant’s
travail in a highly-racialized ecosystem where his desire for
assimilation is perpetually foiled by his inevitable
identification as a neocolonial subject.

In this penultimate evocation of “Young Writer in a

New Country,” the last American story in the collection,
the persona, undoubtedly already acquainted at this point
with the political, economic, and racial dynamics in his new
country, narrates his imagined integration:

Little by little comes my white birth – a cool

white birth in a new land…
It was then that my stories were born – of the
homeland and the new land. Some of you may
have read them – they were cool, afire with
coolth.
I, father of tales. Fathering tales I became rooted
to the new land. I became lover to the desert.
(303)
 PHILIPPINE HUMANITIES REVIEW 65

In keeping with Villa’s aesthetic purism, the persona

valorizes his artistic activity as in itself an act of paternity,
and a way of resolving the political, economic and racial
contradictions that characterized his migrant experience.
Reading the writer’s self-imposed exile through the
psychoanalytic lens, San Juan eloquently synthesizes Villa’s
recourse to the imaginative realm of literary practice in his
attempt to consummate his assimilationist desire amidst the
hostilities of the imperial environs of America:

…the crisis of exile…is dissolved by metaphoric

sublimation: In his visionary re-presentation of
the primal loss (exile as castration; expulsion by
the father), the antinomic discourses of place,
body, inheritance, and need converge in the self-
exiled native being reborn in the desert of New
Mexico where the Oedipal trauma (the loss of
the mother’s/patria’s body) is exorcised by a
transcendent trope of imagination. Art then
functions as the resolution of the conflict
between solitary ego and community…between
subjugated people and despotic conqueror. (San
Juan 1998, 87)

Conclusion

Despite Villa’s overt effort to fashion himself as a

universal writer, Footnote to Youth released the specters of
the colonial realities that he did not seek to discuss in his
works. In fact, this collection clearly traces Villa’s movement
in the matrix of colonial relations. He disavowed the
Philippines as an oppressive fatherland fraught by the
66 CASTILLO

specters of Spanish colonialism, escaping to the American

desert to seek a surrogate White paternity, only to be rejected
because of his identity as imperial subject.

Critical responses to the collection were scathing

toward Villa’s American stories, while registering interest
toward the local stories that highlight his native roots.
Moreover, many reviews concur that his best stories were
those set in the Philippines (Chua 2013-2014, 25) because,
“to an American reader, his stories offered variety because
they “are news from an unknown country, the Philippines”
(ibid., 122). While the book gained some attention, it was
simply on the basis of its and its author’s alterity. Thus,
contrary to the monumentalizing news that circulated in
the local literary community, it did not catapult him to his
desired place in the modernist pantheon.

Remarkably, Villa, understandably daunted by the

lukewarm reception to his American publishing debut,
published almost nothing for a decade, until he released
the poetry collection Have Come, Am Here in 1942. The hiatus,
which was clearly an effort to “sever his links to his
previous work,” apparently paid off, as most reviews of
the poetry book “register) no awareness either of Footnote
to Youth or of Villa’s many publications in the Philippines”
(Yu 2004, 43). Of his decision to turn to poetry and abandon
prose, Villa later on claimed that “a poet is the highest thing,
the hardest thing to be” (in Arcellana 1967, 608). But more
than his high regard for the art of poetry, it seems possible
that “(l)yric poetry allowed Villa to lift his psychological
symbolism to a level of nearly pure abstraction, with its
biographical and geographic bases erased” (Yu 2006, 39),
and was thus more expedient to his modernist aspiration
and self-fashioning as a universal writer.
 PHILIPPINE HUMANITIES REVIEW 67

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