There are tornado warnings. The sun outside is bright one time then gets covered by thick rolling clouds that form a wall somewhere else where tornadoes descend. I have my emergency bag stashed here with clothes, my passport, but I feel fine.
I just saw my grades for the Spring 2019 semester and they are all A’s. That, to me, is triumph considering I really struggled on Fall 2019 semester which I had a grade of B. It just goes to show that I survived my first year here as a PhD student. And as the winds start howling a little bit more loudly, I am still fine. A year ago, I couldn’t even turn on the oven. Later, I will be cooking some meatballs. A year ago, I was getting mentally exhausted from the MFA. Now, the classes make me feel alive. A year ago I could not even process that I will be leaving for Texas because I had to finish my MFA before I had to start.
Now, I am still processing that home for the next few years is Lubbock.
I do not hate it here. Really, I don’t. I do not envy other scholars who have gone to bigger cities hence more accessible to the cosmopolitan America we all know. Lubbock IS America that I needed to be familiar with. This is the perfect locus on what America is right now: a prevailing conservative town with a population that is turning browner every year and where there are people who are in the culture and arts that aim to produce something not for marketability but to cater to community. They really take their arts program in Texas quite seriously…which is mind-blowing. You’d think that LA and NY are the locus for the arts. They are the center of the art world, yes. But arguably, not all the time. It was not in NY where pop art was legitimized by a museum. It was at the Modern and Contemporary Museum of Houston….in Texas. Plus, Marfa, Texas is where the exciting contemporary American artists flock to. So, I ain’t knocking down Texas.
One year ago, I couldn’t care less about agriculture despite knowing most of the Philippines is agricultural. Now, I am beginning to grasp more on the persistence of agricultural issues not just for the economy, but for global assertions, as well as marginalized indicators. Now that Cynthia Villar is number one in the recent polls, she is very much a problematic figure on what agriculture is undergoing now in the 21st century. Her rapacious real estate have been converting prime agricultural lands into waste buckets of subdivisions thus further destabilizing Manila’s food security. It is a different take here in Lubbock, but many farmers voted for Trump, but now with the tariff wars with China, many farmers are now clamoring for a stronger grasp on international relations which Trump does not have. I say all of this because for years….YEARS…..my study has been focused on the favorite Philippine symbol for nation by political cartoonists: Juan dela Cruz, initially a figure of agriculture. The migration of farmers from the Philippines to America helped reshaped American labor as well as the very economic landscape of the wild, wild West. In a way, Filipinos are among the migrant laborers who “tamed” the west. And these manongs, the Filipino farmers asserted themselves with cultural activities like fashion and dance. Some of them going home and bringing back some cultural hybridization which stoked the fires of cosmopolitanism in Manila and in their home towns.
Maybe these few days is perfect time for me to set aside critical theory readings and read my copy of Carlos Bulosan’s America is in the Heart (One of the books I had shipped from Manila). I have always know of this book but never really read it back home. Maybe now that I am displaced myself, perhaps I could see myself in some of the characters in Bulosan’s pages. I am not saying I am a farm worker like them. I am not as poor as they are although arguably I am so close to that, if you only knew how much I am making here (let’s say I make much more back home).
One year ago, I was thinking of farmer as a concept. Now, I am still connecting the dots that make farmers the very reason we have notions of cosmopolitanism and of nation and of diasporic labor migration.
I wonder where will I be next year.
Oh, hey, the weather outside calmed down and the sun is out.