The God who Sees Us

Doing Theology as an American-Made Mestizo, Pt. 3

The following is the third part of a series reflecting on a Mixed-Heritage Filipino-American Identity in honor of Fil-Am Heritage Month. You can find part one here.

I will be discussing things like Filipino Invisibility, liminality and in-betweenness, tokenism, and the history of Filipino Diaspora. Some of the experiences will be common to radicalized communities, others will be particular to mixed-heritage persons, and others will be specific to me and my family. Ultimately, what I am building toward is a life-long struggle of theological reflection on mixed-heritage experience. Isang Bagsak.

2020 was a difficult year for everyone, but in the United States laid a particular burden on the Asian and Asian American communities. Due in part to dangerous media rhetoric and in whole to willful ignorance, hate crimes against Asian Americans skyrocketed. On August 1, 2021, the CBS Sunday Morning show aired a 9-minute special on the history of anti-Asian hate crimes in America. Despite the fact that Filipinos are the third-largest Asian-American subgroup in the United States (accounting for nearly 20% of all Asian Americans), the fact that the Philippines were actively colonized by the United States, and the fact that the first Asians to reach the continental United States were Filipinos aboard a Spanish galleon which docked at Moro Bay, California in 1587… Sunday Morning’s segment did not include a single mention of Filipino-Americans.

Filipino Invisibility

Elizabeth Pisares describes Filipino Invisibility as “an ethnic identity given character by its chronic misrecognition and effaced representation in U.S. culture.”¹ While being overlooked and underrepresented is a common burden experienced by all minority groups, Filipinos are rendered uniquely invisible among not only contemporary culture, but among Asian Americans, as well. In nearly every space where Asian and Asian American stories are shared, heard, and championed, Filipinos are forgotten or otherwise not invited to the conversation. Perhaps this is because it is impossible to highlight Filipino-Americans without highlighting the long history of US imperialism and oppression in the Philippines. As America erases its dark past, it erases Filipinos along with it. Or perhaps it is because of the lingering inferiority complex, a product of too many years of colonial oppression.

Whatever the reason, the lack of representation is striking. During the 2018 Emmy Awards, Michael Che joked that there are 15 seasons of the hit television series ER and yet not one episode features a Filipino nurse. Given the fact that the Philippines are the largest sender of professional nurses to the US—a direct result of US imperialism and the establishment of US-style nursing schools in the Philippines—the oversight is glaring.

When you think of Asian Americans, you probably don’t think of Filipinos. When you think of foreign-born contributors to the US economy, you probably don’t think of Filipinos. When you think of Asian food, you probably imagine orange chicken, pad Thai, or pho, not pancit, lumpia, or adobo. And when you think about American atrocities, you probably don’t think of the Philippine-American War.

The same is true in the religious academy. Scarcity afflicts any search for Fil-Am biblical hermeneutics or theological reflection. In a time when theological and biblical studies communities are taking significant strides towards responding to the needs, challenges, and opportunities afforded by the experiences of Asian Americans, Filipinos find familiar oversight.

To highlight just one example, consider the recent T&T Clark Asian American Handbook of Biblical Hermeneutics. Despite naming Filipinos among six major contexts for Asian American biblical hermeneutics in order of relative size of population (Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese), the editors nevertheless fail to include an example of Filipino American biblical hermeneutics. There are several examples from Chinese-American, Indian-American, Vietnamese-American, Korean-American, and Japanese-American perspectives. There is even one from an Indonesian-American, not included in the books overview of major contexts. But there is not a single contribution sourced from a Fil-Am.

This does not mean that Fil-Ams have not contributed to biblical hermeneutics—Eleazar Fernandez being a prime example. The resources are just fewer and farther between for us than for many of our fellow Asian Americans.

The God Who Sees Us

Being unseen, overlooked, and invisible has its consequences. People who feel underrepresented and undervalued can begin to devalue their own culture, their own names, and their own contributions. When struggles are constantly and unrelentingly erased and dismissed, people begin to feel that their burdens do not matter, not to others and not to God. People who do not feel seen often begin—especially to the majority culture—to build their identity, distancing themselves from the things which make them who they are. Erasure is a key strategy in assimilation.

And yet, Scripture is replete with images of a God who sees the vulnerable. In Exodus, God hears the people’s groaning under imperial burdens, sees their plight and knows their suffering (Ex. 2:24-25, 3:7). It is in this context that God gifts the people with the covenant name of Yahweh, who abounds with compassion for the suffering.

In Genesis, when Abram and Sarai mistreat their servant Hagar to the point that she flees into the wilderness, God seeks her out and blesses her and her child. While God would later give his covenant name to the people through Moses, Hagar is the first person in the Bible to name the unnamed God. She names him El Roi, The God Who Sees Me.

For an unseen people, a God Who Sees is an incredible claim. If the church wants to be anything like the God we worship, it will take having eyes to see the invisible and ears to hear the voiceless. This will require, at minimum, learning and telling the whole story of American beginnings. Because we are not practiced in such things, it will mean developing the skills of seeing, listening, and repenting.

For Filipinos, it will mean resisting and ultimately rejecting our invisibility and proudly bearing the marks of our heritage. It will mean telling our stories to anyone who will listen and especially to those who will not. Because even if no one else sees us, El Roi sees us and delights in the gifts we bring to the table. Yahweh knows our plight, bears our burdens, sees our pain, and hears our groaning—and groans with us.

No sooner than I finish typing that last sentence, the fear, anxiety, and insecurity set in. I’m only part Filipino, after all. Dealing with Filipino Invisibility has extra layers as a mixed-heritage Fil-Am, who has often been called white, Mexican, Japanese, Hawaiian, or “something extra”, but rarely Filipino. I am just as much my mother’s son as I am my father’s, so what do I do with the parts of me that have benefited from the oppressive erasure of the other parts of me. Which stories win out and which ones recede into the past to rest with my nameless ancestors? This will be the discussion of our final part in this series on doing theology as an American-made mestizo.

Continue reading Part Four: Returning Forward.

1. Elizabeth H. Pisares, “The Social-Invisibility Narrative in Filipino-American Feature Films, Positions 19, no. 2 (2011). ↩︎