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Filipinos now constitute the largest Asian ethnic group in California and like many immigrant groups, they face the problem of living a hybrid identity within a dominant culture (Bonus 1). This essay offers a brief report on the significance of ballroom dance to the Filipino community, provides evidence of distinct Filipino social conduct on the ballroom dance floor, and will then focus on the incorporation of what are considered traditional movements from indigenous dances into ballroom-based line dances as examples of Filipinos' efforts to negotiate their identity in the world.
Thomas Turino offers a compelling reason for ballroom dance's popularity within this particular immigrant group. His research into cosmopolitanism and popular music in Zimbabwe examines ballroom dance in Zimbabwe's Salisbury townships where ballroom dancing has been practiced since the 1930's. Considering it the dance of middle class whites, Africans began taking up the dance because it was a prestige activity of "a better class of people." Photos in African Parade of competitions during the 1970's show large crowds of participants and spectators suggesting that the "colonial mentality" remained largely intact even during the height of the nationalist movements (Turino 147-48).
Given 400 years of colonization, the "colonial mentality" of Filipinos has also been explained by varying theories of colonial influence. Nilda Rimonte notes that,
Filipinos were victimized on several fronts: by the assumptions and presumptions of colonial ideology, by the very act of cultural invasion itself, by coercive cultural transformations and by the complicit collaboration of leaders and elders who perpetuated the violence of historical distortions.... Denial of this past has been the source of crippling confusion about Filipino identity and obligations to the West. (41)
I believe Filipino Ballroom dancers practice ballroom dance because they also consider it a prestige activity "of a better class of people," but also as an imagined American activity. Just as the West has its imaginations of the East, the Philippines has its imagination of the United States.
Indeed U.S. colonialism in the Philippines was rhetorically driven by what President McKinley had referred to as "benevolent assimilation," whereby the "earnest and paramount aim" of the colonizer was that of "win[ning] the confidence, respect and affection" of the colonized. Colonization as assimilation was deemed a moral imperative, as wayward native...