Introduction

Nursing These Wounds, a series of panels hosted by KULARTS in the spring of 2021, has brought together artists, poets, scholars, activists, and nurses to, on one hand, investigate the colonial underpinnings of Filipinx nurses in the United States, and on the other hand to mourn the staggering loss of life that the Covid-19 pandemic has wrought upon Filipino communities nation-wide. While the panel Nurses in the Diaspora focused on the relationship between nursing and political activism as ongoing struggles informed by colonialism, racism, and healthcare inequities prior to and during the pandemic, Nurse Narratives in the Arts engaged creative work by poets and artists who aim to theorize a poetics and politics of care and migration, and recast the Filipina nurse with reverence, complexity, and agency. Nursing These Wounds as an interdisciplinary series thus asks how colonial history and the inheritance of historical trauma shape the lives of Filipina nurses today. Further, what is to be gained in conceptualizing and reimagining the histories, lives, and politics of Filipina nurses through art and performance?

Filipina Nurses in the Covid-19 Pandemic: A Colonial Legacy

The statistics detailing the disproportionate deaths of Filipina nurses to Covid-19 have made the news and media rounds to widespread dismay, grief, and anger. As of December 2020, CNN reported that one-third of all nurses who have died from coronavirus in the United States were Filipino, despite Filipino nurses making up only 4% of the overall nursing population.¹ What accounts for the high presence of Filipino nurses in the United States, and their disproportionate death counts during the pandemic? Catherine Ceniza Choy’s 2003 book Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History explains how the U.S. occupation of the Philippines instituted nursing education programs that promised upward mobility and opportunities for travel to Filipina women but led to discrimination, lower wages relative to their white counterparts, and poor working conditions in American hospitals. The delusion of American manifest destiny established the Filipina nursing force in the United States—out of a self-bestowed benevolence and duty, American nurses educated their “little brown sisters” in Western medical practices, and Filipina nurses would be marketed to American hospitals as highly obedient and unlikely to stir up labor disputes. Current studies attempting to address the disproportionate number of Filipino nurses dying from coronavirus suggest this colonial lineage continues to inform the roles Filipina nurses are relegated to in American hospitals, and the extent to which their labor and lives are considered expendable—CNN further reports that Philippine-trained nurses are more exposed to Covid-19, as they are disproportionately assigned to ICUs, emergency rooms, long-term care facilities, and nursing homes compared to white American-trained nurses.²

When we untangle the statistics from the colonial lineage they are born from, an ongoing and contemporary reality comes into focus—that is, the American hospital industry has always considered the Filipina nurse, and broadly the Filipina body, as an expendable source of labor. Filipino/American communities’ continued view of nursing as a lucrative career path along with the genuine heroism of Filipina nurses at the frontlines of a global health crisis come into sharp contrast with the historical truth that the pandemic has wrought—the incommensurate number of Filipino nurses who have been exposed to and died from the virus is a direct consequence of the American nation-state’s exploitation and scapegoating of the Filipina as a producer and object of capital. While Filipina nurses’ labor provides necessary medical service and contributes to a global medical labor market, and while Filipina nurses do enjoy class mobility in American society through their profession, they remain subject to violent racialization and gendering by the white supremacist state which situates the Filipina within a white-black binary of racial, sexual, and class hierarchy.

Filipina Nurses vs. the American State: the Narciso-Perez Case

Empire of Care demonstrates the precarious position of the Filipina at the very foundation of American-led nursing programs in the Philippines during U.S. colonization, along with a more recent example of how Filipina nurses have always been and continue to serve as objects of both labor and carceral punishment for the U.S. state. In the chapter “Trial and Error: Crime and Punishment in America’s ‘Wound Culture,’” Choy details the trials of two Filipino nurses, Filipina Narciso and Leonora Perez, who in June 1976 were arrested and indicted for the poisoning of 35 patients at the VA Hospital in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Both Narciso and Perez had arrived in the United States in 1971 and were permanent residents at the time of their arrest and trials (Perez was four months pregnant). While they complied with the investigation and testified before the grand jury, the FBI harassed, intimidated, and threatened the women in the attempt to recuperate the bureau’s own reputation, along with that of the U.S. government, after America’s loss in the Vietnam War and unsuccessful cases involving Patty Hearst and Jimmy Hoffa.³ Choy describes how the media coverage of the case and sensationalized nonfiction books depicted Narciso and Perez as silent, dark, treasonous foreigners whose “soft voice” and “shy demeanor” belied the true faces of cold-blooded, mentally ill killers.⁴ Further, Choy includes the testimony of a prosecution witness in which he utilizes anti-immigrant and anti-black attitudes to seemingly protect Perez, stating that if she were to return to the Philippines and work as a nurse there she could do “a whole lot of good,” and inventing a black man in his account to deflect blame from Perez.⁵

In these accounts, we see how the white American imagination renders the Filipina as simultaneously submissive, responsible, inscrutable, dangerous, duplicitous, and evil, all within frameworks of colonialism, xenophobia, white supremacy, and anti-blackness. The FBI’s case against the two nurses leaned on these same rhetorics about the enigma of the Filipina, and Narciso and Perez were convicted and imprisoned in 1977 for poisoning and conspiracy. Philippine- and American-based support groups were able to raise legal aid to file a motion to dismiss the case, eventually clearing and releasing the nurses from prison in 1978 due to the original case’s circumstantial evidence, lack of motive, and questionable testimonies.⁶ However, the Narciso and Perez case would continue to have lasting effects for Filipina nurses all across the country—they experienced death threats and job termination as the American public, patients, and hospitals alike had grown wary of this villainized foreign-born professional group.

¹ Shoichet, Catherine. “Covid-19 is taking a devastating toll on Filipino American nurses.” CNN, December 11, 2020. < https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/24/health/filipino-nurse-deaths/index.html >
² Ibid.
³ Choy, Catherine Ceniza. Empire of Care. Duke University Press, 2003.
⁴ Ibid, 147.
⁵ Ibid, 151.
⁶ Ibid, 165.