Introduction

While the first part of this essay examined how the colonial legacy of U.S.-founded nursing programs continues to affect the working conditions and safety of Filipina nurses, the second part focused on the creative works of Jason Magabo Perez and Jenifer Wofford, whose projects in film/performance and illustration, respectively, experiment with aesthetic forms to restage Filipina nurse narratives in ways that are at once deeply personal, transnational, and subversive against backdrops of American nationalism, racism, and xenophobia. The third and final part of this essay continues to contemplate Perez’ and Wofford’s works, this time using Filipinx scholar Neferti Tadiar’s concept of “remaindered life” to frame Filipinx creative and cultural production broadly as quotidian practices that are unintelligible to the legitimizing mechanisms of colonialism and capitalism. In their dailiness, Filipinx performance and artmaking thus offer technologies that evade the protocols of Western meaning-making and productivity, positing not only modes of survival but also new languages that might disrupt and replace existing hegemonic orders.

Art and “Remaindered Life”

The case of Leonora Perez and Filipina Narciso and the Ann Arbor hospital poisonings casts a shadow upon our understanding of the Filipina nurse in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, while the artwork of Jenifer Wofford allows us to recast the Filipina nurse in all her complexities, ranging from the embeddedness of her personal life within larger political and historical moments, to her heroism against the backdrop of American colonialism and militarism. Jason Magabo Perez employs the documentary form, but ruptures it, offering it as a venue for his mother to explore how memory, oral history, storytelling, filmic techniques, and affect can destabilize or refuse linear narratives about state surveillance and control. “YONIE NARRATES” ends with Leonora Perez’s refusal of American citizenship, and by extension American belonging, serving as a direct response to the false promise of both the American Dream and the failure of American justice, and as a reminder of the precarious position the Filipina nurse holds in the United States. That is, the Filipina nurse is a source of labor, her body read as both essential and expendable machinery in the medical field, and she is also a scapegoat, subject to historical structures of capitalism, racism, misogyny, and colonialism, the American state and public poised to villainize her at any convenient moment. Wofford’s work pushes against the stereotypes of the Filipina as a faceless automaton within the medical industry and demands both narrative agency, complexity, and recognition of individual and group narratives. The villainization of Filipina nurses along a racialized, colonial script manifests not only in public scrutiny, but in physical violence, as Perez pointed out in his introduction to Nurses in the Diaspora, when he linked his mother’s case to the recent attacks on Asian people across the country, provoked by the pandemic and Trump’s racist scapegoating to cover up his own government’s mishandling of the crisis:

I am terrified for her because these recent waves of anti-Asian, patriarchal violence exist along the same continuum and state imaginary of white supremacy and its attending productions of vulnerabilities and precarities of working class Asian diasporic women. None of these happenings are isolated historical events or incidents. Rather, they are endemic of broader, structural historical forces of racism, misogyny, capitalism, and colonialism. What I also invite you to think about or look for or to seek out is what professor Neferti Tadiar suggests as what gets remaindered or excessed or surplussed out of moments like this. What is seemingly lost or slightly out of frame for us to imagine? What love, what practice, what dreams, what visions of liberation are not so easy to notice or be noticed in this wake, in the heaviness of this grief, amidst the whitest of white noise and aggressive white liberalisms?¹

Insisting on the embeddedness of anti-Asian violence during the pandemic within overarching structures of inequity and historical violence, Perez invoked Tadiar’s concept of remaindered life which she describes in the essay, “Decolonization, ‘Race,’ and Remaindered Life under Empire,” thus alluding to the complex personal narratives that seep out of our structural analysis, put on display in creative work in particular. In this way, art and performance that attempt to reclaim historical and political narratives might offer “visions of liberation” against the fatalism of statistics and structural analysis, despite our collective mourning in the wake of white supremacy. Tadiar continues that remaindered life consists of practices that are unintelligible to the legitimizing mechanisms of colonialism and capitalism, and technologies that evade the protocols of Western meaning-making and productivity. Gesturing particularly to the Filipina subject who understands her own body as a mechanized technology within the hospital industrial complex, Tadiar suggests subversive and creative possibilities that such an understanding of one’s body and labor within structures of capitalism opens up:

I too have written on the different ways that Filipino women in particular participate in their own expert and exchange, as a medium of exchange, the way they and their families speak of their bodily lives as collateral for loans they take to gain overseas placement, while they themselves offer that very bodily life as the ante they risk in the cosmic gamble of overseas adventure that they embark upon. Rather than simply an ideological effect of capitalism, these practices of self-lending draw on the same seemingly anachronistic “political economy” and ontology, which the extant practice of spirit-mediumship, in its instantiation of fungible, extendable, divisible, alienable, transformable, and combinable selves, continues to be based on as well as renovate.²

Thus, Tadiar suggests that if Filipinas, or any minoritarian subject, are all inescapably embedded within structures of racism, capitalism, misogyny, and colonialism, quotidian practices of agency within those structures might allow for those subjects’ survival, in addition to their resistance and revolt against those existing structures. While these practices are unintelligible to the state and its colonial and capitalistic mechanisms, art and performance allow new languages to emerge to express them as modes of survival and resistance. Remaindered life as an aesthetic and political principal might then include a film produced in collaboration between mother and son with all its editorial seams on display, an elderly Filipina nurse going off the cuff and refusing to read a preordained script, even her resentment over her own naturalization to a country that failed her. Remaindered life might also be practiced in whimsical illustrations of Filipina nurses that remove her from the facelessness and antiseptic setting of the Western colonial medical industry, and place her within the limitless of her own diasporic imagination or within iconographic images of American-Philippine history. Further, remaindered life might also allow for what Choy describes as a residual consequence of the Narciso-Perez case—a heightened consciousness among Filipino nurses in the United States of “themselves as an immigrant, foreign-trained professional group in need of more complete awareness of their rights and obligations as foreign-trained nurses working in the United States.”³ Artwork and performance offer languages for the inarticulable and unintelligible, while also subverting the very structures and mechanisms that are incapable of reading such practices as legitimate.

This heightened consciousness extends from how Filipino nurses view themselves and their daily lives to how they view their positionality in relation to that of other migrant and racialized labor groups, as the same systems of racism, colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy shape the oppression of other communities who face parallel struggles against white supremacy, and with whom Filipinos might foster solidarity. For her contribution to the Nurses in the Diaspora panel, scholar, nurse educator, and grassroots activist Claire Valderama-Wallace shared how her work with GABRIELA Oakland and as a nursing professor extends into arts-based activism, as she encourages her students to utilize murals and performance to uplift and fight for Filipinx communities, but also to interrogate how they are imbricated in parallel struggles and how they might assist other domestic and international movements, from Black Lives Matter to sterilizations at the U.S.-Mexico border, to the plight of migrant domestic workers abroad: 

As Filipinos, we have resisted colonization for centuries, and we continue to. So I feel like it’s a core part of my role as a nurse educator to connect nursing students with movements to see these shared struggles. How are Filipino nurses seafarers and teachers? How are domestic workers connected? How are we connected to the ongoing mobilization of Amazon workers? Missing and murdered indigenous women? What are our connections? Colonialism asks us to see these as separate and isolated, but we know they’re connected, just as we are all connected.⁴

Thus, Nursing These Wounds offers multiple entry points to begin to reconceive our understanding of Filipino nurses’ historical relationship to American empire and how that relationship affects their safety and livelihood today. By combining historical perspectives, socially engaged visual art and literature, community activism, and accounts of the mechanisms of the health industry, we begin to see a fuller image of the Filipina nurse as not merely a statistic in the wake of the pandemic or a faceless victim of the global labor market. Rather, the Filipina nurse is a complex, historical figure, who in her daily struggles and survival embodies a politics and poetics of care, critiquing the oppressive systems she’s embedded within and actively combatting them for herself and her community.

¹ Nurses in the Diaspora. < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8F-Lueqc6zA >
² Tadiar, Neferti. “Decolonization, ‘Race,’ and Remaindered Life under Empire.” Qui Parle, Vol. 2, No. 2, Spring/Summer 2015, 153.
³ Choy, 165.
⁴ Nurses in the Diaspora.

Part 1: An examination of how 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.

Part 2: Exploring the work of Jason Magabo Perez and Jenifer Wofford, whose forays in film/performance and illustration challenge the aesthetic forms of their respective genres and mediums to reclaim agency, personal narrative, and transnational histories for the Filipina nurses at the center of their projects.

Part 3: Continues to contemplate Perez’ and Wofford’s works, this time using Filipinx scholar Neferti Tadiar’s concept of “remaindered life” to frame Filipinx creative and cultural production broadly as quotidian practices that are unintelligible to the legitimizing mechanisms of colonialism and capitalism.

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