Operation Homecoming: The Great Society, the New Society, and Cold War Balikbayans

• In Event: The Misery Index: Sites of Resistance and Revitalization in Southeast Asia

Abstract

This paper considers the extent to which collective miseries produced from the violences of labor, displacement, and migration of Filipino diasporic peoples might be appropriated into liberal institutional reform by the political leaders and governing bodies tasked to represent them. In 1973, Philippine president Ferdinand Marcos issued Letter of Instruction No. 105, which initiated a “Homecoming Season” for all “Overseas Filipinos,” particularly those living in the United States and Europe. He urged them to return to “their homeland and see for themselves the positive changes under the New Society.” Widely understood as the beginnings of the balikbayan program, critics point to Marcos’s call to these Filipinos not only as a means of stifling any growing resentment and discontent abroad but also as a way of acquiring their good graces and securing their foreign dollars through tourist activities and/or family remittances. However, a critical facet of such a discussion must consider that such an operation was leveraged as a necessary next “stage in the movement” of the New Society. Set into motion only one year after his declaration of martial law, the program reveals much more than a scheme to secure foreign revenue but accentuates a much broader attempt to internationalize the Philippines. This paper insists that Marcos’s program capitalized upon the United States’ work in previous years to liberalize immigration reform under Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society anti-communist platform. It further considers the collaborative efforts made by Johnson and Marcos – especially through their Manila Summit on the Vietnam War – to cultivate the Asia/Pacific region as the preemptive site of global reform and modernization. In these ways and others, the paper offers some preliminary conjectures – not on Marcos’s and Johnson’s appropriation of “Filipino America” but on their very creation of it.

Author

• Josen Masangkay Diaz, University of San Diego (CA)