Charting the Course of Filipino Nurses Abroad in Gil Portes’ ‘‘Merika’
The wave for Asian representation in Hollywood over the past decade hasn’t seemed to apply as equally for the Pinoy community. Despite comprising 19% of all Asian Americans, Filipino artists haven’t had the same breakthrough into the public consciousness, and the cultural portfolio that they have accumulated in the mainstream has been thin. Filipino narratives in American media have been described by researchers as being one of low visibility and misplaced representation, which is unfortunate given their significant contributions to the US – particularly in the field of healthcare.
'Merika (1984), directed by Gil Portes, explores the daily life of one such Filipino healthcare worker. The film observes the routines of Mila Cruz (Nora Aunor), a Filipina woman splitting her time between working as a nurse and an elderly care worker against the backdrop of New Jersey in the 1980s, a time when Reaganomics were taking shape in the US and the final years of the authoritarian Marcos era were in sight back home.
Through this single woman’s lens, we are granted access to the history of this massive labor niche whose tradition reaches back more than a hundred years.
The presence of Filipino nurses in the US stems from the time of the Spanish-American War (1898), under the diplomatic veneer of ‘benevolent assimilation’, American powers rejected the notion of an independent Philippines. The following 48-year occupation left lasting impacts on several institutional pillars.
After the war ended, a group of American schoolteachers called the Thomasites arrived en masse to lead the pedagogical transition from Spanish to English. Their core objective? Serving the “imperial vision of assimilating Filipinos into American culture and raising a young generation of followers”. The same period saw the first usage of a Filipino workforce within an American-run medical practice, when practitioners tuned the existing infrastructure across the archipelago into centers to isolate and treat tropical diseases.
The decades of cultural assimilation, along with droves of demand for healthcare workers abroad through different valleys of the 20th century, have prepped a workforce that is now situated firmly at the frontlines of the American healthcare system – notably during watershed moments like the second World War, the AIDS crisis, and most recently, COVID-19. Today, the Philippines is the largest provider of nurses worldwide, including those 150,000 nurses who have made their way to the States since the 1960s. The remittances from these nurses and other Overseas Filipino Workers (OFW) have often served to stimulate the economy during critical moments back home: in 2021, remittances accounted for nine percent of Philippine GDP, of which nurses contributed a quarter.
‘Merika has a quiet, gradual nature that allows us to walk with Mila while she goes about her routine as a nurse, then a caretaker, a churchgoer in an ethnic-specific parish, a single woman mixing amongst other young immigrants, and a companion to her roommate, Violet (Marilyn Concepcion). As she transitions between her roles, she takes the NYC subway, whose swell of commuters renders her briefly recondite. She then comes home to Violet as the two of them debrief the day’s happenings while the television hums its regular scheduling, met with general disinterest by our pair.
Several other scenes – ones of wake, after work, and even those of romance, happen around the roulette of talk shows playing on Mila and Violet’s small screen. The television acts as a soft barrier, a debuff against the gaze of the camera lens and the actor’s conscience, allowing the audience to take part in this decompression routine along the actors, as Gil Portes pays particular attention to these faces against a muted palette of realist influences coalescing the convention of ‘80s Filipino cinema.
There is an identifiable theme of an unseen isolation here. One is not isolated here in the orthodox sense, or in a sense that is common for most films covering the plight of migrants. An obvious parallel is Nora Anour’s most well-known work, Miracle / Himala (1985), where a woman becomes a stranger to herself and her town after supposedly being subject to a Marian apparition – seeing what is outwardly perceived as a blessing slowly becomes a burden on the person as time passes. There is a lush community in the Pinoy neighborhood of Manila Drive, New Jersey. A suite of characters among them the well-off green carder, the naturalized apartment-hunting genteel, the snazzy roommate taking the board exam, and the situational romance from the West Coast (Bembol Roco, best known for Lino Brocka’s Manila in the Claws of Light [1975]) – help bring the teeming, communal narrative to life.
They all inhabit fairly cozy spaces, drive comfortable vehicles, and still speak their native tongue. Outside of English, Tagalog was the seventh most spoken language in the eighties (third currently). When Mila even thinks of leaving, a friend reminds her that she’s in a position which invokes the envy of the thousands of others back home who would probably sell their souls for a spot on their roster. It is a materially evident, asset-filled world that will only appreciate with the swipe of a credit card.
Despite their apparent fulfillment of the American Dream, there is still a certain desolation, unique to Mila and a few others. Kapwa is a core Filipino value meaning "shared identity" or "togetherness," based on the idea that the self is deeply connected to others. While she is wired within this privileged community of natives, she cannot break the emotional tether to her homeland and her relatives who live under very different circumstances.
With principal photography taking place mainly throughout New York and New Jersey, there are no scenes that take place in the Philippines. Nevertheless, the native perspective is provided by a friend of Mila’s whose voice is transmitted in the form of monologued letters. She is a faceless compatriot delivering local context, and her social work drives her purpose and her community. This makes the motif of the unseen, left behind all the more sentimental.
That is the choice and dilemma that she faces through most of the film – whether to return back to her place of origin that is most familiar and mutual, with the trade-off of the comfort that she has accrued in the West. This film was shown recently at Sri Lanka’s National Film Corporation as part of its Philippine Film Festival, and shares a glaring similarity with cultures of migration in countries like Sri Lanka, with its exacerbating levels of brain drain, and many other Asian countries facing the same issue.
For those of us that envision a future where the grass is greener, Portes presents an outlook on the intrapersonal dynamics that come about the longer you start to lay on that field. You may choose to see yourself in Mila, who wishes to return, but you may also see yourself in Violet or the others who choose to remain. ‘Merika is simply a film of choice, set at a time when the most noble of dreams are still possible. Yet, you still look back and wonder whether everything that you wanted was always back home.
-Chathuka
Comments