Asian Americans: An Overview

Asian Americans are those groups and individuals in North America (some prefer to expand the scope of the term to include all countries of the two Americas) who trace their ancestry back to Asia. Asian Americans by this definition include all Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, East Indian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Malaysian, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Cambodian, ethnic Lao, Hmong, Thai, and all other Americans with ethnic backgrounds in Asia. Many include Pacific Islanders under the rubric of Asian Pacific Americans, so that Samoan Americans and Tongan Americans, for example, are included in the mix

El verbo del filibusterismo : Narrative Ruses in the Novels of José Rizal

Schoolchildrn learn his Ultimo Adi6s by heart. University students, although not those of the Universidad de Santo Tomsis, are required to read his two famous novels. Citizens gather annually around his statue in Luneta Park, site of his December 30th execution. Some pray to him as to a saint, before domestic altars displaying his portrait. He is indeed the patron-saint of the Filipinos: 1 the apostle, martyr and patriot; the man who, according to one biographer, single-handedly awakened the Philippine people to national and political consciousness. 2 A precursor to Gandhi in his advocacy of Asian nationalism, Dr. Jos6 Rizal y Alonso, born in 1861, became a hero of modern Third World nationhood when he denounced the violence of Spanish colonialism in his novels Noli Me Tangere( 1887) and El Filibusterismo(1 891). For doing so, he was shot by a Spanish firing squad in 1896 at the age of 35. Together with Rizal\u27s speeches and articles, the two novels are often credited with sparking the Philippine Revolution, which began two years after his death, in 1898, only to be cut short by the intervention of the United States, engaged at that time in its own war with Spain

Crossing the Water: A Photographic Path to the Afro-Cuban Spirit World (review)

This book is one that speaks to the true believers in its readership as well as to academically based students interested in Afro-Cuban religion. Note that it does not attempt to analyze or interpret in the fashion of Mercedes Cros Sandoval’s World-view, the Orishas and Santería (2006), or historicize Afro-Cuban religious thought in the manner of Stephan Palmié’s Wizards and Scientists(2002). Nor does it attempt to connect the practice with political and ideological developments, as does Christine Ayorinde’s Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution, and National Identity (2004)

Sovereignty and Social Justice: The Haitian Problem In the Dominican Republic

THE ISSUE OF DOMINICAN SOVEREIGNTY with regard to the rights of those of Haitian parentage seeking to secure Dominican nationality came to the fore recently in the case of Haitian rights activist Sonia Pierre. The Dominican Central Electoral Board produced evidence that Pierre’s parents obtained citizenship for their daughter, born on a sugar plantation in the Dominican Republic in 1963, by irregular means – that is, with forged documents. Legislator Vinicio A. Castillo Seman invoked the United Nations Assembly Resolution 869 IX General Assembly of 4 December 1975, Article 8, to the effect that the revocation of nationality can be justified in the cases in which it is proven that citizenship was obtained through fraud or false statements. Pierre, argued Castillo Seman, would not remain stateless as a result of the revocation, insofar as the Haitian constitution guarantees Haitian nationality to children of Haitian parents regardless of the place of birth. Confirming or consolidating Pierre’s claim to Dominican nationality, he asserted, would set a dangerous precedent of jus soli, or citizenship based on the territory of birth, for all Haitians seeking to obtain Dominican citizenship through similar channels

The 'Replacement' Chief Executive's Two-Year Term: A Pure and Unambiguous Common Law Analysis

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Santeria Healing: A Journey into the Afro-Cuban World of Divinities, Spirits, and Sorcery (review)

Taking a fresh approach to its subject, Swedish anthropologist Johan Wedel contributes to the field of ethnomedicine in Santería Healing, giving a human face to Afrocuban religion by presenting a series of case studies of santería\u27s real practitioners. The author announces his aim early on: to develop an understanding of how santería healing works, how it is carried out, and how it is experienced (p. 4). In developing his thesis, Wedel applies the qualitative methodology of the participant-observer, drawing on numerous interviews he carried out primarily in Havana and Matanzas during fifteen months\u27 fieldwork from 1996 to 2001

Inter-American Commission on Human Rights

An institution of the Organization of American States (OAS), the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, was crea\u27ted in 1959 and is an important part of the system designed to promote and protect human rights in OAS member states. The commission draws its mandate from two basic documents applicable to all OAS member states: the OAS Charter (1948) and the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man (1948). Its duties expanded with the creation of the American Convention on Human Rights in 1969 and with subsequent human rights agreements. For those states that have signed and ratified these more detailed and binding Inter-American human rights treaties-the American Convention on Human Rights (1969), its Optional Protocol on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (1988), the Protocol to Abolish the Death Penalty (1990), or the Inter-American Convention to Prevent and Punish Torture (1985)-the commission, in conjunction with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, is also responsible for overseeing states\u27 parties\u27 treaty obligations

Staging the Nation: Claro M. Recto’s Domestic Dramas

Near the beginning of a prolific and productive career as a writer and statesman, Claro M. Recto (1890-1960) authored two prize-winning dramas that were performed at the Manila Grand Opera House. Each of the plays—La ruta de Damasco (1913) and Solo entre las sombras (1917)—is a drama that represents the interactions of an ilustrado family in its relationship to the imposition of cultural practices and power structures under American rule. This essay proposes that in these dramas written by an ilustrado and performed for an interpellated ilustrado audience, the ilustrado home stands as a metonym of the nation, its family a synecdoche of the national community. As such, whereas the plays express the nationalist stance identified with members of the ilustrado class of educated elite, the dialogic enactment of tensions and conflicts among their ilustrado characters serves to work out the contradictions within the class and at the same time to legitimate the class’s hegemony and accommodationism in a Philippine society subjected to American colonial rule. The protagonists of La ruta are nationalist newspapermen who, facing persecution and censorship under the colonial government, are offered the choice between collaborating and resisting. The central character of Solo is a medical doctor who, in his struggles to conceal the fact of an adulterous relationship, reveals the effects of a “violent saxonization” that has undermined Philippine custom and identity. Both dramas thus complicate the post-1899 reimagining of the Philippine nation: as a community to be represented and led by what Osmeña called the “directing class,” which would declare nationalist objectives and defend the notion of a “Philippines for the Filipinos” while testing the limits of resistance to the American colonial institutions and registering the effects of their newly introduced values and practices on Philippine society during a time that saw the rise of the Partido Nacionalista of Osmeña, Quezon and Recto

Findings of a Recent Inquiry into the Background and Causes of a Dissociative Identity Disorder in the Case of an American Subjust of Filipino Descent

You who will be thrown one fine day into this kindergarten in Southern California You, the only child in your class with this brown skin Bat nose big ears slitted eyes wide feet and black black hair Who will ask why you feel so short and skinny dark and bony foreign strange and other, And later, your head on your mother\u27s lap, asking--Why am I different, mom? You who will wear the clothespin on your nose and Scotch tape on your ears and keep out of the sun speaking only English watching Beaver and wondering whatever happened to the Cleavers\u27 colored neighbors You who will become an insurgent native colonial subject little brown brother or science project or but always the childlike primitive in need of civilizin

God and Trujillo : Literary and Cultural Representations of the Dominican Dictator (review)

A large body of works on the Dominican dictator Rafael Leo´nidas Trujillo Molina (1891–1961) went largely unknown in its breadth and multiform complexity, at least outside certain literary circles, until the appearance of this significant 2005 study by Ignacio Lo´pez-Calvo. Lo´pez-Calvo describes the scope of his book in these terms: ‘‘Besides contributing to the rescue of the voices of numerous Dominican authors and testimonialists from oblivion, this study adds further insight into the lasting effects Trujillo’s ironclad rule had on the Dominican psyche, on the formation of the Dominican nation, and on the contemporary political arena’’ (xv). Such insights are substantiated by the book’s astounding catalog of atrocities committed under the aegis of the dictatorship, whose monstrous abuses were masked in general by the regime’s own ‘‘extreme style’’ but also justified, perhaps most notably, in the invocation of the providential principle ‘‘God and Trujillo’’ by ‘‘first courtesan’’ and heir to the Trujillist legacy, Joaquı´n Balaguer