JESSICA HAGEDORN AND THE ART OF DIASPORA

 Mixtapes of Power and Memory: Jessica Hagedorn and the Art of Diaspora

By Alex S. Fabros, Jr.

 

Jessica Hagedorn writes as if language were a DJ booth and the world a crowded dance floor where history, rumor, film, and prayer keep cutting across each other’s tracks. Her work—spanning poems, novels, plays, and anthologies—samples the Philippines and the United States with the same restless ear, folding Tagalog into English, gossip into scripture, politics into pop. The mix feels effortless until you listen closely and hear the edits: hard cuts where other writers would fade, jump-cuts that refuse to explain themselves, choruses that return with new harmonies because time has changed the singers. What might look like collage for collage’s sake is something graver and more generous: a method for holding together people whose lives have been disassembled by dictatorship, migration, and the markets of art. Hagedorn’s art says that if the archive is broken—and in the Philippines, as in many diasporas, it often is—then montage is the closest thing we have to truth. [1]

That insight arrives fully staged in Dogeaters (1990), her breakout novel and still the book by which many readers first learn the sound of her voice. Manila, in those pages, is not a map so much as a frequency: you tune in and there are radio soaps, disco lights, generals and movie stars, beauty queens and priests, all humming at different volumes while the Marcos regime manages the board. Hagedorn refuses the comfort of a single protagonist. She hands the mic to waiters, actresses, soldiers, gossip columnists, and their readers; she lets them speak in their own registers, sometimes contradicting one another, sometimes harmonizing by accident. The effect is not merely stylistic. By scattering point of view, she exposes the politics by which power hides in performance. A coup plot becomes a rumor becomes a magazine spread; a murder becomes a memory becomes a movie treatment. And because the novel refuses to adjudicate which voice is “the” voice, readers are forced into the position that authoritarian cultures most fear: we become editors of our own attention. [2]

 

Attention, in Hagedorn, is a moral act. To attend to a rumor is not to dignify it; it is to ask what need made it travel this far and this fast. To attend to a body—of a dancer, a maid, a soldier—is to admit that the nation is written on skin as much as on paper. In Dogeaters, the state’s obsession with spectacle becomes a mirror for the diaspora’s difficulty with memory. If everything is staged, what counts as history? Hagedorn’s answer, delivered through a thousand small scenes, is that history is what survives the edits. The regime can choreograph parades and suppress headlines, but it cannot fully erase the way a mother’s voice changes when she warns a daughter to be careful, or the way a waiter learns to read the faces at a table before the orders are spoken. She trusts those minute adjustments—those acoustics of survival—more than she trusts any official archive. [3]

 

Her next novel, The Gangster of Love (1996), trades Malacañang for Mission Street and the East Village. If Dogeaters is a film reel spliced by a nervous censor, Gangster is a live set—improvised, reckless, tender—about a band of friends trying to turn migration into music. Rocky Rivera, the novel’s singer-protagonist, leaves Manila with her family, lands in 1970s San Francisco, and learns a new grammar: the timing of a joke in a language that isn’t yet home, the muscle-memory of playing to a room that isn’t yet yours. Hagedorn knows bands from the inside; the novel’s title nods to a Johnny “Guitar” Watson track and to her own performance history. But the scenes of rehearsal and touring aren’t included for texture; they are the point. A band is a school in how to share risk. You learn who listens, who overplays, who insists on the solo when the song needs a chord. In a migrant story, that lesson is survival. Rocky’s romances and stage fright, her mother’s fury and her brother’s drift, all ride the same bassline: what do you owe to the people who tuned you when you were out of key? And what do you owe yourself when the room asks you to sing an anthem you no longer believe? [4]

 

Where Gangster follows departure’s aftershocks, Dream Jungle (2003) goes back to the archipelago to expose how empire directs the movie of other people’s lives. It braids two plots that never quite touch and yet make a single indictment. In one strand, a wealthy “discoverer” claims to have found a Stone Age tribe in Mindanao, and the world’s press obliges. In the other, a Hollywood production arrives to shoot a jungle epic that looks and smells like Apocalypse Now, at once riff and rebuke. The conceit is brilliant and bleak: anthropology and cinema, each with its own aura of authority, are shown as industries of staging. When innocence is a product, paid for by bodies and landscapes, the question is not whether a hoax has been perpetrated but how many people have to participate before the lie looks like truth. Hagedorn did the reporting, interviewing people around Lake Sebu and tracking the afterlives of a scandal that still stains the national imagination. The novel refuses easy verdicts because the damage exceeds blame. A tribe turned into a spectacle cannot simply be restored by an op-ed; a film that renders a country as atmosphere cannot be undone by a think piece. Hagedorn’s fiction does the slower work: it teaches readers how to hear the hum of consent and complicity behind the official soundtracks. [5]

When Hagedorn moves to New York in Toxicology (2011), she keeps the same ear for the economies of art—sex and money, mentorship and rivalry, inspiration and intoxication—but the mix is more metropolitan comedy than postcolonial fever dream. The novel’s artists and hustlers orbit fame like moths around a stubborn bulb. The satire is savage and affectionate. A younger writer’s hunger sits beside an older artist’s fear; a patron’s attention arrives with strings that no one has learned to see until they’re already knotting. Hagedorn doesn’t sermonize; she lets talk do the work, and the talk is perfect—gallery back rooms, bodega stoops, late-night cabs. The joke lands, then the ache. You laugh, then you remember that talent alone rarely pays the rent. And this, too, is a diaspora story: how communities of color make worlds in cities that would prefer them as backdrops or brands. [6]

 

Threaded through the novels is the poetry and performance that taught Hagedorn how to cut. Danger and Beauty (1993) gathers work from the late 1960s forward, including Dangerous Music and Pet Food & Tropical Apparitions, and you can feel in those poems the downtown tempo that the later fiction amplifies. The poems are crowded with media and myth; they address lovers and regimes with the same offhand precision. They are also manuals for the jump-cut: change angle, hold for breath, drop the needle on a different beat. In the poem “Arts & Leisure,” a list becomes a liturgy becomes a ledger of debts; the poet-as-editor chooses what to keep and what to cut, knowing that in a colonial archive, the decision is never innocent. Reading the poems after the novels is like listening to demo tapes once you know the album: the bones of the sound are all there, and the confidence of the mix makes sense. [7]

 

Hagedorn’s editorial work proves that her aesthetic is also an ethic. Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction (1993) and its 2004 sequel, Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World, gathered an unruly chorus and insisted that this was not exotica but a literature. The titles are a dare: a racist caricature is dead, and in his place stand writers with their own styles, stakes, and countries of reference. Editing, for Hagedorn, is not a side gig; it is a public art, a way to build rooms where other voices can be heard without apology. She extended that curatorial instinct in Manila Noir (2013), a map of the city’s shadows that reads like community reportage under the sign of genre. Good noir cares less about whodunit than about who profits; the anthology works the same way, tracing how crime, money, and survival braid into daily life. [8]

 

If the anthologies are rooms, the stage is a plaza. Hagedorn adapted Dogeaters for theater, premiering at La Jolla in 1998 and later at The Public in New York. Onstage, the novel’s prismatic media becomes breath and light: bodies moving through a sonic city, gossip rising like steam, soldiers and singers sharing the same air. The productions answered a question that has haunted Filipino and Filipino American writers for decades: can our stories travel without losing their accent? Hagedorn’s answer was to put them where they belonged—in public, where the noise of power meets the noise of people. The play’s chaos wasn’t a flaw but the point: authoritarian glamour survives by staging itself as inevitable, and the stage can teach us how to see the wires. [9]

 

Her career’s geography—Manila childhood, San Francisco adolescence, New York adulthood—maps onto the arc of late twentieth-century Filipino and Asian American arts. San Francisco gave Hagedorn the apprenticeship of small rooms: readings where the mic cuts out and the crowd has to finish your sentence for you, lofts where dancers and poets trade techniques, the intimacy of an audience close enough to call you by name. New York gave her the velocity of big systems: publishing’s distribution and its exclusions, theater’s reach and its risks, the way an art world can anoint and erase on the same day. She moves in both with the same suspicion of simplicity. Her fiction remembers that Manila is not “the Philippines,” San Francisco not “the Bay,” New York not “America.” Places are plural. People who leave learn this with their bodies; people who read Hagedorn learn it with their ears. [10]

 

The politics in Hagedorn are not thesis paragraphs; they are decisions about form. Who gets to speak, and for how long, and in what language? Who gets a close-up and who is kept in the background? Who tells a story and who edits it? These questions run from Dogeaters through Dream Jungle to Toxicology, resurfacing in minor details that become ethical hinges. A background radio ad for skin whitening sits beside a lover’s compliment and cancels it. A journalist’s staged “exposé” becomes a family’s eviction notice. A director’s creative genius remains parasitic no matter how ravishing the footage. Formal choices—voice, cut, frame—are political because the world itself has already been edited by power. Hagedorn’s answer is not to pretend she can restore what has been cut, but to show the seams and refuse the lie of seamlessness. [11]

 

Sound matters because power sounds a certain way. Authoritarian regimes love a strong signal: the leader’s voice on the radio, the anthem at the rally, the speech that lasts too long. Diasporas live with static: accents interpreted as errors, mixed codes treated like noise. Hagedorn makes music from the static. She lets mistaken translation become rhythm. She lets gossip do investigative work. She lets the balut joke return and return until it stops being an insult and becomes an index of who is in on the bit. In her pages, you hear an ethics of mishearing: the willingness to stay in a conversation long enough to learn what you didn’t think you needed to know. That patience is seductive, which is why her books have lasted beyond the seasons of their first acclaim. [12]

 

Readers often ask whether Hagedorn is “American” or “Philippine,” as if the shelf required a passport. The work rejects the border check. It insists that literary citizenship is a practice—who you read, who you cite, who you build stages for—not a visa. The novels tour the Philippines and the United States because the history does; the poems steal from radio because the radio stole from us; the anthologies propose a canon because the existing one left too many names off the list. In that sense, Hagedorn belongs to a lineage of artist-editors—think of June Jordan, Ishmael Reed, Audre Lorde—who understood that a book is not just a book but a room, and sometimes a room is a rehearsal for a country not yet born. [13]

 

There are critiques to make, as there should be for any writer with range and influence. Some readers want Dogeaters to condemn more clearly, to offer a verdict that might comfort the prosecuted conscience; others want Toxicology to lance the art world without mercy. Hagedorn refuses the salve. She seems to believe that the first job of a novel is to produce experience—felt, complicated, unanxious about contradiction—and that readers who want manifestos can find them elsewhere. The result is a body of work that stays dangerous. It cannot be reduced to “representation,” though it represents; it cannot be drafted into any single program, though activists have drawn strength from its pages. This resistance to instrumentalization is itself political. It protects the space where language remains wild enough to surprise us into a better attention. [14]

 

To teach Hagedorn is to teach listening. I have watched students hold a line from Dogeaters like a seashell and swear they can hear a city in it. I have watched others stall in Gangster, irritated by the cool of characters who refuse easy pathos, and then return weeks later having recognized that cool in the mirror. I have seen young writers read Dream Jungle and suddenly have words for the ethics of fieldwork, for the seductions of “discovery,” for the way a camera can make a liar of a land. And I have listened, gratefully, as performers turned the Dogeaters script into breath and sweat—proof that the literature was always already theater, because power always already was. [15]

 

Near the end of The Gangster of Love, Rocky understands that a song survives when a room agrees to hold it. That may be the most accurate description of Hagedorn’s project: to make rooms—on the page, on the stage, in anthologies and workshops—where voices can be held without being tamed. The rooms are noisy because life is noisy; the rooms are mixed because the world is mixed; the rooms are provisional because nobody gets to live there forever, and that is why we keep writing. In an age of platforms that confuse amplification with care, Hagedorn’s practice remains a counter-lesson. Care is editing. Care is curation. Care is knowing when to pass the mic and when to cut the track. [16]

 

We live now in the mediasphere that Dogeaters predicted: presidents as influencers, influencers as policy, the monetization of rumor. If the novel feels contemporary, it is not because the Philippines stands in for everyone else but because Hagedorn understood earlier than most that the state would learn to perform itself in public, and that the public would learn to perform itself for the state. What she offers in response is not a politics of purity but a craft of discernment. Watch the light. Listen for the jump-cut. Ask who gets paid when innocence is sold. Keep a private ear for the unamplified voice in the next room. She gives us, in other words, a reader’s manual for the present, disguised as art. [17]

I keep returning to the first time I taught Dogeaters to a room of students who had never set foot in Manila. They recognized the architecture of gossip before they recognized the geography. They knew the triage required to parse a newsfeed. They had learned, without naming it, that a regime is a playlist and that survival requires more than endurance—it requires taste. Taste, for Hagedorn, is not snobbery; it is the discipline of attention trained by love and by harm. It is the willingness to follow a whisper across a crowded room because you know the whisper has done more work than the speech. Her fiction trains that willingness into a habit. It makes better listeners of us, and in a world tuned for noise, that is a political achievement. [18]

 

If you ask why the work endures, the answer is simple and difficult: Hagedorn refuses to flatten what hurts. She refuses to polish history into allegory or identity into emblem. She keeps the edges. She keeps the noise. She keeps the off-rhythms of people who must change keys mid-song because the bandleader left or the cops arrived or the visa expired. And she insists that this, too, is beauty. Not the beauty of symmetry, not the beauty of a locked groove, but the beauty of a mix that holds. In her hands, the mix holds because she trusts her listeners. She assumes we can keep time while the room shifts. She assumes we will learn the chorus even if it breaks our throats. She assumes we will pass the mic. [19]

The diaspora is a long night with too many stations, and Hagedorn has been among the most faithful deejays: cueing the track we didn’t know we needed, cutting the noise we thought we could not live without, and reminding us, with every crossfade, that the dance floor is a commons. She does not ask us to agree on a song. She asks us to care for the room so that the next voice, and the next, can be heard. That is the ethic inside the aesthetic; that is the politics inside the pop. It is a hard ask in a culture trained to hoard attention. It is also the only way the music goes on. [20]

 

 

___________

Endnotes

[1] Jessica Hagedorn, Danger and Beauty (San Francisco: City Lights, 1993); Jessica Hagedorn, Dogeaters (New York: Penguin, 1990).

[2] Timothy Yu, “Asian American Literature and the Question of Form,” in The Cambridge Companion to Asian American Literature, ed. Crystal Parikh and Daniel Y. Kim (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 101–118; E. San Juan Jr., “Philippine-American Postcoloniality,” Critical Inquiry 23, no. 3 (1997): 726–765.

[3] Resil B. Mojares, House of Memory: Essays (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1999), esp. “The War against Memory”; Vicente Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000).

[4] Jessica Hagedorn, The Gangster of Love (New York: Penguin, 1996); Catherine Ceniza Choy, Global Families: A History of Asian International Adoption in America (New York: NYU Press, 2013), for diasporic kinship frames.

[5] Jessica Hagedorn, Dream Jungle (New York: Viking, 2003); John Nance, The Gentle Tasaday (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975); Thomas Headland, “The Tasaday Controversy: Lessons for the Anthropological Community,” Current Anthropology 31, no. 2 (1990): 123–127.

[6] Jessica Hagedorn, Toxicology (San Francisco: City Lights, 2011); “Best of 2011” lists in San Francisco Chronicle, various contributors, 2011.

[7] Hagedorn, Danger and Beauty; chant-like forms discussed in J. Martin Favor, Authentic Blackness and the Early Asian American Novel (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), as a comparative lens for montage.

[8] Jessica Hagedorn, ed., Charlie Chan Is Dead: An Anthology of Contemporary Asian American Fiction (New York: Penguin, 1993); Jessica Hagedorn, ed., Charlie Chan Is Dead 2: At Home in the World (New York: Penguin, 2004); Jessica Hagedorn, ed., Manila Noir (New York: Akashic, 2013).

[9] Dogeaters, adapted for the stage by Jessica Hagedorn (La Jolla Playhouse, 1998; The Public Theater, New York, 2001); production notes and reviews archived at La Jolla Playhouse and The Public Theater.

[10] Oscar V. Campomanes, “Filipinos in the United States and Their Literature of Exile,” in Reading the Literatures of Asian America, ed. Shirley Geok-lin Lim and Amy Ling (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992), 49–78.

[11] Lisa Lowe, Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 1996), for form as social critique; Neferti X. M. Tadiar, Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004).

[12] Allan Punzalan Isaac, American Tropics: Articulating Filipino America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), on static and signal as diaspora figures.

[13] June Jordan, Civil Wars (Boston: Beacon, 1981); Ishmael Reed, ed., The Before Columbus Foundation Fiction Anthology (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992); Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider (Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984).

[14] Dorothy Wang, Thinking Its Presence: Form, Race, and Subjectivity in Contemporary Asian American Poetry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014), on resisting instrumentality.

[15] Theater pedagogy notes from courses on Asian American literature and performance (author’s teaching files), 2004–2018; see also Robyn Rodriguez, Migrants for Export (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), for student frameworks on labor and spectacle.

[16] José Esteban Muñoz, The Sense of Brown (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), for care and curation as aesthetic practice; additional reflections in Arlene Dávila, Latinx Art (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020).

[17] Patrick D. Flores, Past Peripheral: Curation in Southeast Asia (Singapore: NUS Press, 2008), on spectacle and state; Roland Tolentino, Sine Gabay: Philippine Film (Quezon City: U of the Philippines Press, 2001).

[18] Classroom observations and student response essays (author’s teaching files), anonymized; see also Crystal Parikh, Writing Human Rights: The Political Imaginaries of Writers of Color (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017).

[19] Jessica Hagedorn, interviews in BOMB Magazine, various years; Jessica Hagedorn, conversations with the Asian American Writers’ Workshop (recorded events).

[20] Lisa Yoneyama, Cold War Ruins: Transpacific Critique of American Justice and Japanese War Crimes (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), for commons and memory as contested spaces.

 

 

*****

Alex S. Fabros, Jr. is a historian and writer specializing in Filipino American history and the multiracial communities of California’s Chinatowns. A combat Marine veteran and longtime educator, he has contributed to public-history and documentary projects—including work tied to Delano Manongs and PBS’s Asian Americans—and completed the dissertation Settlements on the Outskirts of Anglo Conformity: Fresno’s Chinatown, California, 1872–1965. His publications span social history, biography, and creative nonfiction, and he advocates for community archives and intergenerational storytelling.