Notes on the Concept of Balikbayan, Notes on Eileen R. Tabios’ novel The Balikbayan Artist
By Michael Caylo-Baradi
The initial outline of these notes was presented in a book discussion of the novel, at the Echo Park Branch Library in Los Angeles (California), with the Carlos Bulosan Book Club, on 19 July 2025 @ 2pm.
One of the sunniest ideas that reigns imperial in the imagination of the Filipino diaspora is probably the concept of balikbayan, the court of celebrations attached to it, gushing of pride for one’s roots, framed in fantasies and acts of warmth, kindness, and generosity. Questions of loyalty will always be deployed on the figure of the balikbayan itself, albeit cautiously, for the spectrum of identities it holds and sponges from other national territories, as serendipitous or conscious layering for their identity as Filipinos. At heart, the balikbayan nurtures a degree of calculation in giving and gifting, through technologies associated with packages, shipment, and cargo delivery systems. Balikbayan is a portmanteau of balik (return) and bayan (town/nation), a convergence of two Tagalog words that hopes to appropriate signification for a figure returning back to the Philippines from abroad, after residing there for an extended period of time, for years, now longing to return to one’s hometown or birthplace, to feel the warmth of family and friends again.
Tracing the origins of the dramatic and melodramatic registers of the balikbayan concept, as we know today, may take us to the early history of the Tagalog language itself. But the term may have gained traction when it acquired a certain currency in the economy of feelings and emotions coterminous with colonial occupations for centuries, when arrivals and departures became the rhythm of expatriation, immigration, and other forms of prolonged habitation in foreign territories, particularly cosmopolitan mobility. To a large extent, Spain and the United States held the position as codes for distance and foreignness, in the Philippine context. They were the archipelago’s main colonizers; and thus, in time, their subjects acquired degrees of natural and/or forced affinity, and aversion for their colonizer’s state of mind, ever curious about its culture, especially their point of origin, wherein the colonized would end up working, visiting, and residing there, in droves, in the postcolonial era. This affinity and sense of closeness was more pronounced during the American occupation, since the U.S. recognized the value of injecting the English language into the cultural milieu that Spain has left behind in the Philippines, unlike Spain’s preference to continuously alienate the Philippines from learning the Spanish language, unless where the church is concerned. Like Spain, the United States also understood that language is an apparatus for inculcating culture into a territory. But as a fledgling and hyper-ambitious empire, the U.S. was impatient to reign over the islands, along with Puerto Rico and Guam, through a process of assimilation deemed less oppressive and psychically violent than Spain’s tenure and governance; for the Philippines, that process and policy was called Benevolent Assimilation, as proclaimed by U.S. President McKinley, in December 1898. And thus, from the nineteen thirties to the mid-sixties, Filipino migration to the United States for employment, mainly blue-collar, had a steady flow, even though it was highly monitored by immigration authorities, through a quota system.
As implied above, the concept of balikbayan, in the early part of the twentieth century, was, no doubt, still abstract among Filipinos in the U.S., though one might recognize the nature of longing for return to homeland in Carlos Bulosan’s semi-autobiography America is in the Heart (1946). The text dedicates a chapter of Bulosan’s life before leaving the Philippines for the United States, where Bulosan recounts life in vivid, idyllic terms, despite the life of poverty he was born into; here, Bulosan becomes a kind of balikbayan when he returns to the Philippines as text on the page, through stories styled like a fictional narrative, and lyricism textured with nostalgia:
The infusion of memory in art; art as a site of return to one’s homeland.
Bulosan’s misfortune, in the context of his struggles as an immigrant, was that he never lived long enough to witness and be a part of the Civil Rights Movement in 1964, a movement that tried to address the state of race relations in the United States, which deeply challenged the quota system in the country’s immigration policies. By 1965, on the 3rd of October, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Hart-Celler Act, also known as the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, a law that abolished the quota system in immigration policies that once favored immigrants from western Europe. This legislation terminated discrimination on certain categories in the issuance of immigration visas based on race, sex, or nationality. The law ushered a new era of professionals and skilled workers migrating from Asia and Latin America that would challenge the largely homogenous American workforce into one that, after decades of its implementation, becomes dizzyingly diverse. Filipinos became part of that diversity.
Roughly a decade after the United States passed the 1965 immigration law, there was a palpable critical mass of those who left the Philippines for the United States that wanted to return, either to visit briefly bearing gifts for family and friends, travel the country like tourists, or settle for good. The regime of President Ferdinand E. Marcos recognized this growing phenomenon in the mid-1970s, and gave the concept of balikbayan a new dimension, through the Department of Tourism, by launching the Balikbayan Program from 1973 to 1975. The program offered a host of benefits and privileges, such as travel tax exemptions, expedited processing of documents, and duty-free shopping privileges, among others; in many ways, the regime understood the desire and longing of overseas Filipino workers, primarily in the U.S., to return home, and become tourists, or retirees. But more so, Filipinos returning home became the target audience for the regime to showcase its purported achievements in the country, that perhaps if the country can host the Miss Universe competition in 1974, the Philippines - under President Marcos - must have done something laudable to its economy, and the country, in general. The Balikbayan Program was renewed a few times, and is still alive today, perhaps a significant instigator of visions for sectors in the hospitality industry, especially hotel management, transportation, and the arts and crafts sector, ever creative and artistic to produce a variety of souvenirs for the country’s guests and visitors.
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In Eileen Tabios’ The Balikbayan Artist, its protagonist, Vance Igorta, is a balikbayan, whose living arrangements in the town of Surat is defined by certain comforts that includes a cook to prepare his meals, and the means to procure materials for his art, since he is a painter. These comforts are the result of two disparate income sources, first as a pensioner of Munificent Artistic Paints, where he was employed before leaving the United States, and second, quite surprisingly, from the CIA, or the Central Intelligence Agency; he is under the payroll of the United States government. At times, Igorta’s CIA connection appears to have the weight of a footnote, as though his role as an instrument of espionage in that institution is inconsequential, since Tabios tends to concentrate on his identity as an artist in the novel. It’s a tendency that pulses with organic urgency throughout the novel, since the story aims to extract a spectrum of colors endemic to the struggles and politics of the Philippines, through the sensibilities and consciousness of a U.S.-trained artist of Filipino descent.
At one point, Igorta claims, quite innocently, that “he hasn’t done anything for [the CIA]” yet; and by that he meant he hasn’t procured any information for the CIA significant enough to create an operation that might involve an arsenal of documentation and physical intervention. In a way, this claim is true, but, technically, he has undeniably done something for the CIA already by accepting their sweet offer, through a personal contact, to become a spy or “watcher”, when he returns to the Philippines; the idea is to become one of the organization’s moles to keep track of the state of the country, under the regime of President Caasi, Jr., to observe and gather information at ground zero, within the population, away from information and insights about the country that’s filtered through annual reports and news stories. The CIA is particularly interested in information about China, the United States’ main rival in the arena of geopolitics; information on China’s infiltration into daily life in the Philippines would, no doubt, be highly desirable. However, the novel doesn’t quite elaborate on why China is an object of interest, here, but by mentioning that country’s name, in that light, we can surmise that it’s pointing at growing cracks in Sino-Philippine relations due mainly to recent territorial disputes in the West Philippine Sea.
Incidentally, Igorta’s role as spy makes him more attentive to President Caasi’s dictatorship; Igorta becomes a kind of tourist into the political climate of the country, immersed in a variety of challenges and dark forces, not to mention those who resist and oppose that regime. Igorta’s shadow identity regurgitates and crawls inside him, desperate to see the light: which emerges into the light of his studio and the light of insights that becomes his diptychs, the two-paneled paintings that occupies the critic and artist in him, where one painting offers an image derived from daily life and culture in the Philippines, and the opposite side offers an illumination and meaning of what that image might be: a kind of critique for the first image, a moment to teach, and, quite deterministically, a moment to be didactic in the viewer’s sense of the ethical and moral.
For example (on page 159), he paints a diptych where the left panel shows a sari-sari store that features a sign with the words SARI-SARI, and the right panel shows the same image but with a sign that displays a different phrase: SAFE HOUSE! Often family-owned, a sari-sari store usually embeds itself by the entrance of its proprietor’s residence, or as an extension to the entrance, equipped with an opening or window big enough for transactions to take place, during service hours, but small enough to discourage thieves and kleptomaniacs to reach for things in the store, since the store is, basically, a private space; customers stay outside the store, and ask for what they need to purchase. The sari-sari store’s success and popularity as a business model hinge on the array of items available for customers who often live around the neighborhood; it’s like a diminutive version of a walk-in convenient store selling toiletries, snacks, food seasoning, cigarettes, drinks, candles, or batteries, just to name a few, which is precisely the reason it’s a sari-sari store, the term means variety. A sizable capital is not required to start a sari-sari store, that’s why they proliferate in low-income areas, where the grit to survive emboldens one’s tendency for business. Its ability to generate a steady income flow offers a safety net of having a reliable source of livelihood all year round. Perhaps the label SAFE HOUSE in the second panel points at the resilience of sari-sari store owners, a safety net of some sort, against the endless tide of struggles and calamities enabled by the country’s political economy that contours their ability to hope for the future. Here, Igorta, like Bulosan, also becomes a balikbayan through art. In critiquing and being didactic, Igorta returns to his country of birth and offers an alternative dimension of that country, a space of fantasy, visions, and perceived truths, on as many canvases as he can deploy his vision.
At one point, Vance Igorta was forced to reveal his CIA affiliation to someone named Juan, one of the rebels against the regime of President Cassi, Jr, which Igorta has sequestered in his home. Here, the revelation allows Igorta to protect Juan from those who are looking for him; in fact, the CIA is instrumental in taking Juan out of the Philippines for safety, to make him disappear for a while. Helping Juan underlines a certain allegiance to a cause, one that critiques the current state of the Philippines through protests on streets, and other forms of disruption. But as someone affiliated with the CIA, however serendipitous and temporal Igorta’s affiliation might be, it’s hard to dismiss Igorta’s sense of allegiance for the United States, as well, having worked, and studied art there. He bears a Filipino’s highly textured relationship with the U.S., colored with a history of disenfranchisements, of being marginalized, which, to an extent, echoes the atrocities and injustices employed by Spain on the islands for three centuries. And however weighted Igorta’s sense of loyalty is between the Philippines and the U.S., it floats on an artist’s mode of contentment and preoccupation, who happens to be a retiree, as well, oscillating between poles, bifurcated by distinct identities, as Filipino and American. And one wonders to what extent Igorta imagines himself being in the first world, while living in the Philippines. The country doesn’t have the power of the first world quite yet, in a number of contexts. The CIA feels that Igorta is useful, because they want someone who has intellectual inclinations, immersed in a world of ideas, one who can report to them perceptions and dissatisfactions, in layered form, from the ground, on the state of the U.S. bases in the Philippines and the region, at a time when China is also showing its muscles over Taiwan. In this context, between China and the US, the Philippines appears like a small entity, indeed, though within the world of art, the Philippines is art itself, a creed of hues as colorful and/or monotonous as items being shipped through a balikbayan box to the provinces, to a neighborhood in one’s childhood brimming of laughter and dreams to be somewhere else, in the near future.
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Michael Caylo-Baradi is an alumnus of The Writers’ Institute at The Graduate Center (CUNY), directed by André Aciman. His work has appeared in The Adirondack Review, Hobart, Kenyon Review Online, The Galway Review, Galatea Resurrects, London Grip, New Pages, PopMatters, and elsewhere. His debut pamphlet Hotel Pacoima came out in 2021 from Kelsay Books. In another name, he has been an editor’s pick for flash features at Litro Magazine.
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