Pacific Power ( Honolulu, Hawaii )

Waikiki Beach in Honolulu is much like Station 1 in our own Boracay beach except for a myriad more of a population of tourists. Station 1 in our own Boracay is where three to five star hotels or high end resorts are located. There are hundreds of thousands of tourists that add up to millions visiting Honolulu each year compared to Boracay’s a hundred thousand only each year. While Boracay beach also caters to Filipinos like you and me, Waikiki beach in Honolulu caters to a group of tourists who are able to afford the almighty US dollar and so these are the Americans, the Europeans & rich Asians like the Japanese & Koreans. What is also markedly noticeable is that many of these rich Asian tourists are yuppies or the young, upward mobile people who are visiting for holidays or holding honeymoons after weddings away from a large kinship relation at home. Noticeable also is that there are no child peddlers or street hawkers in Waikiki that one sees in Boracay. 

I harbor mixed feelings of sadness and joy that most of our Filipinos are relegated as minimum wage workers in the scheme that is Hawaii. Joy because these Filipinos have work unlike many in the Philippines. Most of these Filipinos are of course of American citizenship already. Almost all the housekeepers in hotels and even in the East West Center residence halls of the University of Hawaii are Filipinos or with Filipino parentage. I was particularly sad to have met a case of a student who is a Filipino blood American & who no longer identifies himself with Filipino roots. My sense is that it has something to do with not willing to be grouped under the working class category. After all, as a student one can easily climb up the social mobility ladder. So, I hope that he does not represent a wider sentiment. 

There are no noticeable informal settlers in the beaches nor near the central business district of Honolulu and so for me the place felt so synthetic and unreal. I hear that the working class lives in another part of the Oaho island where Honolulu is. While there, no one remarked to me about the fact that at some point, Honolulu in Hawaii was where former President Ferdinand Marcos & party sought refuge or exiled themselves. It just seems strange for me now why the United States would offer itself to host a former President Marcos in its shores.  

 Some friends & I organized our own visit to the Pearl Harbor while some of our fellow delegates opted to visit the palace of the old monarchy. As we know, the attack on Pearl Harbor by Imperial Japan on December 7, 1941 led the United States into the Second World War. It was not lost on me that the Second World War happened after the 1938 depression. It has been reported that the movement or deployment of US naval marine personnel in the Pacific has increased by ten percent in recent days. So, let’s hope that our oceans are really pacific and that world power is used to promote peace. My visit to Honolulu a few days ago was for a sociolegal meeting under the auspices of the Law & Society Association. 

One of the many themes that is relevant as we are celebrating our June 12 Independence Day is sovereignty. The Kingdom of Hawaii was sovereign (much like our sultanates which were older) from 1810 up to 1893 when the monarchy was overthrown by a resident American & some European businessmen. Hawaii was an independent republic until 1898 when it was annexed by the United States as a territory. It became the 50th state of the United States in 1959. Today, Hawaii is regarded as a settler society much like Mindanao and so they are also beset with sovereignty issues as evidenced by an active sovereignty movement with a well defined advocacy formulated up to the US Congress. These self determination issues dates back to 1898 (at about the same time as our own Philippine Independence) or since the so called 1898 annexation which these sovereignty advocates consider as a prolonged military occupation. It is called “ancestry based sovereignty” and highlights the rights of the indigenous peoples. 

The common backlash argues that “ the use of racial classifications is corruptive of the whole legal order which democratic elections seek to preserve …distinctions between citizens solely because of ancestry are by their very nature odious to a free people whose institutions are founded upon the doctrine of equality.” Of course, like our own Mindanao conflict & ancestral domain issues, most claims for hereditary political power are about land claims, particularly who owns ancestral domains