The Invisible Country: Hiding in plain sight, Part I

Even at its peak, Fanny’s stature was never as high as that of other all-male or mostly male bands—not surprising given that the industry was then and is now male dominated. INQUIRER FILE

NEW YORK—About a week ago, I watched Fanny: The Right to Rock, a 2021 documentary film by Bobbi Jo Hart, on public television. The all-female band, Fanny—the subject of the film—had been popular in the 1970s, and was formed and led by two musicians, June and Jean Millington, born in the Philippines to an American father and a Filipina mother. The family moved to Sacramento in 1961, where the sisters grew into adolescence, first learning to play the ukulele and then the guitar, musical gifts that helped them form friendships in high school that later led to the formation of the band Fanny that itself has undergone several iterations.

Praised by the late rock icon David Bowie for their originality, Fanny had several hits that made Billboard’s Hot 100 and earned a rave review from Rolling Stone, arguably rock music’s most influential journal. Fanny may not have been the first all-female rock band but they were the first to land a contract with a major label, Warner Bros., through its subsidiary, Reprise Records. The band toured worldwide, opening for such bands as Jethro Tull and Humble Pie. Apparently, they were a big hit in the UK. The cognoscenti knew about them and had high praise for the band. And other later all-female bands such as the Go-Gos, the Bangles, and the Runaways have cited Fanny as an influence.

After Fanny disbanded, June went solo, releasing three albums in the ‘80s. But she and Jean did still record together, coming out in 2011 with the album Play Like a Girl. The latest reincarnation is called Fanny Walked the Earth, with the Millington sisters and Brie Howard, an original band member. The band released its eponymous album Fanny Walked the Earth, in March 2018.

And yet even at its peak, Fanny’s stature was never as high as that of other all-male or mostly male bands—not surprising given that the industry was then and is now male dominated. Plus, the two mainstays, Jean and June Millington, are women of color.

Naturally I’m glad for the resurgence, the revival, of Fanny but its story is emblematic in many ways of the tangled and complex history of the Filipino diaspora in the US, with its roots in the US colonialist occupation of the archipelago, from 1898 to 1946. While there is much more awareness today, relatively speaking, of the more-than-a-century ties between the Southeast Asian nation and the US, a lot remains invisible due to the continuing elisions of our shared history—hiding in plain sight as it were.

It’s an invisibility that is surprising, given that an estimated 4.2 million Filipino Americans make up the second largest Asian-American population in the country, Chinese Americans constituting the largest. A major reason for that invisibility is the invisibility itself of the 1899 Philippine-American War, the brutal cataclysm that lasted for more than a decade and resulted in the colonization of the Philippines but usually subsumed in a majority of historical texts under the 1898 Spanish-American War, even though this lasted for only four months, while the 1899 Philippine-American War spanned more than a decade, from 1899 to 1913, with Filipino casualties of at least 250,000 and possibly as high as a million.

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I’ve written about the war before but it bears repeating, that absent knowledge of this conflict, a majority of Americans are ignorant of the context, the whys and wherefores, of the Filipino diaspora right in their midst. The shortest and unquestionably accurate reply to the perennial question, “Why are you here” is “We are here because you were there.”

There are other reasons for this invisibility. For instance, I often hear, especially from apologists for US imperialism, that the 1899 war happened ages ago, let bygones be bygones, etc., effectively delinking the present from the past and implicitly accepting the avowed blessings of being Uncle Sam’s burden, his little brown brother—and sister—,being led from darkness to the shining, consecrating light of civilization.

But we too share the blame. Even more of a rationale for this state of deliberately unmooring ourselves from our history is too often proffered in intercultural cum interracial marriages, especially between a Filipina and a non-Filipino male, who almost always is white.  (To be continued)

Copyright L.H. Francia 2023