With American Idol entering its final
week, Jessica Sanchez-mania in the Philippines has hit fever pitch.
Social networking sites have been flooded by Pinoy Pride campaigns
about the AI finalist. She was the banner story in the news program
State of the Nation where Jessica Soho called her as our kababayan.
News about and pictures of Sanchez hogged the front pages of
broadsheets. Even Malacañang
jumped on the bandwagon, with Abigail Valte urging Filipinos to
“please show your support in any way possible for Jessica Sanchez.
This is the last stretch and we know that when Filipinos gather and
put their minds into it, it will happen.”
Is Jessica Sanchez a Filipino? The
legal system obviously does not distinguish her to be one. Mainstream
pop culture does not recognize her as Filipino as well. She is
competing as an American idol after all. But for her millions of
adoring Filipino fans, these distinctions don't matter. To their
mind, she is one of their own as blood and kinship lines are salient.
For them, Jessica is as much a Filipino as naturalized basketball
player Marcus Douthit is not, legal distinctions of citizenship
notwithstanding.
Some say that this is just another
expression of a Filipino penchant to reclaim foreign celebrities as
one of our own. We have our love affairs with Apl.de.Ap, Nicole
Scherzinger, Bruno Mars and other Hollywood celebrities with
fractions of Filipino blood. The claim, however, that this is a
distinctively Filipino attempt to desperately reclaim national pride
is bullshit as other countries and cultures have engaged in similar
reclamation projects as well. Kenya and the rest of the African
continent celebrated Barack Obama's presidency as the ascent of one
of their own into the height of political power. More recently,
Jeremy Lin's out-of-nowhere rise to basketball stardom captured the
imagination of East Asian - Taiwan and China in particular – as a
fairy tale of a son that has done right to overcome the obstacles of
living in a foreign land.
These various attempts by people to
construct connections along ethnic lines look surprising only in the
context of modernity's self-description of having overcome such
“traditional” distinctions. Modern society fancies itself as
rationally guided by a functional world view as opposed to the
personalistic world view of traditional society. In making a choice
between modalities of a social object, the modern professes using
performance and achievement instead of attributes and qualities as
guides to action and choice. The modern would ask, “can't we just
admire Jessica Sanchez because she's a good singer and not because of
some imagined transcendental connection?” But this is naive
modernity, because the reality is that people still find meaning
using these personalistic distinctions. Behind its rational veneer of
modernity, our society still rests on foundations shaped by practices
of ascription. Life chances – including one's fate in a talent
contest – are shaped not just by some instrumental
performance-based criteria but also by personal attributes, networks
and a dose of serendipity.
