Good evening everyone, for my second blog post, I would like
to touch on tourism in the Philippines, particularly regarding Bataan and how
it functions as a place of benevolence and forgetting.
Tourism functions with colonialism and capitalism because
you can put a price on the past. Tourists can take pictures of sites where violence
and death occurred. The past becomes a twisted commodity as each death recorded
in a statistic adds to the value of the picture you take. Thanotourism serves
as a way of capturing what is currently there but for the case of Bataan, it
serves as a time to forget the years of colonialism and exploitation in favor
of the heroic and savior narrative.
A place like Bataan takes on a new form of life for
tourists. They display a comradery between the U.S. and Filipino soldiers as
both suffered under the hands of the Imperial Japanese soldiers. There is a
suspension of the prior histories of racism that the Filipino endured when U.S.
had control of the Philippines. A sense of heroism ensues as a feel-good story
of the U.S. soldiers helping out their brothers-in-arms. Bataan also serves as
a location where the “little brown brother” and “big white brother” suffered
together, a kinsmanship that demonstrates solidarity through suffering and a
brotherhood that cannot be broken. This narrative also furthers the notion that
America plays the heroic role as General MacArthur famously said “I shall return”
and actually came back. It becomes a story like the movies where the hero comes back just at the right time to save the person in distress.
The act of viewing and standing at a site of a historical
battlefield like Bataan gives meaning to the benevolent U.S. military as the
tourist cannot fathom the prior history of occupation but to consume the relationship
the Philippines shares with their once-colonizer. While a lot of credit is
given to the Filipino for not giving up and fighting a long war, the idea of liberation
and victory is a U.S. only term. At the Bataan memorial, there is a 92 meter high cross that visitors that go on top of. Once at the top, you can see the landscape and visualize the war that went down. The ideas of suffering and struggling to survive are familiar to the scenery. There is a "tourist sublime" as the tourist is able to take a picture with ease with the historical backdrop of death and torture.
Thanotourism can be used to give the tourist a pat on the back for their ancestors and
how they did a great job. Histories are rewritten such as the fact as there was
a Philippine-American war that occurred less than a century ago where
exploitation was at an all-time high.
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