Vernadette Vicuna Gonzalez grew up “a rural country girl” in the Visayan islands of the central Philippines, but she was educated at an American missionary school and was fluent in both English and Visayan.
She was 11 when her parents moved the family to upstate New York. The move involved some culture shock, but there was no language barrier. Gonzalez has been a U.S. resident ever since.
After high school, Gonzalez earned a Bachelor of Arts in English at Princeton University. She took a year to explore a career in law, then continued her education at the University of California, Berkeley. She received a doctorate in ethnic studies, with a designated emphasis in women, gender and sexuality, in 2004.
Gonzalez, 48, joined the faculty of the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2006.
In February, Gonzalez celebrated the publication of her second book, “Empire’s Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper,” (Duke University Press, $25.95). The book is a challenging examination of the American occupation of the Philippines (1898-1946), as personified by the life of the Philippine-born entertainer. Until now, Cooper has been best known as the unacknowledged mistress of Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
How did you discover Isabel Rosario Cooper?
When I wrote my first book, “Securing Paradise: Tourism and Militarism in Hawai‘i and the Philippines” (in 2013), things about MacArthur kept popping up. At some point, something came up that confirmed that there was this woman that was sort of this interesting party to the whole MacArthur story. Her story was always told in a particular way, and as I dug deeper it bothered me because I knew it was more complicated than that — and it turned out that it was.
The approach you take is unusual — it’s part documented history, part analysis and part reimagining events as they might have happened. How did you develop it?
It actually took me forever to settle on that. The early drafts are very much just writing out her story, but as I started digging deeper, so much of the actual documentary evidence that I was basing my stuff on turned out to be fluff. That inspired me to start thinking about the forms of evidence that we base our scholarship on and also the forms (of evidence) that survive. Some of it, around people like her, and even around MacArthur, are things that are really ephemeral.
Isabel Cooper’s American father married her mother in the Philippines, at a time when many Americans did not marry the Filipinas they had children with. He then took his wife and their children back to the United States. How does that fit in to the story?
That’s a hard part to figure out. He even identified (Isabel’s mother) as the beneficiary of his pension as a soldier, but there is little evidence about that portion of their life.
Exploring a phrase you use in the book, what are “alternative past conditional temporalities?”
Thinking through “what ifs?”. Sometimes it’s a really prescriptive way that histories are told that gives you a lot more room to think of agency (control over one’s life). Even if certain things did happen in a particular way that there are interpretations to those things which exist outside the desires of dominant historical narratives.
How does “Empire’s Mistress” fit in with your previously published work?
It fits in because I’m mostly interested in questions of empire (colonial rule). You can look at somebody like Isabel Cooper as somebody who becomes a vehicle but who also becomes an agent of the kind of desires that drive imperialism and also push back against it.
Are you working on another book?
I’m the series editor of the “Decolonial Guide” series with my co-editor, Hokulani Aikau. We started with “A Decolonial Guide to Hawaii” in 2019, and we are shepherding teams working on Okinawa and Palestine. In terms of my own work (as an author), I’m playing with some fiction, but I don’t know yet where it’s going to go.
Editor’s note: “Detours: A Decolonial Guide to Hawai‘i” (Duke University Press, $29.95) is a collection of writings that reinvent the traditional travel guide to redirect readers to a multilayered understanding of Hawai‘i’s culture and complex history.
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Reach John Berger at jberger@staradvertiser.com.
