The clean-up crew
Filipinos are everywhere, we like to say. On cruise ships, in hospitals, in restaurants all over Spain. We sing in hotel bars, push prams in parks with the babies in our care, pack the pews in churches in Italy. We’re so ubiquitous, we’re even in the Epstein files.
Fortunately—despite the country’s reputation as a haven for pedophiles, pornographers, and sex traffickers specializing in babies and young boys and girls—the Filipinos named in the files do not seem to be victims of sexual abuse by the Mossad agent and convicted international sex trafficker par excellence Jeffrey Epstein, he who catered to and encouraged the depraved sexual proclivities of the rich and powerful.
And fortunately—or not, depending on one’s aspirations to entry within elite circles—there do not seem to be any emails, be they gushing or pithy, from any of our own rich and powerful, not to mention those who delude themselves into believing they are such, indicating that they were ever guests at Epstein’s islands or at any of his many homes and orgiastic parties.
Everywhere and nowhere, all at once
Unfortunately—and not exactly surprisingly—the Filipinos in the Epstein files are like Filipinos in most places: everywhere and nowhere, ubiquitous, but unseen. Invisible, but indispensable.
The majority of the Filipinos in Epstein’s life were hired as the clean-up crew. They were the household help who cleared tables of bottles of booze and plates of food, who roused drugged-out girls who should never have been there, and mopped up floors streaked with blood and semen and who knows what else.
Did they know what was going on? Did they know about the rapes and the torture and the cannibalism? Did they know, for instance, that the Israeli billionaire Leon Black raped a girl as young as seven years old—allegedly—then bit her private parts, and even jammed sharp objects inside her until she bled?
Did they feel anything for the young girls who were trapped in the laps of men who moralized in their public lives, but were completely amoral in their most private moments?
A nation of scrubbers
They were just doing their job, they would probably say if asked. Sir Jeffrey said to do this. Ma’am Ghislaine told me to do that. I’m just following orders.
One wonders if they ever thought to themselves as they changed soiled sheets, “Salamat sa Diyos, Sir Jeffrey and his friends only like white children, otherwise it could be kids that look like my own on this island,” before reaching for their rosary and saying their nightly novena.
Cleaning up for Jeffrey Epstein meant more than the physical labor of housework. Even after he was convicted, Filipinos were employed by him to work behind the scenes in the virtual world. Hunched over their screens, they toiled diligently, scrubbing the internet clean of references to his criminal activities, planting articles that portrayed him in a more favorable light, and altering search optimization results.
We are, indeed, a nation of scrubbers.
Refusing to be scrubbed clean
Some of us even scrub ourselves clean of our own Filipino-ness. Just ask the deluded tita in the United States who had a hysterical fit when Bad Bunny performed at the Super Bowl. A certain (and almost certainly MAGA) Joslyn, an American citizen of Philippine extraction, came out railing against the Puerto Rican superstar for not singing in English. Notwithstanding the fact that she sounded just as unhinged as Megyn Kelly on Piers Morgan’s show, Tita clarified that she couldn’t possibly be racist because she was Filipino herself.
So why was she so offended by Benito singing in Spanish, his native language, and, let’s be honest, the mother tongue of most of America? As we were reminded so poignantly at the finale of his show, the United States is but one country in the whole of what constitutes America: Puerto Ricans, Venezuelans, Jamaicans, Antillians, Brazilians, and so on—We are all Americans, was the message implicit in the parade of flags…
It was impossible to watch Bad Bunny’s half-time show and not realize this was a watershed cultural moment. Yes, the singer used it to showcase his Puerto Rican heritage unapologetically as a massive fuck you to ICE, white supremacy, and the politics of division. Yes, he knew that it was still a commercial event; after all, Apple Music and the NFL stood to make millions from the show—and yet he was adamant that he would do it his way.
And yes, he understood the profound symbolism of all the elements of his show, and the power of resistance through joy, music, dance, and community, all the things he and his people have refused to allow to be scrubbed clean from their identity.
Cleaning up one’s act (or not)
If Joslyn had been less willing to conform to what she believed it meant to be an English-only please American in the United States, she might have grasped the affinities that have bound the fates of the Philippines and Puerto Rico for over a century, since both Spanish colonies were sold as part of a package deal to the nascent imperial power in 1898. She might have realized that speaking English was never the guarantee of access or respect that she imagined it to be.
And let’s not even get into how English is essentially a Germanic language, not “American” at all, or that the roots of “American” football come from the United Kingdom.
What’s quintessentially American, Tita might ask? There are many things, but they all flow from one central delusion: that they are the greatest people in the greatest nation on earth.
They’ve clearly never traveled much. Probably busy scrubbing history clean of their unprecedented cruelty, greed, and dishonesty. I just wish they’d stop employing Filipinos to do their dirty work.
