Book Review of Pinoy Stewards

Book Review of "Pinoy Stewards In The U.S. Sea Services" BY ALLEN GABORRO (FilAm Star, December 10, 2010)by Allen Gaborro Writer's Page on Monday, December 20, 2010 at 9:49pm

TITLE: Pinoy Stewards In The U.S. Sea Services: Seizing Marginal Opportunity
AUTHOR: Ray L. Burdeos
PUBLISHER: AuthorHouse
211 pages
nonfiction
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Former US Navy and Coast Guard steward and now-author Ray L. Burdeos is so calculatedly detailed and prolific in his portrayals and reminiscences of his days in the service that he appears to find it easier to describe the faraway past rather than bring attention to the contiguous present. Even in those relatively few times when the present leaps out in Burdeos’s thoughts, the past invariably creeps in as subjective footnotes and as applicative historical material.

Burdeos’s newest addendum of his time as a steward in the US Navy during the 1950’s and 60’s, titled “Pinoy Stewards In The U.S. Sea Services: Seizing Marginal Opportunity,” invokes the memories of those Filipino seamen, including himself, who emigrated to a new world, a world that perhaps they had emigrated to without fully realizing what was in store for them as foreigners in an intolerant atmosphere.
The history of the Filipino stewards in the US Navy and Coast Guard is not exactly well-known to people. Burdeos, whose authority on this subject is very personal and reinforced by his impressive memory, addresses how Filipinos came to enter the US Navy and Coast Guard in the first place. He writes how the departure of African Americans from the US Navy’s and Coast Guard’s staff of stewards from the 1950’s up to the 1990’s made positions available for Filipinos in the two services.

Burdeos preserves the history of the Filipino stewards by boiling down his text into a register of personal narratives that are ascribed to individual stewards. Burdeos engrossingly records his memory of these fellow Filipinos who were friends and colleagues of his. In joining the US Navy and Coast Guard, these Filipinos were obliged, in Burdeos’s view, to begin building their new lives by confronting and absorbing the alien American culture in which they found themselves in: “Filipinos had to assimilate to the American way as much as possible to be understood and accepted. Since they were the newcomers, it was just proper that they had to adapt the American way of doing things.”

In the chapter on United States Coast Guard Commander Zacarias S. Chavez, Jr., the commander’s daughter Christine acknowledges her father’s sacrifice and hard work in realizing his ambition to reside in America. Christine gives credit to her father for what he accomplished in the Coast Guard and for impressing upon her and her siblings the value of discipline and of having “the competitive spirit” that would be an essential cornerstone for securing a bright and prosperous future.

Not easily given to the perfect image attributed by many Filipinos to Americans, Burdeos does a short chapter on Master Chief Quartermaster Rogelio L. Reyes palpably racist experiences in the US Navy. In Reyes’s words: “The whites generally didn’t want to associate with Filipinos. They always gave the impression that they were superior…they kept a distance from us.” With African American servicemen, it was something of a different story for Reyes. For him, they “had their own problems with the white superiority.” Yet Filipinos somehow “found ways to get along with blacks.”

Ultimately, what did it mean for these Filipinos to be able to serve in the US Navy and Coast Guard? Largely, it meant being able to go and stake their claim in the land of opportunity. With clear notions of financial advancement and stability as the connective thread, most of these Filipinos, along with Ray Burdeos, stayed in the US after their service ended and eventually became American citizens.

Years from now, as new chapters of the history of the Filipinos in America are written, the story of Filipinos in the US Sea Services in particular will have been inextricably woven into that history. And no one is more qualified to tell that history than Ray Burdeos whose literary publications have become indispensable contributions to the understanding of Filipino American history.

ALLEN GABORRO