89can identities, a topic already present in Hagedo-
rn’s first novel, DOGEATERS. Spanning the period
from the 1970s to the early 1990s, The Gangster
of Love depicts the life of Rocky Rivera and her
family and friends. Rocky moves to the United
States as a teenager with her mother and brother
in 1970, leaving her father and sister in the Philip-
pines. Once in her new country, she forms a rock
band called The Gangster of Love and witnesses
the counterculture of 1970s San Francisco and Los
Angeles and 1980s Manhattan. Rocky’s path mir-
rors loosely the life of Hagedorn, who also moved
from the Philippines to San Francisco after her
parents’ divorce, formed a rock group called The
Gangster Choir, and later moved to New York.
As Rocky deals with her heterogeneous cultural
background, she acknowledges her ambivalent
feelings toward both the Philippines and older
Filipino Americans like her mother Milagros, her
uncle Marlon, and the street poet the Carabao Kid.
She understands their life choices better when she
becomes a mother herself in the book’s second
part, and even more when Milagros becomes ill
and dies in the third part. The fourth part depicts
Rocky’s return to the Philippines to visit her father,
a physical and personal journey providing an an-
tithesis to her emigration to the United States.
Through its portrayal of Rocky Rivera’s family,
The Gangster of Love reflects on the Philippines’
history of colonialism and neo-colonialism. It fo-
cuses particularly on the migration processes from
the islands to the United States and vice versa,
which closely reflect this history. Rocky’s and
Milagros’s past in the Philippines and their lives
in the United States merge in the vignette “Side
Show,” which closes the novel’s second part. It de-
picts the trial of Imelda Marcos, the wife of Presi-
dent Ferdinand Marcos, whose turbulent regime
lasted from 1965 until 1986. Rather than dealing
with Imelda’s guilt and fate, however, Hagedorn
describes the feelings of Rocky’s mother, aunt, and
uncle during the trial.
Rocky’s personal development is also inter-
twined with her exploration of love and sexual-
ity. The main catalysts for her development are
her musician boyfriend Elvis Chang and her art-
ist friend Keiko Van Heller, two Asian-American
characters of mixed backgrounds. Elvis and Keiko
encourage Rocky to reinvent herself and not be
defined primarily by her ethnic, socioeconomic,
and family background. In contrast to Dogeaters,
which investigates the relationship between iden-
tity and cinema, Rocky’s search for identity is por-
trayed in connection with her love for rock music.
Her aesthetic sense is most powerfully shaped by
ethnic minorities’ art forms, particularly black and
Asian American, and her experiences as a Filipina
in the United States strengthen her affinity with
the history and image of America embodied by
these artistic traditions.
Like Dogeaters, The Gangster of Love uses nar-
rative techniques associated with postcolonial
and postmodern writing, such as fragmentation,
parody, and pastiche. It also blurs the boundaries
between historical accounts, personal stories, and
fiction. The novel questions who and what makes
history, mixing historical references with gossip
and interspersing the narrative with dreams, fic-
tional script fragments, dictionary definitions, and
statements by both famous historical figures and
fictional characters. By doing so, The Gangster of
Love intensely examines how personal identities
are constructed across racial, ethnic, national, so-
ciocultural, and gender categories.Bibliography
Davis, Rocío G., ed. MELUS: Special Issue on Filipino
American Literature 29, no. 1 (Spring 2004).
Miles, Chris, Jessica Heerwald, and Tina Avent.
“Voices from the Gaps: Jessica Hagedorn.” Avail-
able online. URL: http://voices.cla.umn.edu/vg/
Bios/entries/hagedorn_jessica_tarahata.html.
Downloaded September 23, 2006.
Sengupta, Somini. “Jessica Hagedorn: Cultivating the
Art of the Melange” (December 4, 1996). Available
online. URL: http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/
poets/g_l/hagedorn/about.htm. (Reproduced
from Nando Times. URL: http://somerset.nando.
net/newsroom/magazine/ thirdrave/dec496/stars/
1204me.html). Downloaded on July 21, 2003.Marta Vizcaya EchanoGangster of Love, The 89