A LETTER TO PEDRO ALSO CALLED PETE BY: RENE ESTELLA AMPER

 The poem “Letter to Pedro, U.S. Citizen, also called Pete” is a response to the on-going reality of Filipino immigration to foreign countries to seek greener pastures due to a calamity of problems the Philippines is facing as reflected by the sentence enjambment, melancholic imagery, blatant satire and double persona.

Aside from form, the author presents powerful melancholic imagery of the past relationship between the author and Pete or Pedro. The author accomplishes this by establishing a sense of difference in time wherein the past and the present are his main tools for comparison. In the thirteenth line, the unknown author describes how the river wherein the boys were circumcised (the act of becoming true men was often referred to by circumcision in the bible) is none existent because of the new bridge built on its foundations.

This may symbolize how the common places and land that Pedro grew up in has drastically been altered since his departure; leaving these unrecognizable. The author of the letter also enforces blatant satire in his descriptions of the old town because of the images of hegemonies, corruption, colonial mentality, poverty, prostitution, death and secularization present in Philippine society