Slave in Homeland, Slave in Overseas: A History of Racial Discrimination Towards Filipinos in the United States During the American Occupation
Kas 111 (Colonial Philippines II) Final Paper
There has been a resurgence of hate crimes towards Asian people, including Filipinos, across the United States amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, mainly due to the xenophobic claims of Asians being the harbinger of the virus that caused the whole world to lock down. But whatever the motive, it would be undeniable to notice how racism by white Americans has become more obvious than ever before, through violence. However, a simple look at the history of the United States would quickly reveal how racism is inherently ingrained into American society since time immemorial, especially towards indigenous Americans, Blacks and Asians. It was as if a large chunk of their past would be wiped out if we remove all of the policies and incidents of discrimination that actively harmed minorities.
Look at their record with xenophobia towards Asians. Take for example the case of US Congress passing the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which was enacted by President Chester Arthur for the purpose of preventing the in flux of Chinese immigrants into the country, especially in the West Coast, banning them from emigrating to the US for 10 years. Around that time, a lot of Chinese people were poor and in need of a job after the Qing Dynasty just lost the two Opium Wars against Great Britain and France, leaving the whole country in debt. Not to mention that plenty of cases of crop failures and droughts had been occurring in China, and the news about gold mines in California attracted the Chinese to cross the Pacific and look for opportunities at the supposedly “Land of the Free”. What they encountered instead were verbal discrimination and physical harassment from white Americans who cursed them for “taking away their jobs”.
Filipinos in the United States also faced the same fate as the Chinese, the moment that they stepped their feet into the American soil. Being called racial slurs was a common practice, but there come some instances that things got really serious and violent. Some of those cases could even be considered so inhumane that no American would dare to have the desire to know that dark and embarrassing moment in their history. It is interesting to look at some of these incidents at contemporary American history, but there is also a need to take a glimpse on how Filipinos were treated by the whites in the United States during the period when our country used to be their biggest imperialist territory.
It all goes back to that war in 1898 between the United States and Spain that sparked because of the sinking of USS Maine in Havana, Cuba, falsely blaming its wreckage to the Spanish government. By that time, only the Philippines, Cuba, Guam, and the Marianas were the remaining colonies of the Spanish Empire that still they cling on so dearly. The commander of US Navy in the East, Commodore George Dewey was ordered form Hong Kong by then Assistance Secretary of the US Navy Theodore Roosevelt to sail to the Philippines. By May 1, 1898, Dewey and his more superior warships encountered the fleets of Admiral Patricio Montojo at the Manila Bay, easily crushing the Spanish forces. American military presence in the Philippines thus began.
With Dewey comes Emilio Aguinaldo and his men who came back to the country from Hong Kong as they agreed with the Pact of Biak-na-Bato with Governor-General Primo de Rivera. They thought it was time to continue the revolution against the Spanish Empire. A month later, the Filipinos declared their independence from Spain, with some Americans witnessing and honoring the event. The United States made it appear that they were the friend of Filipinos, only to stab them in their backs like what Brutus and his senator friends did to Julius Caesar. Without any regard to Aguinaldo’s declaration of independence, Spain and the United States made a secret deal in Paris on December 10, 1898, where the former ceded their remaining colonies to the Americans for $20 million, basically selling the Philippines to Uncle Sam. They even staged a pretend battle to made it appear that Spain was defeated with honor, mainly because they would rather surrender to their fellow white men than to inferior “Indios”.
The United States became Philippines’ new colonizer, with President William McKinley claiming that what they were doing was to enact “benevolent assimilation”, which means they wanted to guide Filipinos into democracy, believing that they were still too amateur to run a country. Right, as if those Americans were doing a good job being a democratic nation considering their racist history. The supposed friends suddenly turned into enemies the moment that Private William Walter Grayson fired that shot on February 4, 1899, prompting Aguinaldo’s First Republic to declare war against the Americans. But the newborn Filipino government was of course had no match to the weaponry and skills of American soldiers, and eventually surrendered. Dismissing that the First Republic was a legitimate government, the US only called the Philippine-American War an insurgency of rebels, as if they were a child having a tantrum that needs to be “pacified” by their mommy. But the extent of how the Americans belittled us does not end there.
Why did the US wanted to assimilate us into their territories in the first place? Easy, mainly because they simply cannot fathom the idea of a brown race running an entire nation. That a country not governed by white people is bound to be in a state of anarchy anytime soon. Hence, they felt the obligation of us being their protégé when it comes to proper governance. In an extremely racist and imperialist poem “The White Man’s Burden” which is about persuading the Americans to colonize the Philippines, its author Rudyard Kipling described the Filipinos in the most condescending way possible, calling us “sullen peoples, half-devil and half-child” as though we are in dire need of saving. In addition, during the Philippine-American War, some US troops who were about to face the revolutionary forces of Aguinaldo used to sing a chant called “Soldier’s Song” with these kind of lyrics:
In the days of dopey dreams — happy, peaceful Philippines,
When the bolomen were busy all night long.
When ladrones would steal and lie, and Americanos die,
Then you heard the soldiers sing this evening song:
Damn, damn, damn the insurrectos!
Cross-eyed kakiac ladrones!
Underneath the starry flag, civilize ’em with a Krag
And return us to our own beloved homes.
Calling Filipinos with slurs like “savages” or “thieves” or “uncivilized” was their twisted way of attempting to justify their colonial enterprise in the country. Political cartoons about Uncle Sam serving as a teacher or a disciplinarian towards bahag-wearing, spear-wielding, uneducated, barbaric, tribal Filipinos began popping up during the first decade of the 20th century. An 1899 cartoon, for example, depicted President McKinley in a swimming suit, bathing a brown-skinned Filipino child with other children on the background being worn clothes that resemble the American flag. What could be the best way to show to the world that subjugating brown people would be a good thing than to make it appear that introducing Western civilization to them is the necessary task of the white race? It is just funny how the Americans made efforts to introduce Christianity to the Philippines, considering the fact that it is already the national religion of the country for 333 years.
Perhaps one of the most disgusting aspects of American history when it comes to their racism towards Filipinos was that time when they established human zoos across the United States, displaying them for entertainment like they were a part of P.T. Barnum’s freak shows. At the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis, Missouri, also known as the St. Louis World’s Fair, one of the main highlights of the event was the people displays that came from all around the world, most of them being members of indigenous groups from various countries in Africa, Asia, Australia, and the Americas. They were meant to be anthropological exhibits to the American public to show to them how savage, uneducated, primitive, and backward they were, so that they would feel good about the idea of Western countries exercising their imperialist muscles to the country of origin of these human displays. This was a time when the idea of Social Darwinism was on its peak popularity, which asserts that those who have the most advanced civilization (in this case, the whites) belong to the most superior race.
Among the features of the St. Louis World’s Fair, the one that caught the attention of most audiences and generated the most revenue was the Philippine Reservation, which most comprised of Igorots from the Cordillera region. Public relation announcements advertised these Igorots as “head hunters, dog eaters, and cannibals” which naturally made more people curious to see them in action. Their settlements were recreated like those from their homeland, they were made to wear their traditional bahag attire, and just let them do whatever everyday task they were doing back home, such as hunting, eating, dancing, tattooing, playing traditional instruments, and many more, all in the name of highlighting how savage and primitive they were. There were even some instances of Igorots participating on spear-throwing contests, for the entertainment purposes of their American audiences. As much as they provided amusement to the general public in the US, the human zoos only made the perception of whites towards Igorot people and the Filipino community in general to be negative. It only fueled more anti-Filipino racism.
Another case of Igorot exhibits in the US was that in the amusement parks of Coney Island in New York City in 1905, and one thing that made it even more dubious was the illegal and inhumane recruitment of its organizer, Truman Hunt, towards the indigenous people. Hunt was a medical doctor in Bontoc, Mountain Province during the ongoing 1898 Spanish-American War, and vaccinated a lot of Igorots. He was trusted very well by the indigenous peoples there, but when came the news of Igorot people being in demand for 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, Hunt smelled an opportunity for a quick buck: by going to the US along with some groups of Bontoc people in order to establish a freak show of his own. This level of backstabbing just hurts more for the part of Igorots who thought Hunt was their good friend.
Aside from being a conman and a great opportunist, Hunt was also good at spicing his story up to the public, to further show just how primitive these Igorots can get. He made up a story about Igorots and white people who live in Coney Island having some kind of a “battle” to the point that they used pitchforks. There was also a fictional story about a dog being stolen and chased by some Igorots, as the press would narrate it, but in reality, Hunt stole that dog and commanded the tribesmen to chase it. This only exacerbated their reputation of the American public about them being dog-eaters. Igorots were also used for stage presentations with the purpose of demonstrating their “barbaric” cultural practices that would horrify the audiences. For instance, there was a Bontoc chief named Fomoaley Ponci who killed a live chicken in front of a crowd with a stick, then proceeded to burning its feathers and sprinkling its blood around their nipa huts, which was meant to be a religious ritual for remembering a dead elderly member of their tribe.
Meanwhile, with the Philippines being an American insular territory, also means Filipino expatriates going to the mainland US in order to either study, work, or migrate for good. They may all have unique individual experiences of their own, but the level of discrimination and belittlement that they experienced in their homeland, remained the same overseas. In flux of Filipino immigrants began surging during the 1920s and 1930s, especially in the states of California, Washington, and Hawaii. During these time periods, the majority of foreign immigrants who worked in the fields as a farmer comprised of Filipino Americans. They also labored in some Hawaiian plantations and commercial fishing vessels in Alaska. The white Americans of course did not like the fact that brown people were “taking away their jobs” and this only got way worse during the 1930s Great Depression, where the whole US economy was in shambles and unemployment rate was on its all-time high. Those Fil-Ams were also sometimes confused by the whites of being Chinese or Japanese immigrants, who arrived there before.
Another accusation towards them is that they were stealing away all of the white women for themselves, partly due to the fact that Filipino migrants were always hanging out at taxi dance halls during the 1920s, where the dancers (mostly white women) were being paid by their male patrons to dance with them. This is relatively equivalent to what we would call today were strip clubs. This paranoia from white men lately sparked into a call for a legislation to ban intermarriages between whites and non-whites, not to mention that this issue was mostly the reason why anti-Filipino riots occurred during the 1930s, like the Watsonville Riots. In a dance club owned by a Filipino man, that owner offered dances with nine white women, which really pissed off some white guys, which threatened to burn the dance hall down and beat them with their clubs. This later on spiraled into a series of riots that lasted for 5 days, which resulted to the death of one 22-year-old Filipino laborer named Fermin Tobera who was shot by one of the rioters.
But the truth is, most of these migrant Filipinos were just as struggling as most of the common American people. The education and job opportunities were dire, unless if you came from a family of principalia or ilustrados in the Philippines which means they had all of the money and the golden opportunity to become educated. Partly in response to the Jim Crow laws of segregating whites from non-whites, especially when it comes to workplaces, plenty of Filipinos in California banded together and built their own Filipino community in the town of Stockton. They organized and built establishments for everything that they needed such as grocery stores, restaurants, barber shops, social clubs, hotels, and others, making Stockton their “Little Manila”. Most of the migrants, who were mostly working-class Filipino men, were famously called as “Manongs” were beloved by most of the members of their community because of their valiant efforts to fight for their rights to have equal workers’ rights, fair wage treatment, and better working conditions, which eventually led to the live of future Filipino American generations way easier. These manongs paved the way for the likes of Larry Itliong and Philip Vera Cruz to be the icons of the labor rights of peasantry in the West Coast.
Stockton’s Little Manila may have provided them better opportunities, but that did not mean it kept them away from the dangers of racially motivated hate crimes from white Americans. On December 31, 1926, there were a group of white men thugs in Stockton, going around pool halls and hotels in order to look for some Filipinos to attack. Eight Filipinos and whites were beaten and stabbed in the process, but that one anti-Filipino local newspaper Stockton Daily Evening Record flipped the story and made it appear that it was the Filipinos who “ran amok attacking whites.” That incident was the very first recorded case of an anti-Filipino hate crime. It only got worse during the Great Depression. Around October 1929, mobs of whites stormed the farming camps of Exeter in Tulare County where Fil-Am fig farmers worked. They burned down bunkhouses, destroyed cars, beat up immigrants, and vandalized all around, with one graffiti saying “Work no Fils or We’ll Burn This Town Down.” In the span of 1927–1930, attacks against Filipinos were documented throughout California alone. There was even a bombing in the building of the Filipino Federation of America in Stockton.
Carlos Bulosan was a Filipino expatriate which became one of the greatest non-white literary figures in the United States, and also one of the most prolific socialist labor organizers. While staying at Seattle, Washington, Bulosan spent his early years experiencing discrimination on the workplace and forced to work low-paying jobs. He also used to work as an asparagus and grape farmer as well as a dishwasher both in California. Everything that we went through, including his hardships on doing his jobs and the racist sentiments that he encountered throughout his life, was expressed through his literary works. For example, in his semi-autobiographical novel “America is in the Heart”, Bulosan addressed one of the common racist stereotypes towards Filipinos about them stealing white American girls into marrying them.
In one of the excerpts of the novel, he talked about a story of a Filipino man with his American wife and their baby going into a restaurant in which they were denied of service. The owner of the restaurant shouted at the Filipino husband saying, “You goddamn brown monkeys have your nerve, marrying our women. Now get out of this town!” Then he proceeded into punching him, in which he fought back. The owner together with other white men in the restaurant ganged up and beat up the Fil-Am man. Afterwards, to add insult to the injury, two deputy sheriffs came inside the restaurant and arrested the Fil-Am husband. The fact that it was the Filipino who got taken away by the authorities instead of the white men who physically assaulted him is a reflection of just how normalized the racism towards Filipino Americans during that time, and arguably, up until now.
Other instances of Fil-Ams being dubbed as menaces to American society was those allegations of them being pedophiles who groom young white girls. In 1929, a 22-year-old Filipino lettuce farmer in Salinas named Perfecto Bandalan was arrested by the Watsonville police apparently for being in the same room with Chemick sisters Esther and Bertha, who were 16 years old and 11 years old respectively. The press told that Perfecto and Esther were engaged and the girl was sold to the Filipino man by her own mother. In the end, the man was convicted into prison for nine months for the crime of preying on young children.
Just like what African Americans experienced during the Jim Crow era, Filipinos also encountered incidents of particular establishments banning them from entering into. There is one photograph from 1930s, taken by someone named Sprague Talbott, of a hotel door in Stockton which bears the sign “Positively No Filipinos Allowed”. That picture became later on a poster, which had a caption at the bottom which says “Welcome to America”, a chilling reminder to everyone about what an average Filipino Americans had to go through in their everyday lives.
This now begs the question: what were the responses of Filipino wealthy expatriates in regards to this racism that their fellow Filipinos from lower classes constantly experienced? Did they at least do something about it? This is where the pensionados enter the picture. On August 26, 1903, the US Congress passed the Act Number 854 or the Pensionado Act, which granted Filipino students who were either really smart or just came from a filthy rich family of principalia class scholarships to prestigious schools in the United States. This was one of the American efforts to present the Filipinos to the world in a positive light, as well as to prepare them for governing themselves. Most of these expatriate students mostly studied law and medicine, with most of them ending up becoming prolific scholars, politicians, and scientists the moment they came back to the Philippines. Some of the most glaring examples of Filipino intellects being Carlos P. Romulo, Jose Abad Santos, Camilo Osias, Fe Del Mundo, and Encarnacion Alzona.
Since these pensionados were a symbol that Filipinos do not have the mind of an inferior race, they were also the ones who first challenged the idea of them being savage, uncivilized, and primitive, as those human zoos tried to establish to the American consciousness. Those expats who were studying across various parts of the United States, banded together and published a quarterly magazine called “The Filipino” which mainly aimed to give the American public some basic lessons about what is the Philippines, who are the Filipinos, what comprises Filipino culture. One editorial in that magazine directly criticized the way Americans portray Filipino stereotypes in media and about how the photographs from Igorot anthropological exhibits were deliberately designed to brainwash people into thinking that we have a backward civilization. They did not deny the fact that there were indeed “uncivilized” indigenous peoples in the country, but they particularly had a problem with Americans misapplying that characteristic to every single one of Filipinos with hasty generalizations.
However, in their attempt to show to the world how civilized and intelligent these pensionados were, some of them made statements on the magazine that ended up discrediting the Filipino-ness of other peoples in the Philippines, or at worst, belittle them down. In an article written by Rafael Acosta in “The Filipino” in 1906, he described how there are three kinds of Filipinos in the country: the first one being the “aboriginal savages” or the indigenous peoples in the mountains. the second being the Moro Muslims in the south, and the third being the Christian Filipinos, who he regarded as the civilized ones. Acosta claimed that it is the Hispanized Christian Filipinos who actually represent the Philippine islands in social and political terms. Talk about bringing your fellow kababayan down just to lift themselves up.
Other Filipino Americans though had their own methods on how to counter act the harmful stereotypes about them and to break down cultural barriers, like in the world of fashion. Take for example the case of Macintosh Studios, a store in San Francisco who tailored and sold suits in which during the 1930s were considered as the epitome of Hollywood men’s fashion. It was regarded as one of the makers of the finest and quality suit that would echo the word “prestige” onto whoever would wear them. Filipino Americans in California joined into the fashion trend, not only their way to assimilate into the American culture, but also to make efforts on breaking the “uncivilized” stereotype that plenty of whites still hold on to as their prejudice.
Bear in mind that during the time when Filipino Americans were going through all of these racist stuff, it was when the politics behind pushing for Philippine independence was taking place. People like Manuel L. Quezon was definitely aware about the plight of Fil-Ams who were constant targets of anti-Asian hate crimes across the United States. But why did not he do anything at least to address it to higher American officials? The Filipino elite in the Philippines was for sure concerned with all of this, but their hands were basically tied. This is because they feared that confronting and negotiating with the US government regarding racially-motivated violence against Fil-Ams might only sabotage their chances of having a deal to grant independence to the Philippines. The lack of discussions about anti-Filipino racism had only exposed that the idea of the US giving the Philippines its independence out of benevolence is dependent on the idea of Americans being racially superior to Filipinos, concealing their racism under the guise of benevolent assimilation.
Hegel once said that if there is one thing that we should learn about history is that nobody learns from history. The comeback of anti-Filipino violence in the United States just goes to show how nobody gives a damn on what was the plight of our fellow countrymen in the supposed “land of the free”. In fact, despite being a US colony for almost half a century, not once we were mentioned in most of the US History textbooks, let alone the experiences of Fil-Ams. The Philippines is nothing but a footnote to the past of the white man, and the more the American people were to become ignorant with the true stories of their marginalized communities, the more that they will be able to tolerate these kind of discriminatory thinking and practices in the future. This also goes to mention to the Filipino people that the history of Filipino immigrants outside our country also deserves the merit to be part of our Philippine history. We all share the same plight no matter where we go, and we all have to become aware with what the colonizers have repeatedly done to us. After all, to forget the ills of the past is to risk doing it again.
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Passed on July 4, 2023
