Episode 8: A plaque hangs in the rotunda of the Minnesota State Capitol, memorializing Minnesota’s participation in a forgotten war. Today on New Narratives, we start to tell the story of that plaque–all the way from the beginning, hundreds of years ago. We’ll tell the story of the Philippine-American War, talk about why it’s a war nobody remembers, and explore what effects the war has today on the Philippines. This episode is part 1 of a 2-part series on the Philippine-American War.
Guests: Professor Lisandro Claudio (he/him, University of California Berkeley), Dr. Theodore Gonzalves (he/him, Smithsonian National Museum of American History) and Professor Karin Aguilar San Juan (she/they/siya, Macalester College)
Music by Takénobu.
Anya Steinberg: Hey everyone, long time no see. Welcome back to New Narratives dispatches from Minnesota that highlight the stories of Asian America. I’m your host Anya Steinberg. I’m the storyteller intern at Asian American Organizing Project, which is a nonpartisan nonprofit based out of St. Paul, Minnesota focused on supporting the Asian American Pacific Islander community in the Twin Cities area.
[INTRO MUSIC]
Anya: Somewhere in the rotunda of the Capitol building in St. Paul, Minnesota, there hangs an enormous bronze plaque, probably as wide as your arm span with an eagle carved into the top and standing firmly at the bottom, on top of the pedestal, an armed soldier. This plaque is a memorial to Minnesotans who fought in the Philippine-American War at the turn of the 20th century. Etched into its surface is the story of their bravery, their cunning and their patriotism. And right below it, well, that’s another plaque one that says that a lot of the first plaque isn’t even true. The war these plaques are about, my guess is that most of you have never heard of it. Yet it’s the war where we can trace the roots of our brutality from the U.S. war strategy in Vietnam to the American police.
In this two part series on the Philippine-American War, we’re going to tell the winding story of these two plaques. From a time before the Philippines even existed up until today. When a group of Filipinx Americans found themselves in Minnesota lobbying against a plaque hanging in the state capitol. Remember, Professor Aguilar San Juan? She was the one who first introduced me to the plaques way back when I interviewed her for episode six. So I called her up to talk about the Philippine-American War and what it has to do with Minnesota State Capitol. First things first, though, for those of you who don’t know, no need to embarrass yourself asking the nearest Filipino, I asked her, What are the Philippines?
Professor Karin Aguilar San Juan: It’s an archipelago so there’s 7,000 islands actually there 7,108 islands in low tide and 7,107 islands in high tide. That means it’s not one big landmass like the U.S. where you just get on a bus and drive wherever, car driver wherever; you can’t do that in the Philippines. This whole area is very liminal. It’s like on one side is Asia and the other side is the Pacific to the south, these other islands then became you know, constituted as Indonesia and I think Malaysia too.
Anya: But before we get ahead of ourselves talking about the plaques of Minnesota’s role in the war, we need to do my favorite thing. Rewind. This episode, I’m taking us through Filipino history, rewinding all the way back to the beginnings of this island nation. I spoke to Professor Lisandro Claudio, who teaches Southeast Asian Studies specializing in the history of the Philippines at UC Berkeley.
Professor Lisandro Claudio: My name is Lissandra Claudio, but my nickname is Leathery. A name that almost has no relationship with my real name, which happens a lot of Filipinos. And the reason for that is that it’s an intentionally peasant sounding name because my parents are members of the Maoist underground museum. And they were expecting an imminent peasant revolution. So they’re like, why don’t we give the kid the peasant names?
Anya: I wanted to know from someone born and raised in the Philippines, what the Philippines were like before the Spanish colonized in the 1400s. Professor Claudio schooled me.
Professor Claudio: I didn’t know this is a very academic answer. But there was no Philippines prior to the occupation of the Spanish. Because these were a bunch of islands and groups and tribes that did not consider themselves a national community. The Philippines as a concept was formed in the crucible of colonialism, which is the case for a lot of other nations, not just in Southeast Asia within the world right now. The contemporary nations we know of are essentially former colonies. So when you say Indonesia, that was the Dutch East Indies. When you say the Philippines that was Spanish Filipinas.
Anya: Right. The name Philippines comes from the Spanish King Philip. Before the Spanish, the Philippines had no reason to be the Philippines. Even though it’s a defined nationality and culture today, the Philippines has always had these fuzzy borders.
Professor Claudio: There are different conceptions of the Philippines, for example, early Filipina nationalists and a lot of Spanish colonizers thought that the Marianas Islands were part of the Philippines, that the Chamorros were essentially Filipino, right? And of course, that’s no longer the case now. I always tell my students this and this shocks them, but it’s fascinating for them; from the northern tip of contemporary Philippines, you can see Taiwan, no telescope, right, binoculars the lights of Taiwan and that tell you about the porosity.
Anya: When a nation is made up of 7,000 different islands it becomes tough to erect the same kinds of border walls that we do in the US to define ourselves.
Professor Claudio: A lot of those boundaries are difficult to police. So for instance, you have smugglers in the south of the Philippines really they smuggle rice from Kota Kinabalu. They spend… Malaysian but they speak Sama, they speak Sama-bajaw and so therefore they speak the language and they have relatives in Indonesia, their relatives in the Philippines because they’re of the same tribe right and most relatives enable the smuggling network. And it’s quite fascinating. And so, smuggler is an interesting figure because the smuggler and boundaries of the contemporary nation state. So yeah, it’s arbitrary, it was arbitrary in that arbitrariness is something you see in the figure of the smuggler.
Anya: So the Spanish, they came in boats and when they washed ashore, they founded one nation out of many.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: The Spanish colonized the Philippines in the 1500s, all the way from the 1500s to the 1900s. And that was part of Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand decided let’s divide the world between Spain and Portugal so we’ll draw a line and then Portugal gets this half and Spain gets this half. That was decided over there in Spain, right? It wasn’t like the Filipinos said hello, we’re all alone here on these islands. And we need like some kind of European ruler.
Anya: So why were the Spanish drawn all the way across the world to this cluster of islands? Professor Claudio told me that the Spaniards were jealous of something these islands had that they didn’t.
Professor Claudio: Spaniards were looking for spices. We just think about eating kind of bland meat without any spices whatsoever, it would drive me nuts. So part of it was the desire to expand the spice trade. When they got to the Philippines, or what we now consider the Philippines, eventually became a process of Christianization.
Anya: Trade and profit where the Spaniards focus, but the reasons for colonization were also deeply tied to religion. When we think about colonization in the U.S., it’s a messy mixed bag. People romanticize the original colonists and their pursuit of freedom from tyranny. But these same colonists, enslaved people, killed Indigenous people and stole their land in the name of that freedom. I approached Spanish colonization of the Philippines thinking it was a different place. But the same game, Professor Claudio told me that wasn’t quite the case. Many of the Spanish colonists were missionaries bringing Christianity to the Philippines, the remnants of which are still present today.
Professor Claudio: And that’s largely what happens to the countries until now we consider it the only majority Catholic country in Asia, right? The initial phase, and what for many people would be the only face of Spanish colonialism would be the peace. So in the far flung areas means you had missionaries, like Jesuit missionaries, for instance, setting up chapels, churches, in organizing the community into communities of the Catholic faith. They would not only tend to the so-called spiritual needs of the peoples there, but they will tend to a lot of the kind of political needs of the emerging colonial state, taxation went through them for instance, education went through them. And that’s why the parish priest becomes a very influential person in Philippine society.
Anya: These priests, they were colonizing powers, but they also were part of whatever village they had planted themselves in, and sometimes they were figures of protection.
Professor Claudio: In the ____ islands, for example, there were a lot of slavery there in the Muslim south because a lot of the Muslim tribes considered besides lowland Christians, they considered them slaves. So they would enter the ____ islands and get besides take them to Mindanao and enslave them. So when the slave raids happened, it was usually the Spanish priests who protect this potential enslaved peoples in churches and in chapbooks. So there was a kind of, developed a kind of really intense relationship, parish priest and the communities. And so remember, in some of these far flung areas like that, that’s the only spot that’s the only evidence of Spanish colonialism. You’ll see the priests right there, no Spanish soldiers, no Spanish politicians, no Spanish colonial officials, right? Just the peace.
Anya: I wondered how this dynamic could exist. Being a colonizer and being in community with native populations were two ideas that seemed completely opposite in my mind.
Professor Claudio: The Phillipines was the most far flung territory of the Spanish Empire. So if you were a priest, and you went to the Philippines, that was it, you would stay there forever. It would be very, very hard to go back to Spain. So essentially, that became your world, that became your community. And as a result of that, a lot of the of the Spanish missionaries and a lot of Spanish priests ended up in the Philippines for some reason, obviously, they were part of a really problematic system called colonialism. But within that context, some of them were some of the most dedicated priests and colonial officials because they were essentially saying I’m foregoing my life in the Metropole, to completely invest that life in the colonies.
Anya: Professor Claudio told me that of course, there was white supremacy in the Philippines, just like in the colonial Americas but it was different.
Professor Claudio: Of course, of course, of course. But it was not as pronounced as in the context of the United States. I guess you can explain things that are happening in the Philippines using an American lens. But at the same time, you have to nuance it. And the main ones is geography it’s far. The same politics could not have been there. There’s one reason for that, because there were so few white settlers in the Philippines because it was so far away from Spain. In order for them to develop a kind of political community, they had to reach out to others within that community. For example, in the U.S., like Chinese businesses, etc. The second thing is that this white settler colonial class was never purely white. Because again, you know, it’s so far that there were very few purely white people there was always mixing to begin with. The term at that time for Filipino, the more general term was Creole. So European born in the colonies Creole, so they’re Hamilton as a Creole. All right. Washington was a Creole European born in the colony, so it’s in the in the Philippines, the Creoles and so in the Americas, you get the kind of pure, clearly small or purer creolization because they were relatively closer to Europe. So you had more white people there. So they develop the kind of really a purer creole classic mixed less, but because in the Philippines, it was so far and there were so few of them, they mixed a lot more. So the creolization is in the Philippines was always more open than clearly some say in the United States or creolization in various parts of the Americas right.
Anya: At this point, I think it’s important to talk about all the different groups in the Philippines because they aren’t all Filipinos yet. This is where the language gets a bit messy. There are Spaniards and there are Native people who the Spanish called Indios. And then there are Filipinos.
Professor Claudio: The first generation of Filipinos were white men, the first people to call themselves Filipinos as a kind of nationalist Appalachian were white men. And if you think this is confusing, I mean, this is used in the United States as a parallel example. The first people to call themselves Americans were not the Native Americans for the Indians, right? They were people like Jefferson, Hamilton, Washington, right.
Anya: It wasn’t until centuries after Spanish colonization that the word Filipino came to signify a movement for national independence. But resistance to colonization was always a part of the Philippines. Even before the Philippines was the Philippines when Lapu-Lapu a native person killed Magellan, the Portuguese explorer who first tried to lay claim to the Philippines. The rumblings of real revolution came in the early 1800s Filipinos, or remember the Spaniards who are born and raised in the colony. They’re becoming restless, they feel trapped by the colonial structure.
Professor Claudio: They only know the Philippines. They are denied administrative power in the Metropole because they’re born in the Philippines. They’re Filipino, so they can be influential in Spain. But they’re also denied a lot of administrative power in the colony because the people who are given administrative power in the colony are people who are sent from Spain. So that creates a kind of political identity parallel with the United States. The right people, they’re British, but they only have limited power in the colonies, and they believe that the colonies are their home. So they do want to assert that, so that happens.
Anya: I spoke to Dr. Theodore Gonzalez, who is a curator of Asian American Pacific history at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. He told me that these Filipino males traveled back and forth from the Philippines to Europe, where they learned about the enlightenment.
Dr. Theodore Gonzalves: As these Filipino elderly males got together and fought about their common work, they would refer to themselves as illustrators. The illustrious ones, the people who were enlightened, and again, they are animated and inspired by the terms of European enlightenment. Which they would use as a weapon against colonial darkness. The kind of colonial authority that would keep our country, this country, this home country of theirs, enslaved or uneducated or miseducated.
Anya: This movement is gaining momentum from the flurry of revolutions that happen at the close of the 1700s. Filipinos catch the independence fever from France and the United States. By the 19th century, the term Filipino is not just a political designation that Spaniards use to distinguish themselves from their friends in the Philippines, it starts to become an identity.
Professor Claudio: So that happens in the Philippines in the early 19th century and the most important person in disregard this is a Creole named Luis Rodriguez-Varela, who called himself the “conde de Filipinas” or the “count of the Philippines.” Right. So he’s the first person to actively call himself a Filipino.
Anya: That’s Professor Claudio again.
Professor Claudio: Prior to that, that term Filipinos was an administrative designation. So like, you were the Spaniard, the peninsular Spaniard, came from Spain. And you designate that the Spaniard is born in the Philippines as Filipinos so it’s kind of administrative. So but Varela kind of owns that term and says, I’m the Philippine count, el conde de Filipinas. So he is the first in that regard. That critical movement grows in the 19th century, largely informed by the liberalism of the 19th century, remember, there are two major revolutions that opened the century. Those are the American Revolution and the French Revolution. So these careers are inspired by that revolution, try to bring the principles of that revolution in the Philippines.
That kind of liberal movement, combined with a sense of attachment with the land, sparks a kind of period of nationalist agitation, and that grows and that expands. So I said that the Creole movement was not homogenous in the Philippines, unlike the United States. So let’s expand so you have a _______ of Chinese mestizos becoming part of that movement, you have ______ becoming part of that movement record. And that movement essentially peaks in 1872. 1872 is when the Spanish government decided to crack down on this movement. So a lot of them end up in exile, a lot of them start hiding, a lot of them are jailed. And so that creates, that become– it makes it quiet. From 1872 until the early 1880s.
Anya: The crackdown doesn’t kill the revolution, though it’s too late for that. Instead, the revolutionary thinkers retreat to Spain.
Professor Claudio: It’s safer in Spain, right? There’s less repression. And they believe in this movement, believes that they can achieve their goals if they lobby in Spain. So a lot of young Filipino students and by now Filipino is a more, is a broader term. They’re in Spain and they agitate there, they organize their they launch a newspaper called La Solidaridad, which becomes the kind of main outlet of Filipino nationalism in Spain. And, of course, the ________ of this movement, and I’m sure you’ve heard of him, was a result of the most influential person in this cohort. So he writes for La Solidaridad. And he writes to nationalist novice and that galvanizes the movement and that movement in Spain also inspires domestic agitation in the Philippines, and that domestic agitation ultimately culminates in the Philippine Revolution of 1896, the first anti-colonial revolution in Asia, but the last anti-colonial revolution in the Spanish growth.
Anya: And this is where the story of the Philippines gets complicated. Okay, so we’ve got the revolutionaries. By now the revolutionaries are composed of a few major groups.
Professor Claudio: The revolution is led by essentially the ____ lower middle class, and the provincial _____. So those are the two major elements within the revolution. These were people who were largely working in factories, trading houses.
Anya: And according to Professor Claudio, their enemies were…
Professor Claudio: Peninsular Span- mostly Yeah, peninsular Spaniards.
Anya: Like Spaniards that have come to the Philippines too
Professor Claudio: Mostly clustered around ______ colonial government, but also, Spanish friars continue to dominate the Philippine church. They’re the kind of counter revolutionary forces at that time. So to simplify, you know, this is a quote from result.
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Professor Claudio: Results as some of us are Creole, meaning we’re white, some of us are Chinese mestizo, meaning we’re mixed, some of us are in Indio, meaning we’re native. But we only call ourselves Filipino.
Anya: So here we are, in 1896, the Filipino nationalists have begun to rise up against the Spanish colonial government in a movement they call Le Katipunan. And for a second, it looks like it might not work. Emilio Aguinaldo, the most prominent general in Le Katipunan, he nearly surrenders.
Professor Claudio: So this on December 15, 1897, Aguinaldo signs a pack with the Spanish essentially that he would go into exile in Hong Kong. And he does. It is a kind of win, a temporary win for the Spaniards initially, but at the time, the Americans couldn’t be– so this is the time of the Spanish American War. So the Americans convinced Aguinaldo to continue the fight against the Spaniards. Essentially America said we have your back. He returns to the Philippines under the sponsorship of the Americans.
Anya: With Aguinaldo backed by the Americans. Dr. Gonzales said that the victory was in sight for Filipino nationalists.
Dr. Gonzalves: So by 1898, the Philippine Revolution against Spain had become successful. They had turned over thousands of Spanish forces to the Americans and had been holding these lamp positions. It was a decisive military victory for the Philippine army. Up until this time, they had been fighting as a standing army identified by uniforms and you can see what they were wearing.
Anya: That’s an important detail. Dr. Gonzales told me that the Filipinos fought the Spaniards in uniform, army to army in an old fashion duel. In 1898 they won that fight and declared sovereignty with Emilio Aguinaldo as the first President of the Philippines.
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Dr. Gonzalves: While the Filipinos held the land in terms of the army from 1898, slowly they could see the naval forces coming in from the United States, who would maintain a stream of U.S. Army personnel coming into the Philippines. It was becoming odd for many Filipinos to look at the thousands and thousands of U.S. soldiers coming into focus at this time. But the question then for Americans is, are they going to recognize this new nation? Because sovereignty is not just something that can appear magically, you can declare sovereignty; part is also being recognized as sovereign by others. And the United States refused recognition of Philippine independence. So this left it an open question. Well, what’s next?
Anya: Professor Claudio knows what came next, the ultimate betrayal by the U.S.
Professor Claudio: Right, they thought that they’d won independence, and that they have the support of Americans. And if you look at the text, Malolos constitution, certain parts of it, even our own declaration of independence were reminiscent of the American Declaration of Independence. Essentially, they were thinking that the Americans would support them because they thought that America as a former colony itself would not become a colonizer. That’s why they trusted the Americans, right? As the Spanish are about to surrender, the Spanish essentially say we won’t surrender to Filipinos. But you know, based on our pride, we can surrender to Americans. And so there’s a mock Battle of Manila, where in the American storm Manila and they pretend to fight with the Spanish and the Spanish lay down their arms, and it’s a kind of honorable defeat. White people defeated by other white peoples, it’s an honorable defeat. This comes alongside the turning over of the Philippines, the purchase of the Philippines from Spain, based on international law, the Philippines has been purchased. Right. And so therefore, because there is American sovereignty over the Philippines already, then the Aguinaldo government in the eyes of the Americans is an illegal government, and it’s effectively an insurrection.
Anya: And this is where the Philippine-American War begins.
Professor Claudio: So you have the Philippine-American War of 1890 to 1902. Essentially, they have a four year war, that becomes really bloody and depending on the estimate– some people a higher estimate, I’ve seen some million Filipinos dead as a result of the war. This is in a population of 8 million. The low estimates like 250,000, the highest limit is a million so that includes people die in the world, people die because of disease, or there’s a cholera epidemic that spreads or as a result of the war.
Anya: I was shocked by the number of Filipino casualties from this war. That number represents so many people I’d never known about dead from a war that I had never heard of before. Dr. Gonzalez said that the brutality of this war was probably one of the reasons why it is still so obscure.
Dr. Gonzalves: It was justified along, depending on the actor you talk with, is justified along economic and racial lines. And that’s not something necessarily that many people can look back with any sense of pride. It wasn’t necessarily just merely to liberate a colony. If the United States wanted to liberate the Philippines, which they were attempting to do in the early years of the conflict. It doesn’t explain why then they held on to the colony for themselves for almost half a century.
Anya: To Dr. Gonzalez, the US has always woven these dissonant and deceptive narratives about colonization since the very beginning.
Dr. Gonzalves: When you think about the U.S. colonization of North America, there are the celebrated narratives of the United States that talk about its own independence and seeking independence from Britain. But sewn into the Declaration of Independence and sewn into the Constitution was a great contradiction of seeking one’s own freedom from another Empire, the British Empire, but while also enslaving a whole class of people and exterminating others. So that contradiction has been sewn into the documents and it’s not something that could be easily explained away. What is the quality of freedom and independence mean for people who are unfree who remained enslaved, who remain displaced and demonized. And so by the time you get to 1898 1899, in the U.S.-Filipino War, these become echoes. People are experiencing the echoes of American history coming across from the eastern seaboard.
Anya: Professor Claudio saw another motivation behind the U.S. war in the Philippines. Just like the Spanish nearly 500 years before the U.S. wanted to follow God’s will into the Philippines.
Professor Claudio: If you listen to McKinley, who was the president at the time. Essentially says that he is authorizing the takeover the Philippine occupation of the Philippines under the idea of benevolent simulation. Benevolent simulation means we will occupy, but we will do it nicely. Kind of McDonald’s colonization, colonization with a smile. So he says that.. he was a very religious man so he says he’s walking around the White House. He’s listening for the voice of God and eventually can hear the voice of God. After a very reminiscent of George W. Bush before invading Iraq, I” realized that it is my duty to civilize these people and to give them the kind of political institutions that America has and we are in this kind of special place of being able to do this. So let’s do it.” Right benevolent simulation. So it’s McKinley. There are a lot of forces in the United States that time that wanted to go west, but they’d already hit California. So how much further can you go? According to Theodore Roosevelt, you go west to the point of crossing the Pacific and making men out of yourselves in the context of the wild, wild, wild, super West, which is Asia. So that was the next frontier.
Anya: Like I said, at the top of the episode, this forgotten war was the catalyst of so many modern manifestations of brutality. When people think of the atrocities of war, probably the most infamous example is the Holocaust. But Professor Claudio told me that the origins of the concentration camp can actually be traced to the Philippine-American War.
Professor Claudio: The Americans engage in practices the Spaniards did, which is the practice of reconstruction or concentrating people in certain areas so that they’re not able to interact with the levels. The reconcentration concentrating people in particular areas in the 20th century, of course, that becomes the concentration camp. So even the idea of the concentration camp that has its genesis in essentially in the practices of the Spaniards, which become adopted by the Americans in the Philippine-American war.
Anya: So when you say concentration, like in that context, is that just talking about trapping people in the city or like?
Professor Claudio: In their villages essentially and then cutting off kind of supplies and militarizing that area so that they’re not able to provide food for revolutionaries, provide shelter for revolutionaries. That’s the genesis of the idea of concentrating your enemies.
Anya: And you may remember from our episodes on the U.S. war in Vietnam, that the U.S. employed uniquely cruel war tactics to fight the guerrilla forces or the Vietcong. But this strategy didn’t come out of nowhere. They actually wrote the playbook for the war strategy drawing on lessons learned in the Philippine-American war. Here’s Dr. Gonzales…
Dr. Gonzalves: But one of the things that the Philippines realized is that they didn’t have an adequate reliance on weaponry and other arms, and were outmatched militarily by the United States just by the sheer number and also the technology of weaponry at the time that they were bringing in. This force the Filipinos to adopt a new military strategy, and they had to fight tactically in a different way, which was to remove their standing army profile, wearing uniforms and to move into a guerrilla warfare situation, to attack and then to retreat, to keep attacking, to use the cover of various villages and to harass soldiers until they would eventually leave. This becomes something of an annoyance to the United States because the U.S. armed forces are not used to fighting in a guerrilla warfare situation.
But the things that they ended up having to learn would be reflected upon by U.S. military commanders in Vietnam. And then they’d be reflected again in 2003. With the occupation of Iraq. So when you think about military commanders that have built up long histories of how to fight insurgencies people were taking, especially U.S. pentagon war planners are taking the lessons of the Philippines and bringing them into wars of fighting insurgencies in Vietnam, Southeast Asia, as well as in Iraq. So when you think about the long history of what this war means, it means quite a lot to people not just to Filipinos, but it also means a lot to warfighters who are trying to take lessons about how to successfully suppress insurgent troops.
Anya: Professor Aguilar San Juan even traces the origins of the American police system, the center of so many American debates about racism and brutality to the Philippine constabulary that the U.S. created to suppress nationalism.
Professor Aguilar San Juan: Well, there’s some dirty business like the U.S. army recruits Filipino nationalists into the Philippine constabulary, at one point, it was called the insular constabulary. I happened to know this because I was looking at the origins of the U.S. police and one of them is in the Philippines during this time, where they’re in Manila and they want to secure power over this people. They got to put down these nationalists. So they recruit former nationalists and they say, “Hey, will you spy on your fellow people?” Some people say yes, so those become hired by this constabulary force to monitor, survey, photograph, catalog, and sometimes execute people who were fighting for nationalism. And so that began some of the procedures of policing to actually spy on people and then if necessary, eradicate them.
Anya: So the war ends in 1902, as most historical sources will agree, but some historical estimates say that the war didn’t end until as late as 1907. Why? In a nation of over 7,000 islands, especially in a war before telephones existed, you can imagine how difficult it would be to coordinate a single end date or even an end year of a war. When the dust settled though the U.S. had itself a brand new colony. Dr. Gonzales said that the benefits the U.S. reap from the Philippines largely had to do with the military and the economy.
Dr. Gonzalves: The plan for U.S. colonization of the Philippines was really cemented with military bases having rent free access to these large tracts of land for many, many years. But then you’d also have a co-optation of a Philippine elite for the purposes of securing favorable economic deals with the United States in terms of lower tariffs or the importation of goods without any such barriers. So it was really quite a boom for the United States to be able to have access. One was having a military foothold in the Asia region but also have access now to not only workers but also locally produced goods like cobra and ham, for example.
Anya: Professor Claudio weighs both the goods and bads of colonialism when he thinks about the U.S. occupation of the Philippines.
Professor Claudio: Of course, we’re all anti-colonial, but there were things within colonialism that; and I’m going to say this very carefully, I’m obviously not endorsing colonialism but of course if a country stays for 40 years there are going to be good positive and negative developments. It’s just inevitable. It can’t be 100% bad. So a lot of bad things happen. So let’s begin with the bad stuff. Of course, there’s a lot of repression. They ban a lot of speech which is very hypocritical, right? Because this is supposed to be in a republic that respects the Second Amendment. They do things like ban seditious place. They continue to go after missionaries, and they are insurrectionist, in their terms. And they’re very violent towards their insurrection, a lot of the modern methods of torture that you see in Iraq were developed in the Philippines. For example, waterboarding, for instance, in the Philippines, it was called the water cooler. And it was a lot worse than the kind of waterboarding they did in Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. They did that. But at the same time, they’re able to do things that were impossible under the Spaniards. So one thing is the creation of a secular educational system. The Spanish educational system was extremely theocratic. As a result of the Americans you eventually get space for kind of Filipino secretaries to emerge. I think the greatest thing that the United States does in the Philippines is sets up the University of the Philippines system, which is the largest state university in the country.
Anya: According to Professor Claudio, the U.S. always had a roadmap for the Philippines. Unlike other colonial powers, they didn’t want to keep them forever. They set up a congress mimicking American government with an upper house, lower house, and a senate.
Professor Claudio: In the lower house was already exclusively Filipino. So it was actually the only, at that time, the only parliamentary body in the colonizer that was completely run by the natives. So even in the early part of American colonialism, you could already see hints of them saying that eventually we’re gonna let you go because we’re already giving you all of these powers. In their mind. I think they were training wheels.
Anya: Dr. Gonzales, though, has a bit of a different take on U.S. occupation. He thinks the racial animosity flourishing at home in the U.S. had a huge influence on how and when the U.S. decided to relinquish control of the Philippines.
Dr. Gonzalves: With the colonization of the Philippines, you have the creation of this kind of legal fiction for Filipinos living in the Philippines. At this time, they are not sovereign citizens. They are subjects of an empire. And so the question then becomes what is their legal status? Are they U.S. citizens? Well, the answer is no. Are they aliens? Not exactly. Because they are technically they were the government of the Philippines was purchased by the United States in 1998, with the Treaty of Paris, for $20 million. So what was their legal status? Legally, they were understood as U.S. nationals. And so they occupy this kind of legal limbo, between alien and citizen, even though they weren’t full citizens. They couldn’t vote, they couldn’t marry, they couldn’t hold office, they couldn’t land, practice law, all the things that you take for granted for being a citizen. At the same time, they were not complete aliens. They could travel to the United States and its territories without a passport. So this actually means something quite interesting for Filipinos because by 1906, you have that first shipment of Filipinos coming to the Territory of Hawaii. It’s not a state until 1959. So we have to refer to it as a territory. So up until that time, sugar plantation is going full tilt. Filipinos become the next wave of migrant labor that comes from another place. They start coming to the United States, especially in larger numbers in the 1920s.
Anya: Around this time, nativist voices in the U.S. were rallying around policies of exclusion. In the late 1800s, this began with the exclusion of Chinese immigrants and quickly expanded to encompass other Asian nationalities in the immigration ban. While Chinese, Japanese and other Asian immigrants are barred from the U.S., Filipinos can continue to come because of their special legal status, which begins to piss some people off, particularly as the Great Depression strikes.
Dr. Gonzalves: There’s a lot of anti-Filipino riots that are taking place in Yakima, Washington or Watsonville, California, getting chased out of neighborhoods really quite violently. And it’s really quite dramatic. And again, it’s a combination of this idea that the Filipinos were sexual predators that so called taking white women, but also taking white men’s jobs. You can take your pick in terms of what was the reason, but they’re being chased out of these locations, really by force and that was 1930. The voices of nativism would continue until they finally reached the halls of congress with the passage of the Tydings-McDuffie Act.
Anya: Dr. Gonzalez says the Tydings-McDuffie Act was the solution to all of this.
Dr. Gonzalves: So the idea of making the Philippines an independent nation becomes a really interesting idea. How can we formally exclude the Filipinos just as we had done with Chinese in 1882, Japanese 1924? 1934, they had done so. So it becomes known as the Philippine Independence bill. But by making the Philippines an independent nation, it really becomes another exclusion. So overnight, the thousands of Filipinos that were in the United States at the time they became aliens. And so the provision of the bill to Tydings-McDuffie Act of 1934 was that it would require the Philippines a 10 year tutelage period.
Anya: After we taught them our great American ways for a decade, and after World War II wrapped up, the U.S. finally granted independence to the Philippines in 1946. But Dr. Gonzales said the story is not over. Even after independence is declared he sees the Philippines as intertwined with America.
Dr. Gonzalves: That’s a very complicated situation. And I think one way to envision this is to think about the actual ceremony that took place in 1946. This is a photograph of what this is like and what that would look like in terms of independence in 1946, as its formally declared a so called free and sovereign nation. And this is a photograph that appears on cover of a friend’s book, by the name of Sharon Delmendo, she wrote a book called “The Star-Entangled Banner” and what you see is the unfurling of these two flags. Flags become again, icon of a nation state, and they become a source of deep pride for thinking about one sense of sovereignty, belonging, and as the Philippines would achieve its freedom in 1946, its sovereignty in 1946. There’s that ceremony that takes place in the Philippines where the United States flag and the Philippine flag are formally unfurled. But during the ceremony, what you find is that the wind is catching and they’re entangling the two flags. So you don’t see them kind of flying independent of each other, they’re still kind of wrapped up in each other. And in many ways, that becomes an interesting metaphor for thinking about the years since and what that would mean for the continued presence of the United States military bases in the Philippines for yet another 50 years. It would take the explosion of a volcano in 1991 that would end the formal base presence, U.S. base presence, in the Philippines. But we still find that the United States and the Philippines has very close and direct ties. Over that time period, again, those bases would end up becoming the staging grounds for the United States military to conduct its operations in Southeast Asia during the Vietnam War. If the United States did not have the access to those bases, it would not be able to offload all the military personnel and hardware into that region. So it was it was critical to kind of think about that linkage.
Anya: But Professor Claudio respectfully disagrees.
Professor Claudio: This is what I tell my students all the time, it’s easy to talk about the Philippines in light of the United States in the United States. We focus on things like the Philippine-American War, we talk about things like the American occupation, we talk about things like kind of colonial legacy that creates a Filipino mindset that loves America. And that’s true. If you look at the statistics, for example, there was a poll, I think this was five years ago. They looked at countries in terms of their love for the United States, who loves the U.S. more. I think it was a Gallup poll, I’m not sure. Number two in that poll, you can look this up, number two in that poll was the United States. So the people who love the United States the most the people who win a silver medal for that are Americans. Guess who wins the gold medal? The Philippines. The Philippines loves the U.S. more than the U.S. loves itself. It’s crazy.
So on the one hand, that’s true, there’s this real colonial legacy, but on the other hand, my hope and the reason why I teach Philippine studies in the United States is I want, well not just Filipino Americans but for everyone in general, to be able to talk about the Philippines in its own terms. And a lot of the problems of the Philippines in this period, a lot of them can be attributable to America, of course, but I think the majority of the problems of the Philippines have to be attributed to the Philippine ruling class. The ruling elite. And some of them are closer to the U.S. than others. Some of them hate the U.S. _____ for example, hates the U.S. But that failure is a domestic failure and that’s a failure that needs to be discussed in its own terms. So that’s why yeah colonial mentality is a problem. but I think the bigger problem for colonial Philippines is really this elite class who have been running the Philippines from post-independence era until the present. Really not done enough to create inclusive growth to respect human rights to make the Philippines more inclusive for men, indigenous people, LGBT. These are domestic issues and sometimes those issues have very little to do with the U.S.
Anya: Professor Claudio thinks it’s important to let the Philippines be independent, because it is its own country, it would be a powerful thing to let ourselves imagine the Philippines outside the shadow of the United States.
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Professor Claudio: Because to ask questions about the Philippines exclusively in light of what’s happening in the U.S., is the kind of reproducing colonial logic and the colonial logic meaning the Philippines is an appendage of the U.S., even if our intent is obviously sympathetic and progressive and kind to the country. By framing this question only in light of the U.S., does a kind of violence to the independent growth of the Philippines as its own community.
Anya: And that’s all for this episode of New Narratives. Join us next time for part two, where we actually get to talking about the plaque and what Minnesota has to do with all of this. Special thanks to those featured in today’s story, Professor Lisandro Claudio, Dr. Theodore Gonzalves, and Professor Aguilar San Juan. Music featured in this episode is by Takénobu. This episode was written, edited, and produced in fact checked by your host Anya Steinberg, storyteller intern Asian American Organizing Project. More information about AAOP can be found at our website aopmn.org Thanks for listening!
