Filipino American Studies AsianAm 151K/SocSci 178KFall 2017 Prof. Christine Bacareza Balance em: cbalance@uci.edu

CLASS REMINDERS

•  Tues (10/31): OCSEAA Center (meet there), library research session & short midterm study session

•  Thurs (11/02): In-Class Midterm (bring blue books!)

•  Sun (11/05) (11:59pm): Final Assignment Proposal DUE to EEE Dropbox

Today’s 3 major concepts

a. Benevolent Assimilation/ Reform

b. Corporeal Colonization

c. Gender, Labor & Migration

RECAP: colonial narrative/ideology

colonial narrative/ideology—a set of ideas that might find its genesis and its most powerful articulation in colonial state policy but is mainly a floating, diffuse mass of beliefs, materially constituted through representations. This colonial narrative was morally steeped in U.S. notions of Manifest Destiny and included the intent to civilize. It required the colonized to be inferior to the colonizer, socially engineered to be like the colonizer, and currently unfit for self-government.

Benevolent Assimilation/Reform U.S. policy towards the Philippines as outlined in a proclamation by U.S. President William McKinley issued on December 21, 1898. The proclamation reads in part:

Finally, it should be the earnest wish and paramount aim of the military administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring them in every possible way that full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of free peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation substituting the mild sway of justice and right for arbitrary rule.

Thomasites: a group of about 500 pioneer American teachers sent by the U.S. government to the Philippines. The Taft Commission passed Education Act No. 34 on January 21, 1901, which established the Department of Public Instruction and authorized the deployment of 1,000 more educators from the U.S. to the Philippines.

What was taught in the U.S. colonial nursing school classroom in the Philippines?

 

“The idea of women nursing was an entirely foreign one to the Filipino people. To them the work seemed menial and wholly beneath a person of any family or birth. Not only did this idea have to be entirely overcome with both parents and young women, but the latter, as students, had to be grounded in the very A-B-C of hygiene and sanitation--rudimentary knowledge which, in our country, is assimilated we know not when or how--it is almost inborn.”- (Lavinia Dock, 1907)

Corporeal Colonization “the process through which the American colonial project was enacted on its Filipino subjects, more specifically on the Filipino body.”

(Lucy Burns, “Splendid Dancing: Filipino ‘Exceptionalism” in Taxi Dance Halls,” 31)

FREEWRITE: Based upon this week’s readings, where and how do we see corporeal colonization taking place (in the case of Filipino nurses and manongs/farmworkers)?

WHO were the manongs?

1. unskilled, migratory laborers  2. students/domestics 3. U.S. armed forces

WHEN did they immigrate?

1. years following the Philippine-American War & preceding Philippine independence

2. agricultural expansion of U.S. West Coast

3. Great Depression in U.S.   WHERE did they immigrate?

Hawaii; Alaska; Washington; California

Portable communities—networks and itineraries of Filipino migrant workers in the 1920s and 1930s due to seasonal work precisely because their lives depended on mobility. Hotels, restaurants, and services along the migration circuit routinely filled the pages of Filipino ethnic presses, attesting to this mode of living.

Taxi Dancehalls

Gender/Labor/Migration

Gender/Labor/Migration