Between civilizing mission and ethnic assimilation: Racial discourse, United States colonial education and Filipino ethnicity, 1901--1946.

Abstract

This dissertation describes the cultural and intellectual contexts constituting Filipino ethnicity in the early twentieth-century United States. The expansion of the U.S. empire into the Pacific forcibly connected the American and Philippine nation-building projects. In doing so, it mobilized two interdependent groups to imagine and implement a vision of global order: Anglo-American civil servants who were to guide Filipino progress, and American-educated Filipino elites who were to develop into national leaders. By tracing the transnational educational networks which these two groups forged, this dissertation contends that colonial knowledges about Philippine culture, racial composition, and nationality generated a specific racial discourse about Filipino immigrants to the U.S., their class-location, personal morality, and sexual inclinations. My study focuses on Chicago as a site in which the expressions and experiences of localized encounters constituted U.S. empire-building and nation-formation, as well as Filipino ethnicity. I examine the manuscripts of American educators, government reports on Filipino students, administrative papers on repatriation, Filipino newspapers and organizational records, ethnographic and legal sources on Filipino immigrants, oral histories, and autobiographical fiction. Theorizing the links between the U.S. colonial administration and the academic study of immigration, I illuminate the connections between American colonial teachers and American sociologists, both of whom evaluated Filipinos as subjects of reform. Within the distinct yet connected arenas of empire and immigration, white American educators produced a racial knowledge of Filipinos politicized through debates concerning national borders, global visions, and local communities. Filipino ethnic identity emerged as well in the course of disputes among Filipino migrants around national identity, sexuality, gender, class, urban space, and their political relationship to the American nation-state. Rather than growing out of either a common culture or shared political goals, ethnic community within the U.S. emerged in a process of contestation. By attending to the multiple meanings which Filipinos placed on educational pursuits, I explain the diverse cultural and intellectual strategies by which Filipinos asserted political agency and represented their identities and communities to a broader American public. Such strategies reflected the complex ways in which different Filipino migrants experienced U.S. colonial tutelage and saw themselves participating in Philippine nation-building.