Organizer: Richard T. Chu, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

Chair and Discussant: Eva Lotta Hedman, University of Oxford, UK

This panel seeks to reconceptualize nations, nationalism, and national histories. It utilizes as its vantage point the imperial relationship between the United States and the Philippines to examine larger questions pertaining to the making of nations vis-a-vis empire-building; the excising of social identities in favor of constructing national identities; and the ambivalent place of nationalisms in the diaspora. Megan Thomas’s paper "Struggles in the Nation: Views of the US in the Filipino Press before 1898" explores the image of the United States in the eyes of the ilustrados and shows that the latter identified their struggles for freedom and equality with the U.S.’s own history of emancipation. Thus, her essay calls us to reconsider nationalist interpretations of early Philippine-American relations and the formation of Philippine nationalism. Richard Chu’s paper, "Constructing a Nation, Effacing a Race: The Ethno-genesis of "Chinese" and "Filipino" Identities in the Philippines," examines the ways nationalist discourses on Philippine history effectively excised or reified the Chinese and their identities, in order to construct a "Filipino" identity and a "Filipino" nation. By creating Chinese exclusionary laws and fomenting anti-Chinese sentiments, U.S. empire helped construct this "Chinese-Filipino" binary. Also examining this theme of national belonging is Arleen de Vera’s examination of Filipino migrants in pre-World War II California. In "Colonial and Modern Subjects: Filipino Migrants, Surveillance, and Nationalism in California," de Vera looks at the ways the experience of travel and technology led to new forms of subjectivity. Their ambivalent status as American "nationals" excluded from American citizenship paralleled their incorporation as migrant workers and students and their social and cultural containment in California cities and towns, via surveillance and spatial segregation.

Megan C. Thomas, University of California Santa Cruz

This paper investigates views of the United States in the Filipino press during late Spanish colonial rule, seeking in the process to examine the place of the United States in early Philippine nationalist thought. While generations of schoolchildren have learned that José Rizal’s piece "Philippines a Century Hence" predicted the threat of American colonial rule in the Philippines, this piece was not an isolated instance where the culture, politics, history, or power of the United States was subject to analysis by Filipinos before 1898. For example, elsewhere in the pages of La Solidaridad, the United States appeared in brief news items, at times publicizing the struggles of its subjugated populations. These pieces suggest that Solidaridad and its nationalist project was also, indeed, a project which appealed broadly to a rising international norm of human emancipation and equality. When viewed from this perspective, the struggle for rights for Filipinos as Spanish citizens, a struggle which was at the heart of one variety of early Filipino nationalism, was seen as being like the parallel struggles within the United States for the rights and uplift of women and people of color. Re-reading these accounts of the United States can help us both to understand one aspect of the rise of Filipino nationalism during the Spanish colonial period, as well as consider some of the views of the United States which were available before it arrived in the Philippines as a colonizing power.

Richard T. Chu, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

This paper traces the construction of a Chinese-Filipino binary in Philippine society since the U.S. colonization of the Philippines in 1898. Ethnic relations between the Chinese and the indigenous population in the Philippines were intimate and close during the Spanish colonial period, as seen from the socio-religious and business practices of the Chinese and the Chinese mestizos. However, the application of Chinese exclusionary and discriminatory laws under the Americans paved the way for the creation a dichotomous and oppositional relationship between the "Chinese" and the newly-nationalized group of "Filipinos," under which Chinese mestizos and the Malay "indio" population were subsumed. The rise of Chinese and Filipino nationalisms in the 20th century also contributed to the reification of Chinese and Filipino identities. Philippine history textbooks, for example, downplayed or excised the "Chinese-ness" of national heroes and prominent Filipinos. The result has been a contemporary Philippine society in which the Chinese is regarded as separate and homogeneous group, posing problems to the Philippine national government in a time of economic depression and political uncertainties.

Arleen de Vera, State University of New York, Binghamton

This paper explores the connections between urban space, subject identities, and American empire by focusing on Filipino migrants in California during the 1910s and 1920s, when the Philippines was an American colony. I argue that Filipinos’ subjectivity was not that of Walter Benjamin’s flaneûr, the white, bourgeois male who aimlessly wandered about city streets, viewing the city as spectacle. Instead, the presence of large numbers of Filipinos was considered a threat, one that both Filipino elite nationalists, ironically, and California municipal officials worked to contain. Through their experience with steamship travel and their encounters with urban life, these migrants saw themselves as modern subjects who were nevertheless excluded from U.S. citizenship and subjected to segregation and racial discrimination. These attempts at surveillance were aided by none other than Filipino nationalists. These elites tried to discipline recent arrivals and simultaneously argued that Filipinos were already highly Westernized due to the history of American colonialism in the Philippines. Despite their efforts, Filipinos' ambivalent status as American "nationals" excluded them from U.S. citizenship. This exclusion paralleled their social and cultural containment in California cities and towns, via surveillance and spatial segregation.

The Persecution of the Boticas de China in 19th Century Manila
Raquel A. G. Reyes, SOAS, University of London, UK

The ‘boticas de China’, or Chinese pharmacies, of 19^th century Manila were well patronised by Filipinos, Chinese, Spaniards and foreigners alike. Their prescriptions and medical preparations - whose ingredients often included the skin, organs, excrement and blood of animals and powdered human bone - were cheaply available and were considered highly effective in the treatment of a wide range of illnesses. Spanish physicians and pharmacists in the Islands, however, viewed the boticas as a threat to modern standards of health and hygiene, and in 1887, launched a crackdown. All the twenty-nine Chinese pharmacies in the city were inspected, their medicines confiscated and analysed, and criminal charges brought against the farmacéuticos for committing a host of abuses, including the sale of poisons and abortifacients. The official report harshly denounced the pharmacopoeia of the Chinese pharmacists, their methods and their medical practices as fundamentally unscientific. All the establishments were ordered closed, and heavy fines imposed, bringing their operators to ruin. The further importation of medicines from China was banned. These measures provoked not only an outcry from the local Chinese community but also a diplomatic crisis that threw the Spanish government into conflict with the Plenipotentiary of Imperial China to Spain and the British consul in Hong Kong.

This paper examines the persecution of the boticas chinas in 1887 in its broader context, as an important and revealing episode in the growing ascendancy of western, scientific medical thinking in the Islands. It will focus on the role played by Chinese pharmacists in indigenous health care and explore the reasons for their suppression.