HUMAN 1C Lecture Notes - Lecture 2: Refugee Act, Conscientious Objector, Fall Of Saigon
Lecture 2
Capital, Labor, & Empire
Early Filipino Immigrants & Spanish Colonialism
●As early as 1763, Filipino seamen jumped ship in New
Orleans, Louisiana where they established the first
permanent Filipino settlements on the Gulf Coast. They
called themselves the Filipino Cajuns or “Manilamen.”
Exhibiting Empire
●Human exhibitions
(“zoos”)
●St. Louis World’s Fair
1904
○St. Louis, Missouri
(Louisiana Purchase
Exposition)
●President Roosevelt
believes in the need to
build an empire, and
continues the work of
President Mckinley in
racially bias ways.
●Many people had no
exposure to the world
outside America, so ads
and paintings could easily influence those living in
America in terms of how they would understand how much
better civilized nations are than places like the
Philippines, which was a way to persuade them to agree with
the invasions of the Philippines.
●These images show the progress of manifest destiny by the
US government.
●To control governance in the Philippines for the US, they
even hired Filipinos to join the US army.
●This image is not
actually in the
Philippines, it is at the
world fair. They
completely recreated what
the villages would look
like and would even have
them doing the actions
they would do on a normal
day. They had different
individuals and tribal
groups.
●Many Filipinos believed this distorted who they actually
were as Filipino people. The President was okay with
exploiting them in this way.
●They were showing the labor and people in a way that the US
is saying that colonizing the Philippines will not only
benefit the Filipino people, but also benefit the US in
terms of labor and such.
Ethnographic Photography and Archiving Empire
●Racialization and the “primitive”
●Visual narrative and Manifest Destiny
●Dean Worcester and U.S. colonial government
○A professor of zoology, put in a govt position to
control and rule and govern the US empire in the
Philippines. Took pictures of the people in the
Philippines. The pictures were on display for
Americans to see, one of the first ways Americans
could see what was actually going on in the
Philippines. Spent a lot of time in urban areas of
Philippines, but most photos he took were in the rural
areas so as to reinforce the stereotypes they needed
to show America Filipinos were “primitive.”
●Visual narratives were very crucial to displaying to the
American population what Filipinos were like.
Archiving “Prisoners and Primitives”
●Mugshots of Bilibid Prison inmates by Daniel Folkmar. This
prison was rather full of individuals who were not true
criminals, but political prisoners because they opposed
Spanish rule, revolutionaries, and those who opposed
American rule in the Philippines.
●Folkmar had a book published of these photos and displayed
in World Fair.
Aboriginal Portfolio Gerhard Sisters Collection; Louisiana
Purchase Exposition
●First exhibition by women
●Had permission to take Filipinos to their studio and take
pictures of them
●They are full body photos, softer photos, not threatening.
They are still very staged, and you can see same face shots
and side shots in the photos.
●Reinforces the “noble savage” idea
●They also took pictures of women and children, in contrast
to the men many people took pictures of. They tried to
capture the diversity of the people in the Philippines.
●The photos are seemingly exotic, showing they are different
from people in America; exoticising them.
●Some of the people in these photos got sick, died, went
home, or even went on to continue on in exhibitions in
different parts of the country. They were seen as
temporary.
Colonial Student
●Students were state sponsored, meaning European powers
would take students back to the US so they could study at
US universities so they would get used to the politics and
such in America, so they would go back to their home
countries and teach others about American culture and
politics, etc. These students were usually already the
elites of their country. The treatment of them were
different than other immigrants from the Philippines
because they were upper-class and temporary.
Colonial Labor Force
