American Mestizos, The Philippines, and the Malleability of Race
1898-1961
Publication Year: 2017
Across the Pacific, these same mestizos were racialized in a way that characterized them as a asset to the United States, opening up the possibility of their assimilation to American society during a period characterized by immigration restriction and fears of miscegenation. Drawing upon Philippine and American archives, Nicholas Trajano Molnar documents the imposed and self-ascribed racializations of the American mestizos, demonstrating that the boundaries of their racial identity shifted across time and space with no single identity coalescing.
Published by: University of Missouri Press
Cover
Title Page, Copyright, Dedication

Introduction: American Mestizos and the Malleability of Race
The histories of the Philippines and the United States have been directly intertwined since 1898, most dramatically when the two peoples first came into sustained direct contact in the aftermath of the brief Spanish-American War and the more protracted Philippine-American War. The islands would not simply be an adjunct to the burgeoning American military ...

Chapter 1. Drawing the “Color Line” in the Philippines: White and Black Bachelor Colonization and Initial Reactions to the Emergence of the American Mestizos
In 1898, with the conclusion of the Spanish-American War and the signing of the Treaty of Paris, the United States acquired its first colonies in the Pacific, paying the sum of 20 million dollars for the Philippine islands. Men from the United States, dressed in military and civilian garb, came in large numbers to govern and administer the new colony for the next five decades. ...

Chapter 2. Picaninnies, Plump American Babies, and Abandoned Half-Castes: Early Racializations of the American Mestizos in the United States and the Philippines
Racializations of the American mestizos began to appear in a variety of media outlets almost immediately after the US began to administer its Philippine colony. Like previous interpretations of the Chinese mestizos, these concepts were influenced by contemporary circumstances, a history of established racial hierarchies, and the position and viewpoints of the particular observer. ...

Chapter 3. Leonard Wood and the American Guardian Association: Resolving the American Mestizo “Problem” in the Philippines
In 1921, Major General Leonard Wood arrived in the Philippines as the chief executive of the American colony after a failed political career in the United States. A former Army surgeon who had graduated from Harvard Medical School, he had risen in command in the United States military largely through the support of his friend and patron, Theodore Roosevelt. ...

Chapter 4. Reactions to the Concept of the American Mestizo in the United States
Year after year, General Leonard Wood, the white colonial champion of the American Guardian Association, sought ways to help the organization achieve its cultural and humanitarian agenda. Wood initially believed that the American population in the Philippines could provide enough support to enable the AGA to accomplish its work for the American mestizos. ...

Chapter 5. American, American Mestizo, or Filipino?: Enrique Hagedorn, A. M. Snook, and American Mestizo Identities in the Philippine Commonwealth
The previous chapters explored a variety of imposed racializations of the American mestizos by Americans and Filipinos in both the Philippines and the United States. This chapter seeks to ascertain self-ascribed identities of these individuals during the 1930s and 1940s, a period in which the islands transitioned from American colony ...

Chapter 6. Race and Resistance: Luis Morgan, William Tate, and American Mestizo Identities during World War II
Those racialized as American mestizos would, like all Filipinos, suffer from the tragedy that was to befall the Philippines with the Japanese decision to further expand their empire in Southeast Asia at the end of 1941. This chapter will explore American mestizo imposed and self-ascribed identities during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines during the Second World War, ...

Chapter 7. The American Mestizo in the Republic of the Philippines
Lillian Brown, a young woman working with the American Red Cross, remembered the perilous journey to Manila after the Japanese had been defeated in the Philippines. Even before stepping foot in the city, the scars of war were present from many miles away. “We anchored quite a distance from the landing area as the harbor was filled with sunken ships,” she recalled. ...

Conclusion. Non-Coalesced Groups and the “Disappearance” of the American Mestizo
While American Mestizos has explored the concept of the American mestizo in its various iterations across time and space, it concludes with the historical amnesia that surrounds them and the work’s broader theoretical implications. In 1982, Congress passed the Amerasian Immigration Act, ...
E-ISBN-13: 9780826273888
E-ISBN-10: 0826273882
Print-ISBN-13: 9780826221223
Print-ISBN-10: 082622122X
Page Count: 256
Illustrations: 1 illus.
Publication Year: 2017
Edition: 1
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