The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898-1946 by Rick Baldoz (review)

After U.S. victory in the Spanish-American War and the purchase of the Philippines from Spain in 1898, American expansionists and anti-imperialists engaged in heated debates about the future of the archipelago and its inhabitants. Sociologist Rick Baldoz astutely observes that at the heart of the matter was a moral and political contradiction: "the drive to enlarge the territorial borders of the United States through overseas imperial conquest and the simultaneous desire to delimit the boundaries of the American polity to exclude those populations deemed unfit for national citizenship" (23). In The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898-1946, Baldoz documents the U.S. colonization of the Philippines and the early-twentieth-century history of Filipino migrations to the United States in order to illuminate the complex entanglement of international and domestic boundary controls.

Baldoz offers a highly nuanced account of the major roles that race and racism played in the debates over the colonial question. Although anti-imperialists initially employed humanitarian appeals to oppose colonization, they would increasingly rely on an aversive racism that emphasized the unassimilability of Filipinos in the United States and that raised fears of miscegenation. Expansionists reckoned with serious Philippine as well as U.S. domestic opposition. Not wanting American colonizers to replace Spanish ones, Filipino nationalists vociferously demanded independence. Expansionists countered these multi-sited criticisms with a paternalistic racism that offered Filipinos the possibility of racial uplift under the tutelage of a U.S. colonial regime.

Baldoz's analysis also pays close attention to the ways that the Filipino experience intersected with other racialized groups in the United States. Southern Congressmen opposed annexation of the Philippines by invoking the fearful example of African American advancement at the expense of whites during Reconstruction. In the U.S. West, nativists compared Filipinos to uncivilized hordes of Chinese. Expansionists often drew parallels between the pacification of the Philippines and the subjugation of Native American during the "Indian Wars," and federal Indian policy became a model for U.S. colonial education and governance in the Philippines.

The Third Asiatic Invasion illustrates that the racial formation of Filipinos took place in both the Philippines and the United States, reminding readers that the experiences of migrants to the United States are deeply connected to a U.S. global presence in the sending country. From the late 1800s to early 1900s, U.S. colonial officials who comprised the Philippine Commission conducted surveys of the archipelago that categorized Filipinos in a spectrum of primitive and uncivilized groups. The exhibition of approximately 1,100 Filipinos at the 1904 St. Louis world's fair publicized these gradations of Filipino racial inferiority to the American masses.

Empire and migration, Baldoz notes, go together. It would be the large-scale migrations of Filipinos to the United States, primarily as an inexpensive labor force for Hawaiian sugar plantations beginning in 1906, and then for U.S. Western agribusiness and Alaskan canneries beginning in the 1920s, that nativists conceptualized as the "third Asiatic invasion." Unlike previous "invasions" of Chinese and Japanese immigrants, however, the political status of Filipinos as "U.S. nationals" and their racial classification as "Malay" vexed the U.S. court system at local, state, and national levels. Baldoz's meticulous analysis of federal and local court records and newspaper reportage illustrates that nativists worked tirelessly at the level of public discourse as well as in legal proceedings to define Filipinos as a "social problem" and to restrict their belonging in the United States through the denial of U.S. citizenship, anti-miscegenation laws, alien land laws, and repatriation campaigns. The blatant objective of the nativist agenda was to restrict Filipinos' life chances in the United States. When state power to subjugate Filipinos in the United States was ineffective, vigilante attacks occurred to keep Filipinos in their place.

Another major obstacle in the nativist agenda was Filipinos' tenacious...