In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

139 4 The Performance of Patriotism Ironic Affiliations and Literary Disruptions in Carlos Bulosan’s America In late 1902, the adjutant general of the Insular Bureau of the U.S. War Department received a letter from Lt. Col. Richard Pratt, headmaster of the Indian Industrial Training School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, on the subject of the education of Filipinos. Pratt’s purpose in the letter was to propose the Carlisle plan as a method of educating young Filipino men and women; such a plan, sketched broadly, was to bring Filipinos “in as great numbers as practicable” to the United States to live among and be educated by “good Americans” for, as Pratt asserted, “It will hardly be disputed that the best way to make an alien American is to let him associate with Americans, nor that to make him a good American it is essential that he associate with good Americans.”1 Recommending the establishment of schools in the United States solely for the purpose of training Filipino students, Pratt reasoned that separating students from their homes was the surest way to offer them “our education, the language, industries, and other useful qualities of our American life.” The results, he boasted, were “as uniformly successful as any work of its kind among our own people.”2 Pratt was not alone in his concern about the educational potential for assimilating Filipino subjects. The Insular Bureau received dozens of letters regarding the possibility of educating select Filipino students in the United States. Most of these were from American educators eager to enlist their schools in the imperial project; a few were from soldiers returning home who assumed that the Filipino children they left behind would languish in the absence of their example.3 Pratt’s vision was unique, however. He was not concerned with educating individuals, but with inaugurating a system for the large-scale Americanization of the new colonial subjects; 140 The Performance of Patriotism he imagined that the success of a first group of fifty Filipino students would eventually lead to more schools and thousands of students who, once transformed into “good Americans,” would carry forward the “civilizing mission” on their own. Suggesting that the “establishment in America of schools for the benefit of Filipino youth” be an immediate priority, he argued that the Carlisle plan was ideal for ensuring the “extraordinary benefit” that the influence of “fifteen hundred young Filipinos returning to their homes after being educated and living in America under the influences of our American system of education, training, and industries” would have in “Americanizing the islands.” As further proof of the expediency of his proposal, Pratt offered the successful Americanization of forty-six Puerto Rican students who had been enrolled at Carlisle, beginning in 1899. Remarking that the Puerto Rican students’ “superior intelligence ” and “ready use” of Spanish made them “rather more of a problem in anglicizing than the Indians,” Pratt claimed that “these students from our island dependency” have exhibited “extraordinary progress in English speaking and in the acquirement of a knowledge of our American ways and civilization and a complete readiness to conform to and adapt themselves to it.”4 Here, Pratt articulated a significant connection between the treatment of Native Americans and of Filipinos, both of whom he considered to be morally and intellectually inferior populations who required the disciplined guidance of Anglo-Saxon teachers. In so doing, he offered a vision of Filipino Americanization based on a theory of cultural assimilation through immersion in American life. Of course, the American life he envisioned did not include the indigenous peoples of the Americas at its center. Rather, his plan was to mold Native Americans and Filipinos into a particular vision of middle-class American culture, indoctrinating students into the Protestant cultural norms of thrift, property ownership, submission to authority, and patriarchal domestic life. In the heavily controlled , surveilled, and regimented atmosphere of residential schools, he hoped to reinforce the dominance of Anglo-Saxon culture by marking Native Americans’ and Filipinos’ distance from its central traditions and their inferiority to its organizing power. Pratt’s proposal came at the end of a challenging year for the U.S. occupation of the Philippines. President Theodore Roosevelt had declared the end of the war in the Philippines on July 4, 1902, proclaiming the final pacification of the islands and the triumph of U.S. sovereignty. In the United States, however, the revelation of violent excesses of the U.S. [3.145.36.10] Project MUSE (2024-04...

Share