Blog 2 - Life of PI

This week, our experiences shone a lot of light on the relationship between the Philippines and the United States, and on a broader sense, the relationship between Filipino and Western cultures as a whole. From something as simple as seeing one of the largest US Embassies in the world, located in Manila, to visiting Intramuros Park within the heart of the city, the implications reach far and wide. My experiences in speaking with Filipinos this week, such as Master Rey, students at the Philippines Women’s University, and others, expressed that they welcome Americans into their homeland, but it is clearly evident that this hasn’t always been the case. Based on the readings and our firsthand experiences throughout this past week, there was one specific discussion question that I focused on; what made Filipinos romanticize Americans and Western culture, if it was the Americans and Western culture that initially destroyed their own native culture?

As I got deeper into the readings, it was astonishing, as well as appalling, to learn more about how America gained possession of the Philippines. As Spain began to lose their own war with the Philippines, they sold the PI, Guam, Puerto Rico and Cuba to the United States, essentially to save face, transferring their power to the stronger Americans, rather than forfeiting it themselves. As we visited Intramuraos, you could see the remnants of the battles that took place in order to seal America’s possession of the Philippines. At the museum located here, we learned about José Rizal, who was chosen to be the Philippines national hero. I found this fact to be really interesting, because Rizal himself seemed to represent Western culture, rather than representing the Native Filipinos to which he originally belonged. Rizal visibly leaned towards acting as an assimilated Westerner, which in retrospect, seems to represent the Filipino that the Americans hoped to create through benevolent assimilation. In fact, it seemed that he actually denounced his status as a Filipino in order to become a part of the greater, westernized culture.

In the comic piece titled Benevolent Assimilation, the corruption of the Americans during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s was illustrated vividly. The author of this piece expressed his discontentment with the Americans, not only in how the United States gained possession of the Philippines, but also in America’s treatment of the Filipinos after declaring this land as it’s own.  Expressed in this piece is the fact that Americans only wanted to gain possession of the Philippines because they saw the people “unfit for self-government” (Zinn 55). After all, in the words of Emil Flohri, “the Philippines are only the stepping stone to China” (Zinn 67). Relating to Kidlat Tahimik’s lecture from earlier on, after reading this piece, I began to view America’s implementation of the ‘Benevolent Assimilation’ policy as benevolent assassination. As America took control of the Philippines, there was never any interest in incorporating Filipino culture into a mutual cohabitation with western culture; they simply wanted to decimate any individualistic, freestanding Filipino opinions and replace them with their American ideals, implementing their own system of education early on in order to erase the Philippines of the past.

In Dr. Angel Shaw’s class discussion with her art students, I saw a common theme unite most of the individual’s work, relating it to our own coursework. The students work focused on ideas such as inculturation, the ‘other,’ intersectionality and anglo-conformity. One artist that really stuck out to me was Abby Bottacabe, who had one piece titled “Fading Away.” In her explanation, she talked about how you must choose your own destination, as well as become a part of the movement. Abby’s artwork particularly intrigued me because the title ‘Fading Away’ seemed to directly relate to Filipino identity and culture fading away as America implemented it’s own culture and identity throughout the Philippines.

In “To The Person Sitting in Darkness,” Written by Mark Twain, who “spent the last ten years of his life fighting against the US occupation of the Philippines as a member of the Anti-Imperialist League,” he discusses the missionary question of America’s occupation of the Philippines (Zinn 71). He writes that the people who sit in the darkness began to notice the corruption of Christianity and colonization, and became suspicious of it because they recognized that “there [was] more money in it, more territory, more sovereignty, and other kinds of emolument, than there [was] in any other game that [was] played (Twain 61). His opinions of the corruption that took place during this time are strong, as he writes that “religious invasions of Oriental countries by powerful Western organizations are tantamount to filibustering expeditions, and should not only be discountenanced,” but that strong measures should be taken for their complete suppression (Twain 60). This idea of overriding Filipino culture and replacing it with an Americanized system was meant to suppress the Filipinos, imposing the idea that implementing dominant Western culture into the Philippines was beneficial to Filipino natives. This concept directly corresponded with the final piece that we read this week, “The Philippine-American War: Friendship and Forgetting,” written by Reynaldo C. Ileto.

In his piece, Ileto expresses his own opinions on the dynamics of the relationship between the United States and the Philippines. One topic that he focuses on is ‘amigo warfare,’ the Filipino style of resistance in which Filipinos were friendly towards Americans during the day or when confronted, but at night or when no one was looking, they were guerrillas (Ileto 7). I found the fact that Americans identified this shifting of identities as anything other than a mirror image of their own tactics to be ironic, after all, it was the Americans who staged a mock battle in order to make it seem like they were protecting Filipinos, when in reality, they tricked, tortured and killed them mercilessly for their own advantages.

Through our various experiences this week, I began to understand how the Americans essentially brainwashed Filipinos to romanticize Western Culture, although the concept is still unnerving to me. As the years passed, Americans managed to rework Filipino’s viewpoint of themselves and of America, to the point that they began to see America as their protector and savior. To this day, Filipino culture has been altered to idolize the United States, to the point that Filipinos are almost oblivious to the extreme amount of damage that came at the hand of the Americas. Surprisingly, America’s Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation was extremely successful, to the point that many Filipinos still romanticize Americans and Western culture today, despite the fact that it was the Americans and Western culture that initially destroyed their own through the implementation of their own systems.

                                                         Works Cited

Ileto, R.C. (1998). The Philippine-American War, Friendship and Forgetting. In Shaw,A.V. & Francia, L.H. Vestiges of war. (pp. 3-21). New York: New York Press.

Twain, M. (2002). To the person sitting in darkness. In Shaw, A.V. & Francia, L.H. Vestiges of war. (pp. 57-68). New York: New York Press.

Zinn, H. (2008). Invasion of the Philippines. In A people’s history of American empire. (pp.53- 72) NY: Metropolitan Books.