Read an Excerpt
Racial TRANSFORMATIONS
Latinos and Asians Remaking the United States
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2006 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-3704-1
Chapter One
COLONIAL VISION, RACIAL VISIBILITY Racializations in Puerto Rico and the Philippines during the Initial Period of U.S. Colonization
Gary Y. Okihiro
Racialization changes over space and time and the differential locations of subjectivities, of self and other. Racialization, thus, is clearly a historical process of social construction. Both Puerto Ricans and Filipina/os were racialized differently under the successive colonial regimes of Spain and the United States, even as Filipina/os and Puerto Ricans held distinctive racialized ideas of themselves during those historical periods. Those variations emanated from, among other things, the ethnic, class, and gender positions of Puerto Ricans and Filipina/os and the subject positions of business, military, government, and intellectual Spanish and U.S. elites.
In this essay, I survey the racializations (and their apparent absence and transparent presence) among the colonizers of the colonized during the first few years of the U.S. occupations of Puerto Rico and the Philippines. I do not consider the racializations that occurred during the war of conquest, which might suggest differential treatments of the U.S. enemy. In Puerto Rico, the United States fought anineteen-day campaign-which some called a "picnic"-in which three Americans died and the troops were allegedly bombarded with cigars and bananas, whereas, in the Philippines, the United States waged a bloody four-year war of attrition that involved 200,000 U.S. troops and resulted in 4,300 American and more than 50,000 Filipina/o deaths.
What seems obvious from this review is the comparative lack of interest on the part of the U.S. colonizers in Puerto Rico's peoples as contrasted with their prodigious fascination with the peoples of the Philippines. Perhaps Sidney Mintz's insight about anthropology's neglect of Caribbean peoples generally and globally is operative here in the particular case of Puerto Rico. Mintz astutely observed anthropology's valuation of the native and the exotic and its consequent neglect of the migrant and the familiar. The indigenous peoples of the Caribbean, perceived as vanished, and their cultures, seen as Westernized and as transplantations, have, thus, carried scant cachet within the discipline. Similarly, it seems, Puerto Ricans in the United States have been simultaneously racialized as a visible other and rendered invisible within the U.S. social formation, as pointed out by the linguist Bonnie Urciuoli. "For decades," writes Urciuoli, "research, media, and public entertainment have either ignored Puerto Ricans or portrayed them as a social problem," despite the fact that they have lived in U.S. cities since at least the 1890s. Another part of that erasure has been the divergent racialization of darker-skinned Puerto Ricans as blacks and lighter-skinned Puerto Ricans as whites within the dominant U.S. binary of color.
Contexts of Empire
Those narratives of peoples, women, and workers of the new possessions carried special significance for many whites in the United States. The late nineteenth century, the years of this discussion, was a troubling period in U.S. history. The 1890 U.S. Census declared an end to the frontier, the manifest outlet for continental expansion and mythical ground for democracy and rugged individualism. Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian of the frontier, summed up the implication of the Census report. "This, then, is the real situation: a people composed of heterogeneous materials, with diverse and conflicting ideals and social interests, having passed from the task of filling up the vacant spaces of the continent, is now thrown back upon itself, and is seeking an equilibrium," he wrote in 1896. "The diverse elements are being fused into national unity. The forces of reorganization are turbulent and the nation seems like a witch's kettle."
Among those "diverse elements" were the 25 million immigrants, or more than four times the total of the previous fifty years, who streamed to the eastern and western shores of the United States between 1865 and 1915 and who originated, not from familiar Britain or Northern Europe, but from Italy, Greece, Poland, and Russia in the Northeast and from China, Japan, Korea, India, and the Philippines in the West. They flocked to the U.S. Northeast and West, where captains of industry, in cities and fields, accumulated fortunes by monopolizing land, resources, and capital. Racial, ethnic, and class conflicts boiled and bubbled in this "witch's kettle." In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act because, in the framers' words, "the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof." In 1886, police killed four strikers in Chicago, and the next day a bomb killed seven police officers and injured sixty-seven other people. The Haymarket Square bombing came to symbolize to many Americans the alien menace posed by Southern and Eastern Europeans, immigrants, radicals, and anarchists. "These people are not American," a Chicago newspaper reported of the Haymarket strikers, "but the very scum and offal of Europe."
In a letter dated 14 May 1892, the editor and writer Thomas Bailey Aldrich explained the circumstances surrounding the writing of his poem "Unguarded Gates" (1895), which warned against the alien tide. "I went home and wrote a misanthropic poem called 'Unguarded Gates' ... in which I mildly protest against America becoming the cesspool of Europe. I'm much too late, however," he lamented. "I looked in on an anarchist meeting the other night ... and heard such things spoken by our 'feller citizens' as made my cheek burn.... I believe in America for the Americans; I believe in the widest freedom and the narrowest license, and I hold that jailbirds, professional murderers, and amateur lepers ... and human gorillas generally should be closely questioned at our Gates." Aldrich closed his lamentation on criminality, contagion, and evolution with an endorsement of the writer Rudyard Kipling's acid observation that New York City had become "a despotism of the alien, by the alien, tempered with occasional insurrections of decent folk!" In "Unguarded Gates," Aldrich raised the alarm against "a wild motley throng" pressing through America's wide-open gates, bringing with them "unknown gods and rites," "strange tongues," and "accents of menace alien to our air."
The acquisition, thus, of colonies with their "motley throngs" and "accents of menace" added more ingredients to the seething brew. Advocates of the new possessions countered that rhetoric of race by sublimating racializations within discourses of gender and class, even as those who refused to embrace the new possessions engaged in race mongering. Of course, promoters of the new possessions deployed the language of social uplift and the social gospel, popular at the time among white reformers and progressives, and some saw U.S. overseas expansion as the salubrious extension of the generative frontier. The U.S. president, William McKinley, who took up "the white man's burden," explained his decision to colonize the Philippines. After ruling out giving the islands back to Spain, turning them over to commercial rivals France and Germany, and granting them independence, McKinley concluded: "There was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them and by God's grace do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men, for whom Christ also died." And McKinley's secretary of state, John Hay, the architect of the U.S. open door China policy, observed that the Far East had become the United States's "Far West," a reference to the reopening of the symbol-laden frontier.
Other anxieties troubled some white, middle-class men. Domestic spaces were facing challenges from the "New Woman," who sought to remake herself and her society. Middle-class privileges allowed women to pursue higher education, albeit attenuated by degree and career constraints, and to engage in a variety of causes of social uplift. Under the banner of progressivism, these women sought to cure some of society's ills associated with urbanization and industrialization. The settlement house movement, represented famously by Jane Addams's Hull House in Chicago, was an example of that attempt to improve the lot of immigrants by teaching them the middle-class values and lifestyles deemed necessary for their success in the United States. White women played key roles in that movement and the field and profession it helped institute-social work. And economic growth drew working-class women out of the home and into the factory, and the distance between private and public spheres lessened. The New Woman sought to enhance her opportunities and reduce her dependence on men, she participated in the public arena formerly occupied by men only, and she rallied for woman suffrage, one of the largest reform movements in U.S. history.
These erosions of what were formerly the preserves of white, middle-class men prompted a crisis of masculinity and privilege. "Between 1880 and 1910," the historian Gail Bederman summarized, "middle-class men were especially interested in manhood. Economic changes were undermining Victorian ideals of self-restrained manliness. Working-class and immigrant men, as well as middle-class women, were challenging white middle-class men's beliefs that they were the ones who should control the nation's destiny. Medical authorities were warning of the fragility of men's bodies.... All this activity suggests that men were actively, even enthusiastically, engaging in the process of remaking manhood." Imperial expansion was a means by which to reconstitute whiteness and manliness, as in "the white man's burden," and a way to integrate the diverse nation, which involved for some white, middle-class men domestic order both within the home and homeland and abroad in the empire.
Racializing Puerto Ricans
Among the gleanings of U.S. racializations of Puerto Ricans about the turn of the century are brief commentaries by politicians and businessmen who deployed the race card to advance their particular ends. Whitelaw Reid, a member of the U.S. delegation that shaped the Treaty of Paris, which ended the Spanish-American War in 1898, and the owner of the New York Tribune, warned of the dire consequences of admitting the peoples of the newly acquired territories into the Union. "Their people," Reid declared of the new possessions, "come from all religions, all races-black, yellow, white, and their mixtures-all conditions, from pagan ignorance and the verge of cannibalism to the best products of centuries of civilization, education, and self-government." And, speaking to members of the Massachusetts Club, Reid raised the alarm that "the enemy is at the gates ... [and] may gain the citadel." "The enemy," explained Reid, was Puerto Rico's "mixed population, a little more than half colonial Spanish, the rest negro and half-breed, illiterate, alien in language, alien in ideas of right, interests, and government." Their absorption, he predicted, employing the language of eugenics, would lead to the "degeneration and degradation of the homogeneous, continental Republic of our pride." Thus racialized by Reid, the newly acquired peoples in general and Puerto Rico's "mixed population" in particular served to advance his white-supremacist and anti-annexationist ends.
Henry K. Carroll, unlike Reid, advocated greater interaction between the United States and Puerto Rico, especially for the purpose of commerce. Carroll was sent by (and reported to) the U.S. Treasury secretary as his special commissioner to Puerto Rico in 1898 after the signing of the armistice. Race, in Carroll's report, disappears almost entirely as a category and is, instead, embedded within a discourse of class. According to the report, Puerto Rico is densely populated, most of its people are poor, and because of their poverty, resort to crime and sink to immorality. "Porto Ricans are not bad people," assures the U.S. consul, Philip C. Hanna, whom Carroll quotes, in advocating free trade between Puerto Rico and the United States. "Remove from them the terrible temptation produced by enforced hunger and nakedness; give to these people an opportunity to earn an honest living; teach them that toil is honorable; build for them factories instead of forts ... and we shall produce upon them a moral effect which the Spaniards failed to produce, and make of them a people whom we shall not be ashamed to recognize as fellow-citizens of our grand Republic." In the promotion of U.S. business opportunities in Puerto Rico, race was apparently absent, yet folded within the description of the Puerto Rican working class was race, insofar as dense populations, poverty, crime, and immorality signified nonwhites and denizens of U.S. urban centers and of the tropics.
Not surprisingly, this narrative of race, class, and morality was gendered. Work, asserted a group of businessmen from the district of Ponce whom Carroll quoted, eliminated poverty and allowed women to "take the fruit of their labor to their homes, thanks to the factory, which has saved them from the wages of sin." Wage labor, it is explained, "especially elevates and dignifies woman, to whom it opens a wider field than that of ordinary labor as a domestic, and enables her to turn away from the inducements offered by houses of ill fame." In short, labor was presumed to both provide for material wants and elevate morals. Even as class position signified race within the colonial context, where workers conjured nonwhites and employers whites, women figured morality. Capitalism or the factory signified whiteness, manliness, and productivity in this racialized, gendered, and classed discourse, which rescues both the nonwhite poor, elevating them from poverty to plenty, and the nonwhite woman, directing her assets homeward and away from immorality.
Puerto Rican working-class men were feminized by those promoting the colony's economic potential and, thereby, represented as ideal laborers, as best exploited. Amos K. Fiske, the influential business writer for the New York Times, urged the annexation of Puerto Rico for U.S. economic gain. Describing the Puerto Rican labor force, Fiske wrote: "There are many blacks, possibly a third of all the people, and much mixed blood, but the population is not ignorant or indolent or in any way degraded. It is not turbulent or intractable, and there is every reason to believe that under encouraging conditions it would become industrious, thrifty and prosperous." William Dinwiddie's widely read Puerto Rico: Its Conditions and Possibilities, published in 1899, described the Puerto Rican man and laborer: "The Puertoriqueño is not an anarchist or an insurrectionist, for he knows no other life and does not starve or grow cold, while the burdens of oppression are his birthright, handed down for centuries. He is, then, in spite of his wretchedness, dirt, and poverty, as we see it, a fairly-contented man.... [H]e is docile, obliging, appreciative of favors, and, best of all, possesses an inbred courtesy and politeness, and an equability of temperament, which permit him to readily absorb new ideas." As docile, obliging, and appreciative of favors, feminized Puerto Rican working-class men were ideal laborers and bore racialized and gendered features of nonwhites generally, albeit sublimated within a discourse of class and economic uplift.
Less inclined to bury race under the debris of class was the U.S. military, which saw its role in the colony as that of a police force and was skeptical about the prospects for labor in the racial advancement of the Puerto Rican working class. Although the common belief among Americans was that Puerto Ricans were white, the military governor reported in 1900 that "the so-called white race have a decided color-a reddish brown not unlike the color of those persons in the United States who have more or less Indian blood." Puerto Ricans, however, were not Indians, nor were they "negritic." Instead, they had Asiatic features, and their brown skin color was probably due to "Moorish" influences, speculated the report, that is, "the intermixture of the Spanish and Moors over a thousand years ago." Besides those "whites," there were many "Negroes and mulattoes" among Puerto Rico's peoples who were descendants of slaves.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Racial TRANSFORMATIONS Copyright © 2006 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
