ABSTRACT
In the summer of 2004, Filipino Americans from across the nation gathered in St. Louis, Missouri, to participate in the Tenth Biennial Conference of the Filipino American National Historical Society (FANHS). The decision to hold the 2004 conference in St. Louis was a conscious one, for it marks a specific place and time in Filipino American history. St. Louis was the site for the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, a World’s Fair commissioned by President McKinley who, when justifying U.S. imperialism in the Philippines, declared that Filipinos were “unfit for self-government” and that “there was nothing left for us [the U.S.] to do but to take them all, and to educate the Filipinos and uplift and civilize and Christianize them” (qtd. in Rusling 17). This imperialist narrative informed the design of the Fair’s simulated, million-dollar Philippine village. Colonial administrators and academic anthropologists recruited some 1,100 native Filipinos to populate the village and perform their supposed “savageness” by repeatedly performing ordinarily mundane tasks, native customs, and special rituals for the American public according to a highly regimented, monotonous, daily schedule. The 1904 World’s Fair is but one example of how images of the Filipino “savage” became amply available to an American public through various forms of publicity during the early twentieth century, in magazine articles, newspaper columns, and political cartoons. But the Fair also demonstrates how the American academy, particularly the discipline of anthropology, played an important role in “documenting” the Filipino “savage,” therefore justifying U.S. imperialism in the Philippines and a self-proclaimed mission to benevolently “assimilate” Filipinos into more “civilized” ways of life. One hundred years later, Filipino Americans are still trying to negotiate the ways they have been represented by these narratives. Thus, it seems fitting that FANHS members came together during the St. Louis centennial to take stock of how far researchbased knowledge of Filipino Americans has come “A Century Since St. Louis.”1
