Every day (unless I slip) over the next month, I'm going to to be tweeting counterhistories of Filipino America, both from my own research as well as the work of my colleagues, mentors, and friends. #FAHM #AsianAmerican

0/31

In the mid-1930s, FilAm leaders corroborated with Manila elites on various "conventions" to try to solve the "Filipino" problem of vagrancy and unemployment. Their proposed solution? Ship the Manongs to Mindanao and make them colonize it, to restore their masculinity.

1/31 #FAHM

Your favorite "Filipino martial arts" (esp. weapons) most likely emerged as a set of combat practices that US military hired local Filipino men to teach, so that White men could more effectively kill native Southeast Asians in mountains & jungles.

2/31 #FAHM

The same US cavalry regiments that massacred people in the Philippines in the early 20th century were the same units at Wounded Knee and Indian Wars, at the US-Mexico border in the 1910s, WWII in the Pacific, Korean War, Desert Storm, Iraq...

3/31 #FAHM

When asked to defend his forces massacring Kalinga people in the early 20th C, an American colonial official said "it is impossible to make an omelet without breaking eggs." He then proceeded to take photographs of the land and sell his prints to the Newberry Library.

4/31 #FAHM

Many of yall Philippine lowlanders (esp in the diaspora) look at these photos from Americans' punitive campaigns and turn them into self-exoticization, obsessions with tattoos, and futile searches for authenticity. You know the photos.

4.5/31 #FAHM

A counterhistorical challenge: stop romanticizing Gabriela and Diego Silang as your ideal "Filipinos", & think about them in their own native terms, according to the radical geography of the Amianan (North), & through the revolutionary grammars of Itneg & Ilokano.

5/31 #FAHM

cw: sexual violence/abduction

The "Manongs" regularly attempted to abduct young women (Filipina, Indigenous, White) from their homes. This was called "koboy-koboy," or cowboying, attesting to the ways that these men developed ideas of property around women-as-cattle.

6/31 #FAHM

(I'm giving a talk on this soon btw for @WhaHistory next week, with @MatthewBasso1, @mlheslop, and @MeganAnnStanton)

6.5/31 #FAHM

The "exposure trips" to the Philippines of certain activist organizations rely on similar knowledge infrastructures and assumptions of authentic experience that were institutionalized by early 20th century colonial anthropology.

7/31 #FAHM

I know this one's controversial. And I know that these trips are the basis of diasporic radicalization. But what moral relations will you maintain? What class assumptions do you make? What is genuine impact? Upon whose backs is diasporic radicalization built?

7.5/31 #FAHM