Re/producing islands: Migrant Filipino kinship, subjectivity, and settlerism within and across imperial and national peripheries

Abstract

At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States declared war against Spain and annexed Hawaiʻi, eventually enabling the US to claim Spain’s island possessions—including the Philippines—and start its own overseas empire. American agricultural industrialists subsequently established their own plantation economies on America’s new island possessions. The occupation of the Philippines enabled the US to recruit Filipinos in order to exploit their labor in their plantations in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere. But the Filipinos were not powerless amidst these dislocations. Filipinos chose where to take their labor to, which borders (political, cultural, social) to obey, and which ones to transgress. Just as the US empire attempted to transform Indigenous lands in plantation islands, Filipinos also created and recreated their own communities wherever they went across the empire. In some ways, they paralleled the US’s formation of an imperial archipelago across the Pacific. With the plantation as a site of encounter, they met other people—fellow laborers, managers, landowners, lovers, and dispossessed Indigenous people whose lands were stolen and turned into plantations. They came with their own culture and subjectivities, and used these to not only make sense of their host land, but also recreate their own homelands. As the social and political situation changed wherever they resided, they navigated between the US imperial archipelago and the emergent archipelago of the nation-state of the Philippines. In time, they would also make Mindanao, an island in the Southern Philippines, a parallel periphery, an island with rich resources ready for the taking, turning it into a plantation island, oftentimes in cooperation with and constrained by the US empire and later, the Philippine nation.This dissertation aims to retell the story of Filipino migration within and outside the US Empire from the point of view of the migrants themselves, decentering imperial and national narratives and recentering Filipino migrants in motion. I trace the crossed histories of Hawaiʻi, California, and Mindanao from the perspective of the Visayan migrant laborers and settlers who worked the land, raised their families, and interacted with Indigenous peoples. I follow the stories of migrants by taking a closer look at biographies and family histories of Filipino migration from a transPacific perspective that encompasses but ultimately transcends the borders of empire and nation. Indeed, while working within the empire, these Filipino migrants did not necessarily see themselves as immigrating to or emigrating from different territories; they were just moving from one locale to another in order to pursue opportunities, run away from conflict, rejoin families, or create their own communities. Looking at their narratives, through journals, memoirs, diaries, films, and other stories from up-close and on the ground, we obscure grander notions of nation and empire, and better understand their journeys from their ever-changing points of view. By focusing on their own subjectivities, stories, experiences, and encounters, I aim to show how they navigated empire and nation to find their own sense of belonging—a sense of belonging that can present possibilities of decolonial futures where migrants and Indigenous people are not estranged from each other by imperial and national logics, but are instead brought together by shared experiences, and even kinship.