This article takes as its point of departure the disparity between the empirical poverty of race and its survival, even growth, as a way of understanding history and politics—or more specifically, history as politics and politics as history in the Philippines during the nineteenth century. What interested me primarily was how race as a form of praxis is too often and easily ascribed to a discredited science that came into vogue during the nineteenth century. While race rhetoric certainly drew its authority from scientific positivism, its spokespeople also invoked the fields of law, philosophy, and religion. Yet for most people, race was not a question to be resolved by scientific investigation, but a weapon in a war or conflict between unequal opponents. Notsurprisingly, questions around the existence or impossibility of a Filipino race were most fully debated and developed in a time of war—the 1896 Philippine Revolution, and the 1899 Philippine-American War, which began just after the outbreak of war between the U. S. and Spain in 1898. My article charts the genealogy of these debates, and the relationship of race to the narration of anti-imperial movements and alternative cosmopolitanism.

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This article illustrates how important the Spanish press was in the Philippines during the last 30 years of Spanish colonial rule and the early period of American colonial administration. Using archival material from the period, it reveals how the American colonial administration complained that the newspapers in the Philippines were mainly political, a Spanish inheritance in the archipelago as many newspapers were founded in the Philippines in the 1890s of the nineteenth century after the law of press was passed in 1883. This article also emphasizes the political clout papers possessed and the threats that they posed to the new American administration. In particular, this article shows how newspapers such as El Resumen avoided censorship and dared to say what other parties did not. El Resumen was a voice for Philippine national hero Jose Rizal and what they published in “Our Wishes” were Rizalʼs wishes for his country. An analysis of articles in El Resumen demonstrates that the censorship of the press was attenuated and depended on the governor-general. Therefore, this article questions the influential argument in Philippine historiography about Spanish censorship of the press. El Resumen served as an example for other newspapers that were founded during the beginning of the American colonial administration such as La Independencia and above all El Renacimiento. As an organ of the Nationalist party, El Renacimiento came to exert real power in Manila that influenced the government. The journal waged brilliant battles, the most important from 1904 onwards in the form of public reports of abuses committed by the constabulary. In addition, in September 1906, the journal El Renacimiento criticized, through several articles, James A. LeRoyʼs statement about William H. Taft being “the best and most influential friend of the Filipinos.” El Renacimiento, which had become a potent political force, had stated that Taft showed himself in public to be a friend of the Filipinos, while in private he considered them to be “childish.” LeRoy felt annoyed with the journal and decided to write a long letter to El Renacimiento which was published in several supplements in January of 1907. As this article makes clear, LeRoy used his defense of Taft as an excuse to attack the enemies of American rule. In sum, El Renacimiento suffered real press censorship and was forced to close in 1908, leading to the demise of publications in the Spanish language.

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Through an examination of archival materials and decisions of the Philippine Supreme Court, this article documents and analyzes the history of citizenship laws and jurisprudence in the Philippines from the close of the nineteenth century to the immediate postwar period. It demonstrates that the articulation between race and nation, mediated by citizenship, varied according to historical and geopolitical contexts, which informed citizenship debates, policies, and interpretations of legal texts. The short-lived 1899 Malolos Constitution offered an inclusive principle of jus soli, but it was superseded by the concept of Philippine citizenship enunciated in the 1902 Philippine Bill. Emblematic of contradictions within the U. S. imperial apparatus, the same legal framework that was used to exclude Filipinos from U. S. citizenship provided the means for individuals of Chinese or part-Chinese parentage to be granted Philippine citizenship based on jus soli starting in 1911, a direction the U. S. State Department began to oppose in 1920. The Commonwealth period and the crafting of the 1935 Philippine Constitution gave ascendancy to the principle of jus sanguinis, but only after the formal end of U. S. rule did the Supreme Court reverse its stance on jus soli in favor of a myth of descent.

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The widely-lauded progressive achievements of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines during the early decades of the twentieth century included the installation of modern technologies of public sanitation, mass transportation, communication and education as necessary conditions of a developing democracy and its underlying humanism. This article discusses how emergent media of communication established under U.S. colonial rule contributed to the implementing of universal standards of human life and experience towards the formation of citizen-man, as the currency and code required for Filipinos' political self-rule. I analyze the reorganization of perceptual and subjective forms entailed by U. S. imperial forms of governmentality, including the gender and race effects of social accommodations to the protocols of personhood of citizen-man, through the media apparatuses of literature, photography, and radio. Finally, I examine other modes of sensorial experience and perceptibility and forms of human and social life, which are remaindered, devalued and/or rendered illegible in the reconfiguration of natives according to the normative ideals and structures of liberal democracy, in order to expand the parameters of our understanding of the relation between social media and democracy.

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Teodoro Agoncillo's classic work on Andres Bonifacio and the Katipunan revolt of 1896 is framed by the tumultuous events of the 1940s such as the Japanese occupation, nominal independence in 1943, Liberation, independence from the United States, and the onset of the Cold War. Was independence in 1946 really a culmination of the revolution of 1896? Was the revolution spearheaded by the Communist-led Huk movement legitimate ? Agoncillo's book was written in 1947 in order to hook the present onto the past. The 1890s themes of exploitation and betrayal bythe propertied class, the rise of a plebeian leader, and the revolt of the masses against Spain, are implicitly being played out in the late 1940s. The politics of hooking the present onto past events and heroic figures led to the prize-winning manuscript's suppression from 1948 to 1955. Finallyseeing print in 1956, it provided a novel and timely reading of Bonifacio at a time when Rizal's legacy was being debated in the Senate and as the Church hierarchy, priests, intellectuals, students, and even general public were getting caught up in heated controversies over national heroes. The circumstances of how Agoncillo's work came to the attention of the author in the 1960s are also discussed.

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