Project Overview

Reconstructing Transnational Legacies and Rediscovering a "Forgotten" Past

The concept of invisibility is commonly studied in the discourse of Filipino American history and in framing Filipino American experiences in literature. This notion of invisibility with the contention that Filipinos in America have experienced a political disablement by their being "forgotten" from the American mainstream. But who exactly is doing the forgetting? The usual answer to this question points to institutional and political forces as the reason for repression, but it also seems implicitly provocative of another question concerning the remedial course of action: Who is going to do the remembering? This project aims to do just that, to remember.

Under U.S. colonial rule, education was deployed in the Philippines as an apparatus for the pacification of the colonial subjects and their socialization by American instruction. While Philippine society underwent a pedagogical acculturation to the English language and Western standards and practices, a select number of Filipino students were given the opportunity to study in the continental U.S, these students were given the title of pensionados. After obtaining college degrees and certification, pensionados would return to the Philippines and go on to occupy influential roles in civil society. This research examines the historical presence of Filipino students at the University of Washington concentrating on these specific government sponsored students.

Alaska Pacific Yukon Exposition 1909

Held on the University of Washington-Seattle campus in 1909 the photos below are of various ethnic groups that make up the Igorot people from the Cordillera region in Northern Philippines. The Igorots may have been the first Filipinos to set foot on this campus, not as students, but as imperial subjects.