Puro Arte

Filipinos on the Stages of Empire

Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780814744499
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Anthropologie culturelle et sociale

Winner of the 2012 Outstanding Book Award in Cultural Studies, Association for Asian American Studies Puro Arte explores the emergence of Filipino American theater and performance from the early 20th century to the present. It stresses the Filipino performing body's location as it conjoins colonial histories of the Philippines with U.S. race relations and discourses of globalization. Puro arte, translated from Spanish into English, simply means “pure art.” In Filipino, puro arte however performs a much more ironic function, gesturing rather to the labor of over-acting, histrionics, playfulness, and purely over-the-top dramatics. In this book, puro arte functions as an episteme, a way of approaching the Filipino/a performing body at key moments in U.S.-Philippine imperial relations, from the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, early American plays about the Philippines, Filipino patrons in U.S. taxi dance halls to the phenomenon of Filipino/a actors in Miss Saigon. Using this varied archive, Puro Arte turns to performance as an object of study and as a way of understanding complex historical processes of racialization in relation to empire and colonialism.

1

“Which Way to the Philippines?”

United Stages of Empire

The fame of the Philippine exposition has captured the World’s Fair city, and the most constant question which the Jefferson Guards have to answer is, “Which way to the Philippines?”

—New York Times, 1904

In the early decades of the twentieth century, the Filipino/a performing body appears in piecemeal form on diverse U.S. stages, including the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, also known as the St. Louis World’s Fair, and touring assemblies called “chautauquas” that featured music, lectures, speeches, and other acts combining education and entertainment. Some choice (and well-known) representations included Filipinos as buxom “Visayan girls, noted for their beauty” or as savage “dog-eating and head-hunting Igorots” (“Which Way to the Phillipines?”). Filipinos were also objects of mimicry in theater productions, by both white and black Americans, in venues across major American cities such as New York and Chicago. On the one hand, the sheer number of such reproductions of the Filipino/a performing body speaks to its formulaic, and often numbingly savage presence on the stages of U.S. empire. On the other hand, the familiarity and portability of the Filipino/a performing body occludes the very material and affective attachments that found its visibility. In this chapter, I track this recurring appearance of the Filipino/a as an imaginative and embodied consolidation of the institutions of empire, and as a corruptive presence on the stages of empire: Filipino/a bodies are consumed for profit even as they are appropriated for pleasures that exceed the workings of empire.

I turn to two prominent performance sites, the St. Louis World’s Fair and the genre of American musical theater, to consider what role Filipinos played within the larger imaginary of U.S. empire. These various performing stages function, in many ways, as a “contact zone,” a complex terrain of interaction between American patrons and Filipino/a performers, and so also between the United States and the Philippines. In her well-known formulation, Mary Louise Pratt defines “contact zones” as “social spaces where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today” (7). Pratt offers the concept of “contact zones” to shift away from the over-determined expansionist expression of “colonial frontier” and “diffusionist accounts of conquest and domination” (7). The term “contact zones” stresses the “interactive, improvisational dimensions of imperial encounters, emphasizing how subjects get constituted in and by their relations to each other” (8). This semantic shift, from “colonial frontier” to “contact zones,” extends our readings of imperial encounters to include multiple viewpoints, decentering the hegemonic perspective of conquest and domination. “Interaction,” “copresence,” and “interlocking understanding and practices” undo the totalizing script of colonialism to emphasize a relational process. The mutually constitutive character of the “contact zone,” as Rafael Perez-Torres argues, is not a “simple mélange or passive mixture but a volatile, contested, contestatory, and endlessly innovative dynamic” (33). The concept of “contact zone,” as interactive and improvisational, I suggest, forges affinity with the analytic of performance.¹ The lens of performance foregrounds a structure of hermeneutics that leaves open the possibility of interpreting the colonial script. Through spectacular acts of performance, through puro arte, Filipino/a bodies instantiate and exceed the totalizing script of colonialism, inviting forms of critical engagement that emphasize more the incompleteness of and the possibilities of inherited histories. Here, the concept of “contact zones” frames the various stages upon which U.S.-Philippine history are re/enacted, insisting on the uneven relations of power that undergird these exchanges and events.

Ambivalence marks the early years of U.S. imperial rule, as colonial fantasies collided with the spiraling dreams of Philippine nationhood. Sites such as the St. Louis World’s Fair, chautauquas, and theater productions convey the extent to which popular entertainment participated in the consolidating of U.S. imperial culture.² They had a shared interest in developing the pedagogical dimension of popular entertainment as a vehicle of empire. These cultural sites performed the necessary labor of imagining the “unknown” of imperial contact, of literalizing the kinds of relations it would produce. The St. Louis World’s Fair, more so than other sites, sought to demonstrate the United States’ emergence as an industrialized nation at the forefront of technological explorations. The all–African American musical theater production The Shoo-Fly Regiment, which toured in numerous states, including New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Arkansas, was among a repertoire of plays and musicals that also dramatized the vagaries of U.S.-Philippine conflict. Together, these two seemingly diverse cultural sites, the World’s Fair and American musical theater, compel, I will suggest, complex brownface performances of the U.S.-Philippine contact zones.

Let me first qualify the two forms of brownface performances at work here. First is the Filipino/a body at the St. Louis World’s Fair, staged as a spectacular exemplar of racial difference. The U.S. government, in collaboration with Filipino state officials, brought Filipinos to St. Louis as anthropological/ethnographic displays. People from different parts of the Philippines were exhibited in their native garb, and made to perform their daily life for the fairgoers. A distinct area of the fairground was designated as the Philippine Reservation, also known as the Philippine Village, to approximate the spatial and material origins of its savage inhabitants. The Philippine Reservation and its activities were designed, in short, to route the Filipino/a body into a discourse of civilization. The exposure of the Filipino/a body in this instance is a brownface performance orchestrated for and by an imperialist agenda.

The second form of brownface performance I wish to demarcate is the portrayal of the Filipino/a and the Philippines by non-Filipinos, enacted to service the narrative of a benevolent U.S. empire. While the St. Louis World’s Fair has been the subject of numerous scholarly works in Filipino Studies, The Shoo-Fly Regiment has yet to be interrogated for its staging of the Philippines and the Filipino/a body. The brownface performance of the Philippines and the Filipino/a body in this musical accentuates the radical malleability of the black performing body. In an attempt to depart from the dominance of minstrelsy as the only recognizable form for the expression of the black performing body, this staging of the exotic Filipino/a provided an avenue for black performers to transgress constrictions imposed by the white-black binary of the U.S. racial hierarchy. At a time when Jim Crow laws brutally restricted African American freedoms, such brownface performances vividly demonstrated the transformative powers of the performing black body. By focusing on an all black-musical theater production that sought to advance African American citizenship, we can explore instead a more robust “minor” view of the contact zone, and of the Filipino/a performing body. “Minor,” as invoked here, draws its analytical force from Francois Lionet’s and Shumei Shih’s theory of “minor transnationalism,” which emphasizes lateral relationships among minoritized groups (2).

There is of course no doubt that in both instances brownface performances of the Filipino/a body were largely Orientalist productions for consumption by the American public. My interest in these early brownface performances considers the crucial affective and material role of cultural production in the emergence of a U.S. imperial imaginary.³ As Daphne Brooks and Angela Pao have variously argued, such enactments of racial otherness are crucial to understanding the genealogy of the racialized performing body (whether it be blackface or yellowface), which at times functions to defamiliarize the spectacle and/or technologies of otherness.⁴ What is of import here is the necessary engagement of the contemporary Filipino/a performing body with such early and decidedly fraught brownface performances. After all, these performances (in all their variegated racial forms) constitute the ways in which Filipinos existed in the larger U.S. imperialist imaginary.⁵ Indeed, this book regards the Filipino/a performing body in different sites and genres of performance as a laboring body that is racialized, gendered, and sexualized, precisely as it negotiates critical moments in U.S.-Philippine imperial relations. These enactments of Filipinos on U.S. colonial sites and by African Americans impersonating Filipinos challenge attachments to the fixity and object status of the Filipino/a performing body. To read the Filipino/a body through performances of brownface is to consider a genealogy of the Filipino/a performing body beyond the celebratory essentialisms of historical recuperation. In turning to such a model of historical genealogy, I echo the cautions of Coco Fusco’s formative essay, “The Other History of Intercultural Performance.” Through her collaborative performance with Guillermo Gomez-Peña, A Couple in a Cage, Fusco reminds us of racialized performance’s own entanglements with the very imperial ideologies and practices it seeks to exceed. I follow the lead of contemporary Filipino American performance projects and artists, such as KulArts, Inc.’s POMO Festival of Pilipino American Modern Art, Gigi Otalvaro-Hormillosa, Julie Tolentino, and Pearl Ubungen, who similarly confront colonial representations of Filipino/a performing bodies alongside the desires and ambitions of contemporary Filipino/a American performance.

I: The World’s Fair on My Mind: Dogeating, G-Strings, and Bare Breasts

The significance of the 1904 St. Louis Worlds’ Fair is most vividly captured in the film Meet Me in St. Louis. As the Smith family gazes in awe at the magnificent lights and awesome structure of the fair, Esther Smith breathlessly exclaims, “And it’s all right here in St. Louis. Right here where we live.” Meet Me in St. Louis, Sally Benson’s memoir-turned-film-remade-for-television-twice-turned-play, is set in 1903, a year before the opening of the “greatest fair on earth.” The book records the Benson’s family life from the point of view of a young woman (Sally), capturing a local view, if you will, of a powerful nation on the verge of imperial conglomeration. Though Meet Me in St. Louis is a story of the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, both the memoir and the film were released in the midst of World War II. The movie’s closing words, “right here,” focus on the local comfort of a small city, held up as equally promising against the big city. As the war among nations brings uncertainty to the world, Esther’s utterance of “right here, in our own city” is a reassurance of the safety of American lives within U.S. borders. Within such a volatile historical context, the staging of the World’s Fair emerges as a stabilizing symbol and a reaffirmation of U.S. international involvement.⁶ “Right here in St. Louis” declares the arrival of the world in the United States and of U.S. presence in the world.

We know now that the St. Louis World’s Fair’s most popular stop was the Philippine Village and that the Filipino/a performing body was the spectacle to behold. David R. Francis, head exposition director, noted, “ninety-nine out of a hundred fairgoers visited the reservation” (qtd. in Rydell 170).⁷ Though Filipinos were present in earlier world expositions in the United States, the heightened focus on them in the St. Louis World’s Fair is the subject of many writings on Filipinos in nineteenth-century world expositions. At the Philippine Village, approximately twelve hundred Filipinos were exhibited, including Igorots (from Bontoc, Suyoc, and other regions), Manobos, Moros, Visayans, and Negritos, as well as the Philippine Scouts and Constabulary. So grand was the Philippine portion of the exhibition, and so expensive, that it has been referred to as the fair within a fair (Fermin 63).

“The fame of the Philippine exposition has captured the World’s Fair city, and the most constant question which the Jefferson Guards have to answer is, ‘Which way to the Philippines?’” (“Which Way to the Philippines?”). What are we to make of fairgoers’ enthusiastic response to the Philippine exhibit? What solicited their reaction? How did fairgoers react to what they were seeing? Recorded accounts, specifically in newspapers, drew attention to the Igorot dog-eating rituals, various Filipino peoples’ manner of (un)dress, the beautiful Visayan maidens, and the Philippine Scouts and Constabulary. References to “dog-eating and head-hunting Igorots,” to Filipinos as “savage,” and to the Negrito as “the missing link” were made with ease, naturalizing Filipinos/as as savage and barbaric.⁸ The Philippine Village was designed to display different people from the Philippines in their “natural environment” (“Which Way to the Philippines?”), thereby collapsing everyday life with a decontextualized display of the exotic. Scenes such as the Igorots’ dog-feast, “dwarf Negritos … shooting with their bows and poisoned arrows, light[ing] fires with the friction of bamboo sticks,” the “Visayan girls, noted for their beauty, … weaving bamboo hats and basket work,” and “the little naked Moro boys tumbl[ing] in and out of their small dugout canoes” beneath the bridge of Arrowhead Lake were presented as depictions of typical life in the newly acquired tropical colony (“Which Way to the Philippines?”). These activities may well have been daily routines to the peoples of the Luzon mountain provinces and women of the Visayan region. On the platform of the World’s Fair, however, the display of everyday activities subscribed to a racist imperial ideology that characterized Filipinos as the “missing link” in human evolution (Fermin 107).⁹

During the seven months of the Filipino exhibit at the World’s Fair, the spectacular and the mundane intertwined in some strange and comforting twists: elders died, couples wed, and children were born.¹⁰ One of the children born on the fairgrounds was named after the city of St. Louis and the fair’s presiding officer, David Francis. While Americans set up colonial shop in the Philippines, by way of governance, education, and other forms of repressive and ideological state apparatuses, the St. Louis World’s Fair paved consent for the U.S. imperial project in the metropole. It was, par excellence, a pedagogical exercise, teaching not just about the outside world but also about how they—as Americans—inhabited the world.

Recorded responses of the patrons demonstrated that Filipino dog eating and the Filipino manner of dress drew much heated commentary. A fairgoer expressed strong response to the consumption of dog as food, writing the following to his wife: “I went up to the Philippine Village to-day and saw the wild, barbaric Igorots, who eat dogs, and are so vicious that they are fenced in and guarded by a special constabulary…. They are the lowest type of civilization I ever saw and thirst for blood” (qtd. in Vostral 19).¹¹ This dietary and culinary practice caused a lengthy debate, involving the Humane Society. For each response of disgust among the American public came offers such as the following from another American, printed in the Missouri Republic under the title “Letter Offering Dogs.”

Dexter, Mo., April 12, 1904.—

Governor Hunt, Manager Igorrote Tribe:

I have been noticing that for some time your charges, the Igorrotes, have been complaining about their not receiving any dogs for eating, as is their custom. I am desirous of furnishing them dogs for this purpose.

I put in many a weary day in their own country and many a day while there I have yearned earnestly for a few bites of those dishes which I left back in the good old State of Missouri. This has won my sympathy for the poor, disconsolate wretches, separated from the rations which they were reared upon.

Now, the Humane Society has no jurisdiction over the dogs of Southeast Missouri and I will send you as many dogs as you can use, up to the number of 200. I seek no remuneration whatever except that you pay the freight. Hoping for an early reply, I remain, yours truly

MORTIMER T. JEFFERS.

Offers to send dogs by the hundreds flooded the fair’s administration.¹² These expressions of support for the dog-feast are a mix of cultural relativity, cultural sensitivity, patronage, and Orientalist fetishism. American responses to Igorots’ dietary choices reiterate Karen Shimakawa’s notion of “national abjection.” Linking feminist psychoanalytic theorist Julia Kristeva’s work on “abjection” to national identity formation and racism, Shimakawa emphasizes the mutually constitutive process between seemingly different or even opposite locations. As abjects within the U.S. racial hierarchy, racial others are regarded as repulsive. Fervent attention to dog-eating Igorots illustrates the persistence of perverse curiosity and desire directed toward racial others, despite and precisely because of their grotesqueness. The curious performance of the exoticized and “barbaric” Filipinos and their strange eating habits becomes a histrionic part of American identity formation during this period of empire building. The exchange over this dog-eating spectacle highlights that which is “occupying the seemingly contradictory, yet functionally essential, position of consistent element and radical other” (3).

The clothing of the Filipino/a performing body also drew sensationalized attention. Igorot and Negrito men in bahag and the women with exposed breasts caused quite a stir among some of the fair’s patrons.¹³ As 1904 was an election year, debates on whether these Filipinos should cover their bareness extended to the White House. Warring parties exuberantly discussed the “Philippine problem,” with anti-imperialist Democrats casting doubt on the benevolence of the U.S. role in the islands. For anti-imperialists who were against annexation for racist reasons, the bareness of the Igorots and the Negritos consolidated their bigoted perception of barbarism and savageness.¹⁴ Such representations provided ample fodder for the interrogation of the very narrative of progress, uplift, and civilization undergirding the annexation project. Additionally, Missouri was a key state in the 1904 election, and the local media’s lurid coverage of the Igorot and Negrito men and women threatened the incumbent Roosevelt’s pro-annexation stance.¹⁵ Fearing that the...