The 

1904 World’s Fair as a prefiguration of multiculturalism

Anton Cu Unjieng

ARTH 534B: Studies in Canadian art
Dr. Erin Silver
09 Dec 2019
 Introduction

We often think of the migrant experience in terms of invisibility – and while this is certainly

appropriate, there is also a long history of imposing visibility upon Filipinx and other migrants. The

body of the (legal or illegal) migrant is made to present itself as both a sign and the real bearer of:

particular kinds of labor power; an identifiable race within the set of what are called in Canada “visible

minorities;” and a specific stable national-cultural identity (among other things). Like most forms of

racialized visibility, this is imposed both upon the surface of the body and upon a constructed object

that, like a fetish, can almost replace that body – or, it might be as true to say, almost forces the body to

replace itself with the fetish construct.

In Canada, living under this visibility is triangulated between three interlinked factors: Canada’s

migration policy as its chief means of regulating the flow of migrant laborers; the problematic official

construction of Canada as a multicultural nation (which can be understood as a response to and

deflection of the problems posed by the influx of non-Euro-American – that is to say, non-White –

migrants); and the construction by the Philippine state of a particular set of images of and discourses

about the Filipinx laborer. Before discussing this however, I want to consider a moment in what might

be thought of as part of the pre-history of the present situation of Filipinx migrants to North America:

the Philippine Reserve at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St. Louis also known as the St.

Louis World’s Fair. I will consider the subjects of the living exhibition at the “Philippine Reserve” as

what they for the most part in fact were: temporary migrant workers. The Philippine Reserve, by

employing migrant workers to produce, perform, and embody a version of their cultures constructed

out of anthropological and exposition conventions prefigures (with an admittedly artificial clarity)

many of the concerns that arise in relation to Filipinx migrants in multicultural Canada. Finally, I will

conclude this essay with a brief consideration of the artworks of Marigold Santos as one possible

aesthetic response to these same concerns.

 Staging and scripting the Philippine Islands

Named with explicit reference to Native American reservations, the “Philippine Reservation”

was the single largest exhibition at the St. Louis World’s Fair.1 The exhibition was openly undertaken as

an ideological project on the part of the United States government which had empowered the colonial

civil government, known variously as the Philippine Commission or the Taft Commission, to appoint

an Exposition Board to organize and direct it. From the perspective of the Philippine Commission, the

exhibit had two goals: (1) to display the resources from which US capital could hope to profit and (2)

to display the people of the islands in such a way as to justify colonial policy both to the newly

acquired and not-quite-pacified colonial subjects and to its own citizenry who were often insufficiently

committed to the extension of US imperial might to South East Asia. For the most part, opposition to

the US’s imperial policy in South East Asia was articulated through the racist argument that the people

of the Philippines were inherently incompatible with US ‘civilization’ and any attempt to assimilate

them was an adventure bound to fail. The majority position of the Republican Party at this time was to

thread the needle between permanently incorporating the Philippines into its empire (as it did with

Hawaii, Guam, and Puerto Rico in different ways) and simply abandoning its colonial interests in the

1 My understanding of the Philippine Reservation relies primarily upon the accounts of the Philippine Exhibit found in
Robert W. Rydell, All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at the American International Expositions, 1876-1916,
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 154-183; Benito M. Vergara, Jr. Displaying Filipinos: Photography and
Colonialism in Early 20th Century Philippines, (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 1995), 111-150; and
Paul Kramer, “Making Concessions: Race and Empire Revisited at the Philippine Exposition, St. Louis, 1901-1905,”
Radical History Review, no. 73 (January 1999): 75-114. For a detailed account of US colonial policy in relation to the
Philippines see Frank H. Golay, Face of Empire: United States-Philippine Relations, 1898-1946, (Quezon City: Ateneo
de Manila University Press, 1998). Although it was noted by Rydell and Kramer, Vergara puts particular emphasis on
the commercial focus of the exhibition objects (113). An extremely complete description of the Philippine Exhibit can
also be found in Nancy J. Parezo and Don D. Fowler, Anthropology Goes to the Fair The 1904 Louisiana Purchase
Exposition (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 164-193. This last text, unfortunately, needs to be read with
an especially critical eye as it frequently fails to question its primary sources or contextualize information. A few
examples will have to suffice to substantiate this critique. The authors include an appendix listing the “native
participants” of the Fair, and in the case of the Filipinx participants, gives their names and their ages (415). The list
seems to come from the official records of the Fair, but does not mention Antonio S. Buangan’s research which suggests
that, at least in the case of the Suyoc, this data was likely wildly inaccurate (“The Suyoc People Who Went to St. Louis
100 Years Ago: The Search for My Ancestors,” Philippine Studies, 52, no. 4 (2004): 474-98). More frustratingly, after
quoting a newspaper report regarding the impression made by Visayan women upon male Fair goers that is literally
nothing but stereotypes, the authors write bizarrely and without any apparent irony that “[t]hese were the encounters
[that the head of the Exposition’s Anthropology Department, W. J.] McGee had wanted, where one half of the world
met and appreciated the other, turning stereotypes into cultural understanding” (191-192). McGee was, at this time, one
of the most important proponents of the anthropological theory of racial progress which he measured by each race’s
manual dexterity and cranial capacity (see Rydell, 160-163).
Philippines by arguing that, for the most part, the people of the Philippine Islands were capable of

achieving a significant degree of civilization if only the US would patiently prepare them for formal

independence.2 It was taken as assumed that, while the US undertook to train its new apprentice in the

ways of democracy, it would justly compensate itself for this undertaking by means of the material

resources of the islands; that, moreover, once the Philippines was ready for independence, it would

naturally continue to share those same resources with US businesses and the military out of gratitude;

and, of course, help to bring its neighbors into the fold of civilization. It was a sort of convenient

coincidence for US interests in the region that it discovered that the progress of civilization in the

Philippines could be measured quite directly by their acceptance of these same assumptions. The

exploitation of these resources therefore depended upon the construction of a specific image of the

Philippine population as admittedly backwards but for the most part progressing willingly along the

path to civilization that the US was benevolently laying out for them.

It was to this end that the Philippine Exposition Board employed over 1,100 Filipinxs from

across the archipelago to live in the Reserve as a ‘living exhibit’ along with various examples of major

Philippine products, exports, and resources. Among this number, Benito M. Vergara cites the account of

the Exposition president, David R. Francis, which gives the following figures: “18 Tinguian [Itneg

Igorots], 30 Bagobo, 70 Bontoc Igorot, 20 Suyoc Igorot, 38 Negritos and Mangyans, 79 Visayans, and

80 Moros”;3 Vergara also tells us that there were 413 men from the Scouts and 200 men from the

Philippine Constabulary as well as “two ‘Philippine midgets’”; finally the Constabulary and the Scouts

each brought a large band of 80 and 40 members respectively.4 To the extent that the purpose of the

living exhibition was to familiarize the Fair-goers with the peoples of the Philippine Islands, this
2 This position was not monolithic among Republicans however, and important members of the party agreed that the
inhabitants of the Philippine Islands would never be capable of self-rule and so argued strongly that the United States
ought to commit to a permanent policy of colonial control over the archipelago, Golay, Face of Empire, 57. For an
example of a member of the colonial administration championing this argument see Alfred W. McCoy, Policing
America’s Empire:The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State, (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 2009), 227-234.
3 David R. Francis, The Universal Exposition of 1904 (St. Louis: The Louisiana Purchase Exposition Co., 1913), 564,
quoted in Vargara, 112.
4 Ibid., 119, 120, and 145, fn2.
sampling is interesting: at approximately 730, including the two bands, the armed forces made up well

over half of the members of the exhibit. The remaining 400 or so members of the exhibit, on the other

hand, were drawn from ‘tribal’ groups from across the country seen as representatives of different

levels of civilization. Of these, the predominantly Christian Visayans, who were most apparently

influenced by the Spanish, were seen as the most civilized, while the rest sat on a kind of continuum of

savagery. The Negritos and the Igorots were considered the least civilized, although ethnologists made

a distinction between the two: whereas the Negritos, doomed ultimately to extinction, were regarded as

the “missing link” between humans and their animal past, the Igorots were considered as “capable of

progressing” along the path of civilization. Finally, the Moros were considered ‘semi-civilized,’

although, being Muslims, they were unfortunately fanatical and committed to insurrection.5 Each of

these populations were housed in ‘villages’ built by themselves and the Constabulary. Every effort was

made to present these spaces in the idiom of authenticity: the villages were constructed out of materials

imported from their respective regions; they were dressed in their traditional clothes; were equipped

with the traditional tools and materials they needed for their crafts; and were expected to go about their

lives in these villages while Fair-goers explored the space, perhaps even spoke with them by the aid of

interpreters, shot photographs, or purchased souvenirs.

But in the vulgarized anthropological imagination that dominated the Fair, authenticity also

meant that these peoples were presented as having virtually no history until the arrival of the United

States. They might have existed in the same archipelago, but they scarcely changed as a result of

interactions with each other let alone their own capacities for development. The islands were presented

instead as a “jumble of tribes”6 with scant interaction between them except perhaps for the occasional

feud. Hence, an ethnological museum within the reservation run by Albert E. Jenks (who was also the

head of the War Department’s Ethnological Survey of the Philippine Islands) featured exhibits on the
5 Rydell, 174-175. See also Vergara, 120.
6 Bonnie McElhinny, “Meet Me in Toronto: The Re-Exhibition of Artifacts from the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exhibition
at the Royal Ontario Museum,” in Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility, ed. Roland Sintos Caloma et al.
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 226.
“habits and life of the Philippine tribes,” focused on the Igorots, the Moros, the Bagobos, and the

Negritos. According to Jenks, these were “true savages … and their culture is entirely of their own

development.”7 This is, of course, simply untrue: all the peoples listed interacted with other

communities in the Philippines, the Spanish colonizers, and with much of the rest of Asia – the

suggestion is especially absurd in relation to the Moros who must somehow be imagined as existing in

sterile isolation while also being defined by their adherence to a faith that originated in Mecca. The

contrast between these “true savages” whose (non)cultures are entirely their own and the Scouts and

Constabulary created by the US makes the US not only the source of progress, but responsible for

virtually any possibility of change across the islands. This of course required certain convenient

omissions on the part of the set design of the native villages. The simple huts in which the Igorot lived

were accurately constructed and built out of native materials, but as for the remarkable rice terraces

carved upon the faces of the Cordillera Mountains that supports much Igorot agriculture: the creators of

the exhibition weren’t asked and didn’t know.8 By the same token, the fact that Igorot women were

among the most skilled ore-sorters in the world was often mentioned,9 what was not mentioned was

that during the Spanish Era “they [had] maintained a 350-year monopoly on the richest gold trade in

the archipelago”10 – a monopoly that the US occupation was rapidly working to undo.

Parts and players

The above discussion could be thought of as an analysis of the script and staging of the

Philippine Reservation. I want now to consider some of the parts and players of this performance in a

little more depth. Specifically, I want to consider some of the ways in which the Igorots, the Scouts,

and the Constabulary came to appear as objects for the entertainment and education of the Fair-goers

7 Albert Ernst Jenks, “Anthropology,” in Official Handbook: Description of the Philippines and catalog of the Philippine
Exhibit (Manila: Bureau of Public Printing, 1903), 261-262, quoted in Rydell, 171-172.
8 I take this point from the valuable discussion in Eric Breitbart, A World on Display: Photographs from the St. Louis
World’s Fair 1904 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997), 60.
9 Rydell, 176.
10 William Henry Scott, “The Igorot: An Integrated Cultural Minority,” Philippine Sociological Review, Vol. 20, No. 4,
SOCIAL ISSUES '72: Papers from the Philippine Sociological Society's Public Lecture Series (October 1972), 358.
and the ways in which they negotiated the demands placed upon them as performers of their own

identity.

The Igorots

The term ‘Igorot’ was not a term widely used by the people it designates to refer to themselves –

and even today its use is controversial. The word itself is derived from old Tagalog and means ‘from

the mountain.’ It seems to have been in use among low landers by the time the Spanish arrived

although precisely which communities it designated was not stable over the three centuries of Spanish

colonization. The word’s boundaries were firmed up when it acquired an official meaning during the

American occupation and entered into the Ethnographic Census undertaken by the War Department.

Now, Igorot was used to designate the so-called “wild tribes” (this was an official classification) of the

Cordillera Mountains in Northern Luzon, but was adopted as a self-designation only very slowly and

unevenly by them – and as Patricia Afable notes, even today it is not universally accepted in every part

of the region.11 The historian William Henry Scott insists that a collective sense of identity between the

Indigenous Peoples of the Cordilleras did not even begin to be formed until 1907 when the colonial

administration designated the region as the Mountain Province12

It is necessary to acknowledge this out of respect to the Indigenous Peoples of the Cordilleras

but also because it underlines an important aspect of the Philippine Exhibit. If the Itneg, Suyoc, and

Bontoc individuals could appear at the Fair as examples of the Igorot, this was not primarily out of an

internally felt sense of identity, but because this conformed to the schema with which US ethnologists

and the Fair-goers were familiar. This schema set the terms in which the subjects of the living exhibit

were to perform ‘their’ identity.

The imposition of this schema could at times be almost comical. One of the Suyoc men in the

exhibit was Bayongasan – a tax collector during the Spanish Era. According to Antonio Buangan,

11 Patricia O. Afable, “Journeys from Bontoc to the Western Fairs, 1904-1915: The "Nikimalika" and their Interpreters,”
Philippine Studies, Vol. 52, No. 4, World's Fair 1904 (2004), 446 and 471 fn 2.
12 William Henry Scott, “The Word Igorot,” Philippine Studies, Vol. 10, No. 2 (April 1962), 243.
Bayongasan was “the eldest in the Suyoc group and was designated ‘chief” at the fair. … As the

‘designated’ tribal chief, Bayongasan led the prayers during the native rituals at the Fair.” What is

comical about this is that the Suyoc do not have tribal chiefs.13 In fact, as a general rule, few of the

Indigenous Peoples native to the Cordilleras have a centralized traditional tribal hierarchy at all.14

Traveling exhibits of living Igorot became popular across the US and Europe and were a staple in

subsequent World’s Fairs – one wonders just how many chiefs were created by the acclimation of their

various impresarios. Afable’s research into the oral history of families whose ancestors traveled to the

US and Europe as the subjects of such exhibits shows that “jokes about the young men who became

‘chiefs’ during the Fairs” were commonplace among them.15

The people contracted as the subjects of these living exhibits understood the gap between their

own lived experiences and the interpretations of these at the fairs. Unsurprisingly, according to Afable,

they often “found Americans somewhat gullible, for they would buy anything offered them for sale,

like roughly-made spears and hastily braided grass rings and bracelets that makers learned to brand as

‘Igorot’ and hawk to their audiences.”16 Igorots were not the only ones to notice the possibilities offered

by this gap: Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns reports that at least “one Filipino confessed to pretending to be

an Igorot [at the 1904 Exposition] in order to come to the United States”.17 Afable’s research suggests

that this practice of deceiving recruiters and audiences likely increased as the popularity of living

Igorot exhibitions grew after the 1904 Exposition.18 The point is well worth emphasizing: the Igorots at

the Exposition and at subsequent living exhibits understood that they were performers. To be precise,

they were paid performers. And it was, by all accounts, certainly a grueling performance schedule: in

addition to daily demonstrations of their crafts they were also required to give dance performances

13 Buangan, 487-488.
14 See Felix M. Keesing, “Some Notes on Bontok Social Organization, Northern Philippines,” American Anthropologist,
New Series, Vol. 51, No. 4, Part 1 (Oct. - Dec., 1949), 584 and passim.
15 Afable, 462.
16 Ibid.
17 Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire, (New York: New York University Press,
2013), 32.
18 Afable, 463.
hourly.19 It could hardly have escaped the performers that this schedule did not resemble the rhythm of

their daily life in the Cordilleras, but playing up to the Igorot brand was part of the job. Afable argues

that the Igorots who travelled as part of such exhibitions had many reasons for seeking out the work

including dollars and foreign goods as well as simple adventure.20 To this can also be added the fact

that the process of establishing colonial law and order in what would become the Mountain Province

frequently involved burning whole villages to the ground21 and so the desire of some to travel abroad is

hardly mysterious.

Apparently such motivations outweighed the real dangers of going on such tours. The 1904

Exposition’s head of the Department of Anthropology, W. J. McGee, considered it “inevitable” that

some of the indigenous subjects of the exhibits would not survive, and in fact two Filipinos froze to

death on a train on the way to the Fair because their heating was not turned on. While this hardly seems

like an “inevitable” fatality, the organizers bravely took it on the chin and immediately began making

arrangements for the remains (as well as those of any future fatalities) to be handed over to various

anthropological institutions for study and preservation.22 At the end of the 1904 Fair, the government

offered Filipinx children for adoption – being wards of the state, it was only necessary to convince the

head of the Philippine Exposition Board and the Secretary of War.23 Besides such dangers, the regular

occurrence of wage-theft that dogged subsequent Igorot touring exhibits seem pale at worst.24

San Pablo Burns interprets Afable’s research as challenging “the totality of the domination that

constructs Filipinos as mute and victimized.”25 This is a gloss of Afable’s own claim that “Starting out

with the idea that the Igorot had agreed to venture away from home for pay should at least dispel the

notion that they were passive and silent participants in these exhibitions.”26 Presumably, this means that
19 Vergara, 119.
20 Afable, 462.
21 On this see McCoy, 217-235.
22 Rydell,165.
23 Kramer, 106. The similarity to the current practice in the US whereby the children of deported immigrants are being put
up for adoption is both disturbing and, surely, unsurprising.
24 For accounts of these occurrences see Affable, 463-468.
25 San Pablo Burns, 32.
26 Afable, 448.
they were instead active and voluble participants at the exhibitions – and there is certainly a sense in

which Afable’s research bears this out. But the argument ought to be modified by two points. The first

is that the context, discussed above, in which Igorots would “agree to venture” to the US for the sake of

some dollars surely needs more than the scant consideration Afable offers and suggests that the real

existence of choice here does not diminish ‘victimization’ only that they took such opportunities as

presented themselves within the framework of colonization to develop strategies of survival.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, there is the fact that the exhibition display never

intended to silence its subjects – the opposite, rather, was the case: it obligated them to speak and to

make themselves visible. The ideological effect of the exhibit depended on the volubility of its subjects

who were employed not to be silent but follow the script. Afable convincingly shows that they had a

canny, even cynical, understanding of that script, but the ideological effect of the exhibition did not

depend upon their thoughts any more than a factory owner depends upon the feelings of their workers.

All that was required was that they performed their prescribed roles. To the extent that the Igorot’s

canniness better enabled them to play up their parts, it was an aid and not a hindrance to the ideological

and commercial needs of the Exposition.

The Constabulary and the Scouts

In The Dark Side of the Nation, Himani Bannerji identifies a spurious cultural relativism built

into Canada’s official multiculturalism. She observes that non-Western ‘cultures’ are imagined as

inherently patriarchal and traditional, a stereotype which has the effect of identifying the most

reactionary members of various immigrant communities as the most authentic bearers of their identity.

This has the effect of actually strengthening reactionary forces within those communities, thereby

confirming the stereotype and positioning those who reject this image of their traditions as inauthentic

or Westernized.27 Immigrants seeking Canadian citizenship are asked to study the Discover Canada

booklet which informs them that “Canada’s openness and generosity do not extend to barbaric cultural
27 Himani Bannerji, The Dark Side of the Nation:Essays on Multiculturalism, Nationalism and Gender, (Toronto:
Canadian Scholars’ Press, 2000), 48-49.
practices”.28 Bannerji’s insight suggests that one of the effects of this language is to interpellate

immigrants as barbarians, signaling to the most reactionary readers the means by which they might

hold onto their authentic identity even as they confirm their permanent legal displacement from their

countries of origin. The inclusion of this language should therefore be understood as resulting from a

prurient interest in (an imagined version) of non-Western barbarism. This interest, however, turns out

not only to be permissive, but even, to a certain degree, productive of this barbarism.

In her incendiary critique of the construction of Canadian multiculturalism, Exalted Subjects,

Sunera Thobani builds upon Bannerji’s observations. According to her, Canadian national subjects

display a marked libidinal interest not only in those so-called barbarisms that are actually reactionary

(Bannerji uses traditional forms of patriarchalism as her example) but all markers of the cultural

Other’s unassimilability. For her, the communal and ostentatiously public discussion by Canadian

national subjects regarding what aspects of an Other’s culture should be considered “enriching,

annoying, or quaint and which are especially revolting and threatening” is a uniquely pleasurable part

of the way in which national subjects feel their own sense of civilization. “Indeed,” she argues, the

national subject

is perhaps even more obsessed with these negative aspects, for it is in the disavowal and
disdain for these practices that the national subject is able to experience most fully his/her
cultural superiority, his/her higher civilizational status.29

She argues, further, that the “avoidance of such displays of negative cultural excesses also sustain the

self-exultation of the nation.”30 But if Thobani is right about the pleasures of disavowal, then we should

expect the opposite tendency to co-exist with that of avoidance: the exalted subject must find a way to

call forth and experience the Other’s excesses as proof of their alterity and for sheer lurid

entertainment. What is necessary is that they may partake of these ‘excesses’ as observers rather than as

28 Canada, Discover Canada: The Rights and Responsibilities of Citizenship: Study Guide, (Ottawa: Citizenship and
Immigration Canada, 2012), 9.
29 Sunera Thobani, Exalted Subjects: Studies in the Making of Race and Nation in Canada (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 2007), 169-170.
30 Ibid., 169.
part of the tribe – that it comes to them not as the structure of their lives but spectacularized in images

or as spaces that one can visit and leave.

While both Thobani and Bannerji present their observations in the context of critiquing

Canada’s multiculturalism policy, the structure of productive interest that they identify is already

clearly detectable in the St. Louis World’s Fair. Fair-goers were scandalized by Igorot nakedness, but

roundly rejected the US government’s suggestion that they be put in trunks and shifts – even in the

winter, the exhibit organizers attempted to prevent them from bundling up as this was “inauthentic.”31

The tradition of taking the jaws or heads of their enemies as trophies was officially banned in the

Philippines, but skulls were imported from the Cordilleras and used prominently to decorate the mock

villages. Igorot dog feasts were seen as scandalously inhumane, but were such an attraction to Fair-

goers that the dog feast, initially intended to be a one-time event, was performed multiple times a week

until the close of the Exposition.32 Hence, Igorots in living exhibitions actually were forced to eat dog

much more often than they would have in the Philippines where it was a relatively rare ritual

occurrence – Afable reports that Igorots in a similar exhibit in Chicago in 1907 grew so sick of the

meat that they took to pretending to eat it and later burying it in secret after their performances.33

A similar but different process can be observed in the construction of the Scouts and the

Constabulary. Having been created by the US military and colonial civil government respectively, the

Scouts and the Constabulary were seen as the pinnacle of American-style civilization in the Philippines

and the very image of the progress to which the archipelago’s benighted savages could aspire. Not

coincidentally, they were primarily in charge maintaining order among the rest of the Filipinx subjects

of the exhibit.34 Fair-goers did not fail to be impressed: their bands were universally acclaimed and

31 Parezo and Fowler, 171.

32 Ibid., 181-184.
33 Afable, 462.
34 Laurie, Clayton D. 1994. “An Oddity of Empire: The Philippine Scouts and the 1904 World’s Fair.” Gateway Heritage:
The Magazine of the Missouri Historical Society 15 (3): 44–55.
their uniforms, drills, and martial discipline admired.35 Breitbart’s study of photographs from the 1904

World’s Fair contains a set of three images captioned “Evolution of a Bontoc Igorot Man.” The images

show an unnamed Bontoc man, first naked from the waist up, slouching, with his hair down past his

shoulders, wearing only a basketry hat; second the same man in dark trousers and a clean white shirt, a

mustache over his upper lips and his hair apparently done up in a bun nestled inside a similar hat; the

third shows him again sitting up straight, with his hair cut short and wearing the crisp cloth hat and

uniform of the Constabulary.36 The implications of the image are not subtle: the Bontoc man has

become civilized precisely to the extent that he has shed his Bontoc ways and adopted Western ones.

Hence, the performance of civilization was also called forth by the consuming interests of the Fair-

goers who demanded demonstrations and proofs of Philippine integration into Western (US)

civilization. And they got it in spades: the Scout and the CP bands gave nightly concert performances

of Western popular and classical music while the regular troops marched and paraded around the Fair

daily.

But civilization is not the opposite of barbarism – barbarism is an ideological category for any

number of behaviors that ‘civilization’ knows very well how to integrate. The Scouts and the

Constabulary were the primary repressive force backing up the US occupation of the Philippines after

the official end of the Philippine-American War. As such, they provided the bulk of the forces of

‘pacification’ and did so with a degree of loyalty and pride that made them the most violent

collaborators with the regime in the country. No doubt most of this violence was carried out in the

civilized manner one expects from troops under the command of US officers: the water cure for

suspected rebels, the relocation of provincial populations to concentration camps to root out guerrillas,

35 For a careful discussion of the relationship of the Constabulary Band to Philippine musical traditions and to US racism,
See Mary Talusan, “Music, Race, and Imperiallsm: The Philippine Constabulary Band at the 1904 St. Louis World's
Fair,” Philippine Studies, Vol. 52, No. 4, World's Fair 1904 (2004), 499-526. My understanding of the reception of the
Scouts and Constabulary at the Fare relies primarily on Rydell (see esp. 177-178) and Kramer (98-102).
36 Beitbart, 27.
and the destruction of farmland to starve out insurrection were all relatively commonplace.37 Such

modern forms of civilized violence were hardly incompatible with what was called barbarism.

For example, the colonial government had banned head hunting among the Igorots. This law

was enforced by means of punitive raids against whole villages by the local Constabulary recruited

from the Igorot population itself. Soon enough, reports of Igorots in the constabulary taking trophy

heads and jaws while their commanders did nothing began to accumulate.38 These civilized

commanding officers were able to have their cake and eat it: after using such ‘barbaric’ violence for

their own ends they had on hand yet more proof of the necessity of their civilizing mission. The

disdained practices of the barbarian Other are here abetted not merely for the frisson they can evoke,

but because they buttress the project of Western civilization in its imperialist aspect. And all the while

the collaboration of the PC recruits could be marketed as evolution.

The benefits of evolution at the Fair, however, turned out to be rather fragile. When an

“honourary commission” of 50 wealthy Filipinxs were sponsored by the Philippine Exposition Board to

tour the United States, they were feted wherever they went. In contrast, when a number of Scouts and

Constabulary men accepted invitations from young white women to social gatherings, a posse of white

US Marines and the Exposition’s police force called them “niggers” and threatened to arrest the women

after kicking the Filipinos to the ground.39 When this did not stop the scandalous socialization, attempts

were made to lynch the Filipino men that eventually culminated in a race riot involving 200

individuals.

Kramer makes much of this shocking incident, reading it as proof of a radical disjoint between

the segregationist racism of the Jim Crow South and the assimilationist racism of the Philippine

37 See Renato Constantino, A History of the Philippines: From the Spanish Colonization to the Second World War, (New
York: Monthly Review, 2008), 241-245.
38 See McCoy, 225.
39 It is a shame that very little seems to be known about these remarkable women. Rydell claims that they were
schoolteachers (176). According to Kramer, they repeatedly came to the Filipinos’ physical defense (102).
Commission. He quotes a newspaper article that powerfully articulates the racial anxieties evoked by

the sight of white women socializing with Filipino men as equals:

The problem … is how to and where to draw the color line on the Filipinos who have been
brought to the Fair … To what extent, if any, shall the tanned tribesmen of the tropics be
permitted to associate with their white assimilators? If they are to be permitted to sip
sparingly of the social delights, how is it to be expressed upon them that thus far they may
go and no farther?40

To the extent that racial hierarchies continue to exist in the West, this problem must also continue to

persist. In countries that are not apartheid states, strategies must be found to conceal the existence of

the problem without however making it go away. It must be said, though, that, contrary to the author of

the newspaper article and to Kramer, the problem was not, at this time, nearly as intractable as it seems.

After all, a similar official policy of assimilation was adopted by the US government towards Native

Americans – this hardly required an assumption of even eventual equality between them and Whites.

The Philippines was granted independence by the US government in 1946, officially recognizing it as

having formally graduated from US tutelage and legally declaring its assimilation into the ranks of

those people who had the right and capacity to govern themselves. Even then, Whites in the US found

it quite possible to continue to “draw the color line” dividing their bodies from immigrant “tanned

tribesmen” and inform them of exactly how far they could go: a sign that read “No Filipinos” did the

job quite efficiently.41

Vision for sale

Vergara describes the process of displaying a facsimile of the everyday life of a people as a

“commodification of the ordinary.” This commodification requires, according to Vergara, that the

mundane of the West’s colonial Other be “suffused with alien meaning” so that its every detail can

become the object of scrutiny.42 Exhibits were consumed by the Fair-goers because they were produced

40 “St. Louis Color Line Problem at the Fair,” quoted in Kramer, 101.
41 On the subject of Filipinxs and the ‘color line’ in post-war United States, see Angelo N. Ancheta, “Filipino Americans,
Foreigner Discrimination, and the Lines of Racial Sovereignty,” in Positively No Filipinos Allowed: Building
Communities and Discourse, eds. Antonio Tiongson, Ricardo Gutierrez, and Edgardo Gutierrez (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 2006), 90-107.
42 Vergara, 119.
as objects available for both purchase and display. In order to complete the ideological effect of the

Exposition, the Fair-goers themselves had to participate in this circuit.

The ideologues of US imperialism did not equivocate about who they thought were the Fair’s

ideal audience. Speaking on the educational value of the Exposition, the president of Colorado College,

for example, argued that the people who would most benefit from the 1904 World’s Fair were

the great mass of unlearned, if not unlettered people whose first really wide outlook is to
come to them now, and [also] that other class possibly as large, who have never known the
widening influence of travel, but have learned from their reading the fact that here much
that the ordinary traveler may fail to see is made accessible to them.43

Taken as a whole, the Exposition – with its exhibits and concessions showing products, peoples, and

cultures from all over the globe – presented a digest of the world itself. To visit the Fair, was, in fact,

better than travel precisely because it already packaged everything that a traveler ought to see but

would most likely miss. The entire world now came to the people of the United States as already

processed and completely and conveniently available to them. Possessing an even greater ‘widening

influence’ than travel, the Fair made the world into an instructive image for the edification and

education of the Fair-goers and, at the same time, defined education as the successful appropriation and

consumption (that is, purchase) of the world on display.

Of all the Filipinx subjects of the living exhibits, perhaps the only ones who managed to disrupt

the smooth circulation of vision and appropriation were the 38 Moros from Lake Lanao, whose

community in Mindanao were still engaged in armed conflicts with colonial forces. Although they

(reluctantly) accepted the contract to be employed as exhibits at the Fair, once there, they were “wholly

unwilling to perform in accordance with the wishes of the showmen. The result was that the gate fees

to the Lanao Village were small.”44 According to Parezo and Fawler, moreover, the 38 rarely left their

‘village’ and steadfastly refused to smile for photographers, although they did sell their weaving,

43 “Educational Value of the Fair,” Literary Digest 29 (13 August 1904), 192, quoted in Rydell, 155.
44 Louisiana Purchase Exposition Company—Official Photograph Album, Official Photograph Albums (St. Louis:
Louisiana Purchase Exposition Co., 1905), 71, quoted in Parezo and Fowler, 184-185.
apparently with much success.45 In the difficult circumstances of the Philippine Exhibit, it seems only

they managed to exercise some control over the process by which the Fair sought to make them into

objects of consumption.

Multiculturalism

When the Fair closed up in December, the majority of the materials and artifacts from the

Philippine Exhibition were not repatriated but sold off to collectors and various cultural institutions.

The Royal Ontario Museum acquired some objects from the exhibit in 1910, and, in the fall 2008,

opened an exhibit titled “The Philippines at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis/Les Philippines à

l’exposition universelle de St. Louis, 1904” in the Museum’s Shreyas and Mina Ajmera Gallery of

Africa, the Americas and Asia-Pacific. According to the ROM’s press release, at its opening, the

Ajmera Gallery was billed as “highlight[ing] the ROM’s vast and diverse collections that represent the

artistic and cultural traditions of indigenous peoples from Africa, the American continents, the Asia-

Pacific region and Oceania.”46 The strange agglomeration of every inhabited region of the Earth except

Europe and the Middle East is accomplished with remarkable ease: they are united as the spaces of

indigeneity – the difficulty that indigineity does not mean the same thing in all these places is, of

course, ignored.47 What the Museum seems to mean by “indigenous peoples” in this context, therefore,

is simply all those groups of people that they can primitivize.

In her review of the ROM exhibit, Bonnie McElhinny argues that the Museum repeats without

commenting upon the way in which the artifacts were originally used to primitivize their makers while

setting the West up as the repository of all that was civilized and modern.48 According to her, far from

45 Ibid. 185.
46 Royal Ontario Museum, “Shreyas and Mina Ajmera Gallery of Africa, the Americas and Asia-Pacific opens April 4,
2008,” Press Release, undated, https://www.rom.on.ca/en/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/shreyas-and-mina-ajmera-
gallery-of-africa-the-americas-and-asia, accessed December 5, 2019.
47 To take one example, the Gallery includes items made by Filipinx Moros and positions them as ‘indigenous.’ But Moros
do not generally identify as indigenous on the basis of being Moro and the government’s National Commission on
Indigenous Peoples does not include them in its mandate.
48 McElhinny, 232.
interrogating this primitivization, the few interventions that the ROM did make tended to “blur” the

distinction between past and present:

For instance, the exhibit includes a wooden model of a traditional mill used for crushing
sugar cane to extract liquid. It is accompanied by a 1998 colour image showing a man
processing cane using a similar device in a northern province.49

As McElhinny points out this is an exceedingly selective view of the Philippine present. It figures the

Philippines as virtually unchanged since 1904 – as though sugar were still generally being refined in

this way, when, in fact, monopoly agriculture has so intensely entrenched itself in the Philippines that

the country has what is “reportedly the world’s largest integrated sugar mill and refinery”.50 More than

‘blurring’, such a display strategy figures the present as virtually indistinguishable from the past. The

Indigenous is the past frozen in the present.

The ROM exhibit, and indeed the entire framing of the Shreyas and Mina Ajmera Gallery of

Africa, the Americas and Asia-Pacific, therefore seems to mirror the reifying logic that structured the

original Fair’s presentation of Filipinx and non-White Others. But whereas the Fair was an explicitly

and avowedly racist endeavor, the Ajmera Gallery takes its cue from the Canadian state’s ideology of

multiculturalism. According McElhinny, “The official message of the [G]allery ... is ‘a space which

celebrates the diversity of mankind,’ a message linked,” she adds, “to certain kinds of cultural

relativism and multiculturalism.”51 This apparent contradiction becomes less surprising if we take into

consideration the left critiques of official multiculturalism – or what Bannerji has called

“multiculturalism from above”52 – that view it as White hegemony’s “mode of articulation in a

decolonizing era.”53

If this is true, then the similarity between the reifying operations of the ROM and of the 1904

Fair would hardly be surprising: as Thobani points out, multiculturalism relies on the same reification

49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.
51 Ibid., 228.
52 Bannerji, 14 and passim.
53 Thobani, 146.
of culture that I have argued operated at the Fair in order to constitute its objects. In fact, the reification

of culture has to perform twice the amount of work since the reification of race is no longer

conveniently available as a legitimate ideological strategy. It is this process of reification therefore that

allows official multiculturalism to constitute its objects as stably identifiable Others.54

In fact, if multiculturalism from above is an ideological variant of white hegemony, we ought to

expect any number of such parallels. And indeed, Thobani’s descriptions of the occluded processes of

multiculturalism read almost like a laundry list of the overt operations of the Fair. I have already

indicated the productive fascination with what is construed as disgusting in the practices of the Other

that, far from eliminating those practices makes them available for the thrills of the national subject.

The other side of that particular coin is that the selections of the Exhibit organizers regarding which

handicrafts were worthy of display and sale parallels the ways in which “the politics ... of funding for

particular multicultural organizations, activities, and events” determines which practices are “to be

rightly considered part of the traditional culture of immigrants, worthy of being given visibility and

promotion.”55

A full accounting of such parallels would take a much lengthier study. What I want to consider

now however is the ways in which the rendering of the world as an object available for consumption by

the imperial subjects of the Fair parallels and diverges with the rhetoric of enrichment that the

Canadian state uses to justify multiculturalism. Discover Canada declares that cultural “diversity

enriches Canadians’ lives.”56 The ideology of multiculturalism characterizes enrichment explicitly in

terms of consumption. For example, Cochrane et al. argue in Canadian Politics: Critical Approaches

that “diversity makes Canada a more interesting place to live in terms of foods, restaurants, languages,

entertainment, sports, and cultures”.57 This cultural enrichment is presented as a quid pro quo of

54 Ibid., 145 and passim.

55 Ibid. 163.
56 Canada, 25.
57 Perry Rand Dyck, Christopher Cochrane, and Kelly Blidook, Canadian Politics: Critical Approaches (Toronto: Nelson
Education, 2018), 127.
immigration: in return for the privilege of living in Canada, immigrants must offer up ‘their’ culture for

the use of national subjects. While multiculturalism is often used to claim that immigrants have the

freedom to live their culture, the language regularly slips from the valence of rights to that of

obligation. Hence, Discover Canada’s insistence that immigrants make a “contribution to the national

character” by living ‘their’ cultures.58

On the one hand the making of this ‘contribution’ naturally requires a transformation of the

cultures of immigrants into a resource that is already packaged, limited, and available for consumption.

On the other hand, in a period where the reification of culture stands in for the reification of race, the

insistence that immigrants ought to contribute to the national character by being the authentic bearers

of their culture takes on even more sinister overtones. Multiculturalism imagines the reproduction of

nationhood as based on a cultural division of labor whereby each distinct and homogeneous cultural

community makes a specific contribution to the ‘national mosaic.’ As many critics have observed, in

spite of this rhetoric, that mosaic remains distinctly White in hue. However, if the image is not a very

good description of the reality of cultural life in Canada, it turns out to be a quite accurate homologue

of social divisions of labor that map quite well onto the real cultural-racial divisions that traverse

Canadian society.

In point of fact, if one adopts a fairly restrictive definition of culture to include only things such

as entertainment, art, or food we would have to suspect that the Canadian state and its national subjects

are probably not too concerned to husband the contributions of immigrants. The mainstream of artistic

production and entertainment in Canada remain predominantly White affairs, perhaps the only

moments where most national subjects really become concerned to gather the cultural contributions of

immigrants are when they are eating in restaurants or gentrifying Chinatowns. While the Canadian state

is the chief purveyor of the ideological rhetoric of multiculturalism, the rhetoric that presents culture as

58 Canada, 11.
a resource is less a sign of its commitment to the instrumentalization of culture specifically than it is a

signal of its instrumental approach to migrants in general.

As Bannerji points out multiculturalism was a response on the part of the Canadian state to the

political difficulties that its labor importation policies had evoked. According to her, the expected

expansion of industrialization in Canada required an expansion of its labor force that its rate of

population growth could not meet. Hence, in the 1960s and 1970s an open door immigration policy was

developed that allowed it to source skilled and unskilled labor from the Third World.59 It is this specific

pattern of immigration that required management by the ideology of multiculturalism:

Multi-ethnic European immigrations of the past did not inspire it, nor are the present-day
European immigrants the targets of this discourse, even though cultural, religious, and
linguistic differences are very high between them and the two nations of anglo- and
francophone communities. … We began to hear of the notion of diversity from the time of
allowing citizenship to the previously indentured Chinese and South Asians, from the time
of Canada's open door policy in relation to its plans for capitalist growth.60

Significantly, for Bannerji, the emergence of the ideology of multiculturalism did not come from the

immigrants themselves:

There were no strong multicultural demands on the part of third world immigrants
themselves to force such a policy. The issues raised by them were about racism, legal
discrimination involving immigration and family reunification, about job discrimination on
the basis of Canadian experience, and various adjustment difficulties, mainly of child care
and language. In short, they were difficulties that are endemic to migration, and especially
that of people coming in to low income jobs or with few assets. Immigrant demands were
not then, or even now, primarily cultural, nor was multiculturalism initially their
formulation of the solution to their problems. It began as a state or an official/institutional
discourse, and it involved the translation of issues of social and economic injustice into
issues of culture.61

Immigration from the Third World was therefore justified on the basis of the image of Canada as

already a multicultural society, while at the same time the social and economic exclusions experienced

by those same immigrants were explained away is the result of differences and incompatibilities of

culture. And, moreover, these differences and incompatibilities become pinned to a metaphysics of

59 Bannerji, 30.
60 Ibid., 43.
61 Ibid., 44.
vision that defines all those who are neither White nor Indigenous as ‘visible minorities.’ This category,

which defeats any attempt to render it logically coherent (exactly what is visible?), makes the surface

of our flesh into signs of all the powers of aggregation possessed by the reification of culture. A look

discloses not only a statistical relation, but the even the categorical divisions that are the terms of that

statistical relation. As Thobani observes, the policy of multiculturalism and its conceptual tools are the

means whereby the Canadian state exercises its “communalizing power; that is, a power which

constitutes communities as discrete, racial, ethnic, and cultural groups existing within its territorial

borders, yet outside the symbolic bounds of the state.”62 That is to say, multiculturalism is a tool

whereby Canada draws the “color line.”

One effect of this is that as the concept of culture aggregates immigrants into identifiable

peoples, culture itself begins to acquire a subtle capaciousness. Hence, while specific avenues of

immigration created by the state serve to shunt immigrants into specific occupations (and socio-

economic brackets) their ‘cultures’ begin to be seen as uniquely productive of the kind of laborers that

they become – witness, for example, the almost synonymous relationship between Filipina and

domestic laborer. As Philip F. Kelly et al., argue, it “is not uncommon to find that non-Filipinos believe

that all Filipinos (sic) arrive in Canada as caregivers. Thus the types of work for which they are seen as

culturally suited is highly circumscribed.”63 The hypervisibility of Filipinas as care-givers or domestic

workers is not easily avoided by Filipina immigrants who rely on it to find work – they must also,

frequently present themselves in ways that confirm the stereotype. At the same time, the virtual

identification of one with the other is naturalized by the fact that the processes that ghettoize

immigrants in specific economic sectors tend to be invisible to most Canadians. For example, the fact

that a significant proportion of Filipinx immigrants come to Canada via special immigration categories,

such as the (now defunct) Live-in Care Giver Program, combines with the natural reliance of most

62 Thobani, 149.
63 Philip F. Kelly et al., “Filipino Immigrants in the Toronto Market,” in Filipinos in Canada: Disturbing Invisibility, ed.
Roland Sintos Caloma et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012), 81.
immigrants upon networks of friends and relations for jobs to keep Filipinxs overrepresented in care

work or related job sectors even when they do not come in through special immigration categories64

The reduction of Filipinx people to the variety of labor power they posses is not exclusively the

responsibility of Canadian ideology, however, the Philippine state plays as significant a role. Since the

1960s, the Philippine state has aggressively pursued a policy of relying upon the remittances of

Filipinxs working abroad, transforming itself into what Robyn Magalit Rodriguez has succinctly called

a “labor brokerage state”.65 It has been so successful in this that it is now a key producer of the flexible

labor force demanded by neo-liberalism. As Rodriguez notes, in order to market Filipinx workers to

other countries, the government has, relied upon the same reification of cultural identity as is prevalent

in Western perceptions of Filipinxs. She quotes, for example,“Filipino Workers: Moving the World

Today” a brochure put out by the marketing division of the Philippine Overseas Employment

Administration that contains a section on Filipinx medical workers which reads: “the strong desire to

heal and help people make Filipino medical workers much preferred”.66 Steven McKay observes the

same culturalist language in the promotional material used to market Filipino seafarers:

[W]hat truly makes a Filipino the most dependable shipmate are certain inherent traits. He
is adaptable and hard-working. The Filipino’s charm and friendliness makes for a
harmonious relationship essential to the working situation on board. He is neat and
disciplined. Reflective of household breeding, the Filipino is particularly observant of clean
surroundings and good grooming. Moreover, he keeps within set rules and regulations.67

Or again from a brochure produced by a consortium of leading recruitment agencies, labour unions,

ship-owners, and government agencies:

Filipinos go the extra mile and serve with a smile...When you employ Filipinos, you have
access to SKILL with a HEART. Filipinos are by nature a warm people who exude a high

64 Ibid., 70-74.
65 Robyn Magalit Rodriguez, Migrants for Export: How the Philippine State Brokers Labor to the World, (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 2011). According to Rodriguez, in 2009, remittances were the second most important
source of profits for the country bringing in $1.494 billion (US), just behind electronic products at $1.915 billion (xiv).
66 POEA, “Filipino Workers: Moving the World Today” (Mandaluyong City, Philippines, POEA), quoted in Rodriguez,
61.
67 POEA brochure, quoted in Steven C. Mckay, “Filipino Sea Men: Constructing Masculinities in an Ethnic Labour
Niche,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 33, no. 4 (2007), 624.
 standard of customer service. They are also happy to work even under challenging
conditions at sea (emphasis in the original).68

The message could not be clearer: Filipinxs are – inherently and by nature – the ideal worker: friendly,

skilled, hard-working, and above all, docile.

Rather than a conclusion

In discussing the subjects of the living exhibits within the St. Louis World’s Fair as temporary

migrant workers I am suggesting a certain parallel between the ways in which they were constructed as

objects for certain kinds of (primarily visual) scrutiny and the visibilities that objectify Filipinx

migrants in Canada today. All migrants, whether permanent or temporary, have visibilities imposed

upon them as effects of the powers to which they are subject. In the case of present day migrants to

Canada these powers can be listed very broadly as Canadian White hegemony (including its

government) and the Philippine labor brokerage state. In the case of the temporary workers of the

living exhibit, these powers were the Philippine Commission that administered over the Philippines for

the US government, the US federal government itself, the organizers of the Exposition, and the

organized white supremacists of Jim Crow Missouri.

I think Afable is correct to emphasize that, with the exception of the armed forces who were

ordered to go, the subjects of the living exhibit by and large agreed to be contracted to do so. This is

precisely why it is possible to identify them as migrant workers. But if we are to consider them as

workers, it follows that we need to attend to what they were being made to produce. I think we need to

understand the Filipinxs employed at the Fair as cultural workers in a very specific sense: they were

producing an object for consumption and that object was called Philippine culture. This was certainly a

unique trade, and not one with many prospects today. Nevertheless, Filipinx working in other countries

continue to produce a similar product – they are, by and large, no longer paid to do so. They do it

because entering into the new scripts of modern multicultural migration (written by the Philippine state

68 Ibid.
as much as by the ideological apparatuses of the receiving countries) virtually compels them to produce

this product as a ‘natural’ effect of pursuing their lives in countries like Canada – and which, in any

case, is always already imputed to them by the gaze of the national subject.

Tago ng tago (usually abbreviated to TNT), is a Tagalog phrase used to describe Filipinxs living

and working in foreign countries illegally. Tago is the Tagalog word for hide. The reduplication tago

modifies its extension in time: tago ng tago serves to simultaneously indicate a state of being and an

action that is taken up repeatedly. That is to say, the phrase suggests both that the person who has gone

TNT is in hiding and that they must hide over and over again from the bureaucratic gaze of the state.

You could say, then, that going TNT does not indicate a perpetual state of concealment but rather a

strategy of always being ready to conceal oneself. If we consider going TNT as a strategy not just for

working in a country without the right documentation, but more broadly as a strategy against the

visibilities imposed upon migrants, then we can perhaps see something like this pattern of selective

concealment in the strategies adopted by the Moros from Lanao Lake at the Exhibition.

Marigold Santos, a Filipina immigrant artist in Canada, offers another possible image of being

TNT in her aswang paintings, drawings, and tattoos. For several years now, Santos has been producing

images of veiled aswang, their faces obscured but their scars and sharp claws evident. Marissa Largo

reads her aswang as a sort of anti-representation of the Filipinx diasporic identity.69 I would like to

suggest a different use for these figures: aspiration. Santos’ aswang are more precisely manananggal –

monsters from Philippine myth that in the day appear as beautiful women but who, at night, detach

their torsos from their bodies and fly through the air searching for victims whose viscera they suck up

and consume through long tube-like mouths. The aswang in all its forms is the polar opposite of

everything that the champions of multiculturalism imagine immigrants should be. Taking special

delectation on the flesh of the sick, the pregnant, and the dead, they are a direct inversion of the caring

69 Marissa Largo, “Reimagining Filipina Visibility through ‘Black Mirror’: The Queer Decolonial Diasporic Aesthetic of
Marigold Santos,” in Diasporic Intimacies: Queer Filipinos and Canadian Imaginaries, eds. Robert Diaz, Marissa
Largo, and Fritz Pino (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2018), 99-117.
healer.70 Unlike ‘visible minorities’ who contribute to the collective project of the nation, aswang are

invisible agents against the smooth social cohesion of human society. They secret themselves into a

human community – often by marriage – in order to extract their horrific meal. But they are not

incapable of solidarity: there are many stories of multiple aswang making their way into a town as

families or friends – and indeed Santos’ aswang often come in sisterly pairs. There are even myths of

aswang gathering from across the country to meet, deliberate, and eat together. Nor are the aswang a

homogeneous community: besides the manananggal, there are shape-shifters, tiktik, uac-uac, sigbin,

manggagaway, and a host of other creatures united by their infiltration of human communities. There

are even stories of humans being invited into the world of the aswang.71

There might be something useful in appropriating the idea of the migrant as monstrous and as

disruptive of the national community as it currently exists. Canadian capital demands that we make

ourselves useful to it as the condition of our existence, and migrants too often accept this condition as a

virtue – advertising our ‘contributions’ as proof of our worth. But most of us did not come here out of a

desire to contribute to Canada, but simply to make use of an opportunity for better lives than we were

likely to live in the countries of our birth. The common desire for such a life may be a good basis for

community, but not if that community is imagined in terms of a racist Canadian nationalism. The

aswang is a creature of TNT – one that both makes use of and wrecks the facile cohesion of the

community which it enters. The fears of all those already comfortable in that community are justified:

the aswang is not a creature for the comfort of the community as it exists. Perhaps migrants too should

embrace their disquieting presence, and seek out for solidarity not all those who cling to the existing

community but all those who want to see it explode.

70 See Hermenia Meñez, Explorations in Philippine Folklore, (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1996),
96-94.
71 Damiana L. Eugenio, Philippine Folk Literature: the Legends, vol. III (Quezon City: University of the Philippines
Press, 2005), 143-179.
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