“P.I. : Filipino girls playing basketball (early 1900’s). (Worcester); 1855; 1900/1910.” http://quod.lib.umich.edu/s/sclphilimg/x-1855/phld038. University of Michigan Library Digital Collections.
Basketball is a huge sport in the Philippines. In trying to figure out how that happened, I came across this image in the archives University of Michigan Library Digital Collections, which includes lots of images from the early interactions of the US in the Philippines.
First published: Sunday, October 7, 2007, in the Albany Times Union
As President Bush tries to shape his legacy in regards to the Iraq war, he should pick up David Silbey’s engaging history “A War of Frontier and Empire: The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902” (Hill and Wang; 272 pages; $26).
Though both were wars of choice, the details are quite different. Still, the generalizations that can be gleaned from Silbey’s account are eerily familiar: a quick and stunning conventional military victory turns into longer-than-expected guerrilla warfare; a failure by the United States to understand its enemy; a sense of racial superiority that enflames troops and politicians in Washington; and a native population whose loyalties seemed to change depending on the time of day.
Thank you, re:asian magazine, for including me in the “firsts” issue!
The poem touches upon things I’ve been thinking about since grade school when I first read the phrase “benevolent assimilation” as a U.S. description of its colonial policy with the Philippines.
The magazine has also published a photo I took of the home my Lolo — grandfather — grew up in Cavite.
Here’s an excerpt from the poem:
Something like fear structured my feelings around the word
Philippines and whatever it was that connected me to it
Check out the full poem on the re:asian website here and let me know what you think — either here or on the re:asian site.
Michael Janairo 