Download The imperialism of race: class, rights and patronage in the Philippine

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RAC0010.1177/0306396814542922Race & ClassMAGNO and PARNELL
SAGE
Los Angeles,
London,
New Delhi,
Singapore,
Washington DC
The imperialism of race: class,
rights and patronage in the
Philippine city
CHRISTOPHER N. MAGNO and PHILIP C. PARNELL
Abstract: Decisions by the US Supreme Court at the end of the Spanish American
War facilitated US colonial expansionism by laying the foundations for a twotiered system of rights in the Philippines. In tandem with establishing the legal
boundaries of citizenship, politicians and media extended a race-based system
of governance through speeches and graphic caricatures that racialised Filipinos
as underdeveloped and threatening. Both the law and a patron-client system
served to create a new Filipino elite that collaborated with the colonial authorities
and entrenched cultural imperialism; the racial patterning of white American/
Filipino relations was then transduced into class relations among Filipinos that
continue to stratify Philippine society, with the Filipino elite replacing the colonial
administrators in this two-tiered system of rights. Today, this racial categorisation
and organisation of people continues to appear in popular imagery; and the
Christopher N. Magno is an assistant professor in the Criminal Justice Program at Gannon
University, with a PhD in Criminal Justice from Indiana University, Bloomington, and a Master's
in Sociology from the University of the Philippines, Diliman. He is the 2013 recipient of Gannon's
three-year Cooney-Jackman Endowed Professorship. Philip C. Parnell earned his PhD in social
and cultural anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. His research has focused on
the anthropology of law, crime, and the state in rural Mexico and the urban Philippines. He is
Director of Southeast Asian Studies in the School of Global and International Studies and an
associate professor in the Departments of International Studies, Anthropology (adjunct) and
Criminal Justice (adjunct) at Indiana University, Bloomington.
Race & Class
Copyright © 2015 Institute of Race Relations, Vol. 56(3): 69­–85
10.1177/0306396814542922 http://rac.sagepub.com
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70 Race & Class 56(3)
replacement of race by class in a rights-based bifurcation of Philippine society
shapes the ways in which penal law in metropolitan Manila is practised and
administered so that the poor (some 40 to 50 per cent of the population) experience
a diminished, second-class form of citizenship.
Keywords: caricature, civil rights, cultural imperialism, EDSA I, II, III, Insular
Cases, Manila, patron-client system, Philippine society, racialisation, US
imperialism
Introduction
Some of the most vital moments in contemporary Philippine democracy have emerged
as collective expressions of political sentiment and will by Filipinos who have congregated peacefully on Manila’s famed Epifanio de Los Santos Avenue (EDSA) to shift
the direction of national governance by toppling one president and installing another.
In the first of these three popular uprisings (EDSA I), Filipinos ended the dictatorship
of President Ferdinand Marcos in 1986 while expressing their outrage against national
corruption and impunity; the protests demonstrated a unity within Filipino civil society that had formed during the long struggle for democracy. In contrast to the solidarity that EDSA I signified, EDSA II in January 2001 and EDSA III, three months later in
April, demonstrated the rigid class-based divisions of Filipino society as the upper
and middle classes removed the corrupt president Joseph Estrada and the urban
lower classes responded by demanding his return to office as a patron of the poor.
In 2001, one of the Philippines’ popular English-language newspapers, the
Manila Standard, caricatured (Figure 1) the urban poor of EDSA III as a crying,
diapered, almost toothless oversized baby who needed weaning by the Philippine
elite (a father) and its criminal justice system (the Philippine Supreme Court,
drawn as the mother). But the symbolic genealogy of the Philippine poor as senselessly outraged children who could only find development and lawfulness
through the tutelage of others who have ‘grown up’ began, in fact, at the turn of
the twentieth century. What is striking, as this cartoon illustrates, is how the
imagery of late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century racial caricature to depict the
Filipino people has remained essentially the same to the present day. In this it
indicates how deep-rooted the pattern and processes of governance introduced
by the US as a colonial power continue to be. But to understand how this has
shaped and deformed Philippine society, has survived the 1986 rebirth of democracy and the 1987 Constitution that promised rights to the poor, it is necessary to
turn back to the beginning of the twentieth century and American rule.
Racial inferiority and Filipino rights
The Philippines, Puerto Rico and Guam had all become US territories in 1898 at the
end of the Spanish American War.1 At that time, Filipino revolutionaries were continuing a struggle for sovereignty that they had been waging against Spanish colonial
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Magno and Parnell: The imperialism of race 71
Figure 1. Manila Standard, 1 May 2001. Reproduced with permission.
rule, declaring independence in the 1898 Acta de la Proclamación del Pueblo Filipino
– a declaration that was swiftly followed by the US takeover. In 1901, following the
re-election of President William McKinley, the question of whether the United States
would pursue or abandon expansionist policies hinged on how politicians, the media
and the public perceived the inhabitants of those territories. Here, the Supreme Court
played a vital role, helping to resolve the ‘political feud’ that divided Americans over
the issue of how to govern such territories by narrowing it to legal questions, issuing
opinions and judgments that facilitated the expansion of US governance without
extending constitutional rights to its new political subjects.2 In fashioning imperial
law as penal law, a law without courts or due process rights,3 the Court expressed in
its jurisdiction a political narrative, captured often in media caricatures, that argued
that Filipinos and inhabitants of other territories were not yet up to the responsibilities or duties of constitutional rights because of their race. It is a narrative that has had
dire effects on the basic structures of Filipino society to this day.
In the negotiations with Spain that resulted in the 1898 Treaty of Paris, President
McKinley demanded US control over the Philippines. While meeting that year
with a Methodist church delegation, he explained: ‘I didn’t want the Philippines,
and when they came to us, as a gift from the gods, I did not know what to do with
them . . . I went down on my knees and prayed to Almighty God for light and
guidance more than one night. And one night late it came to me . . . That we could
not give them back to Spain – that would be cowardly and dishonorable; that we
could not turn them over to France or Germany – our commercial rivals . . . that
we could not leave them to themselves – they were unfit for self-government . . .
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72 Race & Class 56(3)
and that there was nothing left for us to do but to take them all, and to educate
the Filipinos, and uplift and civilize and Christianize them, and by God’s grace
do the very best we could by them, as our fellow men for whom Christ also died.
And then I went to bed, and went to sleep, and slept soundly.’4
Many elected officials and many among the public opposed McKinley’s reasoning and US expansionism, but McKinley had powerful allies, among them
Massachusetts Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Addressing the US Senate in March of
1900, he argued, ‘It has been stated over and over again that we have done great
wrong in taking these islands without the consent of the governed . . . The Declaration
of Independence was the announcement of the existence of a new revolutionary
government upon American soil. Upon whose consent did it rest? All negroes . . .
were not consulted . . . Were women included in the word “governed”?’5
Cartoons and caricatures in American magazines and periodicals echoed the
distorted images of Filipinos that appeared in the political narratives of the new
US imperialism. They were drawn as ‘snakes, dogs, mosquitoes and other wild
animals’6 that needed to be tamed and subdued. America’s new subjects were
caricatured as ‘abandoned infants, nude, crying, crazy, hungry infants, resisting,
sick, mentally ill, criminal, debtors, dirty, native, dangerous, unwashed, wild,
brown, and black infants.’7 The image in Figure 2, from 1899, drawn by Rowland
Claude Bowman, typifies this.
Figure 2 portrays Philippine independence as a crime. Labels on the dress of the
nurse construct the Philippine struggle for independence as comprised of criminal
acts that include murder, felony, theft, piracy and robbery. Physically, the nurse is
ominous, fat, thick-lipped and dark; she is a filthy woman dressed in rags who is
impatiently waiting to get the Philippines back from Uncle Sam.8 A male–female
dichotomy is also clear in this depiction, but it is flipped. The female Filipino is in
the male position as she towers over a seated Uncle Sam who, while cradling a
baby with an unusually large mouth and fully formed teeth, is peaceful, nurturing
and dignified. The unclean recalcitrant female figure also communicates that the
Philippines is not capable of self-control and not ready for independence.
The caricature conveys the savagery of Philippine independence by appropriating the image of the mammy – a term that referred to black female slaves who
stereotypically were overweight, well-groomed, docile and trustworthy nurses to
white children. In stereotype, the white family and the tamed, obedient, subservient mammy formed a relationship that could work. To construct a contrast
between the Filipino and a domesticated African American, the caricaturist transforms the black nurse from an emblem of domesticity into the epitome of savagery; filthy rags patched with words that cry barbarism replace her neat clothing.
She is no longer well-groomed and docile, and she is, beyond a doubt, unfit to
nurse the Philippines, here represented by a baby boy drawn with adult features
that clearly depict adult Filipino males as mere infants.9
The baby boy has the long hair and a matured physicality of a man but the
body of an infant who also looks malnourished and is crying. Uncle Sam tries to
stop the infant from crying by feeding him ‘education and civilization’, but the
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Magno and Parnell: The imperialism of race 73
Figure 2. ‘Recommended by Hoar’. ‘Hoar: “Give the child over to the nurse, uncle, and it will
stop crying”’, Tribune (Minneapolis), also in The American Monthly Review, Vol. XIX, No 6, June
1899, p.70.
infant continues to cry. The white older man, Senator George Frisbie Hoar, who
opposed president McKinley’s imperialist project, voices the caption: ‘Give the
child over to the nurse, uncle, and it will stop crying.’
Such defilement of Filipinos through racialising them expressed the American
insistence, at the turn of the century, on the superiority of a white-only national
citizenry.10 This racial hierarchy was enacted and made operative through the
Insular Cases, a series of 1901 Supreme Court opinions that addressed and codified the status of US territories. Effectively they converted an imposed racial hierarchy into a new form of US governance and law characterised by a bifurcated
system of constitutional rights under which the inhabitants of US territories could
be US subjects without the constitutional benefits of US citizenship.11 At that time,
‘whiteness’, whether through skin colour or racial classification, was a requirement of US citizenship.12 What made the project of US imperialism feasible was
the creation of non-citizen subjects who were under US legal authority.13
Constructing differences across populations is a prerequisite for building a collective national identity and articulating the boundaries of sovereignty. An
American nation that considered itself superior to all others required the downgrading and distorting of other national identities, such as that of the Filipino.
Creative construction of the dangerous ‘Other’ who can demarcate clean and
unclean, higher and lower, civilised and savage was imperative for maintaining
American national identity, as US empire-making reached across oceans to
encompass the brown inhabitants of other lands.
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74 Race & Class 56(3)
Re-emergence of the Filipino elite
During the initial years of empire, the United States gave material, spatial and
social form to its race-based frames of governance, stratifying the Philippine population according to cultural markers of civilisation and human development.
Filipinos could shed the stigma of Philippine culture and enter into the privileges
enjoyed by western individual citizens through abandoning Filipino qualities of
sociality, individuality and autonomy, living instead in unequal patronage relationships that signified their acceptance of US rule. These patron–client relationships carried the same protections for human life afforded to women and children
in the United States, albeit without the rights to liberty that, for more than a century, had symbolised the individual white male’s inherent autonomy and dominion over state institutions.14 Americans who governed embodied US Constitutional
rights, whereas Filipinos could only gain access to rights by personalising them,
temporalising them and disassociating them from citizenship. Filipinos could
gain limited privileges as clients, servants and captives, even as US law codified
the dehumanisation of ‘Other’ Filipinos – those deemed rebels, criminal bandits
and savages – by categorising them as the rights-free targets of state violence.
A number of Acts were passed to this end, including the Brigandage Act of
1902, the Reconcentration Act of 1903 and the Flag law of 1907. The Reconcen­
tration Act authorised the US military to relocate all Filipinos living in regions of
resistance to garrisoned towns – concentration camp villages, in other words,
designed to prevent rebellious rural populations from gaining wider support
and purchase. Kramer explains, ‘Outside of the policed, fenced-in perimeters of
these reconcentration camps, [US] troops would then undertake a scorchedearth policy, burning residences and rice stores, destroying or capturing livestock, and killing every person they encountered.’15 These subject, rightless
Filipinos were targeted in US caricature, personified as in Figure 3 as the rural
savage carrying a peasant’s machete and standing knee-deep in the pollution of
Philippine culture.
To grow a civilised colony, Americans secured the city of Manila under state
military control to set Filipinos on a path that would forcibly induct them into the
schools, libraries and other gateways to western civilisation established inside
the urban colony’s walls. Filipinos who collaborated with the colonial project
would fall under the city’s tutelage, while others who sought refuge from rural
violence behind Manila’s walls would find security in servitude, and as cooks,
gardeners and tailors who lived in well-watched slums, slave quarters and tenements.16 To keep the humanising processes of ‘civilised’ Manila safe from the
dehumanising power of Philippine culture, the Brigandage Act of 1902 forbade
all Filipinos from joining organisations or nationalist movements. Manila’s new
urban poor migrants and workers were the primary targets of the Brigandage
Act. Their group affiliations were illegal sources of contamination and danger,
and they were not allowed to leave urban pacified areas. And in 1907, the screw
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Magno and Parnell: The imperialism of race 75
Figure 3. Tribune (Minneapolis) June 1902.
was tightened even further when the Flag Law criminalised Filipino display of
any symbols that US authorities had not approved.17
This new legal, rights-based partitioning of Filipinos that sorted people according to whether they were subservient appendages of western civilisation, or were
embroiled in less than human Filipino affiliations, extended racialisation into
Philippine cultural codes and practices. And this rights-based stratification of
Filipinos became imbricated with the class distinctions that had developed among
Filipinos during Spanish colonial rule (1521–1898). Spanish colonial administrators had brought native Filipino rulers into administrative roles and given them
privileges not available to others. The initial policy of the Spaniards for consolidating political control was the encomienda system, which distributed land among
loyal Spaniards who governed Filipinos and forced them to pay tribute. Spanish
landowners enlisted Filipino chieftains in the administration of Filipino settlements, extending privileges to their allies. In this way, the Filipino chieftain’s
family became agents of the Spanish colonial administration.18 This colonising
strategy divided a previously classless society into an upper and a lower class.
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76 Race & Class 56(3)
As the processes of US colonisation transformed the illustrados into a new
skilled and western-educated Philippine elite with privileges, new class-based
relationships stratified Philippine society. Simbulan explains that during the four
decades of direct colonisation, US colonial administrators reserved superiority
and leadership roles for the Filipino elite in political, economic, educational and
religious matters.19 Political and governmental leadership became the elite’s
exclusive domain through the Municipal Code, Act No. 82 section 6, the American
colonial administrative Act, which was passed on 31 January 1901. According to
the Act, Filipinos who qualified for a government position and the right to vote
included only those who had held one of several local political offices prior to
August 1898; owners of real property valued at 500 pesos or more who paid at
least thirty pesos in official annual taxes; and Filipinos who spoke, read and wrote
English or Spanish. These elite Filipinos who managed colonial projects and
bureaucracies appeared in cartoons as educated, civilised and Christianised;
James Scott has called them ‘local trackers’;20 they had a thorough knowledge of
Philippine society, but many had also studied in Spain and the United States.
The United States gained the collaboration of the Filipino elite in governing its
newly acquired territory through a patronage relationship that extended to its
local elite clients the privileges of their white patrons, but not the full citizenship
reserved for white racial status. Within this two-tiered structure of rights, rights
as entitlements could not flow down across the patron-client relationships which
bridged an upper status that could not be achieved and a lower status that was
inescapable. In this way, the practices of colonial government turned access to
state law (as both the conveyer and the protector of rights) into a powerful and
enduring signifier of a rigid binary status system. American colonial administrators could offer their collaborators among the Filipino elite the protection of rights
without these becoming a solid prerogative of citizenship.
Thus legal status and access to rights through clientage (deemed the summit of
Filipino human evolution) came to signify class as well as race. In the early 1900s,
elite Filipinos gained more in the way of privileges than rights through the subordinated citizenship of clientage, but, nonetheless, recognition of one’s humanity as a protection against state violence – which had free rein against
non-collaborators – was a significant gain. Along with all this, the elite also
acquired (secondary) managerial roles in the ordering and disposition of
Philippine society through control over the cultural symbols of US racial superiority. McCoy explains that the Americanised elite used their power and wealth
effectively to silence Philippine resistance to colonisation, identifying with their
white patrons to such an extent that they lost consciousness of themselves as
Filipinos.21
Those among the Filipino elite who resisted colonisation posed, however, the
conundrum of eliding class with race; it was resolved by the criminalisation of
such individuals – who were judged to be on a path downward into the inherent
savagery of Filipinos who might otherwise have found salvation in US culture.
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Magno and Parnell: The imperialism of race 77
Rebels and Filipinos out of place socially and spatially, not evolving towards a
US-oriented future, were criminals, savages, or both.
In caricature (Figure 3), these colonising relationships appear as a Filipino elite
mediating between Filipino savagery and its ascension into a more human future.
Figure 3, published in 1902 captures the stratification of Filipinos on the basis of
class, allegiance and culture. In it ‘civilised’ Filipinos enact US white male dominion over human and political evolution as they represent and manage the culture
protected by Manila’s colonial walls. This depiction captures the purifying power
of the patronage ladder. Civilised elite Filipinos at the ladder’s top have risen out
of savagery by accepting US guidance, culture (the American flag) and expansionism – the path to peace, prosperity, public improvement and knowledge. The
hair of the lower Filipino resembles the grass growing in the dirt of the inferior,
diseased place that he occupies. The US caricaturist considered those who
opposed Americanisation as savage troublemakers and torturers.
Americans used race decisively to show the alleged barbarism of the Filipinos
and legitimate their subjugation. They used class to illustrate Filipino transformation from uncivilised to civilised, from illiterate to literate and from pagan to
Christian. But American periodicals could not depict the upper class as a superior
race despite their Americanisation, education and Christianisation because, from
the Anglo Saxon point of view, the qualities of race were immutable. Senator John
W. Daniel of Virginia (senate years 1842–1910) articulated this view in a speech
opposing American citizenship for Americanised Filipinos. He asserted that
Filipinos ‘cannot have qualities, physical, and moral, or intellectual, that
Americans possess because their race forbids it’.22 Filipino elites playing the role
of US administrators could lift Filipinos out of ‘native’ culture into the evolutionary power of patron-client relationships but only from within the secured locations of western tutelage. Movement outside the US embrace was a return to
savagery.
Racialisation and criminalisation of urban poor Filipinos
What has all this meant in practice for the development of Philippine society?
Almost fifty years after the US took control of the Philippines, it recognised the
independence of the Republic of the Philippines by signing the Treaty of General
Relations on 4 July 1946. But this did not dismantle the underlying structural
relationships and deformations that the years of imperial overlordship had codified and set in place, and which still control the life chances of the poor to this
day. Following independence, the United States and the Philippines continued to
maintain an international patron-client relationship, which tightened during the
Cold War under the presidency of Ferdinand Marcos, who imposed martial law
on the Philippines in September 1972 in response to challenges from the Philippine
Left and a civil society struggling against inequality. Marcos articulated Philippine
penal law in Proclamation (No. 1081), declaring that all persons detained and
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78 Race & Class 56(3)
others who might be detained in the future for a lengthy list of crimes ‘as well as
other crimes as will be enumerated in Orders that I shall subsequently promulgate . . . shall be kept under detention until otherwise ordered released by me or
by my duly designated representative’.23
In 1975 President Marcos criminalised squatting with Presidential Decree No.
772.24 It is likely that in 1975 more than one-third of Metropolitan Manila’s 5 million inhabitants lived as urban poor squatters, a percentage that remains the same
today among the city’s estimated 12 million residents. Extensive violent demolitions of squatter homes marked the Marcos era; the urban poor fighting oppression struggled to survive by defending their homes and resisting forced
relocations. One area, Commonwealth, a region of poor urban neighbourhoods,
was part of the National Government Center (NGC) and the Philippine government claimed ownership of its land. In 1968 president Marcos had added to the
NGC 120 hectares of land that included a 50 hectare neighbourhood known as
North Triangle, not far from Commonwealth. But 1970 witnessed the massive
demolition of North Triangle squatter homes in order to expand Epifanio de Los
Santos Avenue (EDSA). Throughout the Marcos dictatorship, land syndicates
and veterans’ associations organised Commonwealth’s squatters into homeowner associations. In 1984, following a successful drive by the Catholic Church
and community organisers to build a democratic organisation, Sama Sama, to
represent the interests of the urban poor, the women of this grassroots squatters’
organisation stood at a barricade to block the demolition of their neighbours’
homes. Philippine Marines shot some of the resisters, but the women returned to
the barricades the next day. The Marines did not. From such moments of resistance, networks of urban poor groups expanded across the city to challenge the
Marcos dictatorship. In contrast, the urban poor of North Triangle participated in
patronage networks that were charitable or political but did not empower the
poor to retain their homes and govern their communities.
The Marcos dictatorship ended in 1986 when Marcos responded to EDSA I and
his loss of US support by fleeing the Philippines into permanent exile. But the
apparent revolutionary uniting of classes into a Philippine civil society did not
lessen governmental and private corporate use of legal forums and processes to
enact and enforce, at times brutally, the rigid class divisions of Philippine society.
Class relations in the Philippines in practice deny the urban poor access to legal
rights as a means of challenging poverty. The uplifting hand of patronage today
extends charity without rights erratically and unpredictably across poor urban
neighbourhoods in Metropolitan Manila. The denial of law as a means of maintaining inequality across class divisions appears today in everyday government
actions and practices that criminalise poverty; and charity has not stayed the bulldozers used to carry out illegal demolitions and illegal forced relocations.
Government agencies and private corporations ignore the legal rights of the poor,
illegally destroying thousands of urban homes each year and tossing their occupants into deepening poverty. Equally common forced relocations exile the urban
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Magno and Parnell: The imperialism of race 79
poor into fractured communities forced to survive amidst the economic deprivations of the urban fringes. US imperial penal law, built upon notions of racial
inequality, survives today in the virtually unregulated Philippine state and
municipal practices of controlling and punishing the urban poor.
Some Filipinos claim that the third and truest Philippine declaration of independence and sovereignty was the non-violent People Power Revolution of 1986
(EDSA I), when many urban poor joined other Filipinos to oust Marcos and
replace him with President Corazon Aquino. Faced with a united Philippine civil
society, the United States abandoned its support of the Marcos dictatorship.25 The
squatters of Commonwealth had openly supported Aquino; Sama Sama’s patronage networks reached deep into the new administration. In 1987, President
Aquino issued Proclamation No. 137, which set aside 150 hectares of the NGC for
disposition to the ‘squatters’ who resided on that land. Sama Sama, with assistance from its extensive patronage networks, then formed a federally sanctioned
partnership with national governmental agencies to develop a socialised housing
project for the approximately 150,000 squatters who lived on the NGC land of
Aquino’s Proclamation. In stark contrast, that same year President Aquino issued
Memorandum Order No. 127, which released the fifty hectares of North Triangle
for sale or lease to private developers.
Fidel Ramos, who succeeded Aquino as president in 1992, continued federal
support of the NGC housing project and its unique structure combining grassroots and bureaucratic organisations. He also established an ‘inter-executive
committee’ to oversee the development of the North Triangle area as a joint venture with the private sector through sale or lease of its land. In 1998, Joseph
Ejército Estrada was elected president of the Philippines with overwhelming support from the urban poor. On 17 October 2000, President Estrada visited North
Triangle to proclaim that informal settlers who lived within North Triangle’s fifty
hectares could develop the land for socialised housing.
Shortly after Estrada visited North Triangle, the Philippine House of
Representatives sent articles impeaching him, on charges of plunder and corruption, to the House of Representatives. When the trial stalled in the Senate, hundreds of thousands of mostly middle-class Filipinos began to gather at the site of
the first People Power Revolution on January 16, 2000, to demand Estrada’s resignation in what became known as EDSA II. The Philippine military soon abandoned support for Estrada. On 20 January 2001, Estrada left Malacañang, the
presidential palace, and did not return. In April, the Philippine Ombudsman
filed charges for plunder and perjury against Estrada in the Sandiganbayan, a
court that hears anti-corruption charges. Estrada was arrested, and when the
media publicised his mug shot, millions of poor urban Filipinos gathered on
April 30 along EDSA to support their patron, in EDSA III.
Many residents of North Triangle joined EDSA III, their sense of injustice
fuelled by the corruption of past Philippine presidents. The colonial practice of
personalising rights through patronage had survived Philippine independence;
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80 Race & Class 56(3)
during the Marcos presidency, this had led to unprecedented levels of corruption
among elected public officials.26 After EDSA I, corruption appeared among
Aquino’s political appointees; President Ramos too faced accusations of corruption.27 Yet other presidents had not been detained. Many urban poor believed
their patron deserved equal treatment.
Numerous major media outlets in Manila supported EDSA II’s middle-class
protesters, but condemned the lower class’s counter-reaction in EDSA III. Figure
1, which represents a fairly typical media response to the urban poor protesters,
illustrates how the racialised images of Filipinos in Figures 2 and 3 have become
an accepted representation that questions the civic competence of the poor. Figure
1 caricatures the Filipino lower class as resisting, crying, savage-looking and hungry infants. Most Philippine pundits who witnessed the EDSA III uprising
described poor Filipinos who joined the mobilisation as lumpen, idiot, unemployed, rented, irrational, emotional and agitated individuals who had been
fooled, brainwashed and hoodwinked by President Estrada and his consorts.28
On the other hand, they described the middle and upper class of the EDSA II rallies that deposed Estrada as critical, politically active and decisive – as people
with genuine sensibilities over the wrongdoings of the errant president, especially on the issue of corruption.29
In Figure 1, the infantilised underdeveloped urban poor, incapable of political
reasoning, that the union of the law and the elite perforce must wean from patrons
like Estrada, have been made into something less than human, the offspring of
both the imperial law and the colonial-era movement of race into class. In media
images and discourse, the poor are just not ready for responsible citizenship and
access to full rights. Rights-based class distinctions pervade the everyday lives of
the poor. Just as US law criminalised Philippine culture, the urban poor are criminalised through the penal practices of a state and city that often deny their right
to survive.
Many urban poor residents of North Triangle, where Christopher Magno has
conducted ethnographic research, have been imprisoned for violent resistance to
demolitions of their homes. Also, sidewalk vending, their main source of a livelihood, has frequently been targeted by municipal authorities, including the
Metropolitan Manila Development Authority’s (MMDA) Task Force Zero
Obstruction. The MMDA’s chairperson stopped illegal vendors from ‘plying their
trade on sidewalks by ordering his men to spray kerosene on the goods they were
selling’30 and burning them. So the would-be vendors lost everything, unable to
recover their investments. The chairperson also ‘ordered the confiscation of their
carts, and detained those who persisted in occupying the sidewalks’.31
This militaristic style of controlling the poor through violence, which is common to demolitions and forced relocations in Metropolitan Manila,32 pushes them
to engage in crime to survive. Poor residents in North Triangle commit robberies
and hold up buses, taxis and jeep-neys (Philippine public transport) that stop
around the community. Unfamiliar faces in the community are often the victims
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Magno and Parnell: The imperialism of race 81
of opportunistic holdups and robberies. These criminal activities, committed in
the process of survival, retain and reinforce the criminal identity of the
community.
Within the city’s clustering of penality, poverty and crime, Philippine governance, upper-class subdivisions, and businesses have often responded to the
legal and economic plights of the poor by seeking enhanced safety for the rich.
The MMDA has installed thousands of CCTV cameras to perfect the surveillance
of the urban poor criminal. In other cities in the Philippines, mayors have developed their own mechanisms of repression and penal law by operating vigilante
groups that shoot and kill people whom they characterise as street robbers or
criminal suspects.
The criminal image of a whole community has a profound impact on the lives
of North Triangle’s urban poor. For example, the daughters of one resident named
Sonia33 were not hired as sales clerks in a nearby department store when its
human resources officer learned they lived in North Triangle. The son of Teodora,
a North Triangle community leader, was not accepted into Philippine Science
High School even though he had passed the school’s entrance exam and had high
grades.34 Magno observed that Catholic residents could not go to church in a
nearby middle-class subdivision because they were usually halted by community
guards and chased by dogs. Teodora explained during an interview that North
Triangle residents most often could not get care in nearby hospitals because they
could not pay the required deposit. Many North Triangle children lack birth certificates, and many couples do not have marriage certificates, even though the
city hall is only a five-minute ride from their neighbourhood. This whole range of
practices that criminalise, restrict freedom of movement, destroy property, physically injure and even kill the residents of a defined neighbourhood, amounts to a
rightlessness that, even if not laid out in the law of the land, equates to a completely subordinate citizenship status.
With the 1986 movement from dictatorship to democracy in the Philippines,
rights for the urban poor gained advocates in the executive and legislative
branches of the national government. A new Philippine Constitution in 1987
addressed those rights by mandating urban land reform and the provision of
decent affordable housing and basic services to urban ‘underprivileged and
homeless citizens’.35 Six years later, when the Philippine Congress passed the
Urban Development and Housing Act of 1992 (UDHA), the urban poor gained a
mandate for the redistribution of public lands for their legal acquisition by poor
urban squatters, and a clear delineation of their rights in the processes of demolition and forced relocation. The law also created a blueprint for ‘socialised housing projects’ for the poor. In 1997, the Philippine Congress repealed Presidential
Decree 772, which had criminalised squatting.
Yet, these legal efforts have not embedded the rights of squatters and the urban
poor in the policies and practices of government agencies at any level, in the
courts or in the practices of the private sector.36 Seventeen years after the passage
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82 Race & Class 56(3)
of UDHA, a study conducted by a network of over 100 Philippine NGOs and
people’s organisations and federations concluded that the Philippine government had not only failed to stop, but had also engaged in, forced evictions that
involved ‘gross violations’ of human rights, the Philippine Constitution and
UDHA.37 Through government’s illegal activities, North Triangle neighbourhoods remain sites where the carceral city and penal law challenge the right to
life. In 2010, violence erupted during a large-scale demolition of squatter homes
in North Triangle to make way for a new business district – a joint government/
corporate venture.38 Over 5,000 urban poor residents of the region were transferred to a relocation site beyond the outskirts of Metropolitan Manila.39 An estimated 2,000 to 2,500 of those residents returned to North Triangle because they
could not find jobs or any means of livelihood where they had been relocated.40
In January 2014, North Triangle residents fought to save their homes from an
estimated 1,000 police, from the Special Weapons and Tactics force (SWAT), and
a demolition team that swept through their neighbourhoods dispersing tear-gas.
Representatives of the urban poor claimed the demolitions lacked a proper court
order and were illegal.41
Patrons of North Triangle’s poor bear gifts but not rights: politicians, professors, nuns, priests, seminarians, students, non-governmental organisations, religious organisations, medical practitioners and social movements provide
services with different agendas but the same objective of ‘helping’. Professors
and students from exclusive schools conduct research in the community and
provide tutorials within youth organisations. Catholic seminarians immerse
themselves in the community for the required pastoral work before entering the
priesthood. Medical students in nearby hospitals use North Triangle as a laboratory for practising medicine. Churches in nearby subdivisions distribute used
clothes and groceries every Christmas. NGOs organise the community to attain
security of housing, until now a goal rather than a reality. They cite the community’s multiple deprivations in their funding proposals, while mobilising residents around issues such as the environment, corruption, the national debt and
globalisation.
Politicians exchange gifts and sponsorship for votes among North Triangle’s
and all of the city’s poor, whose numbers make them essential components of
campaigns for elected office. Politicians partner with businesses to sponsor mass
weddings and baptisms, sports festivals, and birthday celebrations; they also pay
burial expenses. During elections, politicians gain votes by promising to protect
squatters from demolition and legalise their residency on public lands. Mostly,
these are empty promises, and the poor move no closer to full citizenship through
a clientage that domesticates their allegiances and channels their votes towards
the interests of wealthier Filipinos.
Most Metropolitan Manila poor neighbourhoods experience the governmental
control and repression that challenges life in North Triangle. But Commonwealth
represents an alternative route through patronage that arose during the Marcos-era
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Magno and Parnell: The imperialism of race 83
struggle for democracy. When President Aquino freed the government-owned
land of North Triangle for commercial development in 1986, she also set aside a
region of Commonwealth to be developed and acquired by its poor residents. Such
are the vicissitudes of survival through patronage. Since 1986, Commonwealth
beneficiaries of Aquino’s choice have worked through Sama Sama and other local
democratic organisations to build the Philippines’ largest socialised housing project. Since Sama Sama’s inception, its members have linked the articulation and
realisation of their rights to the practice of local democracy and have coupled the
legal acquisition of urban land with participation in local democratic organisations
and processes.
Commonwealth’s urban poor have played major roles in planning and implementing the housing project; today, they are no longer squatters and are gaining
legal titles to the land they have developed and the houses they have built. The
democratic organisations of the housing project’s estimated 300,000 beneficiaries
work directly with governmental housing agencies and through their NGO alliances to articulate urban poor experiences as rights; they can then begin to infuse
their perspectives into governmental agencies, the vast networks of NGOs and
political parties. Through consultation with their constituencies and housing
agencies, Commonwealth democratic organisations shape the policies of the
housing project to the interests of its urban poor beneficiaries.
In 2009, Phil Parnell, who, as an ethnographer, moved into Commonwealth in
1987 and continues to return to the community, accompanied members of Sama
Sama to their meeting room. Sama Sama’s president took his arm and led him to
two small pieces of notebook paper pinned to a wall; they listed the monthly dues
received and the same month’s expenditure. The profound meaning of the president’s instruction was clear. Ever since the squatter organisation turned its focus
to the security of housing at the 1986 defeat of dictatorship, its members have
located their ability and right to represent the poor in the practice of local democracy. They have sustained democracy while official Philippine governance has
often failed to do so. Now they provide a local democratic base to national housing bureaucracies.
Although the democratic confederations of Commonwealth have been tied
to some of the Philippine’s most powerful networks of patrons of the poor, a
suggestion about rights lies in the life of Sama Sama and other grassroots
organisations. In practice, the rights of the poor have barely inched into being
as a result of their legalisation through UDHA. Some organisations of the poor,
however, have been able to translate their experiences and knowledge into
articulating their rights and moving those rights into local practice. Their legitimacy and political power have been grounded in democratic practices, which
have moved from local grassroots organisations into the lower levels of government bureaucracies to create a hybrid form of national-level bureaucracy.
This democratisation of Philippine institutions, although it is an improbable
ground-up struggle, could create spaces where the rights of the poor can wage
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84 Race & Class 56(3)
battle head to head with the penal legacies of imperialism. It’s improbable, but
it has happened.
For urban poor neighbourhoods whose patrons had the momentary power to
construct enduring barriers to demolition and forced relocation, the first People
Power Revolution planted the seeds of a local democracy that could grow to challenge the facility of race and class in structuring and representing Philippine society. These former squatters represent a path to rights and robust citizenship that
they have emblazoned by articulating and exercising their rights while participating in democratic processes. Only they can begin to move the knowledge,
experiences and needs of their neighbours into the policy-making processes of
governmental bureaucracies. Democratisation of Philippine institutions through
this hybrid of grassroots and bureaucratic organisations that shapes policy without patronage is needed to replace the inhumanity of penality and the walls of a
‘prison city’ with humane shelter and economic opportunities for the poor.
References
1 K. Vignarajah, ‘The political roots of judicial legitimacy’, University of Chicago Law Review (Vol.
77, no. 2, 2010), pp. 781–845.
2 Ibid.
3 A. Kaplan, ‘Where is Guantánamo?’, American Quarterly (Vol. 57, no. 3, 2005), pp. 831–58.
4 J. Rustling, ‘Interview with President William McKinley’, The Christian Advocate (22 January
1903).
5 The Congressional Record, 60th Congress, 1st Session (Volume 33, Part 3), pp. 2618–30.
6 See for instance S. D. Halili, Iconography of the New Empire: race and gender images and the American
colonization of the Philippines (Quezon City, University of the Philippines Press, 2006); I. Ignacio
et al., The Forbidden Book (San Francisco, CA, T’Boli Publishing and Distribution, 2004); P. A.
Kramer, The Blood of Government: race, empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Quezon City,
Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2006).
7 Ibid.
8 Halili, op. cit.
9 Ibid.
10 I. F. Haney-Lopez, White by Law: the legal construction of race (New York, New York University
Press, 2006).
11 Kaplan, op. cit.; Vignarajah, op. cit.
12 Haney-Lopez, op. cit.
13 Vignarajah, op. cit.
14 Ibid.
15 Kramer, op. cit., pp. 152–53.
16 E. Duque, ‘Militarization of the city: implementing Burnham’s 1905 Plan of Manila’, Fabrications
(Vol. 19, no. 1, 2009), pp. 50–51.
17 Kramer, op. cit., pp. 155, 333.
18 J. Scott, Seeing Like a State: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (New
York, Vail-Ballou Press, 1998), p. 129.
19 D. C. Simbulan, The Modern Principalia: the historical evolution of the Philippine ruling oligarchy
(Quezon City, University of the Philippines Press, 2005).
20 Scott, op. cit.
21 W. McCoy, Philippine Cartoons: political caricature of the American era 1900-1941 (Quezon City,
Vera Reyes Inc., 1985).
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Magno and Parnell: The imperialism of race 85
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
2 9
30
31
32
3 3
34
35
36
3 7
38
39
40
41
The Congressional Record (3 February 1899), 1426-27, available at: http://history.house.gov/Sea
rch?Term=Congressional+Record+1899&Command=Search
Republic of the Philippines, Proclamation No. 1081 (21 September 1972), ‘Proclaiming a State
of Martial Law in the Philippines’.
Republic of the Philippines, Presidential Decree N. 772 (20 August 1975), ‘Penalizing Squatting
and Other Similar Acts’.
R. Bonner, Waltzing with a Dictator: the Marcoses and the making of American policy (New York,
Times Books, 1987), p. 384.
For a discussion of corruption in the Philippines during and after the Marcos presidency, see
W. Bello and others, The Anti-development State: the political economy of permanent crisis in the
Philippines (Quezon City, University of Philippines Diliman, 2004).
Ibid.
See for instance B. Olivares, ‘Puwersa ng kwarta’, Philippine Daily Inquirer (8 May 2001), p. 9;
Quijano de Manila, ‘Anatomy of EDSA’, Manila, Philippine Graphic Magazine (28 May 2001), pp.
16–19 and J. Esguerra, ‘After the EDSA III’, Political Brief (July 2001) p. 19.
Bello, op. cit.
R. David, ‘Bayani Fernando and the urban poor’, Inquirer.net (1 September 2007) , available
at: http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/inquirerheadlines/regions/view/20070901-85966/Bayani_
Fernando_and_the_urban_poor_
Ibid.
PhilRights and UPA, ‘Philippine NGO network report on the implementation of the
International Covenant on Economic, Social, and Cultural Rights (ICESR)’ (Quezon City,
Philippine Human Rights Information Center, 2009).
Sonia is a single mother with five children.
C. N. Magno, Conversation with Teodora, ‘Field Note 1’ (5 March 2001).
Article XIII Section 9 of Philippine Constitution, Philippine Law Library, Corpus Juris.
Sunset Review, Unpublished report of the Housing and Urban Development Coordinating
Council (Quezon City, Philippines, n.d.).
PhilRights and UPA, op. cit., p. 81.
L. M. Suarez and J. Abella, ‘Barricades block QC North Triangle demolition; 14 hurt in
clashes’, GMA News (23 September 2010), available at: http://www.gmanetwork.com/news/
story/201776/news/nation/barricades-block-qc-north-triangle-demolition-14-hurt-in-clashes
K. F. Mangunay, ‘Urban poor group labels Aquino “demolition king”’, Inquirer.net (3 July
2011), available at: http://newsinfo.inquirer.net/28391/urban-poor-group-labels-aquino%E2%80%98demolition-king%E2%80%99
Ibid.
J. J. Ellao, ‘Quezon City: North Triangle residents lose homes to demolition, decry “overkill”’
Bulatlat.com (27 January 2014), available at: http://bulatlat.com/main/2014/01/27/north-triangle-residents-lose-homes-to-demolition-decry-overkill/
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