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542922 research-article2015 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 Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016 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 Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016 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 . . . Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016 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 Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016 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. Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016 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 Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016 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. Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016 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. Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016 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 Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016 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 Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016 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; Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016 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 Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016 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 Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016 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 Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016 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 Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016 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). Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016 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/ Downloaded from rac.sagepub.com at PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIV on September 15, 2016