Authors in Conversation, Ep. 3 — Judy Wu & Tessa Winkelmann discuss new book Dangerous Intercourse

7:06PM Mar 13, 2023

Speakers:

Judy Tzu-Chun Wu

Tessa Winkelmann

Keywords:

philippines

people

book

american

understand

places

filipino

filipinos

empire

relationships

sources

dangerous

spanish

thinking

settler colonialism

americans

intercourse

women

talk

colonial

Welcome to Authors in Conversation: The United States in the World Series Podcast from Cornell University Press. Hi, everybody. This is Judy Wu. I'm a professor at University of California, Irvine. I'm also one of the co-editors of the Cornell University US in the World book series. And I'm so thrilled today to be talking to Tessa Winkelmann, who is at UNLV. And the author of this fantastic book called Dangerous intercourse: Gender and Interracial Relations in the American Colonial Philippines, 1898 to 1946. So welcome, Tessa.

I think, Judy, it's great to be here.

I'm excited to talk to you about your book. So I'm so intrigued by the title of your book, Dangerous Intercourse. So why this particular phrase, why intercourse? How is it dangerous? And who is it dangerous for?

Yeah, it's funny, like, lots of people like the title like over winter break, my mom was essentially trying to like, sell my book at a Christmas party to all the people that were there. And she's like, it's a history book. And people would look at the title and be like, it doesn't sound like it's a history. But it's actually named that I got from the archives. So there was a surgeon general for the US military. He made this sanitation pamphlet that was going to be distributed free to the US Naval personnel that was going to point to the Philippines in 1899, for the war. And there was a particular set of information in the pamphlet that caught my attention, it said intercourse with them, will be dangerous. The natives and all the towns of the Philippines are prone to all sorts of diseases. And he goes on to name like cholera and all these conditions. But then at the very end, he lists syphilis and gonorrhea and stuff. So I was like, Oh, this isn't just about like, contagion through sneezes, and stuff, this is about sexual relationships. So I kind of lifted the title from that sanitation pamphlet. And I was compelled by the title because it intercourse was dangerous for, you know, in his eyes for the troops, right, because of how it would imperil their, their bodies, their fertility, etcetera, and affects how they performed in battle. But it was also dangerous in a variety of different ways. This, my book kind of lays out, right. I mean, the the kind of baseline that the basic justification for empire was, with white superiority, right? Like was these ideas of the racial inferiority of non-white peoples? So, so things like interracial marriage, for example, I think, was a dangerous prospect for the colonial occupiers. Because, you know, for many Filipinos, that type of formalized relationship signified to them, that they were racially equal, right, or that the empire softened is somewhat racially equal. And that is, you know, against the whole kind of justification for why Americans saw themselves as being there. So it was dangerous in that way. But it was also dangerous. For I mean, mostly, I point out in my book, I think the the people that were, ultimately in the most physical, economic and social danger was the Filipina women at the center of these relationships. Right? They were in danger of abuse, they're in danger of being sexually violated. If it troops, they're in danger of being abandoned with children with mixed race children, and they were the ones that that lived with dangerous intercourse, that the longevity of these relationships really saved their lives in much more meaningful and longer ways than Americans.

I was just gonna say I really appreciate how multi layered your book is that you're looking at the set of interactions from multiple lenses, different perspectives, and it's so beautiful to see it come together. How did you become inspired to do this work?

I think it's a long time coming for me. I grew up so my mom is Filipino. My dad is is white. And I grew up always kind of getting asked like if I was from a military family, and I don't think I understood really. Growing up why that was what people immediately thought, and I had the sense that it wasn't, you know, it wasn't special, right? I knew that it was there was lots of families like mine. And I think growing up, it was something that I was interested in kind of figuring out, right? Like, why does everybody asked me about the military? And then as I kind of learned about US history, I was like, Well, this is really just a world war two thing, right? Is this, where it starts with the kind of rest and rec industries that that kind of spring up in the Asia Pacific region, after during World War Two, and after, during the cold war in Vietnam. So when I went to grad school, to work with, you know, there's still a spiritual use, like, nobody's done research on that this period. A lot of like, yeah, a lot of the research is kind of like World War Two, and later. So, you know, we both knew, that's not where the story starts. And that was kind of, you know, so it's been a long standing interest. And then I did some language immersion trips in the Philippines. And we went to places like Subic Bay. And you could see everywhere all over the town was was admiration. Folks just, you know, looking out of place, but they were born and raised there, right. So, yeah, that those those types of trips to the Philippines also kind of heightened my awareness of the longer history and how it had kind of, you know, developed into what I was experiencing there.

Thank you for sharing that. One of the things that you mentioned in the book is that multiracial reality, Mestizo identity is something that has a long tradition in the Philippines was under Spanish colonial rule for four centuries. Yeah. And so why do you think there was a slightly different valence to motion reality when it when the Philippines come under US occupation?

It's funny, I was talking to my friends about this, I was like, you know, when Americans came to the Philippines to occupy at 98, a lot of the Filipino elites were Spanish mestizos, and Chinese mestizos. And they were in politics, and but when you get to, like, you know, through the American occupation, and after, there's not really too many American mestizos that are in those same kind of levels of political power. Right? I mean, they might have many kind of local names for themselves. It's like business owners or what have you. But I think I mean, I think part of it is the, the scope and that kind of broadness of of US imperialism in the Philippines versus the Spanish colonialism. Because for a lot of those 500 years, this Spanish didn't have a ton of people there, it was kind of towards the last like 50 to 100 years that more troops were kind of sent in and more more people went to the Philippines to try to pull in the south and pull in the north and more kind of effective ways. And also kind of fending off advances from the British, etc. So for a long time, there, the number of people saying wasn't that many, and those people kind of just integrated into communities and then their their kids became leaders in the community because of connections with the Spanish Empire and the resources that it afforded them. And for, for Americans. I mean, I think, as much as there's this kind of hostility against the Spanish Empire that culminates in the revolution against Spain in the Philippines. I do in the sources that I've read it, I do get the sense that Spanish mestizos of Chinese mestizos didn't necessarily have the same type of stigma around them and their origins as American mestizos who, by and large, like Filipinos, characterize them as you know, the products of Imperial violence if that chapter in the book about the Filipino writers that talk about these kinds of relationships. Now, even in stories where there are these good American characters, so called good American characters that marry i and save Filipinos they're still kind of you know, they're still kind of full of themselves and self centered and don't treat Filipinos as equals. Right. So, it there is, for me in the sources a sense that the Filipinos understood American mestizos more as as symptomatic of American power read and imperialism in the islands. And that's not to say that those those families didn't have positions of prominence. But it is to say that they the American, Mr. Issa community seemed to kind of isolate itself a lot more as well, right. They tended to stay as it kind of American community or or kind of like insulated community from other Filipino communities, even though Filipino communities were more welcoming of them. A lot of these dads like really tried to instill in them, their Americanness, right that they were different somehow, even though they're born and raised in the Philippines like everyone else, right, but didn't have an American Dad. I think there's also that that sense of like, mestizot kids were taught to think that they're, they're better in various ways.

That's really interesting. I was thinking about your comment that Filipino writers interpreted these multiracial relationships and families as a product of American Empire. And we began by talking about how these relationships were considered dangerous on from the perspective of the US military, but you also have this really interesting interpretation of these relationships. So in your introduction, you talked about, well, interracial intercourse, pose a set of dangerous possibilities to colonial officials. It was also a vital importance since the consolidation of imperial rule and legitimacy in the Philippines. Yeah. So could you talk a little bit about that kind of contradictory positioning of sexual of dangerous intercourse as both dangerous but also essential?

Yeah, it's so I think what it really illustrates is that as much as imperialism has these ideologies of like, white racial superiority, right, white supremacy and curiosity of non white peoples, it's just as much practical, the processes of imperialism are just as much practical as they are ideological, right. And so when, when colonists are, are in the Philippines, and they're trying to consolidate 7000 islands, under the US flag, they really come to rely heavily on inter married men are men in relationships with local women who have access to communities, who have access to resources, who have access to knowledge, language, knowledge, and all these things that are going to help them to bring various populations more and more under the US flag. So even though, you know, colonial officials were talking about how they thought these men were deviant, and course like American frontiers, men, right, they relied on them. They were literally their guides, their hosts, and their informants to help them figure out the best ways to bring certain populations to heal, right. And, you know, a lot of these inner married men or men and relationships with local women, were vital intermediaries.

Your characterization of these relationships and how they bolster American empire really resonates. I think, with the scholarship that has been emerging has emerged on settler colonialism. You make this really intriguing comment about how to understand the Philippines in light of that, that scholarship. So at the Philippines during this period as an American colony, with settlers, rather than an American Southern colonial colony. And so I'm really interested in the way that you're making this distinction with settlers as opposed to settler colony. Could you talk a little bit more about why you want to make that distinction? Yeah,

I think it's, it's so messy and so hard to kind of draw the line in terms of How is this? You know, where do we see the apparatuses of settler debate? And because they never really end, right? When I workshop this with people in my department here, people that are more, you know, Native American indigenous studies, they kind of helped me try to wrap my head around what was happening in the Philippines, right, the Spanish Empire was doing various kinds of things in the Philippines that were very much like settler colonialism in the US, right? They were sending soldiers and prisoners down to the southern Philippines, to kind of populate and settle that area, as a way to, you know, hopefully kind of disempower that local Muslim inhabitants. And the US kind of continues those same projects. And, and a lot of the settlers that are helping to consolidate US Empire are mixed race couples, right? Because they're more often the ones that stayed a lot of the soldiers that are in the Philippines, you know, even if they have wives or children, I mean, most of them leave or their their time goes up, right. But the ones that choose to stay usually do so because they have either business interests, or they have wronged some kinds of families in the Philippines, whether they're formal or and so, you know, the similarities between us settler colonialism in North America, right, are numerous. The same people, you know, the same medical doctors that practiced in the plains wars in the US were the first people they recruited to go be doctors in the Philippines because they felt that these doctors would be more familiar with the types of peoples they would encounter the same kinds of scorched earth tactics of like, first genocide and then assimilate. Right? The same kinds of tactics were used in the southern Philippines, the same kind of boarding school models. Barrows, who is the UC president at the time, right, he his kind of curriculum for boarding schools was the same kind of curriculum that was used in the Philippines. And at the same time, you know, what happens with the Philippines is very different from what happens in the US, it doesn't become a state, it doesn't become fully incorporated. Right, it becomes independent. And yet, I mean, independence is one of those kind of fraught, times, right, because the US military still has released to these bases, the largest naval overseas base, US has up until the 90s is in the Philippines. Right. So that is very much like, you know, as people have pointed out, who are looking at, like things like settler militarism, that's very much like what you would see in a settler colony, right, except it's being operated by the US military. Supposed to be independent, but I think also, the actors sort of in my book, also think about this. I mean, they very much understand it as the East and like the so called Orient, right. But they talk about it as a frontier of the and they talk, if they call it the West, farthest west of the United States. So they're even kind of orienting them themselves geographically as Asia Pacific is going to be our frontier, right, our west.

And I think, you know, you could even talk about places like Puerto Rico and Cuba as part of this kind of Western historical trajectory, right, I think Julio Capo in his book, Welcome to Fairyland talks about Miami, right as part of the US Western scholars for much the same reasons. Why don't you things I find really interesting about your book is that it does connect the scholarship on the US continental West with the overseas US Empire. And you have this beautiful phrase or sentence. You're asking us to quote reorient our geographical framework to understand this vast ocean world, specifically, current and former possessions of the United States, such as Hawaii and the Philippines, as also belonging to a Western historical trajectory, and to consider how domestic settler colonial history informed the shape of imperialism in the Philippines. So I was wondering if you want to elaborate more about this, how you we specialize our understanding of US history. And in addition to kind of crossing the Oceans, one of the fascinating aspects I find it that your book is for us to really think about the geography of the Philippines, as you mentioned something about some islands. And there's regional differences as well in terms of us Imperial role within the Philippines.

Yeah. So I mean, if it all the way that that Americans are thinking about Hawaii and Marshall Islands and the Philippines, it's all kind of arising from this. You know, scholars have talked about the crisis in this salinity and the closing of the American frontier and all this, these ideas that no American vitality is, was going to end because there's no more wilds. Supposedly, and they, they orient their gaze farther west, right, like, so you can see that the kind of direct kind of connections with just the US West Coast and places like Hawaii and the Philippines, right, so like, for example, like troops that are headed to the Philippines that they're leaving from, from the Presidio, in San Francisco. And a lot of them are coming from the Midwest, which is also considered the West, right. And the way that they're writing about and thinking about places like the Philippines or talking about Kanaka Maoli, is the same kind of racist slurs as they apply to native peoples. They talked about the men that have relations with with indigenous people in the same way as they talk about rugged frontiersman as courses up and etc. So, in their minds, and I think, as I kind of read more sources, in my mind, I was like, Oh, this is just just moving. Now, this is just moving farther west. And a lot of the kind of terms I mean, if you look at a lot of the early interviews that American colonists are doing with elites in the Philippines, as they're trying to assess the state of the colony and kind of get a lay of the land, they're talking about Native people in the Philippines, Filipinos, Chinese indigenous Morrow, as Indians. That's the kind of name that is, is what you'll see in these kind of early documents. And that changes over the next kind of decade. That is, initially you know, how they understand what you're doing, right, as this is just a new American western frontier. And these are just new Indians. And I think drawing in the Asia Pacific into historiography, I think it's been really fruitful. A lot of really great works that I've seen lately are doing similar types of works looking at like global indigeneity and how Asia Pacific histories really kind of speak to the histories of us settler colonialism and settler colonialism around the world. Yeah, that was my thinking. When I was asking us to reorient our geographical understanding.

Do you want to elaborate a little bit more about even some of the regional differences within the Philippines? Yeah.

So in the Philippines, I mean, the the entire 7000 Islands was thought of as a frontier. But even within that frontier, there was some places that were more frontier. Right, so in a place like Manila, which was, you know, very highly Europeanized because of the commish population there. As candidate, the major or major hub of reading and commerce for so many years, was already kind of a thriving and bustling city with lots of different ethnic groups and religions. Places that American colonists came to think of as more unruly, right and as more approximating what they knew of, you know, of a frontier. So places like the northern Cordillera mountain ranges, right, where you have a lot of indigenous groups, as well as the southern island of Mindanao and Sulu Archipelago, which was mostly Muslim, Malaysian and Filipino and indigenous groups, right so those places that that had kind of, unless incorporated under the Spanish period, were seen as like the kind of problem areas that we're going to be, they're going to require different types of tools of empire to kind of bring under the flag. And what Americans knew was, was the tools of settler colonialism. To do that, they did the same kinds of things like in the south, they they made essentially kind of treaties and then broke them. They learned that from and then, you know, wars of extermination turned into kind of assimilationist practices and sending people they didn't want in Manila down to amalgamate with the Muslim population. In the north, it it's much more of the kind of simulation as practices we see. Later, 1800s, and maybe less, where they're sending teachers, colleges and schools for they at the same time learn from their projects in the US. They don't set up boarding schools, they don't take the money, the schools in New York, they don't take children away from their home, ask families to send their kids. Right. So they're seen as you know benevolent versus. So it's, you know, the tools of settler colonialism but after having honed and refined them in the US, right?

I really appreciate how you provide these kind of micro insights as to what's happening at the local level, and then being able to pan out. And help us understand that this is a repetition of patterns of technologies of empire. I mentioned previously, I really appreciate the the layering of your interpretation, you look at discourse, you look at lived experiences, you look at institutionalized practices of surveillance. And I wanted to ask you, if you could say a little bit more about sources that you use, what were some of your favorite sources? Were their support sources that surprised you?

Yeah. So I mean, I think, for project that's looking at like, sexual relationships and gender, I mean, people that do Gender and Sexuality Studies in history know that they're going to have a problem with sources. And then they know that a lot of times, they're just going to have to do more work and look at more things and pulling interdisciplinary sources. So I think that's an even you know, when I was a grad student, I was kind of told by my faculty members, like, Well, do you think you're really going to find stuff about, you know, people talking about their mistresses? And Stephen was like, you know, I don't know, I'm a grad student doing research...Maybe, right. I mean and it wasn't like encouraging feedback. When I first kind of started this. I was like, Well, you know, like other people that have done these projects, in terms of European empires that found stuff. So I think I'm gonna find stuff. But I did have to look at a really broad variety of sources, right. So I had to look at the institutional sources to get a sense of how the government was, you know, thinking about things like, you know, troops infected with syphilis and my troop effectiveness rates. I knew I was gonna find stuff there. And I looked at memoirs, of soldiers that talked about their own relationships with with Filipinos. I did oral histories with some descendants of people to get their sense of, you know, what made these relationships work and how did their great grandparents understand one another? And what did they leave your family with? Right in terms of kind of historical legacy? But I was also reading things like Farmers Almanac, right, like what does that have to do with like, what I was looking at? I mean, when I kind of found mentioned of this agricultural colony that was made up of mixed race couples, I was like, Okay, so the Department of Agriculture is going to have information and they're kind of main publication was this farming almanac that they would highlight, like, there is interracial couples that were doing, you know, doing good in the south to encourage other people to settle there. And then I looked at, you know, I thought there's gonna be stuff in literature, right. And that was the chapter that I really hated writing because I hadn't really done like critical literary analysis since like undergrad, I have a degree in English and BA. Okay, but that was like, a long time ago. And I was like, Oh, my God, some days, I was just banging my head against the desk, and like, how am I going to talk about these literary stories? So that was a very fraught process for me. But, you know, I'm glad I included them because of the different kinds of angle that they approach the subject from a different kind of perspective from writers that they provide us. And sources that I thought, were fun are my favorite sources, or annex unexpected, I mean, that there was a set of sources, it was a set of interviews. And it was the title of these interviews was the friar land survey. And I was like, Okay, I don't know what I'm going to find in this. They're going to be talking to people about Spanish friars. So I know the Spanish friars had lots of mixed race kids like crossing my fingers that comes up, and it comes up. So like, but it seems like that was all Americans wanted to talk about when they're interviewing people. So that was really surprising to me that like, even when the Filipinos that they were talking to were trying to talk about different topics, that American interviewers will be like, well go back to the Spanish friars and their mistresses, please. Could you keep talking about that? And I was like, This is so weird. These interviewers just really want to know about the sex lives of Spanish friars. And then I and then I realized, Oh, well, it's because the same intimacies are already happening with with US soldiers, and people are trying to get a grasp on well, how are Filipinos going to respond to them? Let's see how they think about those same types of relationships. I was like that, that must be part of why there's this kind of word interest in this excellent fry. Right. Yeah, I also really enjoyed the beer, the beer sources. Um, it's just a wild that the colonists, you know, were thinking that beer was gonna save soldiers from syphilis, that that beer was the prophylactic that the Empire needed to save men's bodies from the women of the Philippines. So I laughed a lot when I was writing.

That is so great. And actually, this reminds me you went to UCI as an undergraduate. Degree, right? Yeah. Go Anteaters! Yeah.

My favorite, my favorite mascot that I've ever had, Anteaters.

I don't know, if you want to share more about what were some of your favorite aspects of your book, or maybe some of the most difficult aspects of your book to write.

I mean, I really like the chapter with the court cases. That also, that was a late addition to the book. And it was only because I had came across the Supreme Court records that I had never seen before. And I don't know why they haven't been used, I think. I think it's highly likely that that a lot of the sources just became digitized by law schools in the Philippines. So they put up like, what, what types of summaries that they had, I think a lot of the kind of paperwork and transcripts, probably kind of got destroyed in World War Two, but a lot of the records remained. And so you know, I didn't get like word for word transcripts, but a lot of the court summaries were being digitized. And so I just started looking through them to see if I, you know, first I started going through and looking for American names, right, or American sounding names, and that was how I found some of these sources that were court cases involving civil and family law that went all the way up to the Supreme Court in the Philippines and I really loved those cases, because it really highlighted how Filipina women how far they were willing to go to get what they knew that they deserved. Right? Whether that was custody at their own kids or spousal support or inheritances that are left to them in the wills of their spouse. Right, but it's often their erstwhile American in laws are trying to take away from them, trying to take away their own kids, or support, right, but even like, I mean, these relationships were precarious enough, but with women that were lucky enough to kind of have a formal marriage and like a contract that says they were owed something, right, even for them, it wasn't guaranteed, and even more that their spouse left a will saying, I'm going to leave this money to my Filipino wife and children. It didn't guarantee really that they were going to get it. So these women often had to go to court, because white family and in the US, it's like, we would argue, well, you know, in Kentucky, there's no such nation, also, your marriage is invalid, that you don't get any of this even though there's a will. And if you know what you see in a lot of court cases like this, and even in other colonial locations, right, the women, often when we because because it kind of the legal parameters, like if there is a there is a will, and it's been assessed. And you know, the court can't really go against that, because the family is arguing that you're a sexually non white woman. Because the facts are, that there is a will. The facts are, we know that you're the first mother of this child, so we can't legally give this child to someone that we can't verify is actually her family. Right? Even though the court might have wanted to do those things and might have wanted to side with people that were trying to take their families and inheritances away. Women often succeeded the courts and it was just so great to see. Even, you know, they go through all these hoops, knowing that they're going to be vilified, knowing that they're gonna, patients are going to be dragged through the mud and that it was probably going to show up in the press. I don't even know how they're paying for it. Right, paying for the legal representation. And they still did it. That was great. Chapter Two, right.

That's a terrific find.

Yeah.

I know, this book is about a particular time and place. But I think the arguments that you're making actually resume beyond the Philippines beyond us colonization. And so I was wondering if you would like to share what you think are kind of maybe the legacies, the larger implications if you're studying

Yeah, it's it was a lot of these kinds of presentist concerns that brought me to this project. Like the immersion population in places like a longer post city we kind of persistent like, in Korea, whether it was a military brat and even like growing up, you know, as my parents got divorced and seeing how hard it was for my mom trying to to enter the dating pool again and kind of seeing and understanding how people expected her to be as an Asian so you know, I, I looked at things like the the admiration homecoming act, this legislation after the Vietnam War, that that recognizes that there's all these mixtures of kids that are being worn all over Southeast Asia because of us occupations there. And, and setting out a path for preferential immigration status. And yet the Philippines is never I mean, there's like three different three different emigration acts that they get passed, and none of them apply to Filipinos. The Philippines is a country that's consistently left off of there and in various accounts that I've read the number of Philippine ama regions to pass is like most other Southeast Asian countries in terms of your, like volume and numbers. It was something that I was like, Why? Why are they on there? And the laws are kind of skirting around the issue saying, Well, we're going to include places that are that were active war zones, where we understand that such children will face discrimination. So I began to understand well, this is basically saying the Philippines was never an active war zone. The Philippines has a different sort of relationship with the United States, not one of occupier occupied. Right? The Philippines is more racially tolerant because of its years of interracial mixed roof. And so we can just leave them out of this. Right? When, when really, I mean, all those those kind of reasons don't make any sense. It's really, I feel like the people that end this probably knew that there were going to be so many more people from the Philippines that this would apply to write in it's kind of that that yellow peril moment, again, where we were, I understand this as lawmakers not wanting to, quote unquote, open the floodgates, and kind of kind of limit it to a small population as possible. And they do that by invoking this idea of us exceptionals. Us is somehow different than the US is never an occupying power in the Philippines, US and the Philippines have a long shared friendship. We still see that in a lot of the documents that talks about the Philippines like Department of Defense. Documents and in the kind of United Nations kind of documents they talked about the Philippines as Asia's oldest democracy, had the US shares a special relationship with the Philippines. And he talks about it as like, as a long romance, your long kind of familial relationship, when the history is actually that, you know, in the chapter with the court cases, the courts and Americans did all they could to deny those familial familial relationships and say that they would never be a part of the American And it really, you know, during this history I mean, I hope that it will kind of help people to understand why, why things also like the recent tragic Atlanta spa shootings, why? Why things like that happen? We're not random, they're not, you know, this person didn't target these places. For no reason. Right. But these are the deeper this is the deeper history that that shows us how Filipina women and Asian women more broadly, came to be understood by Americans, and how the Philippines and its people come to be understood, and why it's so difficult to kind of see and undo is because of this longevity. Right? It's just so deeply ingrained, and it has been for a long time. And these dangerous ideas about our course that these comments made about Filipina women and how they characterize them, meant to be such a significant way that that many Americans think about. So that was also a hope of mine to kind of. So this longer history, and how it still continues to be something that shapes women's lives, Asian women's lives, significant and sometimes life ways. As it did then.

Thank you so much for your important contribution to this geography to Republic conversation. So appreciative of your work. Thank you, Tessa.

Thank you, Judy. This is really great. Thank you for your really great questions.

Thank you for listening to Authors in Conversation: The United States in the World Series Podcast from Cornell University Press.