Playing Filipino: Racial Display, Resistance, and the Filipino Rough Riders in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West

Abstract

Abstract: This article examines the intersection of empire, national identity, performance, and cultural representation through an analysis of the Filipino Rough Riders in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West . Drawing on historical material—including newspaper articles and illustrations, photographs, and Wild West ephemera—this article explores how and why Filipino performers were included in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and how they were represented by the exposition, the press, and the performers themselves. It develops the concept of “playing Filipino,” a phrase that adapts and alters the notion of “playing Indian,” to capture the interactive process of performing not only racialized types for white-dominated audiences and institutions, but also the resistant and creative activity of embodying Filipino-ness through self-crafted style and aesthetic appearance. This study advances transnational Asian American studies by presenting new ways of thinking about turn of the twentieth-century Filipino performers and their relation to US imperialism through cultural institutions and popular entertainment like traveling Wild West shows, and it also expands American West scholarship by considering how Asian subjects figured into constructions of US domestic and overseas frontiers during times of war.