Race-Making across Empires: The Racial Formation of Louisiana’s Filipino Communities from the Antebellum Era through Jim Crow

Abstract

Race-Making across Empires: The Racial Formation of Louisiana’s Filipino Communities from the Antebellum Era through Jim Crow Michael Menor Salgarolo (bio) At the height of southern Jim Crow and the dawn of America’s colonial empire in the Pacific, Filipino nationalist intellectual Sixto López paid a visit to Louisiana. López was surprised to learn that communities of Filipino fishermen had settled in Louisiana’s bayous decades before America’s colonization of the Philippines in 1898. He was even more surprised to see the way they were treated by their white neighbors. “[I]t might be thought,” wrote López, “that in New Orleans, where southern racial or ‘color’ prejudice is said to run to extremes, the Filipinos would be subjected to all the disabilities and prejudices attaching to the negro.” López found, however, that such was not the case. He noted that many Filipinos had close personal and commercial relationships with Cajuns, Italians, and the other white inhabitants of southern Louisiana. Many Filipino fishermen had married white women and sent their children to white schools. The apparent lack of discrimination faced by Filipinos in Louisiana was all the more unexpected given the context of American colonialism in the Philippines, where the United States justified its domination of the islands by propagating the notion that Filipinos were racially unfit for self-governance. While “in his own country, [the Filipino] is a semi-savage, incapable of exercising the rights of citizenship,” López observed, “the Filipinos of New Orleans are in all respects treated as white men.”1 [End Page 25] By the time of López’s arrival, Filipino men had established settlements in lower Louisiana for nearly half a century.2 Their arrival was a result of Western commercial expansion into East Asia in the nineteenth century. As Spain’s imperial government began to open Philippine ports to trade with all nations, a spike in foreign commerce led to a demand for native Philippine sailors, known in the English-speaking world as “Manilamen.” Often recruited through deception or coercion, “Manilamen,” like nineteenth-century sailors of all nationalities, frequently evaded brutal working conditions by deserting when ships came to port. Filipino deserters formed communities in port cities such as New York, Philadelphia, Liverpool, and Barcelona and built fishing villages in Australia’s Torres Strait and Kalk Bay, South Africa.3 In Louisiana, Filipino sailors established a semi-autonomous settlement at a place called Bayou St. Malo, located deep in the coastal marshes of St. Bernard Parish. St. Malo was named for Juan San Maló, the leader of an eighteenth-century Black maroon community who lived on the site.4 By the late nineteenth century, St. Malo had become home to nearly 150 people, mostly Filipino fishermen and their families.5 [End Page 26] In this article, I contextualize López’s observations about race by reconstructing the racial formation of Louisiana Filipinos from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth.6 Using newspapers, census manuscripts, memoirs, and court records, I shed light on a process shaped by both imperial racial knowledge and local racial ideologies. Much of the historical literature on Asian American migration to the U.S. South has focused on the issue of racial formation. A number of important studies have focused on the segregated South in the mid-twentieth century, seeking to answer the paradigmatic question, “where did the Asian sit on the segregated bus?” Scholars have built on Leslie Bow’s nuanced understanding of Asian Americans in the South as “interstitial” figures whose presence reveals both the limits and the flexibility of Jim Crow’s Black-white racial binary.7 These studies form part of a growing field of writing on “third” or “inbetween” peoples in the South and the nation that examines the ways non-Black racialized peoples have navigated, challenged, and upheld systems of white supremacy rooted in anti-Black racism.8 Scholars have tackled similar questions in studies of Creoles of color in New Orleans, seeking to understand how this population of mixed European and African descent claimed rights and defined their social identities within the rigid [End Page 27] Black-white racial binary...