ABOUT THIS BOOK

The American mestizos, a group that emerged in the Philippines after it was colonized by the United States, became a serious social concern for expatriate Americans and Filipino nationalists far disproportionate to their actual size, confounding observers who debated where they fit into the racial schema of the island nation.

Across the Pacific, these same mestizos were racialized in a way that characterized them as a asset to the United States, opening up the possibility of their assimilation to American society during a period characterized by immigration restriction and fears of miscegenation. Drawing upon Philippine and American archives, Nicholas Trajano Molnar documents the imposed and self-ascribed racializations of the American mestizos, demonstrating that the boundaries of their racial identity shifted across time and space with no single identity coalescing.

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Nicholas Trajano Molnar is Assistant Professor of history at the Community College of Philadelphia and the Digital Humanities Officer of the Immigration and Ethnic History Society. He resides in East Brunswick, NJ.

REVIEWS

“Provides readers with a deeper understanding of how race and empire intersect, and a call to re-examine our approaches to the study of ethnic identities.”—Richard T. Chu, University of Massachusetts, author of The Chinese and Chinese Mestizos of Manila

“Sure to make a large impact in multiple fields for mixed-race studies, Philippine history, and U.S. colonialism and empire.”—JoAnna Poblete, University of Wyoming, author of Islanders in the Empire: Filipino and Puerto Rican Laborers in Hawai’i

"A clearly written, well-argued, convincing account of the shifting discourses on American mestizos." —Mina Roces, Pacific Historical Review

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
Introduction: American Mestizos and the Malleability of Race
Chapter 1: Drawing the “Color Line” in the Philippines: White and Black Bachelor Colonization and Initial Reactions to the Emergence of the American Mestizos
Chapter 2: Picanninnies, Plump American Babies, and Abandoned Half-Castes: Early Racializations of the American Mestizos in the United States and the Philippines
Chapter 3: Leonard Wood, John Pershing, and Resolving the American Mestizo “Problem” in the Philippines
Chapter 4: Reactions to the Concept of the American Mestizo in the United States
Chapter 5: American, American Mestizo, or Filipino? Enrique Hagedorn, A. M. Snook, and American Mestizo Identities in the Philippine Commonwealth
Chapter 6: Race and Resistance: Luis Morgan, William Tate, and American Mestizo Identities during World War II
Chapter 7: The American Mestizo in the Republic of the Philippines
Conclusion: Non-Coalesced Groups and the “Disappearance” of the American Mestizo
Notes
Bibliography
Index

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