Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Queering the Philippine Mestizo and Indio

2024; Duke University Press; Volume: 30; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/10642684-10920633

1527-9375

Drew Trinidad,

Philippine History and Culture

In Crip Colony: Mestizaje, US Imperialism, and the Queer Politics of Disability in the Philippines, Sony Coráñez Bolton investigates how the Filipino mestizaje is juxtaposed with the colonized indio and how the mestizo body is both a product and symbol of colonial rehabilitation (7). By considering early twentieth-century American political cartoons, mestizo colonial writings, and archival documents on the Sulu Muslim populations, Coráñez Bolton's work on the crip colonial critique focuses on the re-orientations of a class of educated mestizos, the debilitation of the indios, and disability discourse of the colonial apparatus. Complicating the role of the rehabilitated mestizo, this book extensively expands on the biopolitical exclusion of the indio from the liberal society of the mestizo and contributes to discourse on contemporary Philippine settler colonialism in the archipelago that was derived from the overlapping of distinct Spanish and American imperial projects on native bodies.One of Crip Colony's most significant interventions highlights the self-governing authority of the Filipino mestizo distancing itself from the European scramble for Africa through the explicit anti-Black writings by José Rizal, an educated ilustrado, a mestizo Filipino elite who inspired the Philippine nationalist movement against Spain. Underscoring Rizal's argument of the failure of one European colonial power (Spain) to maintain its colony, Coráñez Bolton explains that Rizal's misconceived argument of an independent Philippines from Europe is groundless by endorsing anti-Blackness and the unfreedoms of Black peoples by slave-holding nations (60). Anticolonial political thought produced from the mestizo Philippine enlightenment was unable to legitimize freedom for a “rehabilitated” Philippines as long as Black peoples remained enslaved. Crip Colony allows readers to consider how, despite Rizal's life being curtailed before the American occupation of the Philippines, mestizaje thought within Philippine nationalism could not divorce itself from transatlantic slavery.Not all mestizos are deemed suitable to join the intellectual vanguard in leading an independent Philippines. Maria Clara, the female love interest of the main character Crisostomo Ibarra in Rizal's infamous novel Noli me tangere, is unable to partake in the new Philippine nation and is portrayed as a tragic figure whose madness debilitates and relegates her to the convent. Maria Clara's refusal to marry and her desire to live the remainder of her life within the Catholic convent as a mad woman places her figure in binary opposition to the able-minded, enlightened mestizo revolutionary thinker who embraces and is embraced by the nation-state. As a queer figure of mixed heritage and improper parentage, Maria Clara is read as a perverse body incompatible with the Filipino national project, inciting an analysis that complicates her previous positioning as an adored figure of early modern Philippine femininity.Coráñez Bolton expands on how, during American occupation in the Philippines, colonial officials defined and vilified “amok-ness,” or Indigenous madness, deriving from “an understanding of how Filipino Moros deviated from civilised sex-gender relations” (146). In chapter 4, Indigeneity, madness, and sexuality are synthesized within the context of US–Philippine administration of Filipino Moros. After the transfer of political governance from the United States to the Philippine government, the North American settler empire is perpetuated by the Philippine government's settler-colonial apparatus and their continued subjugation of the Filipino Moros. While the disabled “amoks” were denounced and documented as incapable of self-rule and full democratic rights, the benevolent rehabilitation of lowland Christian Filipinos by the United States was justified. Readers of postcolonial studies will see how the North American settler empire's interactions with and violence against Indigenous peoples haunt both the US colonial administration in the Philippines and the Philippine constabulary. Coráñez Bolton's reframing of the colonial archive of madness expands on the issues of racialized and sexualized disability logics in the Philippine settler-imperial state and how Filipino Moros were diagnosed as disabled to rationalize their need for rehabilitation.Examples of bodies deemed either able or disabled are presented throughout Crip Colony. In the early twentieth century, Filipino mestizo colonial travel narratives remapped Asia as a land divided into the civilized and the savage. In chapter 3, the reader is acquainted with Kalaw, a mestizo Filipino and companion to Manuel Quezon, the second president of the Philippine Republic after the end of American colonialism, through his travel narrative Hacia la tierra del zar (Toward the Land of the Czar). The contemporary misconstruing of the Philippines, a colonial site of Western modernity, as distinct from Asia can be legibly traced from the travel narrative of the mestizo Filipino. The ability of Kalaw and Quezon to observe “contact zones” (118) where different cultures clash and grapple with each other in the disabled Orient such as the Chinese woman with bound feet were documented to affirm the cure of Filipino mestizos by US benevolent reform and rehabilitation (115).Crip Colony's focus on the years leading up to the Philippine–American War and the American colonial period leaves the three-hundred-year period of Spanish colonialism to be further expanded on. Despite the extensive critique of the ilustrados, queering and challenging the heteromasculinity of mestizaje through crip colonial critique may broaden the conversation of these bodies and their historizations within Asian American–Latinx and Latin American studies. By comparing the disabling colonial policies of Hispano-imperial administrations and their impacts on the mestizo and other racialized groups within the caste system (las castas), further intervention on the colonial archive may be considered toward the Philippines, Mexico, and other colonies within New Spain. Crip colonial critique can be utilized to recognize the differences and similarities of Latinidades and Filipinx Hispanidads while maintaining the distinction of these attributes or for the advocation of some Filipinos’ desire to claim and identify with Latinidad.Spanish and American empires produced and left behind disabling politics that haunt the Philippines and Latin America such as racial misrecognition within the cultural archive of Filipinx and Latinx comparative racialization (168). Crip Colony accomplishes and articulates a critical remapping of the Philippines and other spaces. Advocating for Filipinx and Latinx bodies to refuse disabling imperial diagnoses, this book contributes to postcolonial, disability, and Filipinx studies and will influence related fields for years to come.