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“I Am Already Annexed”: Ramon Reyes Lala and the Crafting of “Philippine” Advocacy for American Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 June 2020

Theresa Ventura
Theresa Ventura*
Affiliation:
Concordia University
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: theresa.ventura@concordia.ca
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Abstract

This article reconstructs the American career of the Manila-born author Ramon Reyes Lala. Lala became a naturalized United States citizen shortly before the War of 1898 garnered public interest in the history and geography of the Philippines. He capitalized on this interest by fashioning himself into an Oxford-educated nationalist exiled in the United States for his anti-Spanish activism, all the while hiding a South Asian background. Lala's spirited defense of American annexation and war earned him the political patronage of the Republican Party. Yet though Lala offered himself as a ‘model’ Philippine-American citizen, his patrons offered Lala as evidence of U.S. benevolence and Philippine civilization potential shorn of citizenship. His embodied contradictions, then, extended to his position as a producer of colonial knowledge, a racialized commodity, and a representative Filipino in the United States when many in the archipelago would not recognize him as such. Lala's advocacy for American Empire, I contend, reflected an understanding of nationality born of diasporic merchant communities, while his precarious success in the middle-class economy of print and public speaking depended on his deft maneuvering between modalities of power hardening in terms of race. His career speaks more broadly to the entwined and contradictory processes of commerce, race formation, and colonial knowledge production.

Keywords

PhilippinesAmerican Empirepolitical patronageknowledge productioncolonial collaborationrace
Type
Essays
Information
The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era , Volume 19 , Issue 3 , July 2020 , pp. 426 - 446
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Historians of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era (SHGAPE)

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References

Notes

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12 My thanks to Megha Sharma Sehdev, and William G. Clarence-Smith for their insights. It is also worth noting that while “Reyes” would indicate that Lala had a mother of Spanish and/or native descent, his use of “Reyes Lala” does not conform to the Spanish convention in which the apelido paterno precedes the apelido materno. Pending research in the Philippine National Archives Radicación de extranjeros and/or Pasaportes may reveal a more exact birth location and passage to Manila for Lala-Ary.

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47 All primary material for this paragraph from Lala, “A Prominent Filipino's View,” ca. 1900.

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57 Henry Cabot Lodge to Theodore Roosevelt, Oct. 17, 1901. Theodore Roosevelt Papers. Library of Congress Manuscript Division. http://www.theodorerooseveltcenter.org/Research/Digital-Library/Record?libID=o35368.

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83 Lala, “Lectures Notes on the Philippines,” 7.

84 Lala, “Lectures Notes on the Philippines,” 17–18. It should be noted that “Jews of the Orient” is the title of an anti-Semitic and anti-Chinese pamphlet by Siam's King Wachirawut (1917). It appears that the prejudices born of Southeast Asian tensions with diasporic merchant communities were among Lala's tools for domesticating the Philippines to the U.S.

85 Lala, “Lectures Notes on the Philippines,” 25.

86 Lala, “Lectures Notes on the Philippines,” 28.

87 Lala, “Lectures Notes on the Philippines,” 49.

88 Lala, “Lectures Notes on the Philippines,” 50.

89 Lala, “Lectures Notes on the Philippines,” 50.

90 Lala, “Lectures Notes on the Philippines,” 40.

91 Lala, “Lectures Notes on the Philippines,” 42.

92 Lala, “Lectures Notes on the Philippines,” 41–42.

93 Lala, “Lectures Notes on the Philippines,” 42.

94 Lala, “Lectures Notes on the Philippines,” 66.

95 Lala, “Lectures Notes on the Philippines,” 67.

96 Lala, “Lectures Notes on the Philippines,” 68.

97 Lala, “Lectures Notes on the Philippines,” 69.

98 Bradford Republican (PA), Oct. 15, 1903 in “Senor Lala,” Redpath Chautauqua Collection, 3.

99 Muncy (PA) Luminary, Dec.17, 1903 in “Senor Lala,” Redpath Chautauqua Collection, 4.