“America’s St. Helena”: Filipino Exiles and U.S. Empire on Guam, 1901–03

Introduction

Shrouded in the gray of a predawn Pacific, the U.S. Army transport Rosencrans sliced through rolling swells toward the island of Guam, then little more than a purple smudge on the eastern horizon. On the afternoon of January 24, 1901, the ship dropped anchor two miles offshore of Piti, a small hamlet near the harbor of San Luis d’Apra. The troop ship had departed Manila nine days earlier with sensitive cargo onboard: thirty-two prisoners of war, the overwhelming majority held without trial, exiled for their roles as “prominent leaders” of the Philippine Revolution. ^[1] Targeted for their associations with the revolution’s political and military leadership, these deported prisoners were seen as pawns in the politics of occupation that accompanied the birth of the United States’ trans-Pacific empire. They faced indefinite detention at the hands of a military regime which employed exile and incarceration as conjoined methods of imposing a U.S. imperial order. Doubly confined within the walls of the Presidio de Asan and by island geography, Guam’s Filipino exiles nonetheless maneuvered within the constraints of their internment for degrees of autonomy, attempting to negotiate the terms of their subjecthood under U.S. colonial rule.

Historians of empire and exile—particularly the exile of political elites and anticolonial dissidents—have rightly treated deportation as an instrument of colonial subjugation meant to punish those condemned to banishment. Empire-builders used deportation to hamstring the resistance of indigenous elites to colonial conquests, as A.I. Asiwaju’s treatment of banishment under the indigenat regime of French West Africa makes explicit. ^[2] More recent work by Christian De Vito, Clare Anderson, and Ulbe Bosman argues that “punitive relocations” weaponized and hierarchized imperial geographies, reinforcing categories of racial and cultural difference as tools of imperial administration. ^[3] Writing on the first decade of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines, Benjamin Weber demonstrates that U.S. authorities transported Filipino prisoners across the archipelago to service the ends of colonial counterinsurgency. Weber also traces another subaltern history: how imprisoned Filipino revolutionaries expressed “alternate ideas and practices of freedom” through prison revolts and escapes, articulating “radical freedom,” invested with notions of independence or kalayaan, through their actions. ^[4] Emblematic of the wider scholarship, Weber treats carceral transportation as primarily concerned with inflicting punitive reprisal. ^[5]

While deportation was an undeniable part of colonial punishment, elite exile stands apart from more quotidian modes of incarceration. Treating exile as solely punitive threatens to flatten the lived experience of deportation while obfuscating other core functions of banishment. Hardships and carceral violence were undoubtedly woven into the everyday reality of exile and confinement on Guam. The “imperative to prevent the escape of any of [the deportees]” meant incarceration policed by a reinforced Marine detachment. ^[6] Yet punitive sanctions were but one part of the multiplicity of functions embodied by the Presidio de Asan. Reframing exile and confinement as multipurposed administrative instruments underscores the heterogeneity of colonial incarceration, as opposed to merely punishment. ^[7] The negotiated and ambivalent nature of colonial incarceration rarely allowed for the absolutism of the Foucauldian panopticon: a total institution designed to punish and reform which controlled its inmates through supposedly Argus-eyed surveillance and overlapping regimes of time, labor, and discipline. ^[8] As a carceral space, the Presidio de Asan was a site of contestation: between prisoners and U.S. naval officials, and along internal lines of social class and political loyalty which divided the society of exiles.

Some deportees flagrantly opposed U.S. colonialism while confined to the Presidio de Asan. ^[9] However, as deported prisoners often came from wealthy and educated backgrounds, the Presidio became an arena of conciliation comfortably circumscribed by Guam’s naval regime. Striking resonances with New Imperial histories of Southeast Asia, Oceania, and Africa, critical Philippinists readily acknowledge that the U.S. conquest of the Philippines would have been impossible without cooperation between U.S. colonial officials and select Filipino intermediaries. ^[10] Besides its obvious military function, Guam was a laboratory of collaboration which fostered new forms of colonial sociability, processes that entailed the partial acquiescence of certain Filipino elites to U.S. colonial rule.

The scholarship on Filipino exile to Guam largely focuses on Apolinario Mabini, often cited as the intellectual leader of the Philippine Revolution. ^[11] Captured by the U.S. Fourth Cavalry on December 11, 1899, the “Sublime Paralytic”—Mabini had lost the use of his legs to polio—had served General Emilio Aguinaldo, president of the First Philippine Republic, as a trusted confidant and eventually as prime minister. Although his memoirs and correspondence provide historians with vital insights from a deportee’s perspective into life on Guam, the scholarly spotlight on Mabini obscures other histories of exile. Reading Mabini in tandem with naval correspondence and military reports reveals the carceral politics of the Presidio de Asan: a system which privileged select deportees and allowed them to bargain for degrees of authority and personal autonomy. The fragmentary biographies of deportees demonstrate how exile helped reconcile Filipino political elites to a privileged form of colonial subjecthood under U.S. rule, a tense but collaborative process negotiated between colonizer and colonized which formed the basis of U.S. colonialism in the Philippines for the next three decades. 

 

New Dog, Old Tricks: Philippine “Pacification” and the Legacy of Exile in the Marianas

Separated from the Philippines by 1,600 miles of ocean, the island of Guam, despite its isolation, was nonetheless seen by U.S. military commanders as entangled in the grand strategy of Philippine “pacification,” an Orwellian euphemism for the imposition of U.S. colonial rule at gunpoint. ^[12] The U.S. military sought to create on Guam, as one Kansas City Star headline put it, “America’s St. Helena”: a prison designed to sequester allegedly subversive individuals from their bases of popular support among Filipino revolutionaries and their sympathizers. ^[13] R. McCullock Dick, a correspondent for Leslie’s Weekly, captured Mabini’s despondency as he stood among his weeping compatriots and their wives on the docks of Manila: “Mabini alone remained unmoved and impassive. His countenance still retained the same look of alert, dynamic repose. It was such a look as Napoleon might have worn when embarking for St. Helena—the look of a mind living in the present but absorbed in the past—the look of a man who had held and spoken in the ear of History.” ^[14] The equation of Guam to St. Helena, and of Mabini to Napoleon, figuratively employed exile to bookend the so-called “Philippine Insurrection,” erasing the persistence of anticolonial revolution against U.S. occupation.

General Arthur MacArthur’s deportation orders reflected the U.S. Army’s overall strategy of Philippine pacification. President William McKinley’s resounding victory in the 1900 general election against his anti-imperialist opponent, the Democratic populist William Jennings Bryan, laid the groundwork for an increasingly aggressive war in the Philippines. MacArthur justified exile as an ancillary strategy of counterinsurgency. In December 1900, faced with much of Luzon in open rebellion, MacArthur cabled Washington, voicing his discouragement: “Progress of pacification apparent to me, but still very slow.” He pushed for taking a “more rigid” line against the revolution, with special animus reserved for Filipinos captured “sending supplies and information to [the] enemy … from towns occupied by our troops.” The general made it clear that he “[w]ould like to emphasize new policy by deporting to Guam at early date a few prominent leaders now in my hands.” The deportation of political prisoners signaled that the gloves were coming off the U.S. Army’s “pacification” efforts. ^[15]

Primarily, pacification entailed the acquisition of Philippine territory as a U.S. colony and the subjugation of Filipinos. The composition of MacArthur’s deportation lists underscored the overlapping military and political aims of Philippine pacification. Deportation mainly targeted elites—writers, lawyers, high-ranking commanders. Rear Admiral George Remey instructed Guam’s naval governor, Commander Seaton Schroeder, that the deportees comprised “some of the most influential leaders of the Insurrectionist Party in these islands,” thereby justifying the later appellation of “political prisoners” to the exiles. ^[16] By selectively banishing “insurgent officers” and “agitators,” MacArthur sought to decapitate the revolution’s leadership, demoralize the anticolonial nationalist movement, and silence Manila’s anti-American press.

The deportees themselves were far from homogenous, with backgrounds distinguished by differences in education, revolutionary commitments, and social class. Some, like Generals Artemio Ricarte and Pio del Pilar, had headed the forces of the nascent First Philippine Republic. Others were high-ranking officers. Pedro Cubarrubias, for instance, had served as Ricarte’s subaltern. ^[17] Prominent civil officials with legal backgrounds—Pancracio Palting and Julian Gerona—and so-called “war traitors”—Lucino Almeida—also found their names on the deportation lists. (Of all the deportees, only Almeida had faced anything resembling a court of justice. In June 1900, he had stood trial before a military commission convened in San Fernando, La Union Province, charged with appropriating supplies and money for “bands of armed insurgents” while presidente of said city.) ^[18] Many had family ties to other revolutionaries. Silvestre Legaspi was Treasury Secretary Baldomero Aguinaldo’s brother-in-law, while Simon Tecson and Maximo Trias, themselves experienced commanders, were brothers to guerrilla leaders. ^[19] Exiling these individuals pressured their family members to surrender.

Also deported were fifteen servants, all of them men, subjected to the same carceral constraints as their masters. ^[20] The term “servant” was an ambiguous classification which obscured a myriad of kinship and patronage relationships. Two servants—Joaquin Agramon and Euligio Gonzales—were themselves prisoners, ostensibly hired by one of the Ilocano deportees taken onboard at Malate. In his memoirs, Mabini mentioned his kuya, or older brother, Prudencio, and Pablo Ocampo’s brother-in-law, Manuel Rivera, but most servants went unnamed. General Orders No. 3, which laid out the Presidio’s regulations, differentiated between “prisoners” and “prisoners’ servants,” but still subjected servants to the same conditions of confinement faced by prisoners. ^[21] Servants prepared food, waited tables, washed dishes, and did “all general police duty within the stockade.” ^[22]

Far from an exception, deportation to Guam during the Philippine-American War perpetuated a history which linked U.S. imperialism to its predecessor regime. By the mid-nineteenth century, governments in Manila and metropolitan Spain began habitually using the Marianas, including Guam, as a dumping ground for convicts, political dissidents, and other “undesirables.” ^[23] Waves of deportations continued in the 1870s as a result of the Cavite Mutiny and the Third Carlist War. ^[24] Deportations spiked again in 1896, with the advent of the Katipunan uprising and the Philippine Revolution. ^[25] Nonetheless, Governor Schroeder was surprised when the Rosencrans dropped anchor off Piti. A week later, on February 1, 1901, the U.S.S. Solace arrived with eleven more deportees. The new arrivals were transferred to the Rosencrans, making space even scarcer. ^[26]  Unprepared for the influx, Schroeder scrambled to secure quarters for the prisoners. In the end, Schroeder decided on “3 ¼ acres along the shore” near Asan, a fishing hamlet about halfway down the road which ran between Piti and Agaña. Purchased by the Spanish government in 1892, the site had formerly housed a leper hospital, but “[t]he last leper died a short time ago, and the building was completely wrecked during the hurricane in November [1900].” On Schroeder’s orders, the acreage was razed and the hurried construction of the Presidio de Asan began. ^[27] 

Schroeder’s decision-making behind building the Presidio showed that the governor saw MacArthur’s deportations as a prelude to future waves of political banishment. MacArthur had, after all, sanctioned exile as a viable military strategy. Schroeder, while drafting the Presidio’s layout, made sure that “care has been taken to so dispose [the buildings] as to permit the greatest expansion possible; and it is estimated that the area is capable of accommodating about 150 prisoners in addition to those already arrived.” ^[28]  Schroeder planned with an eye for the island’s strategic role in the U.S. conquest of the Philippines, carrying this imperial logic into action by designing the Presidio as a holding site for future detainees.

At high tide on February 12, after languishing for two weeks aboard the Rosencrans, forty-three prisoners and fifteen servants disembarked at Piti. The column trekked for two miles, most on foot, some on bull-carts, to the barrio of Asan. ^[29]  Tents were erected beneath the coconut trees on the plot of fire-scarred earth adjacent the sea. The Filipinos—prisoners and servants—spent the night corralled behind a hog-fence, watched carefully by Major Henry B. Orwig, two subalterns, and fifty-two Marines. On March 22, construction on the prison barracks finished. Each prisoner was assigned 28 square feet of floor space, an army cot, and shelf space for personal items. Prisoners were provided exercise equipment, a small library, a dining room, and a kitchen—separate from the prison barracks and run by servants. ^[30]  Writing to his brother Alejandro on February 17, Mabini captured the sentiments of his captors, who “say the [Presidio’s] site cannot be more appropriate, because since our reason is suffering a contagious malady, they are obligated to separate us, like the leper, from social relations with our fellows.” Orwig had the passage redacted. ^[31] 

 

Inclusive Exclusion: Julian Gerona and the May 1901 Marine Riots

Orwig’s five-month tenure as superintendent, from January until May 1901, laid the groundwork for the Presidio’s operation. Although initially predicated on the strict segregation of Filipino prisoners from wider Guamanian society, restrictions on mobility gradually relaxed. The leniency granted to select Filipino deportees derived in large part from the challenges faced by Navy officers as they sought to administer Guam and discipline an unruly Marine garrison. As the first deportee to successfully petition for parole on account of his invaluable services to the U.S. naval regime, Julian Gerona exemplified a process of intermediation which served to differentiate the society of exiles along lines of class and political loyalty.

Maintaining tight control over the Filipino exiles was an early priority. One day after being “designated to command,” Orwig issued General Orders No. 3, a code of regulations that imposed a strict timetable over day-to-day prison life and instructed sentries “to use such force as may be necessary” to enforce the “dead line” demarcated by the Presidio’s stockade. ^[32]  U.S. Marines, however, were not entirely effective as prison guards. Especially during the first two months, Marines were disciplined for failing to enforce the segregation of Filipino deportees from wider Chamorro society. ^[33] Orwig understood the necessity of segregation from a perspective imbricated with colonial categories of racial difference. He observed that the “Chimoras … were greatly opposed to the Tagalog prisoners coming to their island, having had unpleasant experiences with deported prisoners from Manila during Spanish rule.” ^[34] Schroeder concurred with Orwig’s general observations, telling superiors in Washington, D.C., that Chamorros held Filipinos “in general detestation.” ^[35] Given the tendency of U.S. officers to associate mainly with members of Guam’s “better class,” their statements probably reflected a colonial imagination reified by local elite sentiment.

Animosity between Chamorros and Filipino prisoners, as imagined by the colonial regime, further justified the strict segregation of those detained within the Presidio from those without, at least during their first few months of captivity. The relative ease by which deportees who chose to remain on Guam—Leon Flores, Pancracio Palting, and Maximo Tolentino—integrated into local communities contrasted this portrait of Chamorro xenophobia. ^[36] Filipinos and Chamorros had shared centuries of migration, intermarriage, and cultural exchange. ^[37] By 1901, the first U.S. census of Guam reported that 90 percent of the island’s population were indigenous, while a government-sponsored gazetteer published in 1902 claimed Guam’s “aboriginal inhabitants … of the Chamorro Indonesian stock” were “almost lost in a fusion of Tagalog and Spanish.” ^[38] In sum, Guamanian society fostered a high degree of cultural assimilation and evidenced the elasticity of identity in the western Pacific. Seemingly oblivious to this deep history, the Navy officers who oversaw Guam conceptualized Chamorro society—and their dominion over it—through a worldview based on racial difference. In contrast to this vision, some deportees, those hailing from backgrounds of wealth and education, leveraged their class status and professional skills to reassert control over their lives by working in concert with the colonial state.

Julian Gerona, a native of Bulan, Sorsogon, and a former classmate of Mabini’s at the University of Santo Tomas, quickly came to occupy a position of leadership among the prisoners. ^[39] On February 12, 1901, the same day he issued General Orders No. 3, Orwig appointed Ricarte as “presidente de los prisioneros.” ^[40] Ricarte’s tenure proved ephemeral—“by reason,” according to Mabini, “of some trouble [disgustos] … he had with some [of his] companions.” Orwig arranged for an election, with Mabini presiding over the voting. ^[41] On March 17, the prisoners respectively elected General Pio del Pilar and Julian Gerona as presidente and vicepresidente. Del Pilar admitted to “speaking neither Spanish or English,” ceding even greater importance to the Spanish-fluent Gerona. ^[42] Theoretically, Gerona’s duties consisted of representing the interests of prisoners before Orwig and, most importantly, Governor Schroeder, the highest authority to whom prisoners could petition. ^[43] Schroeder, however, visited the Presidio only once during Orwig’s command and never spoke to the prisoners. Instead, Schroeder worked through Alfred W. Pressey, his aide-de-camp. Gerona and Pressey struck up a working rapport. The Navy ensign quickly came to see the Filipino lawyer as a valuable partner in his parallel endeavor—running Agaña’s court of first instance. Toward the end of July, Gerona submitted a “proper petition to take the liberty of going to Agaña everyday … to help the American Judge Mr. Pressey,” a move which formalized his new position in Guam’s colonial judiciary. ^[44]

Targeting members of a socially isolated minority for recruitment, U.S. Navy officers like Pressey derived substantial value from co-opting deportees. Gerona’s Spanish legal training made the Manileño lawyer a godsend to the cash-strapped government. Meanwhile, his status as a war prisoner distanced him from the garrison’s rank and file. For Guamanian elites, his presence recalled the unsettled legacy of Spanish penal exile, while his economic standing set him apart from poorer Chamorros. Pressey and Gerona ran Agaña’s court of first instance. ^[45] Conducting the business of Guam’s highest civil court was a powerful position. For Juan Torres, a former real estate registrar caught up in a scandal over falsified land titles, Pressey’s authority made Schroeder but “the Governor in name.” ^[46] Together, Pressey and Gerona oversaw an arena of legally mediated conflict where the aims, ambitions, and imaginations of occupier and occupied collided. The lawyer’s expertise and reliability became crucial in the dispensation of colonial justice after the garrison rioted in May 1901. Though vilified by some U.S. servicemen, Gerona was nonetheless at the mercy of—and dependent on—his American captors.

U.S. Marines on Guam, often rotated back and forth between Piti and Cavite, were inculcated in a military culture forged in the crucible of the Philippine war. A laissez-faire attitude toward racialized violence accompanied the U.S. occupation of Guam. In January 1901, several persons unknown had “behaved in the most brutal way toward Natives, utterly ignoring the civil laws and the commonest laws of decency.” ^[47] Governor Richard Leary’s General Orders No. 11, issued in response, chastised the garrison for its use of racial slurs, stating “that the natives of Guam are not ‘damn dagoes,’ nor ‘niggers,’” epithets habitually used by soldiers in the Philippines. Unsurprisingly, Marines stationed on Guam imported the colonial animosities of the Philippine war to relations between Chamorros and the U.S. garrison. ^[48]

Under Schroeder, problems with the Marine garrison began in mid-February 1901 with a rash of thefts. First, a barrel of whiskey was stolen from the Navy Hospital. A few weeks later Private Clarence Hoskins was robbed of his clothes and $600 by his fellow Marines. ^[49] Schroeder’s station orders and weekly reports blamed the incidents on a criminal gang of U.S. Marines accused of “terrorism, theft, gambling, and drunkenness.” Despite Schroeder’s recognition of the U.S. garrison’s “disrepute among the people of this island,” Naval Station Orders No. 4, issued May 5, 1901, made no other mention of the hardships befalling Guam’s populace due to the U.S. occupation. Unlike his station reports, written for superiors in the Navy Department and reliant on the projection of a colonial paternalism toward the Chamorros, Naval Station Orders No. 4 narrowly focused on rampant disorder within the garrison. Through this careful framing, Schroeder sought to reconsolidate and safeguard his command of the station’s Marine detachment. He was less than successful. ^[50]

Riots among Marines in Agaña broke out in mid-May 1901. Schroeder denounced the “riotous demonstrations” on three consecutive evenings (May 19–21) as part of “a general line of conduct which constantly scandalized and terrified the civil community.” Marines harassed civilians on the street, broke into private homes, and “maltreated” Chamorro occupants. Allusions to sexual violence permeate the archive. According to Schroeder, “natives complained that it was not safe for a decent woman to be out at night,” while “an American lady sent home for a revolver as a precaution” against marauding U.S. servicemen. Another American woman reported her Chamorro servants were “afraid to stay in the house alone for fear of the Marines.” Witnesses were intimidated into silence. Often, no evidence was obtainable “as the Chamorros were afraid to identify the perpetrators when they could recognize them.” Emphasizing that “the circumstances at that time were the most deplorable I have ever been so unfortunate as to witness,” Schroeder introduced what he termed “exceptional measures.” Schroeder convened summary courts-martial for sixty Marines and sent twelve more to stand trial before Agaña’s court of first instance. On Guam, institutions of jurisprudence, gridlocked by questions of legal jurisdiction and the problems of legitimacy posed by colonial occupation, became further complicated by the presence of a Filipino exile—Julian Gerona. ^[51]

The trials of Edward Johnson, John A. Stokes, and John Lintner placed Julian Gerona in the center of a legal maelstrom. The three enlisted Marines were tried before Agaña’s court of the first instance, charged with theft in the case of Clarence Hoskins. Judge Pressey presided, assisted by Gerona. The situation highlighted the contradictory and overlapping legal regimes which facilitated rule-by-exception on the U.S. empire’s periphery: in a “territorial” court still run under Spanish law, a Navy officer—appointed to a civil post by his military superior and assisted by a Filipino war prisoner—sat in judgment over Marines accused of terrorizing colonial subjects supposedly under the wardship of the U.S. Navy. Gerona’s role in the court cases and their aftermaths subtly inverted the textbook relationship of colonial justice.

The trials concluded that November. The trio were convicted, stripped of their positions and pay, reprimanded from the U.S. Marine Corps, and jailed in Agaña’s prison for terms varying from four to six years. ^[52] Prior to their sentencing came the appeals. In letters home to Pennsylvania, Johnson and Lintner both painted a grim portrait of Guam: harsh working conditions, an officer corps complicit in thievery, perceived injustice under the vestigial Spanish legal system, and a garrison on the verge of mutiny. Johnson, writing in October 1901, referenced a “Philippine prisoner of war (paroled)” assisting the judge, a direct allusion to Gerona. Johnson stressed that “we wish to see if through your judgment we were granted a fair and impartial trial.” He continued: “And, also, we feel every [sic] bad at having a deported prisoner of war, whose offense against the United States is worse than ours could ever be, acting on our case …. I have dwelt a little long on this question, as it is of especial interest to the rest of the marines.” ^[53] The implication was clear. As a deported Filipino, Gerona, whatever his legal qualifications, tainted the court’s impartiality through his presence. Not only that, but Johnson’s letter also voiced the hostility and suspicion U.S. Marines felt toward their Filipino captives, animosities resonant with echoes of the Philippine war.

Reporting to Washington, D.C., in December 1901, Schroeder hoped “to remove [the convicted Marines], if possible, to some penitentiary in the United States.” ^[54] Frank Hackett, the assistant secretary to whom Schroeder reported, demurred, as “[t]hese being civil, and not military, prisoners, the Department does not understand that there is any law under which the transfer can be made.” Hackett suggested to Schroeder “that executive clemency be extended as soon as practicably can be, consistent with the dignity of the Government and the proper punishment of the convicts.” ^[55] The assistant secretary’s advice fell on deaf ears. The trio were imprisoned in Agaña’s carcel publica. Stokes and Johnson perpetuated their violent behavior. In December 1901, Stokes followed Maria Sablan, a Chamorro woman prisoner, from the washroom back to her cell. “[W]ithout uttering a word,” he assaulted her, punching and slapping the back of her head before guards broke them apart. Johnson, meanwhile, managed to escape confinement on the evening of December 20, 1902. He was recaptured around midnight in the barrio of San Antonio. ^[56]

Julian Gerona’s suspension between states of freedom and restriction circumscribed his role as a law clerk and made him an invaluable intermediary. Without Gerona’s professional expertise, Pressey, who had no prior experience with the Spanish penal code, would have found himself blindly navigating an adopted legal system. Gerona’s decision to take up employment with the U.S. naval regime might well brand him a “collaborator.” In a strictly definitional sense, the term is apt: Gerona undoubtedly “collaborated” with the colonial regime, “affording a material assistance to the Governor of Guam.” ^[57] Stripped of its connotations as inherently traitorous to a nationalist project, however, “collaboration” was often a rational choice. Gerona’s decision to serve as a colonial intermediary let him reassert some personal autonomy over his life. Intermediaries like Gerona often acted as instruments of U.S. colonial policy, but they also advocated and cared for imprisoned deportees. Working as a bridge between Guam’s naval authorities and the prisoners who remained behind the Presidio’s stockade, parolees—notably Pablo Ocampo, Norberto Dimayuga, and Julian Gerona—articulated a politics of intermediation which served the interests of U.S. naval administrators but also substantiated the claims of Filipino elites for meaningful degrees of authority within the nascent U.S. colonial enterprise.

 

Degrees of Freedom: Selective Parole, Imprisonment, and U.S.-Filipino Intermediation

Parole to Agaña exposed certain contradictory realities of U.S. empire in the trans-Pacific. Despite an ideology of colonial rule predicated on segregation and racial difference, U.S. colonialism—in practice, if not in theory—functioned by blurring administrative distinctions, appropriating local knowledge, and leveraging the opportunities offered by isolation and scant oversight at the edge of empire. For Schroeder and his interim replacement, Lieutenant William Swift, selective parole served two objectives: “benevolently assimilating,” to paraphrase McKinley, a narrow coterie of Filipino prisoners to a privileged form of colonial subjecthood under U.S. rule; and tapping the deportees as a pool of “elite” prison labor, desperately needed by Guam’s skeleton-crew colonial administration (in March 1904, nine Navy officers held 28 posts between Guam’s insular government and its naval station). ^[58] Parolees became cultural and political intermediaries who contested and negotiated the terms of colonial subjecthood for exiled Filipino elites.

Guam’s naval regime hired two deportees, Julian Gerona and Macario de Ocampo, for middling government posts. While Gerona worked for Pressey, de Ocampo found a job under Chief of Public Works Leonard Cox. Both de Ocampo and Gerona occupied roles which helped legitimize and consolidate Navy rule on Guam. Courts enforced the executive edicts emanating from Government House, while public works—especially sanitation and roadbuilding—fed into the propaganda line the U.S. Navy deployed to sanctify its half-century of military rule-by-decree. The Navy characterized its mission civilisatrice between 1899 and 1950 as guiding Guamanians “from disease-ridden medieval peonage to the dignity and demeanor of a healthy, self-reliant citizenry in the modern world.” Under the headline “Good Health Travels Good Roads,” the U.S. Navy’s half-century report on Guam claimed that Schroeder’s 1901–02 public works program aimed “to build roads to make all parts of the island mutually accessible.” This project used de Ocampo’s expertise and the labor of civil prisoners formed into road gangs for “the hard, monotonous work of grading, ballasting and surfacing roads.” ^[59] 

The liberal dispensation of paroles under interim governor William Swift in September 1901 brought wealthy elites, along with their servants, to Agaña, Guam’s colonial capital. Parole came with privilege. The freedom of movement granted to parolees, mostly imprisoned politicos, ostensibly posed less of a threat than that of revolutionary generals or their subalterns. Parole meant private quarters, fresh food, and a respite from the regimented monotony of prison life. ^[60] Attended by their servants, Filipino parolees fraternized with U.S. naval officers and Chamorro principales at feasts, dances, and parties. A letter from Pablo Ocampo, paroled in September 1901, to Mabini and Mariano Llanera offered a glimpse into the social circles traversed by parolees. In the letter, Ocampo invited “those who will go out [of the Presidio] on that day [June 29, 1902] … to a lechonada (barbecue) at the house of the Calvos.” The party, presumably thrown by attorney Tomas Anderson Calvo, was part of the feast-day celebration of Saint Peter and Saint Paul. ^[61] Parolees and high-class Chamorros shared a language (Spanish) and a religion (Catholicism), factors which helped smoothen initial misgivings and form strong friendships.

A small coterie of parolees amicable to U.S. colonial authorities worked to win over Apolinario Mabini. As the Philippine Revolution’s foremost intellectual firebrand, Mabini enjoyed the sympathies of anti-imperialists in Congress and the press. He also aroused the deep suspicions of U.S. colonial officials, notably the Philippines’ incumbent civil governor-general, William Howard Taft. The rotund colonial proconsul called Mabini “a persistent inspirer of rebellion and insurrection” and “the most prominent irreconcilable among the Filipinos.” ^[62] Mabini refused Pablo Ocampo and Julian Gerona’s entreaties to accept parole to Agaña multiple times. His capitulation would have been a major political victory. The campaign to turn Mabini reached its climax in late August 1901, when the transport Kilpatrick made landfall on Guam. Onboard was Paul Linebarger, recently appointed by Taft as Justice of Batangas. At a meeting in Agaña put on by Schroeder on August 29, Linebarger promised Ocampo that he would speak to Taft and personally lobby for the release of Ocampo, Gerona, and Mabini. To mount his case before Taft, the incoming judge asked each for letters. Both Ocampo and Gerona complied, but Mabini demurred, unsure if his “presence [on Guam] has been prejudicial or not to the pacification of the Islands.” ^[63] Nothing came of Linebarger’s promises.

While aligned with the U.S. colonial regime’s political agenda with regard to Mabini, at other times parolees advocated for imprisoned deportees and cared for their welfare. In December 1901, the Presidio’s prisoners confronted a deteriorating standard of living and a serious shortfall of fresh rations.  ^[64] A new shipment of supplies, including fresh meat, gave the prisoners some respite during the beginning of the new year, but only briefly. Writing to his brother Alejandro in May 1902, Mabini described widespread food-related illness within the prison compound, not sparing “even the most robust.” ^[65] Judge Alfred Pressey was asked in mid-December to help the prisoners get access to better foodstuffs. Given his close association with Pressey, Julian Gerona was probably involved in these interactions. By late March 1902, parolees, especially Norberto Dimayuga, were returning to the Presidio (or sending their servants) with provisions. Food problems persisted through September 1902, even after the Presidio’s superintendent, Captain James McGill, relaxed regulations and allowed “[f]ive prisoners … to daily visit Agaña” for the purpose of buying provisions. ^[66] Nonetheless, wealthy deportees like Gerona and Dimayuga, by working within the parameters of their partial submission, found the time and resources to care for Asan’s remaining prisoners.

Imprisoned deportees pursued differing but complementary strategies to engage and contest the terms of their detention with U.S. naval officers. Through gift-giving and petitions, deportees affirmed their status as elite prisoners of war, a designation which implied reciprocal obligations on the part of their captors. Deportees showered their captors with presents and warm letters of leave-taking, going so far as to inscribe “a peculiarly artistic memorial … which recited Mrs. Schroeder’s many virtues” for the Maria Schroeder Hospital. ^[67] The Presidio’s deportees often made a performance of these gestures. One anonymous epistolist, writing shortly after the Rosencrans made landfall, stated that “[the deportees] have given us no trouble at all; on the contrary, appear [sic] very well pleased with their lot, and frequently compliment and try to flatter the officers in charge by pretty diplomatic speeches.” ^[68] These “pretty diplomatic speeches” were in fact a tactic readily employed by representatives of the First Philippine Republic to stake claims to independence based on Filipinos’ “civilized” status. What “civilized” meant, of course, constituted an ideology of racial and cultural supremacy that rationalized both Spanish and U.S. colonialism. Nonetheless, elite deportees appropriated these definitions and worked to make them their own. ^[69]

Contestations over the appropriate role of Filipino servant labor also helped the Presidio’s internees substantiate their status, duplicating some of the inequities of fin de siècle Philippine domesticity and hinting at tensions between prisoners and parolees. Following the September 1901 exodus of parolees to Agaña, the Presidio’s remaining servants found that prisoners still expected them to work despite the evaporation of prisoners’ funds, and consequently their wages. To combat uncompensated exploitation, some servants rallied around a classic strike action. Responding to these protests, the prisoners petitioned Schroeder on June 1, 1902. The document, drafted by Mabini with input from his fellow deportees, claimed that “the servants … refuse to serve those who are not their masters.” Servants rejected the appropriation of their labor beyond the bounds of kinship or patronage. Some “had only come because of affection and consideration for their relatives,” while “others … came to repay precious favors.” Though acknowledging an equitable distribution of the duties of upkeep would be “more in consonance with justice,” the petitioners emphasized that they “merited some considerations from the American authorities either because of their social position or unreproachable conduct.” ^[70] Mabini made no mention of whether Schroeder acceded to their requests.

Parolees and prisoners helped construct the terrain of intermediation between Filipino deportees and U.S. Navy officials. Despite their constraints, deportees—imprisoned and paroled in Asan and Agaña—pursued their own agendas for their own ends. However, deportation and incarceration placed meaningful limits on such expressions of agency. Carcerality circumscribed whatever degree of autonomy, resistance, or accommodation deportees managed to attain. As they granted parole, relaxed regulations on travel, or acknowledged the status of Filipino exiles by hiring onsite servants, Schroeder and his military subalterns also arbitrated and demarcated this interlocutory landscape. Both defiance and conciliation on the part of deportees depended on the recognition, however tacit, of high-ranking naval administrators. Exile to Guam manufactured conciliation, an end-product symbolically finalized by deportees as they swore allegiance to the United States and gained their passage home.

 

Homecomings: The Pageantry of Exile and Oath-Taking

The fate of Guam’s deportees remained irrevocably tied to the Philippine war. Following Aguinaldo’s capture in March 1901, the U.S. Army continued to battle an increasingly fragmented guerrilla resistance. In April, Aguinaldo issued an address to the Filipino people in which he urged the revolutionary army to stand down. A succession of guerrilla commanders laid down their arms. ^[71] Surrenders were punctuated by the release en masse of Filipino prisoners of war. Emancipations incentivized disarmament. Beginning in March 1901, guerrillas surrendering their weapons could request the release of prisoners of war “in numbers equal to the number of arms delivered.” ^[72] Filipino fighters began making a trade: submission to U.S. colonial rule for the liberty of their captive compatriots. With hostilities ostensibly winding down, President Theodore Roosevelt declared victory in the Philippine “insurrection” in an amnesty proclaimed on the Fourth of July 1902. Far from unintentional, the anniversary of U.S. independence marked the formal end of Filipino aspirations for immediate self-determination.

For most deportees, exile ended almost as suddenly as it began. News of the proclamation reached Guam toward the end of July, but official confirmation would have to wait until late August. ^[73] Roosevelt’s “full and complete pardon and amnesty,” however, came with a catch: in order to return home, exiled prisoners had to swear to “recognize and accept the supreme authority of the United States … without mental reservation or purpose of evasion.” ^[74] Schroeder decided to unilaterally add his own qualifiers to Roosevelt’s amnesty. The naval governor had received his orders regarding the deportees in a communique dated July 26, 1902. His instructions stated that the prisoners “will be permitted to return to the Philippine Islands, if desired, when they have taken the oath of allegiance which is prescribed in the President’s proclamation of amnesty” [emphasis added]. ^[75] Despite the stipulation that oaths be administered in the Philippines, Schroeder “assumed that subscription to the oath in Guam will avail to the same end.” ^[76] Schroeder’s usurpation of the proclamation’s stated procedure became a serious bone of contention for Apolinario Mabini.

Their return was further complicated by the provisions of Act No. 265 of the Philippine Commission, passed in October 1901. The Act gave the Collector of Customs the right to demand an oath of allegiance from any person thought “guilty of having aided, abetted, or incited insurrection in these Islands.” Failure to pledge warranted on-the-spot deportation aboard the next available steamer. ^[77] Taken together, Roosevelt’s amnesty and Act No. 265 compelled Filipino deportees to return home on terms dictated by U.S. authorities, affirming something far more concrete than U.S. “sovereignty” over the Philippines. By partaking in the oath of allegiance, Filipino exiles were supposed to acknowledge the failure of the Philippine Revolution. Deportees did not universally accede to the colonial semiotics of oath-taking. MacArthur had sent many of them to Guam for—in addition to their “crimes”—breaking previous amnesty oaths. ^[78] Nevertheless, deportee responses to amnesty and oath-taking were almost uniform. By August 27, all prisoners except Artemio Ricarte and Apolinario Mabini had submitted to the oath before Captain McGill. After swearing their oaths, the prisoners were freed. On September 21, the U.S. Army transport Warren lifted anchor off Piti and headed for open ocean, bearing most of Guam’s deportees westward toward Manila. ^[79] Guam’s holdouts eventually left the island aboard the U.S.S. Thomas in February 1903, after more than two years in exile. ^[80] “After two long years of absence,” Mabini wrote in the manifesto published on his return, “I return so to say, completely confused, and what is worse, almost annihilated by illness and sufferings. Nevertheless, after some time of tranquility and study I expect that I be still of some use, unless I returned to the Islands for the only object of dying.” ^[81] His words proved tragically prophetic. Mabini died of cholera on the night of May 13, 1903, victim to an epidemic plaguing Manila. Ricarte, still defiant, was embarked aboard the S.S. Gaelic and deported once again, this time to Hong Kong. He never submitted to the oath.

Just as MacArthur had deported Filipino prisoners to signal a new muscularity to U.S. “pacification” efforts, their homecoming also functioned as a set-piece of colonial pageantry and propaganda. The deportees arrived home to a transformed Manila, reshaped over the past twenty months by an emergent political scene which had begun to define the terms of U.S.-Filipino intermediation. Filipino entry into the arena of U.S. colonial politics, spearheaded by the Partido Federal, essentially depended on the same criteria as the deportees’ homecoming: the acceptance of U.S. sovereignty over the Philippines. Articulating these sentiments, The Manila Times editorialized that the returned exiles should “eschew politics of all kinds, at least in so far as they do not fall in line with the interests of … the United States.” ^[82] Nonetheless, the deportees had their part to play in the explicitly political theatrics that sought to signify the end of the “insurrection” and the advent of a tenuous pax 23mericana.

A brief entry in the Army and Navy Journal narrated their reception in Manila: “Governor Taft, of the Philippines, gave a reception on Sept. 30 in honor of Hon. Luke E. Wright, vice-governor, on the eve of the latter’s departure for the United States. Three thousand persons were present, including Aguinaldo and the Filipinos who were exiled to the Island of Guam.” ^[83] The guest list featured a veritable who’s who of Manileño high society: members of the Philippine Commission, directors of government bureaus, Army and Navy top brass, and ascendant politicos like Felipe Buencamino. ^[84] Manila’s fiesta scene, as Kramer notes, created “new cultures of Filipino-American sociability” against the backdrop of dwindling hostilities. ^[85] Intermingling distinguished guests with returned deportees in the banquet hall and on the dance floor showcased Taft’s management of the transition from war to peace. Taft’s ballroom theatrics, which framed returned deportees alongside a recently humbled Emilio Aguinaldo, told a concise story: the “insurrection” was finished, and the revolution’s worst offenders—the intellectuals who had defended its principles, the presidentes who had supplied food and shelter to roving guerrillas, the officers who had commanded Filipino forces in the field—were docile, sociable, and affable to the prospects of U.S. colonial rule.

 

Conclusion

Exile helped channel anticolonial politics through the colonial state. Through parole, oath-taking, and their reintroduction to colonial politics, deportees were offered pathways to acquire positions of authority comfortably policed and surveilled by state-sanctioned institutions. Gerona and Ocampo seized on these opportunities. Gerona resumed his law career, spending the next five years defending revolutionaries from criminal charges but never advocating a return to the battlefield. When the Philippine Assembly, a nominally representative body elected on a restrictive suffrage limited by stringent income and property qualifications, was inaugurated in 1907, Gerona was elected as the body’s First Reader. ^[86] Ocampo pursued his own political fortunes through the labyrinthine maze of elite Filipino politics during and immediately after Commission rule. By 1907, Ocampo was in Washington, D.C., as one of the Philippines’ first Resident Commissioner to the U.S. Congress. ^[87] Pursuing disparate agendas, deportees navigated exile and homecoming to the best of their advantage, processes which nonetheless delimited the participation of Filipino elites in the U.S. colonial project.
 

Endnotes

^[1] Cablegram from Gen. MacArthur to Adjutant-General’s Office, U.S. Congress, Senate, The Mabini Case, 57th Congress, 2nd session, 26 January 1903, S. Doc. no. 111, serial no. 4424-9: p. 4; Brig. Gen. Thomas H. Barry to Maj. Henry B. Orwig, Correspondence, Appendix A, “Expedition to the Island of Guam with Deported Prisoners of War,” Annual Reports of the War Department of the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1901. Report of the Lieutenant-General Commanding the Army Part 4, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1901): pp. 426–428, hereafter cited ARWD 1901 [Part].

[2] A. I. Asiwaju, “Control Through Coercion: A Study of the Indigenat Regime in French West African Administration, 1887–1946,” Bulletin de l’Institut fundamental d’Afrique noire 41, no. 1, (1979): pp. 54–59. As Asiwaju argues, banishment “was calculated to achieve both vengeance and deterrence,” rationalizing the deportation of Ohori chieftains, Mourid marabouts, and other indigenous leaders to a constellation of prison camps which stretched from the Sahara to equatorial Africa and beyond.

[3] Christian D. De Vito, Clare Anderson, and Ulbe Bosman, “Transportation, Deportation, and Exile: Perspectives from the Colonies in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries,” International Review of Social History 63, Special Issue (2018): pp. 1–24.

[4] Weber uses Vincente Rafael’s definition of kalayaan, “freedom from the necessity of labor and the violence of law.” Rafael, White Love and Other Events in Filipino History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000): pp. 11–12, 349. For his conceptualization of the Philippine Revolution’s ethos of millenarian and radical liberation, Weber makes heavy use of Reynaldo Ileto’s classic Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979). For a critique of Ileto’s seminal work, see Joseph Scalice, “Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution Revisited: A Critique,” Sojourn: Journal of Social issues in Southeast Asia 33, no. 1 (March 2018): pp. 29–58.

[5] De Vito et al, “Transportation, Deportation, and Exile,” pp. 1–7, 9–10; Benjamin Weber, “Fearing the Flood: Transportation as Counterinsurgency in the U.S.-Occupied Philippines,” International Review of Social History 63, Special Issue (2018): pp. 191–210.

[6] Rear Admiral George C. Remey to Gov. Seaton Schroeder, 14 January 1901, USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351A-5, Box 405: p. 1; Gov. William Swift to Asst. Sec. Nav., 12 October 1901, USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351-200, Box 383.

[7] For a decisive rebuttal of Foucauldian penological theory and a well-warranted explication of the heterogeneity of colonial punitive regimes, see Florence Bernault, “The Politics of Enclosure in Colonial and Post-Colonial Africa,” in A History of the Prison and Confinement in Africa, Florence Bernault (ed.), (Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2003).

[8] Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995): pp. 198–228. For a critique, see Frank Dikotter, “Introduction,” in Cultures of Confinement: A History of the Prison in Africa, Asia and Latin America, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2007): pp. 9–13.

[9] Frederick Cooper and Ann Laura Stoler challenge the notion of “an indigenous ‘response’ or ‘resistance’” as insufficient to “capture the dynamics of either side of the [colonial] encounter or how those sides were drawn.” According to Cooper and Stoler, the “most basic tension of empire” was “that the otherness of colonized persons was neither inherent nor stable” and that “his or her difference had to be defined and maintained.” But “defined and maintained” by whom? As the case of Filipino exiles suggests, these differences were constructed as instruments which served specific utilities in a colonial-carceral milieu. Cooper and Stoler, “Between Metropole and Colony: Rethinking a Research Agenda,” in Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997): pp. 6–7.

[10] See, for instance, Michael Cullinane, Ilustrado Politics: Filipino Elite Responses to American Rule, 1898–1908 (Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2003).

[11] Honesto A. Villanueva, “Apolinario Mabini: His Exile to Guam,” Historical Bulletin 8, no. 2–3 of the Philippine Historical Association (June–September 1964): pp. 86–91; Atoy M. Navarro, “Philippine-Marianas Relations in History: Some Notes on Filipino Exiles in Guam,” Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 8, nos. 1–2 (1999): pp. 117–130; Cesar Adib Majul, Mabini and the Philippine Revolution, (Quezon City: University of the Philippines, 1960): pp. 436–470; Augusto V. De Viana, In the Far Islands: The Role of Natives from the Philippines in the Conquest, Colonization, and Repopulation of the Mariana Islands, 1668–1903, (Manila: University of Santo Tomas Publishing House, 2004): pp. 138–141.

[12] Michael Cullinane, “Bringing in the Brigands: The Politics of Pacification in the Colonial Philippines, 1902–1907,” Philippine Studies 57, no. 1 (March 2009): pp. 50–55; Alfred McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009): pp. 82–92.

[13] “Filipino Prisoners at Guam: A Transport Landed a Batch January 12 at America’s St. Helena,” Kansas City Star (19 February 1901). The Kansas City Star was probably referring to Napoleon Bonaparte’s exile to the island in the south Atlantic following his defeat at the Battle of Waterloo (1815). However, during the Second South African War (1899–1902), St. Helena hosted a detention camp used to sequester at least 3,000 Afrikaner POWs. See, for instance, “The Epidemic of Beri-Beri in the Boer Camp at St. Helena,” The British Medical Journal 2, no. 2181 (18 October 1902): p. 125. For a comparative analysis of British and U.S. imperialisms in South Africa and the Philippines, see Jennifer Ann Sutton, “The Empire Question: How the South African War, 1899–1902, Shaped Americans’ Reactions to U.S. Imperialism,” Ph.D. diss., Washington University in St. Louis, 2012.

[14] R. McCullock Dick, originally in Leslie’s Weekly, “Reminisces of the Guam Exiles,” Manila Times, 27 September 1902.

^[15] MacArthur to Adjutant-General’s Office, U.S. Congress, Senate, The Mabini Case, 57th Congress, 2nd session, 26 January 1903, S. Doc. no. 111, serial no. 4424-9: p. 4; Alfred McCoy, Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009): pp. 66–70.

[16] Rear Admiral George C. Remey to Gov. Seaton Schroeder, 14 January 1901, USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351A-5, Box 405: p. 1.

[17] Charles R. Trowbridge, “Headquarters of the Provost Marshal General, Department of Secret Service,” in Appendix UU, Annual Report of Major General Arthur MacArthur v. II (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1900): p. 502.

[18] Lucino Almeida, Native of Luzon, P.I., Trial by Military Commission, RG 153, Case No. 23950, Box 614. Cases before courts-martial and military commissions were cross-referenced against a list of deportees to Guam. Index to Army Court Martial Cases 1894–1917, RG 153, Entry No. PC-2917.

[19] “‘Deported to Guam’: A Trip with the Political Prisoners (Letter to Army and Navy Journal),” The Hartford Courant, 15 May 1901; Luis Zamora Tecson, Remembering My Lolo: Simon Ocampo Tecson, Leader in the Siege of Baler, ed. Jaime B. Veneracion, (Baliwag: MSV Printers & Publishing Inc., 2011); Michael Cullinane, Ilustrado Politics: Filipino Elite Responses to American Rule, 1898–1908, (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2003): pp. 151–153. The brothers, Pablo Tecson and Mariano Trias, went on to become provincial governors. The 1902 “elections”—the franchise was limited to municipal officials voted into office a year prior by an electorate circumscribed by stringent income and property qualifications—saw Tecson win the governorship of Bulacan, his home province, while Mariano Trias emerged victorious in Cavite (Cullinane op. cit.).

[20] “‘Deported to Guam’: A Trip with the Political Prisoners (Letter to Army and Navy Journal),” The Hartford Courant, 15 May 1901; Bankoff, Crime, Society, and the State, pp. 36–39; Rafael, “Colonial Domesticity: Engendering Race at the Edge of Empire, 1899–1912,” in White Love: pp. 52–75; Orwig, ARWD 1901 Pt. 4, pp. 427–428.

[21] G.O. No. 3, Presidio de Asan, 12 February 1901, in Orwig, ARWD 1901 Pt. 4, p. 431.

[22] Mabini, “Petition of Prisoners,” in Testament and Political Letters of Apolinario Mabini, Alfredo S. Veloso (trans) (Quezon City: Asvel Publishing Co., 1964): p. 357.

[23] Greg Bankoff, “Deportation and the Prison Colony of San Ramon, 1870–1898,” Philippine Studies 38, no. 4 (4th Quarter 1991): pp. 444–448. The U.S. colonial regime in the Philippines perpetuated this practice, sentencing 49 “convicts and political prisoners” to hard labor on Guam in 1927. Clarisa G. Quan, “Filipinos on Guam: American Era,” Guampedia, www.guampedia.com/filipinos-on-guam/, Accessed 26 May 2019.

[24] Robert Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall: A History of Guam (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1995): pp. 100–2; Carlos Madrid, Beyond Distances: Governance, Politics and Deportation in the Mariana Islands from 1870 to 1877 (Saipan: Northern Marianas Islands Council for Humanities, 2006).

[25] Greg Bankoff, Crime, Society, and the State in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines, (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1996): pp. 185–7; Christian G. De Vito, “Punitive Entanglements: Connected Histories of Penal Transportation, Deportation, and Incarceration in the Spanish Empire (1930s-1898),” in International Review of Social History 63, Special Issue (2018): pp. 173–9, 184; Susan Martinez-Marquez, “Transported Identities: Global Trafficking and Late-Imperial Subjectivity in Cuban Narratives on African Penal Colonies,” in Journal of Latin American Studies 51, no. 1 (2018): pp. 31–2; Dolores Garcia Cantus, “Fernando Poo: Una Aventura Colonial Española en el Africa Occidental (1778–1900),” Ph.D. thesis, Universitat de Valencia (2004): pp. 479–89, 542–9; Atoy M. Navarro, “Philippines-Marianas Relations in History,” pp. 122–3; Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall, pp. 105–6; Paul Carano and Pedro C. Sanchez, A Complete History of Guam (Vermont: Charles E. Tuttle Co., 1964): p. 161; Jacobo Marina, “Dando cuenta detallada de los succesos del 19 y 20 de Diciembre con motivo de la rebellion de los confinados,” PNA (MARC), Marianas, Bundle 20, Exp. 156, Fol. 1-8b, pp. 1–8. Intriguingly, Carano and Sanchez make no mention of Filipino deportation to Guam during Schroeder’s governorship (pp. 196–201), even though they obviously availed themselves of the relevant sources.

[26] Orwig, ARWD 1901 Pt. 4, p. 422; Apolinario Mabini, “Las Memorias de Guam,” La Revolucion Filipina (con otros documentos de la epoca), Teodoro M. Kalaw (ed) (Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1931): pp. 226–5.

^[27] Schroeder to Asst. Sec. Nav., Station Report, 26 January 1901, USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351A-2, Box 405, pp. 1–2. In fact, Asan’s lepers had probably slipped the bonds of their medical captivity and returned to their families during the interregnum which followed Governor Juan Marina’s surrender to the U.S.S. Charleston. See Anne Perez Hattori, “Re-membering the Past: Photography, leprosy and the Chamorros of Guam, 1898–1924,” The Journal of Pacific History 46, no. 3 (December 2011): pp. 293–318.

^[28] Schroeder to Asst. Sec. Nav., Station Report, 26 January 1901, USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351A-2, Box 405: pp. 2–4.

[29] Mabini, “Memorias,” p. 227.

[30] Orwig, ARWD 1901 Pt. 4, p. 422.

^[31] Mabini, “Memorias,” pp. 229–231.

[32] G.O. No. 3, Presidio de Asan, 12 February 1901, in Orwig, ARWD 1901 Pt. 4, p. 431.

[33] Mabini, “Memorias,” p. 234.

[34] Orwig, ARWD 1901 Pt. 4: p. 425; see also Mabini, “Memorias,” p. 229.

[35] Schroeder to Asst. Sec. Nav., Station Report, 26 January 1901, USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351A-2, Box 405: p. 3.

[36] Rogers, Destiny’s Landfall, pp. 124–125; Navarro, “Notes on Philippine-Marianas Relations,” p. 120.

[37] Domingo Abella, “Guamanians and Filipinos—Are They the Same People?: An Introduction to the Study of Philippines-Marianas Relations,” Guam Recorder 3, no. 2 (April–June 1973): p. 10.

[38] Ann M. Pobutsky and Enrico I. Neri, “Cultural Integration and Separation: The Pre-historical and Historical Links between Guam and the Philippines or Where Did All the Filipinos Go?,” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 42, no. ½ (March–June 2014): p. 10; A Pronouncing Gazetteer and Geographical Dictionary of the Philippine Islands … (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1902): p. 521.

[39] Encarnacion Alzona, “Three Letters of Apolinario Mabini,” n.p., n.d.: p. 24.

[40] Mabini, “Memorias,” p. 229.

[41] Mabini, “Memorias,” p. 234.

[42] Mabini, Las Cartas Politicas de Apolinario Mabini, Teodoro M. Kalaw (ed) (Manila: Dia Filipino Press, 1903): pp. 327–8.

[43] G.O. No. 3 in Orwig, ARWD 1901 Pt. 4, p. 431.

[44] Mabini, “Memorias,” p. 236.

[45] Schroeder to Asst. Sec. Nav., 16 February 1901, USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351, Box 385.

[46] Jose Palomo to W. E. Safford, 30 April 1902, and Juan Torres to W. E. Safford, 27 August 1902, Micronesia Area Research Center (MARC), MSS 980, Box 1, Folder 1.

[47] Maj. A. G. Kilton to Brig. Gen., Commandant, U.S. Marine Corp, 20 January 1900, USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351, Box 383: p. 5.

[48] Paul Kramer, “Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire: The Philippine-American War as a Race War,” Diplomatic History 30, no. 2 (April 2006): pp. 181–194; Gen. Orders No. 11, in Guam: General Orders Directed by Naval Governor in force December 20, 1901, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1902), USNARA II, RG 350, Entry No. 5A(I-3), File 230, Box 30: p. 5.

[49] Adjusted for inflation, $600 in 1901 is worth approximately $18,000 in 2017 dollars.

[50] Schroeder, Naval Station Orders No. 4, USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351-10, Box 383.

[51] Schroeder to Asst. Sec. Nav., Station Report, 24 Sept. 1901, USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351, Box 385: pp. 1–3.

[52] Schroeder to Asst. Sec. Nav., Station Report, 5 Dec. 1901, USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351, Box 385: p. 1.

[53] For a synopsis of Lintner’s letter, see “A Soldier Complains: A Millersville Marine Makes Serious Charges Against Officers in Guam,” USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351, Box 385; Edward Johnson to Editor, The New Era, “Soldier’s Story: Charges of Cruelty Reiterated,” USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351, Box 385.

[54] Schroeder to Asst. Sec. Nav., Station Report, 5 Dec. 1901, USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351, Box 385: p. 1.

[55] Asst. Sec. Nav. Hackett to Schroeder, 29 January 1902, USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351, Box 385: pp. 1–2.

[56] Maria Sablan vs. John A. Stokes, 31 December 1901, Agaña Court of First Instance (MARC), Folder 28, Leg. 9, Caja 1, ff. 1–3; Gobierno vs. Edward Johnson, 21 December 1902, Agaña Court of First Instance (MARC), Folder 42, Crim, Caja 3, ff. 1, 9–10.

[57] Seaton Schroeder, A Half Century of Naval Service, (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1922): p. 252.

[58] Paul Kramer calls this a drive to collaboratively construct “an inclusionary racial formation that both invited and delimited Filipino political agency in colonial state-building.” Paul Kramer, The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006): p. 5; “Island of Guam, Official List, March 15, 1904,” RG 80, Entry No. 9351, Box No. 384.

[59] U.S. Navy Report on Guam 1899–1950, Prepared by the Department of the Navy Office of the Chief of Naval Operations, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1951): pp. 3, 5–7. The report was written as the Navy Department prepared to transfer administrative responsibilities for Guam to the Department of the Interior, which also subsumed the Bureau of Insular Affairs.

[60] Mabini, “Memorias,” pp. 253–254.

[61] Ocampo to Mabini and Llanera, n.d. but c. 29 June 1902, in Testament and Political Letters of Apolinario Mabini, pp. 358–359; Leo Baubata, “Eduardo ‘Jake’ Calvo,” Guampedia, www.guampedia.com/eduardo-jake-calvo/, Accessed 25 May 2019.

[62] Taft to Sec. War Elihu Root, 12 January 1903, quoted in Mabini, “Memorias,” pp. 255–256.

[63] Mabini, “Memorias,” p. 238.

[64] Mabini, “Memorias,” p. 242.

[65] Apolinario Mabini to Alejandro Mabini, 24 May 1902, in Las Cartas Politicas de Apolinario Mabini, Teodoro M. Kalaw (ed) (Manila: Dia Filipino Press, 1903): p. 339.

[66] Mabini, “Memorias,” p. 241, 246; orders by Capt. James F. McGill on p. 246.

[67] Schroeder, A Half Century of Naval Service, p. 266.

[68] “‘Deported to Guam’: A Trip with the Political Prisoners (Letter to Army and Navy Journal,” The Hartford Courant, 15 May 1901.

[69] See, for instance, Paul Kramer’s discussion of Felipe Agoncillo, the First Republic’s envoy to Washington, D.C., and the propagandistic slant of La Independencia, the Republic’s flagship paper. Kramer, “Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire”: pp. 176–177.

[70] Mabini, “Petition of Prisoners,” in Testament and Political Letters of Apolinario Mabini, pp. 357–358.

[71] MacArthur, ARWD 1901 Pt. 1, pp. 25–26.

[72] Address by Emilio Aguinaldo, 19 April 1901; G.O. 89, 5 May 1901; G.O. 97, 20 May 1901; G.O. 139, 25 June 1901, in MacArthur, ARWD 1901 Pt. 1: pp. 23–26.

[73] Mabini, “Memorias,” pp. 249–250. Acting as messengers for the Taft regime, Felipe Buencamino, one of the founders of the Partido Federal alongside Pardo de Tavera and Florentino Torres, arrived in San Luis d’Apra with Flaviano Abreu, another party member with a seat on its executive Consejo de Gobierno. MacArthur, ARWD 1901 Pt. 1: p. 17; “Manifesto y plataforma comprensiva del credo y procedimientos del Partido federal,” in U.S. Congress, Senate, Affairs in the Philippine Islands: Hearings Before the Committee on the Philippines of the United States Senate, 57th Congress, 1st session, 10 April 1902, S. Doc. no. 331 Pt. 1: p. 318.

[74] Theodore Roosevelt, “By the President of the United States: A Proclamation,” in Adj.-Gen. H. C. Corbin, G.O. 69, 7 July 1902, USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351A, Box 405.

[75] Acting Secretary H. C. Taylor to Secretary William Moody, Corr., July 26, 1902, USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351A, Box 405: p. 1.

[76] Gov. Schroeder to Asst. Sect. Hackett, Corr., August 27, 1902, USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351A, Box 405.

[77] Act No. 265, 15 October 1901, in ARWD 1902 vol. 11, Acts of the Philippine Commission: pp. 26–27.

[78] “Exiles Have Arrived,” Manila Times, 27 September 1902.

[79] Mabini, “Memorias,” pp. 252–253.

[80] Gov. Sewell to Asst. Sec. Nav., February 13, 1903, USNARA I, RG 80, Entry No. 9351A, Box 405

[81] “Mabini’s Manifesto on His Return,” in Political Testament and Letters, pp. 375–376.

[82] “Exiles Have Returned,” Manila Times 3, no. 168, 27 September 1902.

[83] “News of the Philippines,” Army and Navy Journal 40, No. 1 (6 September 1902): p. 106.

[84] “Current Society Doings,” Manila Times 3, no. 174, 4 October 1902.

[85] Kramer, The Blood of Government, pp. 185–191.

[86] Fiske Warren, “The Philippine Assembly,” 24 October 1907, in The Public, v. X, no. 505, (7 December 1907): pp. 851–2.

[87] Julian Go, “Ilustrado Transnationalism: Cross-Colonial Fields and Filipino Elites at the Turn of the Twentieth Century,” in Filipino Studies: Palimpsests of Nation and Diaspora, M.F. Manalansan IV and A.F. Espiritu (eds) (New York: NYU Press, 2016): p. 140.

 

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