UC Davis

This dissertation examines how past U.S. colonial education in the Philippines impacts the ways in which Filipino bodies are commodified and racialized under contemporary education and training systems in both the Philippines and the United States. This research project utilizes participatory action research and in-depth interviews with over 50 Filipino trafficking survivors who were employed as educators in the United States and over 50 Filipino American college students and alumni. I connect the experience of both sets of respondents to the early 1900’s U.S. imperialist education project in the Philippines, which produced a racialized subjectivity I coined as the “Model Filipino Student Subject.” The “Model Filipino Student Subject,” undergoes a conditioning process that pushes Filipinos towards a culture of submissiveness, obedience, labor, and self-sacrifice towards a collective colonial identity shaping how they teach and how they learn. I analyze the history of U.S. Colonial education in the Philippines as, to borrow the term from Avery Gordon, a haunting the Filipino body through the following: 1) Tracing the roots of the “Model Filipino Student Subject” back to early 1900s Philippines’ colonial education system and its racialized production of reliable and malleable Filipino colonial subjects which laid the foreground towards a now established global labor export system, 2) Drawing connections between U.S. colonial schooling and recent cases of trafficked Filipino migrant teachers as a consequence of this racial capitalist haunting under the “Model Filipino Student Subjectivity”, and 3) Analyzing how this legacy of colonial education impacts the current conditions of Filipino undergraduate students and campus organizations as racialized bodies of labor within the same institution that helped establish western colonial education in the Philippines: The University of California. My project defines and applies the “Model Filipino Student Subject” haunting through three research locations: the formation of the “Model Filipino Student Subject” within the early 1900’s U.S. colonial education system in the Philippines, the haunting’s application to Filipino migrant teacher training and conditioning in the 2010’s, and the haunting’s impact on Filipino American college student cycles of labor and burnout in the 2020’s. I close out my project by uplifting the patterns of resistance and healing both Filipino migrant teachers and Filipino American college students engage through their shared experiences, rejecting the “Model Filipino Student Subjectivity,” and envisioning a future of collective liberation as an active exorcism of this colonial haunting.