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• 1 2016-03-25T11:20:09-07:00 American Colonial Period and the Schurman Commission 23 plain 2017-02-16T07:18:37-08:00 The gradual disappearance of the “Chinese mestizo” as a “third” ethnic group became permanent and made official by legislative fiat under the American colonial government. In place of a three-way ethno-legal classification system for Chinese, Chinese mestizos, and indios, American policy nationalized ethnic classifications to create a “Filipino”-“alien/non-Filipino” binary.[31]
  
  After signing the 1898 Treaty of Paris with Spain in December that effectively handed control of the Philippine Islands over to American hands, the United States suddenly found itself at a loss as to how to deal with the heterogeneous population found in the its new territorial possession. President William McKinley appointed the Schurman commission to gather information regarding the different “races” on the Islands, including the "Negritos,” the “Moros,” the “Chinese,” and “Chinese and European mestizos.” The task the Commission faced was a daunting one, especially in a place where “all the races are represented in these islands.”[32] The Commission’s aim was to identify, describe, classify, or categorize the various indigenous groups of people in the Philippines, including the Chinese mestizos. To this end, the Commission spent some time interviewing various prominent people in Manila, ranging from foreign merchants, local residents, and Chinese merchants about who the “Chinese mestizos” were. The Chinese mestizos were seen as a “dangerous” element of Philippine society, since Emilio Aguinaldo and many other revolutionaries were Chinese mestizos. William Daland, an American who had been in the Philippines for thirty years, called the Chinese mestizo the “worst class” of Philippine society because:

   …they have always been taken so; they are treacherous and unreliable, but they are smart; the touch of Chinese blood seems to make them more cunning." [33]

  At the end of the hearings, the Commission wrote in its report that the negative characteristics of the Chinese mestizos could be attributed to their “Chinese-ness.” The report points out that in “the crossing of the Chinese with the Indians(,) the Chinese blood is so potent that a small proportion suffices to produce a wide variation from the primitive type of native.”[34] It argued that if such mixing continued, the Chinese blood “might eventually …take the place of the Malayan blood.”[35] Thus, the mixing of the Chinese race with the different ethnic groups of the Philippines might produce a predominantly “Chinese” race, a development that would not augur well for the long-term imperial plans of the United States in Asia-Pacific and for the security of its own nation against an invasion of the “yellow race” from the Philippines.
  ________________________
  
  ^{[31] It should be noted that it was not the Americans who invented the “Filipino” as a category to classify the majority of their colonial subjects. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, ilustrados had already propagated the idea of calling natives of the Philippines “Filipinos,” although the term could be interchanged with Tagalogs, the ethnic group that most of the revolutionary leaders belonged to (Kramer 2006, 78-9).
  [32] U.S. Philippine Commission 1899-1901,Report of the Philippine Commission to the President, Vol. 3 1900, 331
  [33] Ibid., Vol. 2 1900, 167.
  [34] Ibid., Vol. 3 1900, 360.
  [35] Ibid.}