Policies of Exclusion
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To prevent the “sinicization” of the Philippines, it extended the Chinese exclusion laws to the Islands.[36] Unlike the Spanish, the U.S. colonial government classified “all persons who were directly descended from one or both parents of pure Chinese blood” as “Chinese.” Under the Philippine Bill of 1902, the offspring of a Chinese father and a local mother were considered “Chinese” until the age of majority, when they could opt for either “Chinese” or “Filipino” citizenship.[37] However, if a first-generation Chinese mestizo applied for Spanish citizenship under Spanish colonial rule, then he was classified like other second, third, or fourth generations as a “Filipino.”
American prejudice toward the Chinese helped reduce the number of “mixed” race children between the Chinese and the newly classified ethno-linguistic group “Filipino.” It also discouraged the unions between Chinese and local women—and consequently, the propagation of the Chinese mestizo population—by criminalizing people who engaged in bigamy or polygamy. Having one wife in China and another one in the Philippines was a common practice during the Spanish colonial period, especially amongst the wealthy Chinese. But under the American colonial period, Chinese men who engaged in bigamy or polygamy were prohibited from entering the Islands. While the number of intermarriages in Manila registered in the double-digits during the 1870s and 1880s, the first two decades of American colonial rule saw a decline to less than ten per year.[38]
Other factors also contributed to the reduction of intermarriages between Chinese men and “Filipino” women during the American colonial period. One factor was the decision of the Chinese imperial government, following the principle of jus sanguinis, to grant citizenship to the huaqiao or “overseas Chinese.” Because a Filipino woman marrying an “alien” would assume the same status as her husband, this must have discouraged the former from intermarrying with the latter.[39] Another factor was the 1930s American policy that allowed the Chinese to bring their Chinese wives and children to the Philippines as political and socio-economic conditions in China worsened. With more Chinese women available as marriage partners in the Philippines, the incidence of Chinese men marrying Filipino women became less common. Furthermore, the rise of Chinese nationalism in the 1930s created amongst the “overseas Chinese” a notion of Chinese racial superiority, dissuading many from intermarrying with Filipinos. In time, Binondo, which was once known as a community of Chinese and Chinese mestizos, became predominantly “Chinese” and earned its moniker as Manila’s “Chinatown.”
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[36] Elsewhere, I have discussed the different reasons for the strong anti-Chinese prejudice that the Americans held in the U.S. (Chu 2006).
[37] Chu,Chinese and Chinese Mestizos, 396
[38] Informaciones Matrimoniales, Archives of the Archdiocese of Manila
[39] Robert Lewis Gill, “The Legal Aspects of the Position of the Chinese in the Philippines,” (PhD diss., University of Michigan, 1942), 295.
