This Scalar project is still very much a work-in-progress, but we may restate the goals that have been fulfilled thus far: I was able to use extant scholarship and various media to update and expand the original findings of Kenneth Munden, which were based solely on material in the Archives of the Department of Interior. I deliberately chose annotation as my vehicle for revisiting the history of the Pensionado Program. The annotation constitutes a form of counter-history. Through footnotes (again literally, a “speaking from below”), I was able to interrogate the textualization of my country by the US colonial government, and showed how these discursive processes relied on racist assumptions about the Filipino people in relation to the purported superiority of Anglo-American culture. We did not only show this text to be inherently biased, imperfect, and contingent, we sketched the outline of an alternative history by showing what had been misinterpreted or excluded, and claiming in the process a privileged position outside the colonialist text and the authority of an “insider”-commentator to speak about and for the country.

Here we are adopting a more transparent anti-colonial stance than did Munden who was, at that time an entry-level, functionary of the US government. He was employed by the Archive Section of the Department of Interior but was also enlisted as an officer in the US Armed forces.[1] In writing his version of the Pensionado Story, however, Munden was limited by matters of sources and form. He lacked source materials outside the archives of the War Department and was constrained by the mode and structure of a governmental report. A civic chronicle that devotes seven of its eight chapters to narrating accomplishments under successive American administrations and only one chapter to the critique of the program itself (this will come much later in the document and is not included in this study), Munden’s report delimited the space for interpretation and to discourse on adverse effects of the program.

I attempted to repurpose the archive to narrate a story that does not privilege the colonial administrations’ view. However, despite its advantages, it must be said that annotation is an auxiliary rather than autonomous form. Footnotes dictate a discontinuous commentary that lacks the fullness and coherence of a narrative and does not quite displace the main text as the primary narrative. Moreover, our attempt in its present form does not question the validity of the colonial archivist’s historiographic mode and its rules of evidence and persuasion. Thus our annotations — many of which are clarifications and thus, explanatory in nature — serve to complement as much as subvert the official American account. The Scalar Project has been a tentative exploration, a shadow history, a prospectus for a national history rather than that history itself.

Particular to the section we examined, Kenneth Munden wrote briefly about the racism and general intolerance of American society into which these pensionados were integrated but he was constrained to rely on the reports that reached the archive. Of particular interest was the representation of Filipinos as being equivalent to the American “negro” in discussions about education. Handwringing about miscegenation between Filipino Pensionados and US citizens prompted political lobbying in Indiana. Meanwhile, the administrators of the program constantly worried about their “dark-skinned wards” being subjected to racist attacks. One report could represent the many other unreported incidents. What the archive implicitly tells us is that the Pensionado Program as a component of the general policy of Benevolent assimilation of the US colonial government in the Philippines, exposed the exclusionary racial politics of the United States that had been naturalized and thereby rendered invisible in the archive of the Pensionado Program.