As I was writing my thesis project for a masters degree in American Studies at Columbia University, I found a number of primary source materials about Filipino painter Victorio Edades (1895-1985), who was among the earliest participants of the Pensionado program as a scholar at the University of Washington from 1919-1928. I was preparing to write about the early years (1905-1914) of the Pensionado program to foreground the conditions in which Edades found himself in the United States but this rich material remained tangential to the larger argument of the thesis. The course in Advance Reading in Asian American Studies gave me this chance to revisit the archive and critically re-read the Pensionado story through an act of gleaning—a term whose historical definition piqued my interest: “gather (leftover grain or other produce) after a harvest.”[1] A number of references in painting, especially of the 19th century, help explain what this act physically entailed and meant. It was a practice described in the Hebrew Bible as a legally enforced entitlement in Christian Kingdoms for the less fortunate to harvest leftover crops from farmers’ fields after they have been commercially harvested or on fields where it is not economically profitable to harvest. In this paper, I define “gleaning” as an act of textual intervention—of annotation and footnoting (a form of writing, literally from below), and illustration—to repurpose Munden’s report. The objective is to critique the racist discourses that framed the Pensionado program and the commissioning of the report by the Department of the Interior. In this humble attempt to reanimate historical records, I wish to uncover new insights and information on the Pensionado program. What follows is the first part of Kenneth Munden’s report, “Los Pensionados: The Story of the Education of the Philippine Government Students in the United States 1904-1943,” in his own words. My annotations and illustrations may be seen in the digital interface of the Scalar platform.