In the history of Western colonialism, the ‘hinterland’ typically referred to the marginal regions of the colony dimly understood by imperial epistemology. Yet as evidenced in his book Bundok: A Hinterland History of Filipino America, Adrian De Leon’s examination of the periphery hardly obscures our understanding of U.S. race-making in the Philippines—quite the opposite, it further illuminates the contours of this colonial endeavor. For even while initially focusing upon the hinterland, De Leon’s scholarship ultimately refracts historical insights that are panoramic in scope.
While the book’s predominant theme is U.S. colonial race-making, De Leon does not subsume the material beneath the ideological. Indeed, the book’s starting point describes with impressive detail how Spain transformed the hinterland of northern Luzon—with its imposing mountain ranges separating indigenous peoples and peasantry from the more civilized metropole—into a region of agricultural plenitude for the nineteenth-century global market. Such transformation entailed the reconstruction of Luzon’s hinterland peasants into a proletarian class whose labor was intended for the industrial plantations of Luzon. Once colonial rule changed hands to the Americans, Luzon’s highlands regions were now the “boondocks”—an expression derived from the Tagalog word bundok (meaning “mountain”), in reference to the same northern hinterland. Luzon’s boondocks did not escape the attention of U.S. capitalists and administrators. In fact, the bundok further transformed into a repository of migrant laborers for American agribusiness, deracinated from the highlands while destined for the plantations of Hawai‘i and the fields of the U.S. West. Against the backdrop of global capitalism, De Leon argues persuasively that the category of labor was intrinsic to the colonial race-making of the “Filipino.”
Attendant with the outflow of commodities and migrant labor under imperial rule was the generation of “knowledge commodities” focused upon the hinterland’s indigeneity. The emissaries of imperial knowledge—American ethnologists, photographers, soldiers, writers—found themselves at the bundok as they deliberately catalogued the most “uncivilized” habits of indigenous tribes (such as dog-eating and head-hunting), wittingly affirming their belief in the cavernous racial gulf between colonizer and colonized. Some indigenous people of the boondocks would actually be exported as spectacle within human zoos of fin-de-siècle world’s fairs. Moreover, racial representations of the Filipino hinterland “savage” would be globally circulated, consumed by urbane readers of anthropology and travel books. Despite this, De Leon is careful to emphasize how Filipino subjects—whether indigenous, peasant, or educated elite—found ways to contest their racialization.
Scholars in the field of Filipino American history will greatly profit from their reading of Bundok. Among the contributions forged by De Leon include the place of the colonizer’s economics (labor) and knowledge (the archive) in Filipino racial construction, the exigencies wrought by extractive capitalism in Filipino colonial life, and the agency exercised by indigenous, peasant, and elite as they negotiated racial representation and resisted exploitation. Methodologically, scholars will find De Leon’s material-based analysis interdigitated with the hermeneutics of textual and archival production to be rigorously detailed and intellectually compelling.
University of California Press