| This work examines a unique migratory movement of Filipinos to America: Filipino nationals recruited into the United States Navy and Coast Guard during the post-World War II era until the early 1970s. Existing scholarly work in Filipino American history has largely focused upon prewar agricultural laborers in the West as well as post-1965 Filipino immigrants, most notably domestic workers and healthcare professionals. This study of the immigration of Filipino sailors, a migratory group that heretofore lacks a definitive scholarly analysis, aims not only to contribute to the current academic discourse of Filipino American historical studies; it also seeks to establish their historical place within the larger narrative of U.S. immigration, ethnic, and labor history. I argue that the analysis of their experiences reveals a depiction of American foreign policy, society, and culture at variance with other approaches that conform to more exceptionalist interpretations of U.S. history.;The recruitment of Filipino nationals into the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard was seen as a solution to a recurrent labor problem stemming from the Navy's traditional use of minorities to fulfill duties as "stewards" for naval officers. Stewardship in the Navy and Coast Guard was officially described as domestic work: serving meals, cleaning living quarters, washing and ironing clothes, and other menial tasks. Unofficially, however, it can be aptly described as servitude towards Navy officers, since a variety of tasks expected of stewards extended beyond this official job description. Previous to the time period of this study, African Americans sailors, due to discriminatory naval policies, dominated the occupational rating of officers' steward. Yet with African American protest of social, political, and economic apartheid during the civil rights era, the U.S. Navy looked to its former colony - the Philippines - to replenish its supply of servant labor. By the mid-1950s, up to two thousand Filipinos were recruited per year to serve as stewards. As a racialized postcolonial labor force in the U.S. military, the overwhelming majority of Filipino stewards were prohibited from entering other occupations other than stewardship ostensibly due to issues pertaining to citizenship; they were subject to widespread discrimination, racism, and exploitation in the Navy and Coast Guard, as well as within larger U.S. society. Yet as will be shown in this study, such Filipino sailors were able to forge a complex culture of resistance, whether manifested through non-confrontational acts of defiance, protest through official channels, and even labor stoppage. The cumulative effect of these actions, I argue, resulted in the reversal of naval policy regarding its tradition-bound practice of stewardship, as Filipino protest percolated upward to the upper levels of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard's chain of command. Through the use of oral interviews and archival evidence, it will be shown that Filipino agency was an instrumental factor in the termination of the U.S. Navy and Coast Guard's practice of racialized domestic labor by the early 1970s. |
