The Strange Career of the First and Second Filipino Regiments: Military Service and Citizenship in Filipino America, 1940–65

In 1951, sociologist John Burma informed readers of the postwar disappearance of the “Filipino problem.” Wartime changes—including defense jobs, military service, and the migration of thousands of war brides—meant that Filipino culture would “become more and more dilute,” he wrote, “and eventually may disappear.” Yet just a decade earlier, Filipinos in the had been marked as outsiders in multiple ways—excluded from New Deal social benefits, subject to scrutiny of their personal lives, required by the Alien Registration Act to register as outsiders to the nation to whose flag they still owed allegiance.

How can scholars of empire, nation, and migration come to terms with these profound and undeniable changes in the socioeconomic status and lived experiences of Filipino migrants—without turning, as John Burma did, to tropes of the disappearing Indian, or without relying on unsatisfying notions of assimilation or Americanization? As part of the panel’s inquiry into Filipino/a diasporas in historical perspective, my paper explores how legal and institutional structures regulating citizenship and migration—in both the United States and the post-1946 independent Philippine Republic—have shaped communities years, decades, and even generations after they were put in place.

The paper draws in particular on the wartime and postwar experiences of the 7,000 men who served in the First and Second Filipino Infantry Regiments, two volunteer forces recruited among Filipino migrants in the western during World War II. Based on news accounts, government records, court cases, memoirs, and oral histories collected by Filipino community historians in the 1970s, this paper situates the political and social history of these soldiers and their families within the “Islands, Oceans, and Continents” of AHA 2010.