Cutters versus Vintas: How Chinese-Indigenous Networks Prevailed in Southern Philippines, 1910–38

This paper explains how from the 1910s to 1938, the Philippine colonial police failed to suppress Chinese exclusion and opium prohibition in the southern islands of the Philippines, particularly in the Sulu archipelago. It will highlight how maritime routes, corruption, and underfunding undermined US colonial border patrol. Inhabitants of islands like Palawan traded with Chinese migrants who lived in nearby Southeast Asian islands like British North Borneo. Meanwhile, coastguards who worked at the Customs and Border Patrol did not have adequate equipment and funding to stop migration and commercial activities. In highlighting this history of smuggling and corruption, this paper will reveal how Chinese migrants in the Southern Philippines transformed the history of US colonial legal culture and border patrol in the first half of the twentieth century.