After Don Francisco Muro: A Model Minority Myth
During and after the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), American colonizers suppressed Filipino resistance, in part, through the recruitment of Filipino men to police their own people. This practice was carried into the Philippine Exposition, a human zoo containing more than 1000 Filipinos that was heavily promoted as a central feature of the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis, MO and infamously solidified the “dog-eating savage” stereotype in the Western imagination through numerous articles published over the course of the exposition. “The Igorot Sequence” was a series of photographs created by Dean Conant Worcester between 1901-1903 with the intention of framing Indigenous peoples as beneficiaries of “civilization” and American colonizers as their benefactors. According to Vicente L. Rafael in his collection of essays titled White Love and Other Events in Filipino History:
“Photography registered the circulation of colonialism’s gifts. Government reports, travel accounts, and historical narratives were generously illustrated with photographs of the natives’ inevitable transformation under U.S. tutelage. For example, there were pictures of savages turned into soldiers; prisoners turned into obedient citizens; lazy natives turned into productive laborers; and local elites turned into national politicians already destined for monumentalization by future generations.”
The artists’ After Don Francisco Muro recreates this image set and responds to Worcester’s racist propaganda by acknowledging the humanity and station of Worcester’s subject, drawing attention to the artificiality of the image, and implicating the viewer with Jackson’s gaze.
