“Independencia in a Box”
“Independencia in a Box”
This chapter concerns the Baguio marketplace and American market ideology. American visitors to the marketplace sought to capture its hustle and bustle in photographs, postcards, and travel accounts. Some came to see the infamous trade in dogs, sold as consumable articles in Igorot ritual. Daniel Burnham had positioned the marketplace at one end of the central axis of the hill station, yet were one to follow the logic of U.S. imperial ideology, the marketplace stood at the very center of the colony. To some administrators, the marketplace was a site of liberation: it was the place where Philippine peoples could enjoy self-rule as they traded the fruits of their labor. Here, they could become the independent agents who might come to constitute citizens of a nascent Philippine republic. As this chapter shows, even as they celebrated the market as an incubator of individual liberty and nationhood, American imperialists judged Philippine people in part, by what they traded and what they consumed. They used representations of Igorots’ trade in dogs and Filipinos’ supposed trade in persons to entrench perceived differences among Philippine peoples, and they made these into new justifications for continued imperial rule and anything but liberty.
Keywords: marketplace, market ideology, trade, Ibaloi, Dean Worcester, Jones Act, slavery
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