In 1905, fear of another cholera epidemic spread throughout Manila and the surrounding countryside. In response, U.S. soldiers seized control of the Filipino people’s clean water supply and regulated its use to ensure the quality for themselves. To aid the sick, a native woman filled an abandoned U.S. army tank with water and medicinal herbs, and took a bath in this discarded symbol of colonial violence. Blending Catholic religion and indigenous therapeutics, she gained the trust of Filipino peasants and working-class people who began taking pilgrimages to drink from her water tank in the city of Taytay, Rizal. The native woman called herself “a healer of all the ills to which flesh is heir.” 

This talk is a medical and social history of Taytay, Rizal, a town which was the site of mass political and biomedical resistance against U.S. colonial governance. I examine the cholera outbreak in the Philippines during the Philippine-American War (1902-1905) and the blurring of military and public health measures to control native populations. In order to complicate the U.S. colonial record’s representation of cholera, I focus on the perspective of Queen Taytay, a folk healer who challenged the American colonial regime’s control of water.  Second, I will discuss how these resistance movements resulted in the town becoming a “living laboratory” which attracted a range of medical and scientific specialists. The experimental study of Taytay is a preamble to the strategies that American health officials would use to manage non-elite Filipinos throughout the colony, employing a discourse which rationalized surveillance and human experimentation while dehumanizing Filipinos as a public health menace.

Christine Peralta is a postdoctoral fellow for the Center for Research on Race and Ethnicity in Society and visiting assistant professor in the History Department at Indiana University. She received her doctorate in history at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  She writes on U.S. empire, gender, and medicine. She is currently working on a book entitled Insurgent Care: Reimagining the Health Work of Filipina Women, 1870-1948.

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Sponsor(s): Center for Southeast Asian Studies