Introduction

I have been fascinated by the dark history of the United States empire ever since a long-term substitute came into my twelfth-grade social studies class and taught history from the colonized perspective, upending everything I thought I knew. My anger at not being taught the truth grew when in college I read Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong.¹

Almost twenty years later, it seems that not much has changed. Students are still being taught a very distorted view of the U.S.’s role in world history, leading to many Americans having a very distorted view of the U.S.’s role in world politics and economics. I recently read the book Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq.² While this book is twenty years old, it helped me to see that if America keeps acting as a colonizer, but telling itself it is a benevolent liberator, history will keep repeating. This will be to the detriment of ordinary people from underdeveloped countries, many of whom are my students. 

To me, understanding history, true history, is essential to understanding all aspects of the modern world, especially how to change it for the better. As an educator, I need to (and have a great interest in) continuing to learn history, especially this aspect, and work on ways to infuse it into my English/Language Arts classroom. 

I would like to develop a unit where students explore the effects of empire on immigration through first person narratives. To start the unit, I plan to focus on one colonized place for shared reading and whole class discussion. I am planning on focusing on the Philippines.

Rational

This is my thirteenth-year teaching seventh grade ELA at Greenberg Elementary School. According to the School District of Philadelphia’s website, Greenberg’s ethnic make-up for the 2021-22 year was 44% White, 37% Asian, 11% Black/African American, 6% Hispanic/Latinx, 2% Multi Racial/Other. There are dozens of languages spoken at Greenberg. The most spoken languages other than English at Greenberg, from greatest to least, are Chinese, Malayalam, Uzbek, Russian, Mandarin, Arabic, and Ukrainian.³

Seventh grade is a time when students are often struggling with their identity. Identity is often tied to self-esteem (something too many middle schoolers lack) and is connected to students’ thoughts and feelings of their past and future. Complicating the discovery of identity, over half of my students are immigrants or the children of immigrants. They are not the stereotypical picture of “Americans”. Many of my students’ families have fled countries the U.S. has intervened in directly such as Puerto Rico, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, the Philippines, and South Korea, or indirectly such as Syria, Egypt, China, India, and Palestine. One of my goals in this unit is to help my students sort out some of their thoughts about identity and develop a clearer and more positive sense of identity through the writing of narratives.

Another way students can learn about identity and develop their own sense of identity is through reading. Since I started teaching, I have heeded the advice of the progressive education books, magazines, and professional developments I seek out, and striven to make the literature in my classroom diverse. While I have striven to make my classroom library and curriculum diverse, it wasn’t until I started participating in Teachers Institute of Philadelphia (TIP) that I really focused on making the literature in my classroom actually mirror the diversity in my classroom. Greenberg Elementary does not look like most of Philadelphia, which is primarily African American and Latinx. Though many teachers in Greenberg try to choose diverse literature for our classrooms, we usually choose books that are well known and easily available. I doubt that in eight years of schooling, my Malayali students (speakers of the language Malayalam, usually from Kerala, a southern state of India) have ever read anything in school that reflected their culture. Malayali students are the second largest ethnic group represented in Greenberg, so their culture should be a part of my curriculum. Yet, I primarily teach reading by using novels. I have found just two middle school novels where the protagonist was Indian, and neither seemed like a good fit for guided reading. Even if I found a “good fit” novel, what about the other students in my classes? How can I find texts so that all students each see themselves in literature? How will we have the time to read that many texts?

Storytelling Traditions of South Asia and the Middle East, the first seminar I participated as a part of TIP, helped me realize that not only did the content of literature in my class not celebrate the diverse culture of my school, the structures or genres of literatures did not celebrate them either. I remembered what I had learned when taking Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (TESOL) courses about the importance of capitalizing on multiple literacies. According to a study I read by Hornberger and Skilton-Sylvester about biliteracy, “In limiting the discourse in official school contexts to monolingual, written, literary texts from the majority culture, the richness of multilingual, oral discourse, vernacular writing and literary texts from minority cultures is left outside of the school walls.” Storytelling is a genre my class is lacking. Every culture has important literary forms such as oral storytelling or story-telling through dance, song or skits. These literacies are often not valued in Western schools because they are not considered “formal” written literature. In my opinion, however, oral literacies should be brought into the classroom as a strength, not just to further goals of diversity. Teaching orality as a mode of learning builds on the strengths and knowledge that students already come to school with.⁴

In my unit for the Storytelling Traditions of South Asia and the Middle East seminar, called Celebrating Cultures of the World Through Reading and Writing Folktales, the class read folktales from all over the world and then wrote their own folktales.⁵ I see this current unit on immigrant narratives as a good continuation of the folktale unit. It continues to celebrate and capitalize on multiple literacies by having students now focus on reading and writing non-fiction personal narratives. These narratives focused on the diversity of our community and the diversity of the common experience of immigration.

Content Knowledge

According to Empires in World History: Power and Politics of Difference, by Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, “Empires are large political units, expansionist or with a large memory of power over space, politics that maintain distinction, and hierarchy as they incorporate people.” They further explain that empires draw in, usually by force, “peoples whose difference is made explicit under its rule.” Underlying the concept of empire is the assumption that different people within the empire will be ruled differently.⁶ The U.S.A. started its empire building right away with territorial expansion, growing from the original thirteen states in 1776 to what Daniel Immerwahr calls “the logo map” of the forty-eight contiguous states.⁷ These lands were taken primarily from the Native American sovereign tribes, but also from the French, Spanish, and English empires and the independent republic of Mexico. This territorial expansion falls under settler colonialism, the act of eliminating the native population of a conquered land and replacing it with a settler population.⁸ The U.S.’s success with settler colonialism meant that these colonized lands of the U.S. were incorporated into the nation-state. According to Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, nation-state is, “based on the idea of a single person in a single territory constituting itself as a unique political community,” which “proclaims the commonality of its people – even if the reality is more complicated.” Like empire, nation-states insist its people be ruled by institution, but it rules through homogenizing the population and trying to keep those it sees as different out.⁹

The U.S. began acquiring extractive colonies just three years after it finished expanding to the logo map of the contiguous United States. Extractive colonialism are forms of colonialism in which the colonizing country does not permanently move their population into the colony, but instead uses the land, natural resources, and/or indigenous labor of the colony for profits.¹⁰ In 1857, the U.S. began annexing what were called guano islands, tiny, usually uninhabited, islands in the Caribbean and Pacific covered in bird droppings. This guano was needed for fertilizer and seen as so necessary that the United States was prepared to go to war over them.¹¹

The U.S.’s empire expanded to include colonized people with the Spanish-American War. Cuba had lucrative sugar plantations that Spain had been exploiting through extractive colonization for centuries. In the 1860s Cuban nationalists started pushing for reform and then revolution. What became known as the Ten Years War (1868-78) failed, but developed several powerful leaders and paved the way for future revolution.¹²

Meanwhile, in the U.S., assistant secretary of the navy, and future present, Theodore Roosevelt mourned the closing of the frontier, which was a problem brought to his attention by the work of historian Frederick Jackson Turner.¹³ Several factors convinced Roosevelt, and later President McKinley and Congress, that the next frontier was Cuba. According to Barbarian Virtues, by Matthew Frye Jacobson, the United States was in an economic depression in the 1890s that many business and political leaders argued was due to surplus. These surpluses needed new markets that colonies could provide.¹⁴ Roosevelt had also been convinced the U.S. needed to prove it had a strong navy and control of the seas when he read Alfred Thayer Mahan’s 1890 book, The Influence of Sea Power Upon History. The American public had also been convinced that the U.S.  military needed to intervene in Cuba from the sensationalist journalism of William Randolph Hearst. While his newspaper articles did bring attention to Spain’s oppression of the Cuban people, it also focused on exaggerated stories of the danger Americans in Cuba faced and made William Randolph Hearst’s paper handsome profits. President McKinley was committed to finding a diplomatic solution. However, on February 15, 1898, a U.S. warship, the USS Maine, stationed off the coast of Havana, mysteriously blew up. This pushed Congress to declare war on Spain. Less than a month after U.S. troops arrived in Cuba, Spain surrendered. The Treaty of Paris was signed in December 1898 by the U.S. and Spain, not Cuba. Through it the U.S. gained Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and for $20 million, the Philippines.¹⁵ 

The Philippines, which is composed of more than 7000 islands and had approximately 7.6 million inhabitants, had been a colony of Spain for centuries when the U.S. bought it. It also had a strong independence movement. As part of the Spanish-American war, U.S. Admiral George Dewey sunk the Spanish fleet of ships in Manila Bay of the Philippines. This emboldened Filipino nationalists, who declared independence on June 12, 1898. The Spanish army refused to surrender to the Filipino nationalist army, only to the U.S. While they were working together to defeat Spain, nationalist leader Emilio Aguinaldo claimed that Dewey promised him Filipino independence, but later Dewey denied this. After the Treaty of Paris was signed, the U.S. refused to acknowledge the government that Filipino nationalists had set up. Therefore, the Philippine Republic declared war on the U.S. on February 4, 1899. This war lasted for several years, and the U.S. army committed many atrocities including killing civilians, putting civilians into concentration camps, and torturing prisoners of war. Aguinaldo was captured two years into the war. He reluctantly pledged allegiance to the United States, and urged Filipino nationalists to cooperate with the U.S., but the war continued.^{16 17}

Meanwhile, there was a large debate in the U.S. among politicians, business leaders, and in the newspapers over whether or not the U.S. should continue its colonizing efforts in the Philippines. On the side of imperialism many business interests, saw China as the most important market to solve their surplus problem. They wanted the Philippines to “serve as a ‘stepping stone’ to the China market.”¹⁸ Politicians and many newspapers asserted that the war proved Filipinos were uncivilized and not capable of self-government. They advocated for gradual release of governmental responsibility to the Filipino people. The side opposing imperialism was a strange coalition. Civil rights advocates thought the U.S. needed to be focusing on the problems at home and felt empathy for the Filipinos in their quest for independence against racial subjugation. Labor leaders feared people from the new colony would come to the mainland and take Americans jobs. Many of the anti-imperialists used racist rhetoric, not wanting to extend U.S. rights and protections to inferior peoples who would change the white Protestant Christian culture of America.¹⁹

The imperialists won out and the U.S. government began a process that, according to Kristin L. Hoganson, was “summed up by the term benevolent assimilation, which implied development along U.S. terms and integration into the U.S. economic system.”²⁰ The U.S. used local governments and public-private partnerships, including missionaries, to carry out these goals. They prioritized English-language public schools and public health. They distributed land to individuals through homestead legislation and improved roads and harbors. The U.S. government tied the Philippine economy to the U.S. economy, having most of Philippine exports going to the U.S. This “increased the power of the landed oligarchy.”²¹ The power of the landed elite was also strengthened by the voting laws the U.S. imposed. Voters had to be male, 23 or older, own property, and pass a literacy test. Future president William Taft was appointed head of the all-white American male commission of the Philippines in 1900. The Filipinos, under American rule, never had U.S. citizenship. A series of Supreme Court rulings in 1901 surrounding the rights of residents of the U.S.’s newly acquired territories have come to be known as the Insular Cases. These cases were decided at the same time as Plessy vs. Ferguson and were also centered around race, but they are much less known and are still considered good case law. These cases determined that the Constitution does not apply to unincorporated territories and therefore residents of the territories do not automatically have U.S. citizenship. Citizenship can only be granted to colonies through acts of Congress. Yet, residents of the colonies were legally U.S. nationals, and could serve in the U.S. military, which Filipino men did in great numbers.²²

In 1916, The Philippine Autonomy Act passed, replacing the commission with a Senate and House of Representatives elected by the Filipino voters and a governor appointed by the president. The Jones Act of 1916 announced the U.S.’s intentions of gradual release of power to Filipinos with the goal of withdrawing from the Philippines once the United States saw a stable government in place. Withdrawal kept being delayed until the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act, which set July 4, 1946 as Independence Day.²³ The Japanese military invaded the Philippines on December 7, 1941 and occupied it until 1945. Many Filipinos fought in the Philippines forces against the Japanese. In 1945, the U.S. retook the Philippines from Japan, destroying the capital city of Manila in the process.²⁴ The Philippines did still gain Independence from the U.S. on July 4, 1946. However, in April 1946, Congress passed the Bell Trade Act, which set strict quotas on Philippine imports to the U.S. but required complete access to the Philippines for American exports and commercial interests. This lopsided act ensured continued unequal economic relations between colonizer and colonized long after independence. ²⁵

What is the connection between empires and immigration? On the demand side, capitalism demanded growing markets for American products. One way to ensure people in other lands bought U.S. products was to colonize them. Also. U.S. merchants and missionaries were all over the world, and were requesting ever more protection from the U.S. military and government.²⁶ On the flip side, America’s growing industry required an endless supply of cheap labor. With the industrial revolution, the jobs in the mainland U.S. went from over half farming in 1870, to over two thirds factory work in the 1910s. Since this time period, the immigrant has been seen as the job seeker in the mainland public’s eyes, willing to do unskilled labor for less than we are willing.²⁷

The demand side rests on the imbalance of economic and political power that colonization causes. Countries created empires for economic and political gains. They excused their behavior by spreading the racist idea that colonization helps the colonized because the colonizers were superior to the colonized. Yet, empires caused great economic inequalities between the colonizers and the colonized. For example, by 1913, the per capital income in the European imperial powers was more than three times greater than their overseas colonies.²⁸ These inequalities usually persisted even if colonies gained independence. The inequalities prompted (we could even say sometimes necessitated) immigration from colonized countries to colonizer countries. For example, a laborer in the U.S. earned on average $10.68 a week in 1910. Yet, in most of the countries immigrants were arriving from, laborers earned less than $2 a week.²⁹

However, the same racist ideas that allowed colonizer countries to build their empires, kept their voters from wanting immigrants from the empires be allowed to be citizens of their countries. As noted earlier, increases in U.S. mainlanders around the world led to an increase in U.S. global intervention. The racist ideas of uncivilized and barbaric people needing to learn western religion, government, and work ethic that was used to justified the U.S.’s global empire led to xenophobia among the American public. This led to calls for isolationism in U.S. foreign policy. The isolationists never won out when it came to colonization, but they often won out when it came to immigration restriction in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, especially when it came to restricting immigrants from Asia and Latin America. In fact, according to Matthew Frye Jacobson, many “Americans reversed the power dynamics of imperialism, so that it was they, the powerful natives of an emerging world power, who were under attack.” ³⁰ What attack? Immigrants would destroy America’s culture by refusing to assimilate, drive down wages, become public charges, and commit crimes. The ongoing call for immigration restriction and to crack down on “illegal immigration” led to the development of a huge bureaucracy around immigration and what is now call remote control of immigration. In 1924, Congress moved the daily work of immigration inspection and of handing out limited numbers of visas from the border to American consuls in foreign countries. Remote control keeps immigration is the hand of the State Department and in some ways, out of sight and out of mind for most of the American public.³¹

When people talk about foreign relations, they often think about foreign trade or international relations. They are not usually referring to the U.S.’s colonies or immigration. Never the less, immigration has connected the U.S. to the rest of the world through all of U.S. history, even during periods seen as isolationist. What many non-immigrant mainland Americans do not see is that most immigrants remain connected to the people and places they left behind. In fact, family unification, often also called more negatively “chain migration”, accounts for much, in some times in U.S. history even the majority, of immigration. This is when a person is immigrating to be with a family member who is already living in the U.S.³² Interconnected communities of families and friends develop in cities in mainland U.S. that are still very much attached to their home countries. For centuries, immigrants have not only been sending for their relatives to come join them in the U.S., but also sending money home to help their families and communities. This money is called remittances and has played a transformative role in many countries of origins’ economies.³³

Immigration from the Philippines to the U.S. was almost non-existent until U.S. colonization. With colonization, Filipinos became U.S. nationals. Among the few rights and protections that status gave Filipinos was that they were no longer subject to the very strict immigration quotas that the U.S. government had placed on other Asian countries. Many American lawmakers were very worried about unrestricted Filipino migration but could do nothing about this international convention.³⁴

The first large group of Filipinos migrating to mainland came in the first decade of the 1900s. There were three groups from three different tiers of Filipinos society. At the top were college students studying under the Pensionado Act of 1903. This program sponsored students to study in the U.S. and then become leaders in the colonial government in the Philippines as part of the Civil Governor William Howard Taft’s “Americanization” policy. The second group were Filipino veterans who had served in the U.S. Navy. This followed a 1901 Executive Order issued by President McKinley authorizing Filipino admission into the Navy. The third group were laborers recruited by Hawaiian sugar plantation owners to harvest sugar cane starting in 1906. Filipino laborers were used to replace low-wage Japanese workers in the sugar cane plantations because Japanese workers had started to organize for better working conditions. In the 1920’s, Filipino and Japanese labors joined together to strike for better working conditions on the Hawaiian plantations, but were ultimately unsuccessful.³⁵

At this same time, thousands of U.S. citizens came to the Philippines as part of the colonial administration. The influx of American people, consumer products, and culture disrupted Philippine traditions of reciprocity, replacing them with individualism, materialism and upward mobility. The colonial government also restructured the economy to focus on cash crops for export. This left many subsistence farmers landless and jobless, necessitating migration.³⁶

As the salmon canning industry developed in Alaska in the 1920s, Filipino laborers were recruited to immigrate there. The growing agribusiness in the mainland also needed low-wage laborers, but faced criticism from nativists for recruiting from Mexico and Asia and difficulties because of immigration quotas. Therefore, they began recruiting Filipino young men as farm labors on the West Coast. Growers sought out workers from racially and politically disenfranchised groups because they would work for low wages and were less likely to complain, strike, or quit over poor working and living conditions. More than half of the migrants came from the plantations in Hawaii. By the mid-1920s, migration networks between the Philippines and the U.S. were firmly in place and remittances were flowing back to many families in the Philippines. By 1930, there were approximately 4,500 Filipinos living in the U.S. mainland. Most were male, and almost all lived on the West Coast. Nativist leaders, especially in California, were frustrated with the free migration of Filipinos and called them the “third Asiatic invasion”.³⁷ They launched propaganda campaigns warning about the dangers of Filipino settlement in California, which led to widespread discrimination culminating in a series of race riots and physical attacks against Filipinos. Nativists were trying to get the federal government to restrict immigration from the Philippines. When they could not, they joined the coalition pushing for Philippine independence. ³⁸

Immigration all but stopped during the Great Depression. During WWII, most Filipino American men were too old for the draft, but many did enlist to liberate the Philippines from Japan. Filipino American men were also able to move from the fields to the factory, as wartime demand for workers trumped racial exclusion. They were also still in high demand in the fields and could begin to negotiate for better wages and working conditions. Filipino GIs were eligible for citizenship but still faced racism, segregation, and antimiscegenation laws. Once the U.S. recaptured the Philippines in 1941, the U.S. Army established a military command post on the Philippines. An estimated 200,000 – 250,000 Filipino troops served under U.S. command. The U.S. government had promised these soldiers the same veteran’s benefits as U.S. soldiers and they were technically entitled to U.S. citizenship. However, after the end of the war, Congress declared that those obligations ended with Philippine sovereignty. Filipino servicemen were only allowed to apply for citizenship before the 1946 handover. This was poorly advertised and many applicants were denied for no reason. Only 11,000 veterans were granted citizenship and most of those were nationals already living in the U.S. ³⁹

In 1946, the Philippines became an independent nation, and with this came strict immigration quotas. Therefore, there was little immigration to the U.S. until immigration laws changed in the 1960s. One exception to the quotas were war brides. Approximately 1,600 Filipino women came to the U.S. as war brides following WWII.⁴⁰

The removal of national origin quotas from U.S. Immigration Act in 1965 and Filipino policies that encouraged labor emigration contributed to high levels of migration from the Philippines to the U.S. From 1960 to 1980, the Filipino immigrant population in the U.S. increased from 105,000 to 501,000 people.⁴¹ Dictator Ferdinand Marcos also came to power in 1965 and ruled the Philippines until 1986. Marcos put the country under martial law. His government was corrupt and led to poverty and a debt crisis. Many young Filipinos felt they had no other choice but to emigrate.⁴² One of the largest populations to leave were Filipino women graduating from nursing school. The legacy of colonization paved the way for this. During the colonial period, Philippine schools were basically satellites for mainland universities. After independence, Philippine nursing schools continued to teach U.S.-centric nursing practices, making it easy for Filipino nurses to work in U.S. hospitals.⁴³ The 1965 Immigration Act gave preferences to immigrants with needed skills. Nursing shortages started in the 1960s in the U.S., as women began entering professions previously not open to them. It continues to today, as the U.S. population continues to age, needing more healthcare. Filipino nurses were recruited to work all over the country, but most ended up settling in California where there were already established Filipino communities. In 2018, 28% of all immigrants working as registered nurses in the U.S. were Filipino.⁴⁴ Filipino nurses are often recruited to work in hard to fill critical care units. In 2021, Filipinos were four percent of the total nurses in the U.S., but 31% of all nurse deaths due to COVID 19.⁴⁵

Today, most people immigrating to the U.S. from the Philippines do so through family reunification, either as immediate relatives of U.S. citizens or through family-sponsorship. Many also obtain green cards through employment. Filipinos have much higher college education rates than both the foreign-born and U.S.-born populations in the United States. Between 2014 and 2018, the largest populations of immigrants from the Philippines were in California (43%). The next most populous states were Hawaii and then Texas, Illinois, New York and Nevada. The NY-NJ-PA metro area had a Filipino immigrant population of 151,000, which was 0.8% of the population. A very small number of Filipino immigrants are unauthorized (approximately 313,000 in the 2012-16 period), three percent of the total population of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. Most of these Filipino immigrants (approximately 26,000) were eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, but as of March 2022, only 3,270 Filipinos were participating.⁴⁶

Even though Emma Lazarus’s poem on the statue of liberty proclaims the U.S. to be a benevolent, empathetic country that welcomes the lowest of immigrants, America’s history of immigration rhetoric and immigration policy shows that was never true. Every wave of immigration was always seen as a threat to our American way of life. Yet, according to Matthew Frye Jacobson, “the capacity of the republic to withstand its own diversity is greater than the capacity of many citizens to imagine an America that departs significantly from the demographic status quo.”⁴⁷ In fact, immigrants have never exceeded more than fifteen percent of the U.S.’s total population.⁴⁸ Immigrants’ narratives show more similarities among groups and over time than they show differences. One important similarity, according to Foreign Relations American Immigration in Global Perspective, is the “human tendency to love and remain attached to family and birthplace.”⁴⁹

It is also difficult for Americans to see the connection between empires and immigration because the U.S.’s former and current colonies are invisible to most of the American public. The United States empire, especially the period of empire building that resulted in the Philippines being a U.S. territory, goes against our exceptionalism view of America being a benevolent and reluctant worldwide power, just as our immigration policies do.⁵⁰

Unit Objectives

My reading goal for this unit is to have students see the value of the non-fiction narrative (the stories we tell each other about our lives) as interesting works of literature and important sources of information. The writing goals are to teach students the values of writing down personal narrative stories and develop foundational skills and strategies to do so. With regards to the content of the narratives, my goals are for students to see immigration as a process that had a complex set of causes and began way before a person stepped into the U.S. I also want students to see that the U.S. has a lot more power than is always apparent. That power effects people all over the world, sometimes negatively. Finally, I want students to see immigration broadly, as an important phenomenon with multiple causes and effects. Yet, I want them to remember that large migration movements consist of individual humans that each have their own lives and stories. They are all unique but share a same humanity and hope for a better future.

I have found two sources for immigrant narratives. I recently attended a workshop about the South Asian American Digital Archive, SAADA.org. This archive has an initiative called the First Days Project. It contains true stories of immigrants’ first days in the U.S., in narrative or interview form. The initiative started just to chronicle the stories of immigrants from southeast Asia. Yet, part of the initiative is to allow readers to upload their own stories, so there are stories from immigrants from all over the world. There are sixteen stories of immigrants from the Philippines. There is also a page to upload stories. As part of the unit, students will read some of the narratives and interviews. Later in the unit, they will write a narrative about their own experience or interview someone who has immigrated to the U.S., and upload the story.⁵¹ I have also found a similar site called Made into America: Immigrant Stories Archive. It has eleven stories of people who have immigrated to the U.S. from the Philippines. This site also encourages readers to submit their own story to the site and has a “Tips for Getting Started” page. I can use this page to help me a create a graphic organizer to help students create questions. These questions will be used in their interviews or self-interviews to begin the information gathering process for their narratives. ⁵²

As students are reading immigrant stories from the Philippines, the class will need to explore the geography, history, and economics of the U.S.’s empire in general and the Philippines in particular. This will give students a better understanding of what led people to immigrate to the U.S. Therefore, I will need to find some combination of articles, websites, videos, podcasts, primary sources, maps, and images to help them a develop a basic historical, geographical, and economic understanding of the U.S.’s empire, especially in the Philippines, and the effect on immigration. One resource I have found is an episode of the The Experiment podcast called The Sisterhood. This podcast is a mixture of narrative and interview. It tells the story of how and why a group of nurses immigrated from the Philippines to the U.S. The hosts explain how the Philippines was a colony of the U.S. and how this led to nurses being trained in American medicine. The nurses being interviewed explain how Dictator Marcos led them to feel they had little options in the Philippines. It then talks about how the COVID 19 pandemic disproportionately affected the Filipino nursing community.⁵³ I may use parts of the audio and/or transcript for background knowledge in my unit. I may also use parts of the transcript as part of the lesson when students each read different immigrant narratives in small groups. I also may show clips from “The Crucible of the Empire: The Spanish-American War” in class to illustrate key information about the Spanish-American War and its consequences.⁵⁴ There is also a timeline on the film’s website that I could use as a source for background knowledge on the war and its effect on the Philippines.⁵⁵

I would also like to work in a cross curricular unit with the Social Studies teacher. Seventh grade Social Studies in Philadelphia focuses on world geography. It would be great if part of the exploration described in the above paragraph could take place in the social studies class, especially the study of the geography and culture of the Philippines, as geography and culture are primary focuses in the seventh-grade social studies curriculum. Also, the 7^th grade social studies teacher uses Socratic seminar as one of his teaching strategies. I could see him being eager to conduct a Socratic seminar with the students where they critically discuss the ideas of American empire and immigration using primary and secondary sources.

Students will then use the migrant narratives we read and discussed as mentor texts to write their own migrant narratives. These student narratives could be true first-hand accounts, based on interviews of family or friends, or based on passed down family stories. Using mentor texts is a technique used widely in middle school writing classes. I use mentor texts to help students develop character, setting and plot for their short story writing, but I have not used it for non-fiction texts. According to Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children’s Literature, K-6, mentor texts become coaches and partners to bring joy to writing students. They are models to, “help students envision the kinds of writers they can become.”⁵⁶ Young writers can imitate mentor texts while continuing to find new ways in which to grow. Mentor texts must be high quality texts because they, “ignite the writer’s imagination and determination to create high-quality text that mirrors the mentor text in many ways.”⁵⁷ For teachers of writing, mentor texts help us move from developing individual pieces of writing, to developing the whole writer. 

The first crucial step is, of course, choosing the mentor text. The first criterion is for the teacher to connect with the text and love it. Next is to find examples of the author's craft that you want to highlight. Then think about how the text serves the students’ needs and connects with the curriculum. Key questions Dorfman and Cappelli suggest teachers ask themselves are, “Is this a book your students could relate to and/or read alone or with a partner?”, “Does it provide examples of the kinds of writing you want for your students?” and “Can it be revisited often for multiple lessons across traits of writing?”⁵⁸ Writing teachers should have a good balance of genres in their mentor texts and choose texts with cultural diversity and high engagement. When it comes down to it though, choosing mentor texts is always a personal decision.

Using true short immigration narratives of people who immigrated from the Philippines to the U.S. limits my choices when picking the best mentor texts. However, I can highlight specific parts of different narratives that are good models for specific narrative techniques such as imagery, descriptive language, character development, internal thinking, speeding up and slowing down, and satisfying conclusions. Specifically, the narrative “Letting Go of the Philippines”, on Madeintoamerica.org, models starting with a hook and creating imagery through descriptive language. “A Leap into the Unknown”, also on Madeintoamerica.org, models a seamless blend of dialogue, thinking, action, and description. This narrative also models creating suspense and ending with a purposeful conclusion.⁵⁹ Most of the narratives about the Philippines on Madeintoamerica.org are written by high school students from Palo Alto, CA about their relatives. I think this must have been part of the students’ coursework, possibly as part of the unit I found on Edutopia.com, which first led me to the Made into America database. The unit on Edutopia includes a lesson and graphic organizers to help students turn an interview into a narrative with a structure and storyline.⁶⁰ These two narratives are exemplary models of structure and storyline that should serve as great guides for my students.

The culmination of the unit will involve students sharing their writing with each other. This will lead to discussions, comparing and contrasting experiences, and drawing conclusions about the effect of global empire on immigration to the United States. I will also bind students’ final writing pieces into a book, as I do with all my students’ final writing pieces. As mentioned above, I also want students who want to and have permission from their parents, to upload their published pieces on the First Days Project of the SAADA archive⁶¹ and/or madeintoamerica.org.⁶²

Teaching Strategies

The beginning of the unit will focus on shared reading of immigration narratives. Shared reading is when the teacher reads a text aloud while the students read along silently. This process models reading fluency for students. This is a particularly important first step in close reading, because in heterogeneous classrooms, the texts will almost always be above some students’ independent reading levels. Teachers need to ensure that all students are able to access the content. 

Then the class will do close readings of some of the immigration narratives in order to infer, make connections, formulate questions around, and draw conclusions about immigration experiences and the history of the Philippines. Close reading is a deep dive into a text, involving at least three readings of the same text. The first reading is for enjoyment and to get the main idea of the text. The second reading is for deeper meaning. In this reading, we pause often to discuss and annotate the text. We look at structure, word choice, and figurative language, and determine how these affect meaning in the text. This involves annotating the text. The third reading is with a specific purpose, usually analysis, comparison, or reflection. This is often done in pairs and with the aid of a graphic organizer to help students focus their thoughts on the specific purpose and record their learnings and realizations. 

I will employ different types of discussion models to get students to think more deeply about the information they are gathering from the narratives and other sources. Different types of discussion models used include whole group discussion, turn and talk, and think/write-pair-share. Turn and talk is when a teacher poses an open-ended question for students to discuss with an assigned partner sitting close to them. Think/write-pair-share is when students think or write independently about a question or topic. Then students engage in discussion with a partner about the question or topic. Finally, students can volunteer to share out in a whole class discussion. 

I will also use students’ daily journal entries to promote deeper thinking about the ideas that come up in this unit. Students respond to a daily journal prompt during the first ten minutes of class. The prompt is often a question to access prior knowledge about the topic of the upcoming lesson or a question to get students to reflect on the ongoing unit. I often use the journal entry as the thinking of a think-pair-share. I collect, read, and respond to students' journals once a week.

Since there are more narratives to read than time permits, I will have one class period in which students read and analyze the narrative in cooperative learning groups. Cooperative learning is form of scaffolding in which students work in groups on specific tasks. Each member has a responsibility to learn and accomplish, but also the responsibility of group success. Cooperative learning projects can be short or long term. They aid students in practicing communication skills, problem solving, and critical thinking.

After students read and analyze different narratives in cooperative learning groups, students will share their learning with each other using the jigsaw method. The jigsaw technique is a form of cooperative learning. Students are broken up into small groups and each group becomes an expert in a different part of a topic. Then students are configured into different small groups that consist of one member of each of the previous groups. Each member of the new group teaches the other members what they learned during their study in their previous group.

Since I was trained in Socratic seminar last year, and my school is really pushing it, I will use Socratic seminar as a way to have students look at primary and secondary sources about the colonization of the Philippines and grapple with the motives and rational for colonization. Socratic seminar is a formal, highly structured discussion based off the idea that inquiry and discussion is needed for deep critical thinking, which lead to deep understanding and knowledge. Students prepare for the seminar by reading, annotating, and creating questions about one or two texts. During the seminar, a leader poses open-ended questions. Participants respond to the leader’s questions, listen intently, respond to each other’s comments, and pose questions of their own. Often students are expected to write a reflection after the seminar.

To begin the writing portion of the unit, I will use some of the immigrant narratives we read in the beginning as mentor texts. Mentor texts are texts for writing students to reread, study, find inspiration from, and sometimes imitate. They help students take risks to try new techniques and learn how to do something they may not yet be able to do on their own. 

At the end of the unit, we will have a celebration of writing for students to show off their final published narratives. The point is for students to feel a sense of accomplishment in a finished piece of writing, to feel that they are writers who just published a piece, not just students who completed an assignment. A quick internet search will produce many different ways teachers conduct their celebration of writings. Since many middle schoolers are shy about reading their work aloud to the entire class, I usually have students share their work in small groups of their choosing. Students fill out compliment cards for each other and I give out small treats. Later, I use a book binding machine to make a book out of the classes’ work. For this unit, students will also publish their writing on the immigrant narrative archive on either Saada.org or madeintoamerica.org.

Classroom Activities

(Designed for a daily 90-minute ELA class)

Lesson One: Introducing Immigration Narratives

Materials:

1. Student journals
2. Copies of vocabulary for students
3. Copies of first narrative being used for shared reading
4. Chart paper for class lists (or write on white board or smart board).

Objectives:

Students will be able to critically discuss the terminology surrounding migration in collaborative discussions in order to build on each other’s ideas and express their own clearly.

Students will be able to read, comprehend and discuss an immigration narrative in order to recognize and value the diverse experience of immigrants from other countries.

Procedure:

Introduction/Accessing background knowledge

Journal Entry: Answer any of these questions you want to, based on your own ideas and knowledge. (10 Minutes)

• What is immigration?
• What do you know about immigration?
• Who is an immigrant?
• Why do people emigrate?

Pair – share journal entries. Make a list on the board or on chart paper of common themes that come up. Also make a list on the board or on chart paper of questions that come up. (10 minutes)

Mini Lesson: Key Vocabulary (20 Minutes)

Give out sheets with the vocabulary and definitions, have the students pull up the sheets online, or have students copy the words and definitions.

Vocabulary:

1. migrant (noun.) one that migrates: such as
   1. a person who moves regularly in order to find work especially in harvesting crops
   2. an animal that shifts from on habitat to another
2. immigrant (noun) a person who moves to a country from somewhere else
3. oral history (noun) information about the past that is passed down through stories and word of mouth
4. personal narrative (noun) a nonfiction story relating a person’s experience, usually told in first person
5. refugee (noun) a person who flees for safety, especially to a foreign country, during times of political trouble, war or other danger
6. illegal immigrant/ undocumented immigrant/ unauthorized immigrant (noun) a foreign person who is living in a country without having official permission to live there

Go through each term with the class, making sure students know how to pronounce the word, reading the definition, giving examples and asking what they know about the word.

Have these two definitions on the board:

denotation (noun): a direct specific meaning

connotation (noun): the suggestion of a meaning by a word apart from the thing is

Before going over term number six, discuss denotation and connotation. Ask students to explain the conations for illegal immigrant verse undocumented immigrant verses unauthorized immigrant.

Ask students if there are any other vocabulary words they have heard that they think should be added to the list or any questions they have about the vocabulary. Add their responses to questions list you have on the board or chart paper.

Shared Reading: First Immigrant Narrative

Pass out printed copies of one of the immigrant narratives from the Philippines on madeintoamerica.org or firstdays.saada.org. I would suggest “A Leap into the Unknown” or “Letting Go of the Philippines” for their attention-grabbing hooks and storytelling techniques.

Before starting, read the title and ask students to pair share what they think the genre of the text is and what it is about. Refer back to the terms oral history and personal narrative when discussing genre. Explain that we will be reading narratives of people who immigrated from the Philippines to the U.S. written by the immigrant or someone who interviewed the immigrant. Show where the Philippines are in on a map. Ask students what they know about the Philippines. Start a new list on the board or on chart paper to write true information students know about the Philippines. Gently correct any students’ misconceptions. Ask students what questions they have about the Philippines. Add these questions to the questions list.

Read the narrative aloud to the students as they read silently. Stop halfway through and then at the end to ask these questions.

What happened in the story?

What are your reactions to the story?

What did you learn from the story?

What questions do you have?

What personal connections do you have?

As students discuss the story, continue to add to your three class lists (immigration ideas, information about the Philippines, and questions).

Conclusion:

Review the three lists the class created today. Tell students we will explore the questions as we continue the unit. Preview that students will read more narratives, learn more about the Philippines, and then write their own immigrant narratives.

Lesson Two: Continuing Immigration Narratives

Objectives:

Students will be able to critically analyzing a variety of sources on the history of the American colonization of the Philippines in order to think about the ways in which colonization led to immigration.

Students will be able to read, comprehend and discuss an immigration narrative in order to recognize and value the diverse experience of immigrants from other countries.

Introduction: Review Learning from previous day and reflections.

Mini Lesson: Short historical lesson about Philippines and immigration from Philippines using nonfiction article, maps, photos, or film clips.

Guided Reading and discussion: Read and discuss a second Philippine immigrant narrative following similar format as previous lesson.

Conclusion: Review learning and preview next steps.

Lesson Three: Immigration Narrative Jigsaw

Objectives:

Students will be able to read, comprehend and discuss an immigration narrative in order to recognize and value the diverse experience of immigrants from other countries.

Students will be able to extract key information from written narratives and impart that information orally in order to teach each other about various immigrant experiences.

Cooperative Learning:  Break groups up into groups of three or four. Give them each a different immigrant narrative to read. After reading have each group fill out the graphic organizer below.

Introduction: Review Learning from previous day and reflections.

Immigration Narrative Graphic Organizer

Sharing Out: Students can share their learning by presenting to the entire class or by doing a jigsaw rotation.

Conclusion: Pull knowledge from the share-out. Use today’s experience to add to the three lists (immigration ideas, information about the Philippines, and questions).

Lesson Four: Preparing for Interview or Self-Interview

Objectives:

Students will be able to write generative questions about immigration experiences in order to conduct an interview or self-interview.

Lesson Five: Immigration Narratives as Mentor Texts

Objectives:

Students will be able to use mentor texts in order to develop strategies for turning interview answers into a compelling narrative.

Lesson Six: Outlining Narrative

Objectives:

Students will be able to use a graphic organizer to organize their content in order to develop interview answers into a compelling narrative.

Lesson Seven: Drafting Narrative

Objectives:

Students will be able to use their narrative outline to write structured paragraphs in order to develop a compelling immigrant narrative.

Lesson Eight: Peer Reviewing and Revising Narrative

Objectives:

Students will be able to give and receive feedback using a checklist or graphic organizer in order to improve their immigrant narratives.

Lesson Nine: Proofreading and Writing Final Narrative

Objectives:

Students will be able to correct each other’s grammar, spelling, capitalization and punctuation errors in order to improve their immigrant narratives.

Lesson Ten: Publishing Narrative/Celebration of Writing

Objectives:

Students will be able to share their writing with their peers in order to develop a sense of pride in their writing and writing ability.

Students will be able to read aloud with expression in order to improve their speaking and oral reading skills.

Students will be able to listen intently to their peers in order to improve their listening skills.

Resources

Books:

Baldoz, Rick. The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898-1946. New York, USA: New York University Press, 2011. https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.18574/nyu/9780814789889.001.0001

This book gave detailed information and analysis about the immigration of Filipinos to the United States during the U.S. colonial period.

Burbank, Jane and Cooper, Frederick. Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference. United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 2010.

The introduction of this book gives a good definition of empire and some historical context.

Cappelli, Rose and Dorfman, Lynne. Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children's Literature, K-6. Sommerville: Stenhouse Publishers. 2017.

This is a book about using mentor texts in writing curriculum. I used it as a reference to refresh my knowledge and develop a plan of how I would use immigrant narratives as mentor texts in my unit.

Gabaccia, Donna R. Foreign Relations: American Immigration in Global Perspective. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2015. 

This book goes through the history of immigration and immigration policy in the U.S., showing how immigration affects and is affected by foreign relations as in immigrants’ ties to their homeland and foreign relations as in the U.S. governments’ ties to other countries.

Hoganson, Kristin L. American Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, Macmillan Learning. 2017.

The introduction of this book provided a good understanding of the U.S. colonization of the Philippines.

Jacobson, Matthew Frye. Barbarian virtues: the United States encounters foreign peoples at home and abroad, 1876-1917. New York: Hill and Wang. 2000.

This book helps explain the interconnectedness of U.S. empire and immigration to the U.S. It explores the two sides of Americanization – making immigrants “Americans” and making the world “American”.

Immerwahr, Daniel. How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. New York: Picador. 2020.

This book gives a thorough history of the U.S.’s imperial pursuits, their causes, and their effects on the U.S. and the world.

Kinzer, Stephen. Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq. New York: Times Books, 2006.

This book details the fourteen foreign interventions the U.S.’s history, their causes and their consequences. It posits that the U.S. needs to stop ignoring this part of its history and stop seeing itself as exceptional.

Kramer, Paul A. Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States, and the Philippines. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Accessed July 19, 2022. ProQuest Ebook Central.

This book looks at Philippine-American colonial history through the lens of race, as it was used to justify colonization and to entrench western notions of racial hierarchy into Philippine society.

Loewen, James W. Lies my teacher told me: everything your American history textbook got wrong. New York: New Press, 1995.

This book explores the largest myths in American History text books, uncovering the truth and delving into why important parts of American history are fictionalized.

Journal Articles:

Hornberger, Nancy and Ellen Skilton-Sylvester. “Revisiting the continua of biliteracy: International and critical perspectives." Language and Education, 2000. 14, 96-122. 

This article gives information about the importance of and strategies for using multiple literacies in the classroom.

Marinari, Maddalena. “Migration, War, and the Transformation of the US Population.” Chapter, 419–39, n.d. doi:10.1017/9781108297554.020.

This article goes through the U.S. immigration policies from the second half of the nineteenth century until 2018 to show how war has shaped migration and immigration policy. This gave me a good overview of the U.S. immigration policies, their causes, and their consequences. The bibliographic essay at the end pointed me towards books specifically about how colonization affected Filipino immigration.

Ostler, Jeffrey. “Settler Colonialism.” Chapter. In The Cambridge History of America and the World, edited by Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton, 80–100. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. doi:10.1017/9781108297479.005.

This article defines settler colonialism and outlines how the U.S.’s settler colonialism led to genocide of the Native American population.

Oyen, Meredith. “Borders and Migrants.” Chapter. In The Cambridge History of America and the World, edited by Brooke L. Blower and Andrew Preston, 3:499–518. The Cambridge History of America and the World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. doi:10.1017/9781108297530.023.

This article looks at the history of U.S. immigration law and its enforcement and how it was affected by the U.S. ' growing empire and involvement in wars.

Websites:

Celebrating Cultures of the World Through Reading and Writing Folktales.” Curriculum Units. Teachers Institute of Philadelphia. Accessed July 14, 2022. https://theteachersinstitute.org/curriculum_unit/celebrating-cultures-of-the-world-through-reading-and-writing-folktales/.

This is a previous unit I wrote through a Teacher Institute of Philadelphia Seminar. It centers around reading and writing world folktales and is designed for seventh grade ELA classes.

“English Language Arts Standards,” Common Core State Standards Initiative, 2022. http://www.corestandards.org/ELA-Literacy/.

This is a site I use to research English/Language Arts standards for lesson and unit planning.

“Exploring Young Immigrant Stories” Learning for Justice. https://www.learningforjustice.org/classroom-resources/lessons/exploring-young-immigrant-stories.

This webpage has a suggested series of lessons about young immigrants’ stories that gave me ideas and pointed me towards resources for my unit.

Gallardo, Luis Hassan and Batalova, Jeanne. “Filipino Immigrants in the United States” Migration Policy Institute, July 15, 2020. https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/filipino-immigrants-united-states-2020.

This webpage gives a very short overview of the history Philippine immigration to the United States as well as extensive statistic of current Philippine immigrant populations in the U.S.

“First Days Project,” South Asian American Digital Archive. https://firstdays.saada.org/browse/gallery?departure_country=Philippines&arrival_state=All&year=All

The section of the digital archive contains true stories of immigrants’ first days in the U.S., in narrative or interview form. There are sixteen stories of immigrants from the Philippines. There is also a page to upload stories.

“Honoring Our Families' Immigrant Narratives” Edutopia. Accessed https://www.edutopia.org/blog/honoring-our-families-immigrant-narratives-emily-lee-nanor-balabanian

This webpage gives an overview of an entire unit on reading and writing immigrant narratives. It gave me many ideas for lesson plans, graphic organizers, and rubrics. It also introduced me to the Made into America immigrant narrative archive.

Learning for Justice Staff. “Ten Myths About Immigration” Learning for Justice. 39. Spring 2011. https://www.learningforjustice.org/magazine/spring-2011/ten-myths-about-immigration.

This article gives helpful advice on how to correct students’ misunderstandings about immigration.

“October 1st Enrollment for the 2021-2022 school year: Greenberg, Joseph School: Demographics” School District of Philadelphia. Accessed July 13, 2022. https://dashboards.philasd.org/extensions/enrollment-public/index.html#/demographics.

This chart gave me information on the ethnic makeup of my school for my rational.

Made into America: Immigrant Stories Project. Accessed July 12, 2022. https://madeintoamerica.org/

This website is also a digital archive of true immigrant narratives it has a least a dozen stories from Filipino immigrants. It also has a place for anyone to upload their story and a “Tips for Getting Started on Writing” page to help someone write their narrative.

“Timeline.” Crucible of Empire: The Spanish American War. Accessed July 14, 2022. https://www.pbs.org/crucible/frames/_timeline.html.

This website gives a clear summary of the Spanish American War.

“View Standards,” Standards Aligned System, 2022. https://www.pdesas.org/Standard/View.

This is a site I use to research Social Studies standards for lesson and unit planning.

Films:

Miller, Daniel A. “The Crucible of the Empire: The Spanish-American War” Great Projects Film Company, 1999.

This is a film produced by PBS that provided me with good background knowledge about the Spanish-American War. Clips can be shown in class to illustrate key information about the war and its consequences.

Podcasts:

Hunte, Tracie and Berbey, Gabrielle. (The Sisterhood) The Experiment Podcast, podcast audio. February, 5, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2021/02/nurses/618110/.

This podcast is a mixture of narrative and interview. It tells the story of how and why a group nurses immigrated from the Philippines to the U.S. It then talks about how the COVID 19 pandemic disproportionately effected the Filipino nursing community. I may use parts of the audio and/or transcript as mentor texts or for background knowledge in my unit.

Appendix on Implementing District Standards

ELA:

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.RI.7.3 - Analyze the interactions between individuals, events, and ideas in a text (e.g., how ideas influence individuals or events, or how individuals influence ideas or events).

With each narrative students read, whether whole class or in small groups, students will be reflecting on, analyzing and connecting with the text through discussion or writing.

CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.7.3 - Write narratives to develop real or imagined experiences or events using effective technique, relevant descriptive details, and well-structured event sequences.

Students will use the narratives they read as models to write their own well-structured detailed immigrant narrative. They will create these narratives from notes they took from interviewing a relative, friend, community member, or by conducting a “self-interview”.

Social Studies:

8.4.7.D - Explain how conflict and cooperation among groups and organizations have impacted the history of the world.

Students will reflect, through discussion and through journal writing, on how the U.S. colonization of the Philippines lead to both conflict and cooperation between the two countries. This conflict and cooperation were factors in many Filipinos’ decision to immigrate to the United States.

Notes

¹ James W. Loewen, Lies my teacher told me: everything your American history textbook got wrong (New York: New Press, 1995)

² Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Times Books, 2006)

³ “October 1^st Enrollment for the 2021-2022 school year: Greenberg, Joseph School: Demographics” School District of Philadelphia, Accessed July 13, 2022, https://dashboards.philasd.org/extensions/enrollment-public/index.html#/demographics.

⁴ Nancy Hornberger and Ellen Skilton-Sylvester, “Revisiting the continua of biliteracy: International and critical perspectives," Language and Education (2000) 14, 96-122. 

⁵ “Celebrating Cultures of the World Through Reading and Writing Folktales,” Curriculum Units, Teachers Institute of Philadelphia, Accessed July 14, 2022, https://theteachersinstitute.org/curriculum_unit/celebrating-cultures-of-the-world-through-reading-and-writing-folktales/.

⁶ Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 2010) 8.

⁷ Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. (New York: Picador. 2020.) 8-9.

⁸ “In The Cambridge History of America and the World, Settler Colonialism.” doi:10.1017/9781108297479.005.

⁹ Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 2010) 8.

¹⁰ Jeffrey Ostler, “Settler Colonialism.” Chapter, In The Cambridge History of America and the World, edited by Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton, 80–100. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022) doi:10.1017/9781108297479.005. 80.

¹¹ Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. (New York: Picador. 2020.) 48-51.

¹² “Timeline” Crucible of Empire: The Spanish American War, Accessed July 14, 2022, https://www.pbs.org/crucible/frames/_timeline.html.

¹³ Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. (New York: Picador. 2020.) 62.

¹⁴ Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang. 2000) 18-22.

¹⁵ Timeline” Crucible of Empire: The Spanish American War, Accessed July 14, 2022, https://www.pbs.org/crucible/frames/_timeline.html.

¹⁶ Kristin L. Hoganson, American Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, Macmillan Learning. 2017) 17-21

¹⁷ Timeline” Crucible of Empire: The Spanish American War, Accessed July 14, 2022, https://www.pbs.org/crucible/frames/_timeline.html.

¹⁸ Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang. 2000) 31.

¹⁹ Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang. 2000) 245.

²⁰ Kristin L. Hoganson, American Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, Macmillan Learning. 2017) 23

²¹ Kristin L. Hoganson, American Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, Macmillan Learning. 2017) 24

²² Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. (New York: Picador. 2020.) 86-87.

²³ Kristin L. Hoganson, American Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, Macmillan Learning. 2017) 24

²⁴ Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. (New York: Picador. 2020.) 3-5, 210-212.

²⁵ Rick Baldoz, The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898-1946 (New York, USA: New York University Press, 2011. https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.18574/nyu/9780814789889.001.0001) 229-230

²⁶ Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang. 2000)14-13.

²⁷ Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang. 2000) 65.

²⁸ Kristin L. Hoganson, American Empire at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: A Brief History with Documents (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, Macmillan Learning. 2017) 3.

²⁹ Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang. 2000) 63.

³⁰ Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang. 2000) 63.

³¹ Donna R. Gabaccia, Foreign Relations American Immigration in Global Perspective. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2015) 143.

³² Donna R. Gabaccia, Foreign Relations American Immigration in Global Perspective. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2015) 2.

³³ Donna R. Gabaccia, Foreign Relations American Immigration in Global Perspective. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2015) 104-105.

³⁴ Rick Baldoz, The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898-1946 (New York, USA: New York University Press, 2011. https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.18574/nyu/9780814789889.001.0001) 13.

³⁵ Rick Baldoz, The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898-1946 (New York, USA: New York University Press, 2011. https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.18574/nyu/9780814789889.001.0001) 13.

³⁶ Rick Baldoz, The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898-1946 (New York, USA: New York University Press, 2011. https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.18574/nyu/9780814789889.001.0001) 45-46.

³⁷ Rick Baldoz, The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898-1946 (New York, USA: New York University Press, 2011. https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.18574/nyu/9780814789889.001.0001) 14.

³⁸ Rick Baldoz, The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898-1946 (New York, USA: New York University Press, 2011. https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.18574/nyu/9780814789889.001.0001) 194-236.

³⁹ Rick Baldoz, The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898-1946 (New York, USA: New York University Press, 2011. https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.18574/nyu/9780814789889.001.0001) 194-236.

⁴⁰ Rick Baldoz, The Third Asiatic Invasion: Empire and Migration in Filipino America, 1898-1946 (New York, USA: New York University Press, 2011. https://doi-org.proxy.library.upenn.edu/10.18574/nyu/9780814789889.001.0001) 194-236.

⁴¹ Luis Hassan Gallardo and Jeanne Batalova, “Filipino Immigrants in the United States” Migration Policy Institute, July 15, 2020, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/filipino-immigrants-united-states-2020.

⁴² Tracie Hunte and Gabrielle Berbey, The Experiment Podcast, podcast audio, February, 5, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2021/02/nurses/618110/.

⁴³ Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States. (New York: Picador. 2020.) 304.

⁴⁴ Luis Hassan Gallardo and Jeanne Batalova, “Filipino Immigrants in the United States” Migration Policy Institute, July 15, 2020, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/filipino-immigrants-united-states-2020.

⁴⁵ Tracie Hunte and Gabrielle Berbey, The Experiment Podcast, podcast audio, February, 5, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2021/02/nurses/618110/.

⁴⁶ Luis Hassan Gallardo and Jeanne Batalova, “Filipino Immigrants in the United States” Migration Policy Institute, July 15, 2020, https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/filipino-immigrants-united-states-2020.

⁴⁷ Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang. 2000) 63.

⁴⁸ Donna R. Gabaccia, Foreign Relations American Immigration in Global Perspective. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2015) 226.

⁴⁹ Donna R. Gabaccia, Foreign Relations American Immigration in Global Perspective. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press, 2015) 222.

⁵⁰ Matthew Frye Jacobson, Barbarian Virtues: Encounters Foreign Peoples at Home and Abroad, 1876-1917 (New York: Hill and Wang. 2000) 263-65.

⁵¹ “First Days Project,” South Asian American Digital Archive. https://firstdays.saada.org/browse/gallery?departure_country=Philippines&arrival_state=All&year=All

⁵² Made into America: Immigrant Stories Project, Accessed July 12, 2022, https://madeintoamerica.org/

⁵³ Tracie Hunte and Gabrielle Berbey, The Experiment Podcast, podcast audio, February, 5, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2021/02/nurses/618110/.

⁵⁴ Daniel A. Miller, “The Crucible of the Empire: The Spanish-American War” Great Projects Film Company, 1999.

⁵⁵ “Timeline.” Crucible of Empire: The Spanish American War, Accessed July 14, 2022, https://www.pbs.org/crucible/frames/_timeline.html.

⁵⁶ Rose Cappelli and Lynne Dorfman, Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children's Literature, K-6 (Sommerville: Stenhouse Publishers. 2017) 6.

⁵⁷ Rose Cappelli and Lynne Dorfman, Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children's Literature, K-6 (Sommerville: Stenhouse Publishers. 2017) 7.

⁵⁸ Rose Cappelli and Lynne Dorfman, Mentor Texts: Teaching Writing Through Children's Literature, K-6 (Sommerville: Stenhouse Publishers. 2017) 8.

⁵⁹ Tracie Hunte and Gabrielle Berbey, (The Sisterhood) The Experiment Podcast, podcast audio, February, 5, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/podcasts/archive/2021/02/nurses/618110/.

⁶⁰ “Honoring Our Families' Immigrant Narratives” Edutopia, Accessed https://www.edutopia.org/blog/honoring-our-families-immigrant-narratives-emily-lee-nanor-balabanian

⁶¹ “First Days Project,” South Asian American Digital Archive. https://firstdays.saada.org/browse/gallery?departure_country=Philippines&arrival_state=All&year=All

⁶² Made into America: Immigrant Stories Project, Accessed July 12, 2022, https://madeintoamerica.org/