Sleight of Hand, Fair Games, and Side Shows - Step right up folks to the second era of Worlds in Collision.  The Spanish-American War in 1898 was a great collision of geo-political interests.  The United States fought Spain for control of Spanish territories in the Caribbean and the Pacific under the banner of Manifest Destiny.  After the war, the Treaty of Paris in 1898 recognized Cuba’s independence, and ceded the islands of Puerto Rico, Guam, and other Spanish territories in the South Pacific.  The Spanish government, which did not recognize Philippine Independence, with a sleight of hand, included the Philippines in the Treaty.  The Filipinos asserted their independence and the Philippine-American War followed.  The US firmly planted its imperial footing on the islands after the bloody war and the Filipinos eventually welcomed the democratizing Yanks and the following do-gooders, the Thomasites, a group of educators who volunteered to help civilize their “little brown brothers.”  By 1904, Filipinos were in the mind of Americans as the St. Louis Worlds Fair exhibited more than 3,000 live Filipinos.  The Philippine Pavilion housed people representing almost every province and sub-ethnic group in the Philippines and became one of the biggest and most popular pavilions at the Fair.

The continuing development of technology and industrialization, along with the sideshow of modernization that the Americans brought to the Philippines, catalyzed the paradigm shift from the religious outpost of the Spaniards to the poor, orphaned ward of the Americans.  It is also in this period, “from 1906-1934, when more than 100,000 Filipinos, mostly single men (though about ten percent were women), migrate to Hawaii and the West Coast to work in the agricultural fields, in the service sector, indelibly changing the face of the labor force in Hawaii, California, Washington, Oregon, and Alaska.”(Prof. Dawn Mabalon)