In a documentary that was shown over a decade ago, the late former Vice President Emmanuel Pelaez recounted how, as young student before World War II, he had been bodily thrown out of the Army-Navy Club, which was for whites only and off limits to Filipinos. This at a time when the country was already a Commonwealth. An ironic story when you consider how Pelaez was mocked in 1963 for making speeches denying he was a mestizo; to think he felt uncomfortable about being too white and yet suffered indignities at the hands of people who certainly felt he wasn’t white at all! But the point is, treatment like this, at the hands of white men, helped foster nationalism. And high society found nationalism had an impact on their social lives.
That impact was felt in terms of sensitivity over racism, the bane of all colonies. Members of the Filipino upper class were particularly touchy with regards to racial matters. One of them, Victor Buencamino (the first Filipino veterinarian), who was sent by the US government to study in the USA, noted that as in “my own case, the little incidents of discrimination against Orientals, particularly on the West Coast, rankled long in my mind.” In fact a few years after Buencamino’s stint in the US, race riots would occur in California and legislation banning marriage between Filipinos and Americans would be passed.
There were other things that fostered Filipino nationalism. “In US classrooms [we] had to join other students in pledging loyalty ‘to the United States of America, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.’ This exercise evoked a strong wish among Filipino students to pledge loyalty to their own nation.” Besides, “Distance and nostalgia had made [us] miss home badly.”
So when Buencamino returned home in 1911, he “found it totally revolting that there were too many places where we Filipinos were off limits.” “I recalled that even the government-operated Manila Hotel was by practice if not decree an exclusive white abode for a good many years,” he wrote in his memoirs.
If club, church, and school defined society, then the clubs off-limits to Filipinos demarcated the hangouts of the high society of the colonizers, and that of the colonized. Up to nearly the outbreak of the war, the Manila Polo Club, the Manila Golf Club, and the Army Navy Club would be for whites only. “Even the YMCA had a separate building for Americans and Europeans,” Buencamino recalled. The Polo Club itself would feature in a “nationalist” struggle when Col. Manolo Nieto, aide-de-camp of President Quezon, applied for membership and was blackballed; the decision was condemned as “racist,” and in solidarity the Elizalde brothers who were famous polo players besides being industrialists, resigned from the Club and established another one called Los Tamaraos (the name lives on to this day in the Los Tamaraos field where wealthy children still take horseback-riding lessons in Parañaque). The irony for some was that Nieto and the Elizaldes were all mestizos.
But this incident was still in the future when Buencamino struck what he claimed to have been a blow for nationalism.
Buencamino reminisced that besides the Elizalde-led walk out from the Polo Club, other racially-motivated events took place involving private clubs. According to him William “Bill” Shaw of Shaw Boulevard fame helped form the Wack Wack Golf Club because of the racism of his fellow Americans: “The story went that he did not feel at home in the exclusive Manila Golf Club in Caloocan everytime he brought along his Filipina wife and his mestizo child, so he aligned himself with Filipino aficionados and founded Wack Wack.”
Another “racial battleground” was the Rotary Club of Manila. It was founded in 1919 with only two of the 38 founders being Filipinos (Gabriel Lao and Gregorio Nieva). It was only in 1933 that a Filipino, Arsenio Luz, came to head it, followed by Carlos P. Romulo and Buencamino himself.
It was in the dance hall, that the biggest blow against racism was delivered. The cabarets (night clubs were people went to dance, dine, and drink) were all segregated: “The Sta. Ana Cabaret and the Lerma night club had areas reserved exclusively for whites while Filipinos were secluded in a taxi dance area down the hall, fenced off from where the whites amused themselves.”
Then one day the president of the Senate, asked Governor-General F.B. Harrison to “spearhead a move to knock down the race barrier” — and Harrison agreed. Buencamino recounted that “Governor Harrison made a reservation for a small party at the Lerma cabaret. A large table was reserved for him in the middle of the dance floor in a section exclusively reserved for white VIPs. The word had got around that the governor was entertaining some important visitors. Buencamino’s account continues: “That evening the governor general’s limousine rolled into the front door of the Lerma cabaret, followed by a smaller car. The governor gathered his [Filipino] guests and their ladies and led the group to the center of cabaret section where only Occidentals had been permitted to tread before. There were startled looks from the all-white patrons as the mixed group walked in.... We...danced all night, somewhat pleased inside us we were making a little bit of history.” Soon after all the cabarets dropped the color barrier.
The onset of World War II brought to an end the old, colonial Manila. As Carmen Guerrero Nakpil wrote in her recently-published memoirs, “Myself, Elsewhere,” explained, “Strangely enough, after the war and the destruction of Ermita, bigotry faded and we all became warm and loyal friends. It had only been the diehard Ermita protocol that had kept us revising the Spanish Conquista and the Protestant Reformation and the Filipino-American War, imposing anachronistic strictures on ourselves. I recall, with embarrassment, the frissons of antipathy to Spanish and Protestants that we harbored. Their disappearance was one of the welcome consequences of the war. After facing terror and destruction together, we came to our senses and became confirmed liberals. There were no bigots in the ensuing rubble.”
Contacts which had previously been restricted to Filipino officials and their friendlier American counterparts, with the majority of the American population preferring to keep to their exalted selves, had to be broadened — and were.
