I wanted this on eBay – but got outbid. 
It’s one of the original brochures of the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis, where America first met the Filipinos in a setting that was essentially a human zoo, euphemistically called a “Filipino Exposition.”
An expo, what fun!?
During the week of Trump’s “go back” rhetoric, I was in Washington, D.C. doing my one-man show, “Emil Amok,” at the Capital Fringe. But the hot race talk of the day made me see a section of my show in a new way. It frames the “go back” story for every Filipino in America.
It begins with what happens after the Philippines was raped and pillaged in the Philippine-U.S. War —the rebellious post-mortem of the Spanish American War. The death toll of innocent civilians is estimated to be a million, just a fraction of the U.S. war dead.
White American show-biz entrepreneurs decided to put a happy face on that relative act of American genocide and help the government sell the U.S. colonization of the Philippines to the country and the world.
The expo featured 1,200 native Filipinos as if in a zoo: 40 different tribes, six Philippine villages, 70,000 exhibits, 725 Native soldiers.
