Youths in Frame: Indigenous Filipino Children and Transnational Display at the 1904 World’s Fair
This presentation reexamines the roles of indigenous Filipino children during the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. By using a collection of exhibition photographs taken of the five Philippine Villages (Negrito, Igorot, Bagobo, Visayan and Moro), the aim is to provide reframe these children’s lived experiences and place them at the “center” and look at their impact as emissaries to the United States and to other indigenous groups present at the fair.
You can attend this lecture online via Zoom or in person in the Herta Mohr Building, room 0.28. All are welcome; registration is required due to limited seating and to receive the Zoom link.
The Lecture
Children were the most photographed demographic during the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, usually interacting with American fairgoers, and postcolonial discourse has portrayed these children as propaganda pieces and passive objects on display. This presentation challenges this assertion by repositioning these children as central actors due to their position in the civilising narrative of the fair’s organising committee.
Many young Filipinos were photographed playing in their respective villages on the fairgrounds, but they also made frequent visits to the Model Playground area, co-mingling with children from other indigenous groups like the Ainu and Native Americans, when adults were generally kept apart. The children’s time in the Model Playground also later affected the Philippine Village’s layout, as their enjoyment of certain rides led to recreations being made by the young children and organisers along the nearby lake, causing greater engagement with fairgoers which resulted in money tips, allowing for something separate from the meager salaries dictated by the organizing committee.
Using Marleen Reichgelt’s approaches of ‘watching photography’ & ‘subaltern prosopography’, this presentation analyzes the temporal and spatial dimensions the children inhabited as they interacted with the American fairgoers and the other indigenous communities on display. It uses supplementary sources like newspaper articles and exhibition documentation, to support a “watching” of the events that the children influenced.
By using photographs to “watch” the children actively interact with the events around them rather than simply viewing their experiences in a bubble, this presentation attempts to bring their ‘story’ back into history, and as Reichgelt puts it, “confronts the historian with the ‘living’ existence of their research subject”.
The Speaker
Enrico Joaquin Lapuz is an early career scholar from the Philippines, having earned a master’s degree in Colonial & Global History at Leiden University in 2023. He is currently the web content coordinator of the Humanities Across Borders educational research program at the International Institute for Asian Studies (IIAS), Leiden. His research interests focus on Philippine history, specifically the American colonial period of the archipelago (1898-1935).
Registration
You can attend this lecture online or in person in the Herta Mohr Building, room 0.28 (IIAS Conference Room), Witte Singel 27A, Leiden. Please use the registration form on this page.