Making Mestizos

This chapter discusses the changing discourse surrounding the mixed-race children of American–Filipino liaisons. It considers how Americans perceived a preexisting tolerance for mestizos in the Philippines, and how this understanding imbued colonialist thinking about the “natural” place for American mestizos. American mestizos themselves understood their socioracial position within the Philippines and pushed back against the colonialist characterization of mixed-race people. Narratives of colonialist philanthropic organizations and stories of elite American mestizo society shifted the discourse of child abandonment in the Philippines into American benevolence, responsibility, and settler respectability. The chapter looks into the parental advice of Mrs. Winifred O'Connor Pablo in raising American mestizo children.