Broken Promises with Christopher Capozzola

The United States and the Philippines have been intimately bound by conflict. A US colony from 1898 to 1946, it remained an important US ally in the Pacific. In that time, hundreds of thousands of Filipinos fought and died for the United States, including against fellow Filipinos who opposed their US colonizers and against the Japanese occupation. Filipino immigrants also enlisted to serve on the Western Front in 1917, joined the US Navy in the 1920s, and served in American regiments during the Second World War. Despite these sacrifices, in 1946, US Congress passed the Rescission Act, retroactively barring these veterans from American citizenship and the benefits to which they were legally entitled.

Christopher Capozzola, Professor of History at MIT and author of Bound by War: How the United States and the Philippines Built America’ First Pacific Century, recently joined our program to discuss his new book, the colonization of archives, memory and forgetting, and the efforts of Filipino-American veterans to undo the broken promises of the past.