Filipinos and Americans: A Love-Hate Relationship by Virginia Benitez Licuanan

Filipinos and Americans: A Love-Hate Relationship by Virginia Benitez Licuanan is a heavily illustrated history of American colonial rule in the Philippines, told through the story of Baguio and the Baguio Country Club. Published with a cover design that places oval portrait photographs of 10 key figures from both sides of the Fil-American encounter, Aguinaldo to Reagan, around the central title, the book moves through the colonial period, from the Spanish-era search for Cordillera gold through the pensionado generation of the 1930s. Chapter titles like “Colonial Schizophrenia: A Caucasian Disease” and “The White Man’s Refuge: Hill Stations and Social Clubs” signal the author’s tone throughout: sharp, historically grounded, and irreverent enough to note, in a caption of a 1908 Manila club photograph, that these particular colonizers “allowed dogs.”

Licuanan came to the subject with unusual credentials. The widow of Brigadier General Francisco H. Licuanan Jr. and daughter of a pensionado sent to America in 1908, she spent 20 years writing the widely-read “Incidentally” column for the Manila Chronicle, a society column that functioned in practice as an influential opinion platform, credited with pushing Olongapo back into Filipino hands and shifting Philippine Independence Day away from July 4th on the grounds that the date was too colonial.

This book is unique because it highlights not so much the Filipinos fight for political freedom. But their fight for social equality which was almost as long and perhaps even more difficult. Placed in the beautiful background of Baguio, the first and only “American City” in the Philippines and recounted in a manner that makes historical characters come to life, this historical study becomes even more fascinating to the modern-day Filipino who now takes his social privileges for granted.