Agents of the Settler State: Incarcerated Filipino Workers, Conjugal Migration, and Indigenous Dispossession at the Iwahig Penal Colony

Abstract

Abstract: This essay examines a conjugal migration program at the Iwahig Penal Colony in the early twentieth-century Philippines that was designed by American colonial administrators and built by incarcerated Filipino men. The penal colony was part of a settler colonial project that was pushing to transform Indigenous spaces into terrains primed for the influx of land-seeking migrants from Hispanicized islands. Before the prison was opened, Indigenous Tagbanua lived at the site, which had never been governed by Euro-American colonizers. US officials cast Tagbanua families as impediments to development. The penal colony's incarcerated men were from lowland areas that had come under colonial rule for centuries. Colonial administrators saw their labor, conversely, as the linchpin that would turn the land, and eventually the entire island, into a terrain for commercial agriculture. Bureaucrats worked to transport women to Iwahig who had been in romantic relationships with prisoners before their arrests in order to support this project. Even though only 10 percent of incarcerated men were ever joined by their female partners, state agents cynically characterized the nuclear families formed through conjugal migration as institutions that sat at the foundation of the penal colony's settler colonial goals. Ultimately, American colonizers used these logics to confiscate Indigenous land that they identified as "underutilized," and integrate it into the colonial political economy.