by Connie Triggiano
This year’s celebration of Filipino American History Month recalls the start 124 years ago of the Americanization of the Philippines.
It began with the arrival in 1901 of 600 teachers to the Philippines from the US to establish the public educational system. The teachers planted English as the medium of instruction and established a language legacy that still thrives to this day.
The teachers came on board the US Army ship called Thomas, which sailed from San Francisco, California, and docked in Manila on August 21, 1901. Henceforth called “Thomasites”, the teachers provided the cornerstone for transitioning colonial rule over the Philippines to American civilian control.
In 45 years, the mostly male teachers with 180 females were able to effectively switch the Filipinos’ mindset and language use from Spanish to English despite the former’s hold on the Filipino psyche for over 300 years.
Fast forward to 2025
Filipino teachers are returning the gesture of the Thomasites who etched their mark on the Philippines as an English-speaking nation. For the past many years, Filipino teachers have been hired by Chicago public schools for specialized disciplines, including arts and humanities, in various grade levels. In 2023 alone, 75 Filipino teachers were deployed under the US Exchange Visitor Program or J-1 program and are now assigned to many of the 630 CPS schools in the city.
Filipino CPS teachers in 2022 were feted with a picnic at Labagh Woods by Circa Pintig and Chicago Nightingales
This year, some 50 teachers recently arrived, recruited to provide teacher services across the following content areas: Special Education, Bilingual, World Language, Math, Science, and STEM. They are expected to bring unique perspectives and cross-cultural programming, enhance language acquisition, and help students grow into competent global citizens.
The Filipino students’ fluency in English was a skill model described by one of the Thomasite principals in his diary, as recorded by Dedi Turmudi of Universitas Negeri Malang, Indonesia, in an academic paper:
“We must insist that every day in his first three years of school life, the Filipino child has a dialogue lesson, and we must make him commit that lesson absolutely to memory. For instance, suppose his first lesson is as brief as this: Good morning, Pedro. Good morning, Jose. How are you this morning, Pedro? Thank you. I am very well. It would not be cruelty to animals to insist on any second-grade pupil’s committing that lesson to memory” (Martin, 2002, as cited in, Martin, 2014, p. 476).
Filipino American History Month
The annual celebration of Filipino American History Month offers a quick look back at some significant events in US-Philippines relations that deserve a space in memory.
There is the Treaty of Paris (December 10, 1898) that ended the Spanish-American War and formalized, for $20 million, the transfer of sovereignty of the Philippines from Spain to the US. All the while, the Philippines had declared indepedence on June 12, 1898 under President Emilio Aguinaldo, a freedom call that the United States ignored which in turn triggered conflict and consequently launched the Filipino American War.
From 1898 to 1901, the Philippines remained a colony of the US. Filipinos fought alongside American soldiers during WWII and finally gained independence on July 4, 1946.
In 1962, President Diosdado Macapagal honored the original declaration of independence from Spain.
This meant a break, finally, from American colonial ties and reinforced the Philippines’ determination to embrace freedom.
Connie Triggiano is currently Board Secretary of Circa-Pintig, a Chicago community theater organization. She works as Academic and English tutor assisting foreign students to pass IELTS, TOEFL, Celpic, ESL and other English exams to gain admission to universities in English speaking countries. She also trains greencard holders to pass US citizenship exams and interview. She worked for many years as Vice-President of Chicago-based Leo Burnett Advertising in its Manila office where she managed the advertising accounts of the country’s biggest brands: Procter & Gamble, Pepsi Cola International, BPI, Vicks, Wyeth and Cathay Pacific. She edited a travel newspaper in Singapore and taught college freshmen in a local university. Connie graduated with a BA degree, major in English, from the University of San Francisco in California while working as an information officer for a United Way agency. She took up MS in Advertising at the Asian Institute for the Development of Advertising, UST Graduate School.
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