Digital History

Author:   Julian Llar
Date:1930

Annotation: Julian Ilar, a Filipino student at the University of Chicago, describes the prejudice that he and others faced.

Document: Try as we will we cannot become Americans. We may go to the farthest extreme in our effort to identify ourselves with the ways of the Americans, straightening our noses, dressing like the American in the latest fashion, pasting our faces with bleaching cream, and our hair with stacomb---but nevertheless we are not able to shake off that tenacious psychology. Always we remain sensitive, always we retain at least a subconscious fear that we are being slighted because we are Filipinos. Always there lurks over us a suspicion that perhaps after all, we do not “belong.”