This dissertation explores the dramatic experiences of African American soldiers who served in the Philippine-American War (1899–1902+), and traces their complex interactions with diverse Filipinos during the war and through the arc of formal American colonization until World War II. Following their service in Cuba during the Spanish-American War and upon their arrival in the Philippines, African American soldiers already occupied an ambivalent sociopolitical status stemming from their simultaneous ties to the state and their history of oppression in the United States. Seeking to prove their patriotism, manliness, and worthiness for full citizenship rights, black soldiers weighed their goals for racial uplift against their affiliation with a segregated U.S. Army and their role in an expanding U.S. empire in the American West, the Caribbean, and Pacific.

I argue that the Philippine-American War forced black soldiers to negotiate their ambivalence about their position as African Americans in the U.S. military, at the same time they confronted the violence of a war defined by its physical brutality on the ground and its racist imperialist mission against Filipinos fighting for independence from colonial rule. The self-sacrifices of war compelled black soldiers to grapple with and act upon their ambivalence, which was intensified by encounters with Filipinos who recognized the possibilities of shifting loyalties. In highly contingent spaces of war and U.S. empire-building, African American soldiers and (later as) veterans tested the legitimacy and effectiveness of imperialist motivations and improvised colonial processes as they fostered intense and changing relations with Filipino revolutionaries and civilians who acted within multiple capacities of resistance, alliance, and negotiation.

I foreground the subjectivities of black soldiers and Filipinos in an uneven war on the ground, drawing from multilingual research in the Philippines and the United States. I analyze the intersections between military records, government documents, letters, personal accounts, and newspapers in English, Spanish, and Tagalog. I incorporate oral histories in Tagalog, Ilocano, and English, having conducted over forty interviews with descendants of black-Filipino unions from the Philippine-American War and their contemporaries, mainly in six provinces in Luzon and the Visayas, and also in the San Francisco Bay area.