UC San Diego

United States national narratives deploy a selective memory in order to construct the U.S. as a benevolent global power and enable its political and economic interests abroad. In the case of the Philippines and Puerto Rico, the U.S. relied on U.S. styled education systems established during the colonial period, to function as "technologies of forgetting" and suppress memories that counter the narrative of U.S. imperial benevolence. This dissertation explores how Los Angeles Filipino American and New York Puerto Rican performance poets remember U.S. imperialism in the Philippines and Puerto Rico in the face of institutionalized efforts and social pressure that encourage systematic forgetting. These performance poets educate their communities about forgotten and current histories of U.S. imperialism to organize for social change but these histories are not institutionally recognized. My analysis relies on Foucauldian conceptualizations of the power of institutionalizing knowledge and the disqualified or subjugated knowledges that institutionalizing processes such as language policies, public education and assimilationist paradigms produce. Despite the U.S. nation state's resources for reproducing institutionalized histories, neither resistance to the narrative of U.S. colonial benevolence nor the histories this narrative omits can be completely eradicated. Instead, the reproduction of these subjugated knowledges takes place in alternative spaces and through alternative pedagogical practices. Examining the spaces and transnational practices that enable Los Angeles Filipino American and New York Puerto Rican performance poets to construct and reproduce historical narratives challenging institutionalized U.S. history, I argue that these performance poets trace a genealogy of global power that engages the politics of remembering U.S. imperialism to enable social change. Put simply, these poets reconstruct the past to imagine and work towards a different future. "Making History from U.S. Colonial Amnesia" acknowledges both how Filipino American and U.S. Puerto Rican performance poets make history by intervening in a politics of remembering U.S. imperialism and make history by actively participating in local and transnational social movements