New Voices: Christine Peralta

Before the Philippines became a global producer of overseas health workers, Filipina women sought training in a range of medical and scientific knowledge across the globe. While these methods were either facilitated or curtailed by shifting colonial regimes, I foreground native women who developed modern health programs on their own terms from 1870-1948. In this talk I examine Olivia Salamanca, one of the first Filipinas to earn her medical degree in the Philippines, whose life represents a range of complexities that Filipinas (and people of color) become entangled with when they choose to engage with institutions of Western knowledge. First, Salamanca’s story is complicated because she contracted tuberculosis. Therefore, she decided to submit her body for the testing of an experimental drug she hoped would cure her disease. This act represents a common pattern that Filipinos faced within the context of knowledge production: they were valued for their bodies of knowledge and also for their bodies that could be used to expand medical or scientific knowledge. Salamanca’s medical training in infectious diseases was valued but once she was unable to utilize it, she was solely valued as a body worth experimenting on for the expansion of knowledge. This dual relationship is reflective of Filipina women’s subjugated knowledge, which I refer to as “insurgent care,” a form of devalued knowledge that was prized and sought after not only for its effectiveness, but also because of its capacity to be easily undermined and diminished by both elite Filipino male nationalists and American colonial officials in the colony. Despite this development, Filipina women found ways to express insurgent care, as a creative means to address social and medical inequality particularly of working class women and their families.

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