Filipinos First Performers in US Amid Colonial Control

In the summer of 1899, as the United States toured its triumph from the Spanish-American War, three Filipinos rode into American arenas not as soldiers but as spectacle. Ysidora Alcantara, Felix Alcantara, and Geronimo Inocencio became the first documented Filipinos to perform professionally in the United States, recruited by Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show at the moment the Philippines passed from Spanish rule to American control.

Their presence, historians now say, reveals how popular entertainment was used to flatten distant peoples into colonial curiosities — and how those on display navigated applause, hostility and agency in a country newly at war with their homeland.

Recruited After Annexation, Displayed as “New Possessions”

The recruitment came swiftly after the Treaty of Paris on December 10, 1898, which transferred the Philippines from Spain to the United States. Within months, Ernest Cooke, manager of Buffalo Bill’s travelling spectacle, enlisted the three Filipinos for the 1899 season.

They were folded into the show’s most international segment, the “Congress of Rough Riders of the World,” which paraded horsemen from different cultures before mass audiences. According to historians Yumi Janairo Roth and Emmanuel David, the goal was explicit: to introduce Americans to “the so-called strange new people of our Colonial possessions.”

It was entertainment stitched tightly to empire, with the arena doubling as a classroom for imperial pride.

A Colossal Tour, A Hostile Welcome

Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1899 was enormous by any measure. Over 200 days, it travelled 11,111 miles, staging more than 300 performances across 130 American cities. Crowds of around 15,000 people filled the stands at each stop.

The Filipinos, however, encountered a reception no other group faced.

“Unlike the other groups that were celebrated and like receiving applause when they stepped out into those arenas,” Roth and David write, “they met a collective hiss or this booing from the crowd.”

The hostility mirrored the political moment. As the show toured, the Philippine-American War was raging thousands of kilometres away, turning Filipino bodies in the arena into stand-ins for a real conflict.

Portrayed as Unskilled, Proving the Opposite

Contemporary media coverage often dismissed the Filipino riders as poor horsemen, reinforcing racist hierarchies that framed them as inferior colonial subjects. Yet the performances told a different story.

“The reporting would cast them as unskilled horse people,” researcher Emmanuel David notes, “but they were also winning these relay races.”

By early 1900, five more Filipinos joined the troupe, expanding it to eight performers. They continued to compete — and at times excel — within a system designed to diminish them, performing skill under the weight of stereotype.

A Photograph and a Vanishing Act

The Filipinos remained with the show for just two seasons. By late 1900, their segment ended quietly. What remains is a single surviving photograph, inscribed: “Remember to Buffalo Bill’s wild west, the Filipino group.”

After that, they disappear from the record.

There were no ceremonies, no headlines marking their departure. Their role — like that of many colonial subjects — had been temporary, their usefulness tied to a political moment that soon shifted.

Why This History Still Matters

The Wild West Show episode had little immediate effect on daily life in the Philippines. It involved a handful of individuals and unfolded entirely on American soil. Yet its significance lies elsewhere.

This was the first known instance of Filipinos performing in the United States, setting early terms for how Filipinos would be seen: exotic, subordinate, and politically useful. The arena became a mirror of empire, reflecting power more loudly than truth.

At the same time, the performers were not passive. They rode, raced and endured, carving out a narrow space of agency inside a spectacle built to contain them.

For modern audiences — far removed in time but not from the legacies of empire — their story is a reminder that history often enters popular culture quietly, on horseback, under the roar of a crowd that rarely understands what it is seeing.