Christine Peralta

Nursing the Nation: Examining the History of Early Migrant Nurses and the Origins of University Nursing Programs in the Philippines

Nursing In the Decades Leading Up to Independence

In September 1943, Julita Sotejo, a Filipino nursing graduate student at the University of

Chicago, submitted her thesis on nursing administration. Her academic milestone is significant to

the history of nursing because it essentially was a “how to” on modernizing nursing in the

Philippines. Sotejo wanted nurses to go to college. In other words, she wanted to emphasize a

nursing curriculum that paired practical training in the hospital with theoretical training in the

classroom. For instance, while the U.S. established Philippine General Hospital’s Nursing

School under the direction of the University of the Philippines, nursing students were not

officially recognized as students of the university. In contrast, Sotejo wanted nursing students to

participate in college life and receive a broad education in the sciences and humanities, which

was a departure from the nursing education system established by the U.S. medical regime. She

envisioned that this university-level nursing program would create a feminized college-educated

workforce that would aid in rebuilding the Philippines, which was then in the midst of World

War II.1 Upon returning to the Philippines, Sotejo established the first college of nursing at the

University of the Philippines. This training model was replicated in different universities

throughout the country by a number of other Filipino nursing educators. Although this cohort of

early migrant nurses intended to train a population of nurses to benefit the Filipino nation, they

inadvertently created a permanently migratory labor force, since nurses with a college education

were more likely to leave the country permanently.

Although Sotejo’s work in the Philippines and abroad was a critical contribution to the

profession of nursing, she is a figure who has largely been obscured in the literature.2 There are a

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number of reasons that her work in nurse professionalization has yet to be fully written about or

historicized. The primary reason Sotejo is not in the historiography is because the development

of university nurse training occurred after the Philippines became a commonwealth. At this point

the Philippines was no longer a colony of the U.S., though the U.S. still retained military and

political influence over its former possession. The history of nursing in the Philippines has

mostly been fascinated with two periods: the colonial period (1898-1935) as well as the period

following World War II, in particular after the passage of the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965 which

allowed for easier naturalization processes for college educated professionals (1965-present).

Comparatively less attention has been paid to the history of nursing after the Philippines began

its transition to independence.3

This blind spots leaves some basic questions about the history of nursing in the

Philippines unanswered, such as: What did nurse training in the Philippines look like after U.S.

colonial medical officials left the Philippines? Additionally, while we know that there was a

mass nursing emigration post-World War II to the U.S., who were the medical professionals on

the ground who were training nurses in the Philippines? Ostensibly Filipina nursing faculty were

training nursing hopefuls at a sufficiently advanced level to give their education parity with

nations that have been historically understood as more medically “advanced.” But who were

these nursing professors that engineered a program extensive enough to accommodate such a

large migration of specialized health care workers? And most importantly, what were the

motivations of women like Julita Sotejo to educate nurses, who provided the medical talent to

educate Filipino nursing cohorts from the 1950s-1970s?

To begin to answer these questions, it is important to look at Sotejo’s biography, because

her life and career in nursing expands from the American colonial period to after World War II,

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which fills an important gap in the history of nursing in the Philippines. By centering the

biography of a nurse that challenges historical narratives, we are able to re-interpret conclusions.

As Grypma and Choy state, nurse biography as a method can be used to “to foreground nurses

who have been ignored, misunderstood, or forgotten.”4 Therefore, this paper will foreground

three phases in Sotejo’s life: First, her post-graduate experiences as a Rockefeller Nurse Fellow

in the U.S. and Canada (1941-1943). Secondly, her development and establishment of a Nursing

College at the University of the Philippines (1943-1948). Lastly, her participation in the global

health movement post World War II (1950-1960).

Filipina Nurse Fellows Experiences Abroad

In 1941, the Rockefeller Foundation granted Sotejo a Rockefeller Nursing Fellowship to train

and take post-graduate courses at the Yale School of Nursing and the University Of Toronto

School Of Nursing. The Foundation sponsored a nursing fellowship that was highly selective,

only sending two Filipinas each year to do post-graduate work in North America and Europe.

Established in 1921, the creation of the scholarship was a joint effort on the part of the

Rockefeller Foundation and the Philippine colonial government. This meant that candidates went

through a rigorous screening process that necessitated the approval from both the Foundation and

Filipino representatives, who determined who was best suited to fulfill a dire need in the

country’s medical system. Although the fellowship was established during the U.S. colonial

period, the Foundation continued to give money to the Philippines after it became an

independent country.5

The Foundation aspired to create a global medical network that extended throughout Asia

which provided fellowships for advance medical training. For instance in 1929, the same year

that Sotejo graduated from the Philippine General Hospital’s School of Nursing, the Rockefeller

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Foundation partnered with the Red Cross to send six Thai nurses to the Philippines to undergo

training at the Philippine General Hospital. Additionally, medical practitioners from the

Philippines did tours in newly annexed territories and colonial possessions of the U.S., such as

Puerto Rico and Hawaii. Therefore, nursing in the Philippines became an institution that

represented the promise of advanced medical training and modernity of the Philippines as well as

Asia, facilitated by imperialism.6

Due to the colonial legacy of the Philippines and the sustained financial support of the

Rockefeller Foundation after 1935, Filipino nurses who pursued advanced graduate nursing

training abroad in the 1940s were in a liminal space. Their relationship to the Foundation was

shaped and informed by a colonial past, but the U.S. was not the only place they visited. They

encountered Nursing Colleges and hospitals which were outside of the metropole, but in

conversation with the medical practices and racial logics of the U.S. For example, Iyko Day’s

work looks at how the racialization of Asian labor in the U.S. and Canada developed and worked

in conversation with one another.7 The nurses came in contact with a racial hierarchy in North

America that was quite different from the one they experienced in the Philippines and yet was

still informed by colonialism. Although the Philippine General Hospital was a colonial

institution, the majority of the patient care population was Filipino, while in Canada and the U.S.

Filipino nurses abroad would be working mostly with white patients and white instructors.

Encountering white medical spaces created difficulties for many nurses while they

pursued post-graduate work abroad. These narratives are important because they not only capture

the history of nurse training for Filipinos, but also present a rare window into the early

experiences of international students in the U.S. and Canada, particularly women of color in

STEM fields. For example, many nurses were assessed as having insufficient English skills,

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despite English being their language of instruction from grade school to high school, and the

nurses’ exposure to technical medical language in nursing schools prior to studying abroad for

post graduate work. A number of Filipinas also pursued their RN degrees in nursing at American

institutions, and this was their second time studying abroad. While Sotejo was described as

having an uncommonly good mind, and although she was an alumnus and head of the nursing

school at the Philippine General Hospital, she still struggled to get along with her professors at

Yale and Toronto for behavior reasons.8

For example, Sotejo and the other RF nurse fellow that year, Leonor Malay, completed

studies at Yale University in the summer of 1941. Both nurses were criticized for their

unwillingness to do ward duty. Although their refusal to do ward duty was framed as

disobedience, the dean at the Yale University School of Nursing, Effie J. Taylor originally did

not want to assign them to ward duty out of concern that the Filipino nurses would not be treated

well by the general population, writing “It was not possible to assign Miss M. and Miss Sotejo to

the wards first because Miss T. did not feel they wanted to go ward duty and second, because she

wasn’t sure how they might be accepted if assigned to regular duty in the hospitals wards.”9

Therefore, Malay and Sotejo’s instructors were not sure that the patients and medical

practitioners would be able to handle working with visible minority nurses.

After the two nurse fellows completed their time in New Haven and had moved on to the

University of Toronto, Taylor wrote a letter complaining to the Foundation about Sotejo and

Malay’s conduct at Yale. She stated that the two women never did ward duty because they

refused to do the work. Taylor interpreted the nurses’ hesitancy as feeling “unequal to the

responsibility,”10 implying that they needed to do more work in the ward. Assuming that the

nurses refused the work due to a lack of knowledge, Yale faculty members decided to require the

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two the two nursing fellows do three hours of ward duty a week. When the nurses refused to do

so, Taylor enrolled both women in a remedial course to refresh their memory on basic nursing

skills. However, both Sotejo and Malay had experience with ward duty as nursing students

nearly a decade prior, and both had been instructors at the PGH nursing school, meaning they

had likely once taught the course they were being required them to take. Sotejo was on

fellowship to study nurse administration and therefore would get no helpful insights on how to

run a training institution from doing menial labor. While the intentions of Yale are not certain, it

appears as if the nursing faculty were attempting to use the fellows as an extra source of labor

and were particularly frustrated when both Malay and Sotejo refused to be exploited in this way.

Although the faculty operated as if the nurses were deficient in knowledge, Sotejo’s record is

filled with glowing reviews about her exceptional intelligence as the Foundation wrote, “[Sotejo]

is highly intelligent and will return to a key position when she is able to get back to Manila.”11

Therefore Sotejo was not lacking in intelligence, but her intelligence was not respected.

Requiring the nurses to work a certain number of hours in the ward and to take a remedial

courses were ways of shaming the two women into doing labor below their skill-set. As more

time passed and the women had still not balked, some of the nursing professors cornered Sotejo

with a baby and demonstrated the proper way to bathe the child. The gesture was an attempt to

force Sotejo into a specific way of practicing nursing. Questioning both the nurses’ intelligence

was also a means of policing their decision not to perform the labor. Perhaps because the

students were international, the faculty were more willing to frame the students as merely unable

to perform particular tasks, rather than unwilling to do them. It also is a reflection of the rigid

power structures in the nursing school. While Sotejo and Malay may have thought the nursing

faculty they met could engage in a dialogue among equals and direct their program of study,

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such feedback was not appreciated. Experiences such as these may have also been one of the

reasons motivating her to design a curriculum which looked beyond the practical aspects of

training.

The hostility and confusion the nurses faced when they attempted to challenge and

question hierarchical order in the nursing school can also be understood as what Kramer and

Choy call “inclusionary racial formation.” This is the belief that colonized subjects would one

day prove they were ready for self-rule, but required American tutelage and supervision.

Therefore, while this tutelage was in effect, it rationalized inferior treatment and the nurse

faculty’s demand for menial care work.12 In a similar case study that Choy analyzes, Ines

Cayaban, a Filipino nurse, received a fellowship from the Daughters of the American Revolution

to pursue graduate training at the University of Chicago. However, the stipulations of the award

were altered from a fellowship to a work study in which she earned her room and board for

school by being a full-time nanny to a widower’s son. Interestingly, Cayaban and Sotejo were

colleagues at the Philippine General Hospital, and probably applied to the same awards, since it

was a Rockefeller Nurse Fellow who encouraged Cayaban to study abroad. The opportunity to

study abroad was critical because the Philippines lacked any sort of post-graduate training in

nursing until the late 1920s.13 Therefore an education abroad was absolutely critical to become

faculty or rise in the ranks of nurse leadership. The scholarships that nurses pursued to provide

funding were often based on colonial models and rigid racial hierarchies that were not revised

even after the Philippines gained independence. For instance, the legacy of imposing gendered

care labor on to Filipinos persisted long after the independence. Therefore there is definitely an

under examined gendered aspect to inclusionary racial formation.

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Although colonial models of racialization persisted, nurses in the Philippines had already

established their own forms of support, and created their own chains of command, which

oftentimes were in conflict with pre-existing colonial forms. For example, it appeared that Yale

instructors felt especially aggrieved when both nurses refused to do ward duty. As a result, they

could not isolate just one offender, although it appeared that Sotejo experienced the brunt of the

criticism. The unequal scrutiny placed on Sotejo quite possibly had to do with her promise and

her temperament, which had been described as unstatesmanlike, but also that Lenor Malay was

considered more easygoing than Sotejo. For example, in a separate incident in which Malay

complained that the instruction she was receiving at the University of Toronto was merely a

repeat of the work she had already done in the Philippines, the Foundation sat Malay down to

“point out the limitations of her background and what Toronto had to offer.”14 She did not

complain again about the easiness of the program. Malay’s unwillingness to back down in terms

of ward duty had to do with the fact that Sotejo was her boss at the PGH. This meant that once

Malay left for the Philippines, she would have to directly answer to Sotejo. Seven years later,

they would work together as dean and assistant dean of the college of nursing. Therefore, the

resistance that nurses expressed was the product of new power bases forming outside of merely a

colonial order. This meant that graduate student nurses abroad were not only beholden to

authority figures in the program abroad, but also had to answer to authority figures back home.

In the extreme case of Malay, she had to demonstrate her loyalty to leadership in the Philippines

while in these white medical spaces.

In the fall semester of 1941, Sotejo and Malay began their post at the University of

Toronto. Both nurses flourished academically at Toronto. Toronto had a much more diverse

international nurse population, hosting 39% of all the Rockefeller Foundation’s international

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Nurse Fellows. This meant that Malay and Sotejo took courses with RF nurses from Brazil,

China, India, and Puerto Rico. In addition to the nurses sponsored by the Foundation, Toronto

also admitted a large cohort of African American nurses. Although they found the nature of their

research much more agreeable, it was not only exclusively medical spaces like the hospital ward

and the classroom where Sotejo and Malay raised issues. When they identified problems with

housing, the faculty fell into racial stereotypes. When the nurses complained that the bathroom

facilities were disgusting, a faculty member at Toronto responded to their complaints by stating

that housing in Canada was excellent in comparison to the housing in the Philippines. She also

stated that Filipinos tried to cheat the system and get the cheapest housing possible. This

statement racialized the women as having inferior housing simply based on their country of

origin, and that implicitly Western housing would have to be of a higher standard. It also framed

Filipino nurses as devious by merely attempting to gain access to more resources or avoid feeling

discomfort. Similar to the idea that Malay and Sotejo should be happy with any type of

instruction they were receiving, the faculty in both Canada and the U.S. both diminished the

opinions of the nurses when they were less than ecstatic over the opportunities that the schools

provided them. These moves to denigrate the nurses and interrogate their basic interpretations

was a tactic of wearing Filipino women down to question their basic assumptions and

experiences. It also operated on multiple faulty premises, such as that the North American

experience was normative and ideal, and anyone who wanted more than this was being

unrealistically foolish. The idea that Filipino nurses should be content with what was given to

them was a persistent dynamic in higher education for both women of color as well as

international students. Writing on the experiences of black women in the academy, Tamura

Lomax argues that there is a zero mentality that is applied to the experiences of women of color

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in institutions of higher learning. Since colonized women are perceived to be experiencing gross

levels of disenfranchisement and abuse, when two Filipino women are granted access to

privileges that their normative counterparts get more easily, such as education and housing,

Filipino nurses are supposed to be happy to have been given a seat at the table. Therefore when

acting outside of the role of a grateful pupil, the nurses were racialized as inadequate students,

too poor and backwards to evaluate what is or is not good housing or nurse training.

These systematic erasures that invalidated the experiences of Filipinos and racialized

them as inferior present a consistent theme in the relations between Western and Filipino health

officials. When Americans came to the Philippines they created a wide scale health and

sanitation program in the Philippines in conjunction with the Filipino elite, who were also very

much concerned with health and sanitation efforts after the Philippine American War.15 But

American doctors de-emphasized the crucial role that native medical practitioners on the ground

played. Instead, in order to rationalize their presence in the Philippines to a general population in

the U.S. who had never heard of the Philippine Islands, medical officers glorified their

contribution in the Philippines. Colonial doctors liked to boast that health and sanitation in the

Philippines was in the dark ages prior to the contributions of the American medical colonial

regime. Similarly, the treatment of Sotejo and other nursing colleagues show these systematic

erasures. A common idea in the scholarship is that nursing came to the Philippines due to

colonialism. This idea is held by scholars both critical and celebratory of U.S. empire. However,

when we examine the experiences of early migrant nurses in North America, faculty member

may have respected that Sotejo wanted to advance nurse training in the Philippines, but they

wanted her to do that while also performing respectful subservience. Therefore paradoxically just

as much as they may have helped Sotejo with her education, American faculty also obstructed

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the efforts of those who were working to professionalize nursing in the Philippines if it

threatened the racial order that they were invested in maintaining in their programs.

Developing a Filipino Model of Nursing

Another common misconception is that the U.S. merely applied a U.S. model of nursing to the

Philippines, but in the 1940s there was no unified model of nursing. Through Sotejo’s study of

different nursing patterns within Canada and the U.S., she outlined three organizational patterns:

primary division of instruction, nursing school with a subordinate position, and affiliation model.

The primary division of instruction model treated nursing colleges like other colleges

within the university. In her research, Sotejo found four schools operating under this model: Yale

University, Western Reserve University, Vanderbilt University and the University of California.

The second model placed the nursing school in a subordinate position. The University of

Washington, University of Oregon and the University of Colorado are examples of such

American schools that managed their nursing programs under a subordinate model. Affiliation,

the third model, was when a hospital program was loosely affiliated with the University, such as

Evanston Hospital School’s affiliation with Northwestern University. Philippine General

Hospital (PGH) also organized their nurse training program under a loose affiliation with the

University of the Philippines. Out of the three, Sotejo proposed to model UP’s College of

Nursing after the primary division of instruction model. Sotejo promoted “The school as a

primary division of instruction” because she felt it gave nursing education more freedom for

study, experimentation, and demonstration.

Among her recommendation of how the program should be structured, Sotejo also

selected what type of curriculum at the University of the Philippines’ College of Nursing should

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have. She argued that instead of a program with two to four years of general study followed by a

professional program, a combined curriculum lasting four to five years would be best. Hence,

instead of simply copying a U.S. model, Sotejo reviewed various nursing school models and

curriculums and decided which one would be most effective for instruction in the Philippines.

Building an entire college of nursing required Sotejo to have the ability to predict trends, and this

is intellectual labor that has not been credited to Filipino women.

In a similar vein, although the development of nursing in the Philippines is often seen as

bi-national, where concepts of instruction, theory, and nursing practice migrated to the

Philippines from the U.S., the development of a professional nursing program was multinational.

From the sources Sotejo relied on her dissertation, we see that she used literature in the U.S.,

Canada, Europe and the Philippines. Sotejo’s dissertation also drew from “her personal

knowledge of nursing education and of the health picture in the Philippines,” demonstrating that

her perspective was valuable.16 Professional nursing was not grafted into the Philippines

seamlessly, instead requiring native professionals to apply their own knowledge in dialogue with

Western models to create a nursing program tailored for the Philippines.

On May 13, 1948, the University of the Philippines created the College of Nursing,

approving Sotejo’s proposed curriculum and program. Starting with the University of

Philippines, Rockefeller nurse Julita Sotejo created the College of Nursing at the University on

May 13, 1948 and became the College’s first dean. Three other RF nurses followed Sotejo’s

footsteps, becoming the first deans of newly established Colleges. Cesara Tan became the dean

for the College of Nursing at the Southwestern College (1951), Socorro Salamanca became the

dean of Nursing at Manila Central University (1951), and Rosario Sison-Diamante became dean

of Nursing at the Philippines’ Women’s University (1964). Additionally, Sotejo, Tan,

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Salamanca, and Sison-Diamante’s Rockefeller nurse colleagues became faculty that taught in

these newly established programs: Alma F. Lara became a professor at the College of Nursing at

the University of the Philippines (1949), Leonor Malay became assistant dean at the College of

Nursing at the University of the Philippines (1956), and Juana Basuel Crispino served as

assistant professor for the College of Nursing at the University of the Philippines (1964).17

Filipina medical knowledge in the world

The recognition of Sotejo’s research across different points of the globe reveals the way in which

mid-twentieth century medical nursing geographies complicate our present day understanding of

the hierarchy of medical knowledge. Sotejo’s career was marked by multiple achievements that

demonstrated skill in developing innovative nurse training techniques that others wanted to adapt

to other locales. As if consciously aware of the importance of her position and impact to the

field, Sotejo meticulously saved correspondence between her and the colleagues that consulted

her research and invited her to give lectures at their universities and hospitals. For example, the

American University of Beirut consulted Sotejo’s research on nursing education, while Kango,

the Japanese Nurse Association publication, translated her article, “Nursing Education in the

Philippines” into Japanese. She gave lectures to the Associazioni Infermiere Professionali in

Rome, Italy and at the nursing program at the University of Florida Gainesville.18

Sotejo’s understanding of nursing administration and education was sought after and

replicated in countries and regions that in the 1950s had yet to develop nursing education to the

degree of the Philippines. In the wake of World War II, when there was a desperate need for an

increase in medical personnel, countries desired to create nurse training facilities that would meet

the medical needs of its people. The countries that once sought Sotejo’s advice on implementing

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nursing education now represent some of the biggest receiving nations for Filipino nurses in the

present day. From 1957-1960, Margaret L. Shetland, an American nurse, maintained

correspondence with Julita Sotejo, now dean of the College of Nursing at the University of

Philippines. Shetland, who worked as the Chief Nursing Advisor for the Health Division in the

Philippines, sought Sotejo’s professional advice. After Shetland finished her tenure in the

Philippines and began working at the National League for Nursing as a nursing education

consultant, she continued to seek Sotejo’s advice, seeing her as an important resource on nursing

education even after she had left the Philippines and relocated to New York. This implies

Sotejo’s expertise on nursing education was not only relevant within the context of the

Philippines, but also for nurse education programs in the U.S.

In one letter, Shetland asked for Sotejo’s insights on a paper she was writing about

nursing principles that were universal in nature. “It is hoped that the ideas in the paper will have

a fairly universal application rather than be limited to the particular situation existing in any

country.”1 As the occupation of nursing globally, the concept of “universality” was an

increasingly desirable trait. If nursing principles were understood as universal, this meant that

newly trained nurses could seamlessly adapt to different contexts. But as Sotejo’s work in the

U.S. demonstrates that universality in nursing required intensive study of alternative models and

negotiating with the power-brokers on the ground in order to actually construct a new way of

nursing.

Although Sotejo’s work in the Philippines and abroad was a critical contribution

to the history of nursing and migration, she is a figure who has largely been obscured in the

literature. There are a number of reasons that her work in nursing professionalization has yet to

be fully written about or historicized. This paper has addressed three of these reasons. First, the

1 Margaret L. Shetland to Julieta Sotejo, August 8, 1957; October 10, 1957; February 5, 1960.

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lack of attention of the history of nursing the years leading up to Philippine independence.

Second, the misconception that the American medical professionals brought a U.S. model of

nursing to the Philippines. As this paper demonstrates, by analyzing what that looks like on the

ground we see that it was early nurse migrants who constructed an entirely distinct model of

nursing to the Philippines. The conclusion of this paper would like to talk about these themes in

broader terms. First, the understanding that the nature of modern medicine is a universal despite

health scholarship that has studied a number of barriers that lead to health inequities, such as

economic and infrastructure limitations. Therefore medicine is not universal, but is subject to the

specificity of a particular locale. This means the work of native health specialists on the ground

who translated medical ideas and developed them for a specific non-western context are often the

card hidden in the magician’s sleeve. In other words, we celebrate the universality of medicine

and its applicability to multiple contexts at the expense of glossing over the ways that native

specialists have had to work through hurdles like language difference, cultural competence, and

scarce economic resources, in order to make a medical idea like college level nursing applicable

to a particular context.

On a related note Filipino nurses and their migration to other countries is oftentimes used

to symbolize the universality of modern medicine. In an article published by the Washington

Post, the writer marvels at the adaptability and variability of Filipino labor in multiple contexts,

“What makes the Philippine migration remarkable is its scope, no other Asian country has so

many types of workers…in so many different places, from Hong Kong to Italy, Chad to

Kazakhstan.”2 Therefore the ability for women to receive specialized training in one country and

practice in another is often a testament to the fungibility of nursing. But this narrative has a cost,

2

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the scholarship has a tendency to treat nurses from the Philippines as if they are inherently

destined for another location other than their home. In other words the moniker “Filipino nurse”

is often synonymous to “foreign trained nurse.” This is not to say that it is not worthy pursuit to

study foreign trained nurses from the Philippines, but this should not be at the expense of the

work that nurses have done to serve national causes of their home country too.

Notes

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1 Julita Sotejo, “A University School of Nursing in the University of the Philippines” (MS thesis, University of Chicago, 1943). 2 There has been a few nursing biographies written about her in the 1970s: L. Aragon, “Life’s Work and Philosophy of Dean Julita V. Sotejo,” ANPHI Papers 13 (1978): 2-9; J.A. Samson, “Julita V. Sotejo, Aribiter of Charity,” St. Thomas Nursing Journal 4 (1965): 183-185; Also she was featured briefly in: Catherine Ceniza Choy, Empire of Care: Nursing and Migration in Filipino American History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003), 56,88; Estela Duque, “Modern tropical architecture: medicalisation of space in early twentieth-century Philippines,” arq: Architectural Research Quarterly 13 (2009): 261-271.3 Brush also talks about the absence of Philippine nursing literature in the interwar period in, Barbara Brush, “The Potent Lever of Toil: Nursing Development and the Exportation in the Postcolonial Philippines,” American Journal of Public Health, 100 (2010): 1572-1581.4 Sonya J. Grypma, “Critical Issues in the Use of Biographic Methods in Nursing History,” Nursing History Review 13 (2005): 171; originally seen in Catherine Ceniza Choy, “Nurses Across Borders: Foregrounding International Migration in the Nursing History,” Nursing History Review 18 (2010): 15-16. 5 Rockefeller Foundation Records, Fellowships, Fellowship Recorder Cards, Julita Sotejo Fellowship Card, Record Group 10.2, Box 14, Rockefeller Archive Center, (hereafter cited as Fellowship Recorder Cards). 6 Rockefeller Foundation Records, Siriraj Hospital-(Nursing Education), 1923-1930.7 Iyko Day, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). 8 Rockefeller Foundation Records, Fellowships, Fellowship Recorder Cards, Julita Sotejo Fellowship Card.9 Rockefeller Foundation Records, Fellowships, Fellowship Recorder Cards, Julita Sotejo and Leonor Malay Fellowship Card.10 Ibid. 11 Ibid. 12 Catherine Ceniza Choy, “Nurses Across Borders: Foregrounding International Migration in the Nursing History,” Nursing History Review 18 (2010): 20. 13 Ibid.14 Rockefeller Foundation Records, Fellowships, Fellowship Recorder Cards, Leonor Malay Fellowship Card.15 For a narrative that tells the history of medicine from the perspectives from the U.S.: Warwick Anderson, Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race, Medicine, and Hygiene in the Philippines (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). For a narrative that talks about the history of medicine from the perspective of the Filipinos: Reynaldo C. Ileto, “Cholera and the Origins of the American Sanitary Order in the Philippines,” in Imperial Medicine and the Indigenous Society.

16 Rockefeller Foundation Records, Fellowships, Fellowship Recorder Cards, Julita Sotejo Fellowship Card.

17 Julita Sotejo, Fellowship Recorder Card, RG 1.1 242 E Fellowship Recorder Files, RAC, Tarrytown, New York; Cesarea Tan, Rockefeller Fellowship Card, RG 1.1 242 E Fellowship Recorder Files, RAC, Tarrytown, New York; Socorro Salamanca Fellowship Recorder Card, RG 1.1 242 E Fellowship Recorder Files, RAC, Tarrytown, New York; Rosario Sison-Diamante Fellowship Recorder Card, RG 1.1 242 E Fellowship Recorder Files, RAC, Tarrytown, New York; Juana Basuel Crispino Fellowship Recorder Card, RG 1.1 242 E Fellowship Recorder Files, RAC, Tarrytown, New York. In 1964, Crispino became assistant professor for the College of Nursing at the University of Philippines, Quezon City. Alma F. Lara, Fellowship Recorder Card, RG 1.1 242 E Fellowship Recorder Files, RAC, Tarrytown, New York. In 1949, Lara became the instructor at the College of Nursing at the University of the Philippines; Leonor J. Malay, Fellowship Recorder Card, RG 1.1 242 E Fellowship Recorder Files, RAC, Tarrytown, New York. In 1956, Leonor Malay RF nurse fellow who studied abroad in the U.S. along with Sotejo became her assistant dean at the University of the Philippines.

18 L.e Pomers to Julita V. Sotejo, July 26, 1958, Sotejo Papers , Julita V. Sotejo Papers, University of the Philippines Library, Diliman, Quezon City (hereafter cited as Sotejo Papers); Letter from Yasuko Otake to Julita V. Sotejo, June 2 1954, Sotejo Papers; Febe Tedesco to Sotejo, October 10, 1958, Sotejo Papers; Dorothy Smith to Julita V. Sotejo, July 9, 1963, Sotejo Papers.