Radio broadcasting functioned as a ‘soft power’ that US-Americans effectively employed to shape Filipino consciousness during the US colonization of the Philippines in the first half of the twentieth century.

One writer said that what the US-Americans failed to do through their guns, they achieved with their music. Imitating the alien cultural practice coming from the US A was an efficient way to train and deploy Filipino talent on air. Filipino broadcasters and audiences quickly took to jazz and the English language. However, Filipino broadcasters did not merely adopt US-American broadcasting; they appropriated it and re-interpreted it for their needs. The skills and abilities they acquired in the production and reception of radio programmes were even turned into assets, which increased their competencies in the cultural field of mass media. The result is neither a faithful reflection of the colonizer nor a stubborn image of the colonized but something in between—a hybrid produced in what Homi Bhabha calls the ‘third space of enunciation’, the in-between, the liminal space, which provides an abstract but creative way to conceptually imagine where the process of hybridization takes place and where its effects may be observed. Thus, this flawed imitation is evidence of colonial authority as well as its failure, offering opportunities for the historical transformation and discursive transfiguration of the colonial narrative. The hybrid culture reveals the colonial conditions in the Philippines, while at the same time indicates opportunities for a counter-colonial discourse as the suppressed culture enters the space of the dominant discourse and upset its authority.

The celebration of the 100th year of radio broadcasting in the Philippines in 2022 reminds us to continue examining broadcasting as a structure of power, but also as a producer of resistances.