Staff Favorites is a new interview-based series in which staff members share favorite items from Manuscript Division collections. Here we speak with Manuscript Division cataloging librarian Joy Orillo-Dotson.
First, can you tell us a little bit about what you do at the Library?
I’m a cataloging librarian in the Manuscript Division. I work with senior cataloging specialist Bennett Heggestad and other staff in the division to accession and catalog collections and perform a variety of other related responsibilities. Through that collective effort, we are involved in the life of a collection from the time the Manuscript Division receives it and throughout our work to enable and maintain access to the material.
So, tell us about this collection and photo album.
Sure, this is from the K. C. Emerson Papers. It’s a small collection processed by Laura Kells and originally cataloged by Bennett. I later updated the catalog record to include additional material. Emerson was a U.S. Army officer, an entomologist, and a prisoner of war in the Philippines who survived the Bataan Death March during World War II.
Like my former colleague Laura Kells, who processed the Emerson Papers, there are lots of things in this collection that I find interesting. I especially like the numerous international recipes Emerson recorded in his notebooks, especially the one for adobo, arguably the unofficial national dish of the Philippines. Seeing it here makes me think about how wartime food shortages impacted regular people, how they adapted to those shortages by tinkering with their recipes, how they probably hungered not only for food but nourishment from life beyond the war. It also makes me think of how adobo has evolved over time and in kitchens all across the Filipino diaspora, including mine.
But I really find myself drawn to this photo album. Flipping through the pages, you see different pockets of life against the backdrop of war, including the Philippine countryside, the markets, and the daily lives of Indigenous people, Filipino servants, and common folk and families. You can imagine how daily encounters with machinery, uniformed soldiers, weapons, and other symbols of war changed their lives.
A lot of the images are of common activities, like bowling matches and cockfights, or household items like irons, or the rattan chairs you see in many people’s homes, which my dad has talked about, reminding me of the impact of the war on industries producing these and other household objects. There are báhay kúbo, or “nipa huts,” which remind me of a traditional folk song of the same name that my mom taught me as a child. One of those báhay kúbo is literally being moved on sticks by townsfolk. My dad explained that this was one way people in a community participated in one another’s lives. Those homes were built with sturdy yet lightweight material so that they could be moved if necessary, such as during a flood.
But in looking at those photos, it’s hard not to imagine how those communities experienced the disruption of war, how differently their frame of reference must have been compared to soldiers like Emerson, and what kinds of cross-cultural dialogues they all must have had. I also think of my late great-uncle who shared a little of his experience surviving the Bataan Death March as Emerson did, both arriving at that specific path, yet coming from and returning to very different lives. Some of the images also seem to throw things out of time – like the military vehicles that were later repurposed and became the basis for the country’s postwar jeepney transportation system, but here they are war machinery.
In other words, there’s an intersection of culture and war in this album, and a throughline from past to present, one that for me also evokes photographs from my dad’s childhood, when he remembers finding shells of bombs where he and other kids would play. Emerson was documenting his war service and experiences, but there’s also a story about Filipino identity across time – one about Filipino people who’ve struggled to adapt to war, and to international migration, and to colonially imposed education systems that were so foreign to people’s lived experiences at first yet have become so integral.
The historian Daniel Immerwahr writes that history textbooks and overviews often treat America’s territorial empire as “an episode rather than a feature,” where the acquisition of a new territory becomes a notable event but the colonies themselves somehow “vanish.” Photo albums like this help show that isn’t the case. I previously cataloged atlases and at times looking through this album has been like the experience of looking through an atlas: You can see the throughline, the continuity, the far-reaching tentacles of war and occupation disseminated across culture, land, the movement of people, the manipulation of resources and environments and technologies, the redefining of geographic boundaries, all perpetuated through time. Somehow the movement and stillness of those events come together in photographs like this, as they do in maps, showing the relationships between people, land, technologies, industries, and more. Together they help bring a sense of clarity, because these aren’t just individual images of people frozen in wartime. It’s one of the things that makes research so powerful, the ability to find something that may help you understand better your connection to other people through the smallest of details.
What else have you brought out here?
I also have a couple of miscellaneous things from other collections. I always like finding doodles, sketches, any kind of handmade surprise in a collection item. There are so many unexpected things in the collections: ship’s logs with dramatic sketches of shipwrecks, little books with handmade binding and specimens of type and letterpress, mysterious handwritten alchemical books, travel journals with hand-drawn maps, and little things that remind me of places where I’ve lived. I love this shipwreck image especially.
I also brought out an annotated typescript from the Estella T. Weeks Papers, which shows sketches of Shaker dance steps and a musical notation the Shakers developed in the early nineteenth century. They’re meant to be there, but they do look like doodles. Even if you’re not particularly interested in Shaker history, there’s so much visual appeal there.
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“An episode rather than a feature…” Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 14.