"Their Flame Flares for but a Little While": Dencio Cabanela, Pancho Villa, and the Production of Prizefighting's First 'National Commodity,' ca. 1918-1930
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This study considers the articulation and exchanges of discourses of race and tropicality, and narratives of American colonial rule, about the bodies of Filipino prizefighters during the 1910s-1930s in a trans-imperial sphere. It tracks these through the Anglophone sporting press, examining their confluence with prizefighting’s ‘indigenous values’ and the new knowledge they produced about Filipino bodies within and for prizefighting’s ‘imagined community.’ Chapter one examines the brief Australian sojourn and tragic demise of Dencio Cabanela, the first Filipino prizefighter to achieve extranational prominence. It considers the personal links, networks, and discourses through which his body was conceived as preternaturally resilient and predictably undisciplined, situating the cause of his demise deep within his body, rather than the trade in which it was engaged. It also contemplates the unwitting role Cabanela played in uniting several components – youth, preternatural imperviousness, and aggressiveness – of a nascent Filipino pugilistic identity. Chapter two centres on the contractual relationship between world’s flyweight champion Pancho Villa and his manager, Frank Churchill, to consider the business of prizefighting, and power and agency therein. It examines how this business shaped expressions of American colonial rule and Philippine nationhood through Villa’s singular exploits, the impact of these exploits on the production of Filipino fighters, and the role of the routine, material practices of Churchill’s Olympic Athletic Club in uniting and consolidating the key elements highlighted in chapter one into a new, commodified identity for Filipino prizefighters, the ‘Filipino-as-prizefighter,’ a virtual Philippine ‘raw material’ who could not but fight.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".