Vol. 3 No. 2 (2026): Global More-than-Human Histories of Palms
Mobilities, Diasporas, and Translocal Ecologies

Planting Power: Visual Cultures of the Philippine Coconut Cropscape

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  • Theresa Ventura
Theresa Ventura
Concordia University
DOI: https://doi.org/10.3197/whppp.63876246815930

Published 2026-09-16

Keywords

  • Coconuts,
  • Palms,
  • Philippines,
  • United States,
  • History

How to Cite

Ventura, Theresa. 2026. “Planting Power: Visual Cultures of the Philippine Coconut Cropscape”. Plant Perspectives 3 (2):266-87. https://doi.org/10.3197/whppp.63876246815930.

Copyright (c) 2026 Theresa Ventura

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Abstract

This photo essay filters the Philippine copra industry through the lens of the cropscape, a mode of understanding the multiple assemblages and timescales by which rooted plants become mobile. One key story in this assemblage is Imelda Marcos's Tahang Pilipino – a model ‘Filpino home’ purportedly built exclusively out of coconut materials at the dawn of her husband's martial law regime and today popularly known as a ‘the Coconut Palace’. By approaching the Tahanang as a mid- to late-twentieth century iteration of a longer visual culture of coconut palm extraction, we see how Imelda Marcos’s imagined coconut future was deeply rooted in the extractive logics of a Euro-American colonialism that divided the globe into a temperate North and tropical South. The Tahanang Pilipino, I argue, modernised and nationalised a colonial history by naturalising the Philippines as a producer of tropical commodities for global consumption.

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