...to Filipinas (or "The Republic of the Philippines")?
It depends.
It should. Because time is circular and new generations feel the need to connect with the past. New generations are always dissatisfied with the world that the generation of their elders (parents especially) offers them. They need roots. They are not ready to be resigned and blindly accept "what is".
It depends on the consciousness of the new generation of political and cultural leaders, if they also feel that wish to illuminate the past, if they are not mediocre, only interested in filling their pockets or glorifying their names.
Manila outside Intramuros was a city of many canals and vendors circulated on bancas offering their products. One Spanish visitor said the city had a similarity to Venice.
In my opinion, whether Spanish returns to the Philippines or not is now an obsolete query.
This is a photograph of the principalía of a provincial town.
Please sense the air of formality, of dignity, refinement.
This is the world that I recreate in my first full-length novel.
If things continue as they are, it will not happen. Not ever. Never.
This is a photograph of an important public celebration. Pay attention to the aesthetic, to the architecture, to the cleanliness and orderly social space, the modern transportation (carromatas, quiles).
One can tell that the people were well-dressed, well-behaved. There is no sign of a lot of vendors selling food or beverages. The entire scene is reminiscent of urban scenes in European cities, just that the streets are not paved and there are no European stone buildings. However, there was urban planning.
Something big has to happen first.
There needs to be a Big Bang of some kind.
Outdoor theater was a very important cultural activity. The social classes mixed in these presentations.
The themes were, as we know, adapted versions of classical Spanish theater about Christian and Moorish romances and adventures.
Or a Boom.
Something at the same or similar level as José Rizal's Noli me tángere.
The social class to which these young ladies belonged
was Hispanic Filipino.
But all of Filipinas was hispanic for over 300 years.
Just as World War I decimated an entire generation of highly-educated young Englishmen, the Philippine Revolution and the Fil-American war decimated our Hispanic-Filipino cultural elite.
But not just that. Something else that will be so big that the country's entire structure will become so deteriorated that the people will clamor for "the return of the olden days" but in the good sense.
Probably I'll be dead by the time the Double Whammy happens.
However, I like to think that I have been quietly doing some needed work to prepare the way. Changes that level up a nation's sensibility are not things that happen from one day to the next. They percolate for a long time first. Underground. They get a lot of passive-aggressive resistance. There will be "cómo si" --- "as if" ---promoters of the Hispanic-Filipino past. But they won't be reconstructing, they will be praising what is dead and gone and can't challenge them. They will be the vedettes (showgirls), but they won't be artists, cultural creators. They will at best be profiting from reflected glory and the rewards from their financiers and protectors.
However, the regime in power will merely keep demonstrating how hopelessly out of tune it is with the demands of a changed world. That it does not honor the people, it is only interested in the commerce of power. Which is creating mounting chaos, disorder and causing the people to feel their abandonment by their so-called government more and more intensely, to the point that one day they must take matters into their own hands for the sake of their children, and for their children's children to have a country of their own.
I like to think that, through my essays, my short stories, my poems, I have somehow shed light on certain dynamics of historical/generational events that caused the future modern generations to take as Gospel truth that Hispanic Philippines never really existed.
In the novel that I will soon finish and find the way to publish (in a number greater than just the 1,000 copies of Rizal According to Retana and the 350 copies of Sampaguitas en la Cordillera), I open a window for modern Filipinos to see what that world might have looked like. The novel is long and detailed enough to allow my reader to virtually step into that world, and experience it in a way that will be enjoyable, uplifting, revelatory.
A world that unfolded for 333 years deserves to be re-imagined and portrayed with respect, care and color.That world did not deserve to be shut down, then oversimplified to the extreme of making us believe it was and still is utterly irrelevant to our 20th-century lives. Even worse: promote the lie that it was pathetic, primitive and boring.
"Indio a caballo": wrong.
"Hispanofilipino a caballo": check.
No, mis respetables damas y caballeros filipinos.
Fue un mundo interesante, curioso, bello, y muy, pero muy filipino.
Tan hermoso como mi hija es hermosa.
I don't deceive myself that my novel will even reach up to the ankles of Rizal's Noli me tángere.
Noli me tángere is the Manila Cathedral of Filipino literature.(In my opinion, El Filibusterismo would have been as accessible ---popular--- as the Noli had Rizal left out some minor characters and reduced the political pamphleteering. It's still a great novel, but highbrow, while the Noli is lowbrow. If you follow my meaning.)
(However, this opinion may change, after I read it in Spanish. I also still have to finish reading the Noli in Spanish.)
I will be more than content if my novel can be considered like one of these churches from the old times. It is in Spanish, it describes the way of life of the people in this photograph as I imagine it, based on my study of our history in Spanish in the following sources:
*** 19th and early 20th century historians' and writers' and
*** travelers' accounts (Jagor, MacMicking, Álvarez, de la Gironniere, etc.)
*** my studies of Latin American literature and history
*** my experiences growing up in Quezon City, Cebu, Manila, Makati.
I emphasize that my novel is filipinized thanks to the wealth of information on culture, mentality, daily life practices and customs supplied by
don Pedro Serrano-Laktaw in his magnum opus of lexicography,
Diccionario Hispano-Tagalog, 1914 edition.
Since it is in Spanish, it will have to be translated into English for most Filipinos to be able to read it.
I had to write it in Spanish because "the medium is the message".
You cannot bring 19th-century Hispanic Philippines back to life
with a novel written in English!
Not even in Tagalog --- which I could not do either because I was not taught classical Tagalog, I am learning it from don Pedro Serrano-Laktaw, and before that from the Correspondencia Rizalina.
(You see, Tagalog was not persecuted, it was crippled, amputated. The erasure of Spanish caused the inescapable impoverishment, the dumbing-down of Tagalog.)
When I visited my mother in California she was proud that I could speak Spanish. ;)
We were once in a huge hardware store, lined up at the cashier's.
There was a Latino in line ahead of us and my Mom ordered:
"Talk to him in Spanish!"
Of course, I was too embarrassed to!
¡Ay, mamá!
But I'm sure she is pleased, up there in her special place in Heaven.
And my father? Uuuuffff, he was fluent in Spanish.
He was proud of me because my English was so good.
But now he's even prouder, because man, it has been difficult for me to learn Spanish.
Even more, to write properly in it. (Not like a carabao!)
¿Papi, estás feliz?¿Lolo Emilio, tú también?
De seguro.
Y es en honor a mi pueblo, a su pasado.
¡Te amo, lolo Emilio! ¡Te amo, lola Librada!
P.D. 15 de mayo de 2026: la novela está terminada y casi lista la revisión final.
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