Photo of my mother, Felisa or Fely, with L to R: myself (9), Elvira (6), Emil (14), Rafael (12) and in front, Rico (4). On the road that faced our house in Pag-Asa, Project 6, Quezon City.
Behind us, a high school attended by working-class boys.
Behind me, a neighbor dog.
I think my Dad took the picture.
The picture is very blurred, but it shows a very attractive Filipina mother with her
five beautiful children.
American History Tellers | Philippine-American War: The Path to Independence | Podcasts - YouTube
Inbox
| Comcast | 2:21 PM (3 hours ago) | ||
This is very interesting. The Filipino historian is quite brilliant. He brings up a lot of interesting points about the attitudes of the Americans toward benevolent simulation, and their Christianizing the Philippines, the hard reputation of the Spanish Catholics dating back to how they treated the Indians of Latin America. Describing them as dark Catholics.
Also speaking of the origins of the revolt against the Spaniards. It’s interesting how your take on Spanish rule has not really touched on the unequal treatment and racism of the Spaniards but rather the romanticizing of the era.
Also speaking of the origins of the revolt against the Spaniards. It’s interesting how your take on Spanish rule has not really touched on the unequal treatment and racism of the Spaniards but rather the romanticizing of the era.
(Emphasis mine, not my brother's.)
Dissatisfaction with colonial rule was qualitatively transformed. Certain groups of people began thinking of themselves as no longer colonial subjects to the absolute rule of the Spanish king. But now began to think of themselves as possibly, potentially as equal citizens who would acclaim to equal treatment of the law; when that was denied to them they began to turn to the possibilities of separation, dreams of independence, movements to overthrow first through reform and then eventually by revolution to overthrow the rule of the Spaniards. Global changes as well as changes within the colony, economic, political, and social changes within the colony would spur this movement towards more radical attempts at revolution rather than the local events that preceded it in the colony. When Philippine nationalism did emerge in full bloom it was in some ways a result of conflict between church and state. Christian conversion and the catholic church were important players in the colonial regime. An emergent bunch of Filipino priests who were mestizos as well as Creole and Indio priests or native priests began to demand equal treatment with the Spanish friars who had monopolized the running of and the management of Filipino parishes and they were denied equal rights on the basis that they were not Spanish, they were treated as racially inferior to Spaniards and deemed to be incapable of running these parish churches and would emerge as sustained protests to this racist treatment on the part of Filipino priests and discourse among the Filipinos became a starting point for protest against Spanish rule on the basis of racist treatment by the Spaniards. This was in the 1860’s. By the 1870s and the 1880s many of the folks who were influenced by these Filipino priests looked to their discourse and their protests to demand equal treatment from the Spaniards at that time who were embroiled in the series of uprisings in Cuba were totally spooked and freaked out, they did not want to lose the Philippines like they did Latin America and so they responded with enormous amounts of repression, of censorship, with violence and the more violence they used against these Filipino nationalists the more militant they be came. Some of them were exiled, some of them were tortured and killed. By the time you came to the 1880s and 1890s things had wrapped up and intensified and many Filipinos who were nationalist were forced to go into exile some of them to Spain and France, where they continued to lobby for support. When these reforms were denied and Spain refused to listen, there was a turn towards movement to separation, of armed uprisings. By 1892, the emergence of the first organization that was dedicated toward Revolutionary armed struggle, and by 1896, after a series of events, this armed struggle exploded and continued through fits and starts until 1898 when the United States appeared on the scene as a consequence of the Spanish American war.
I’m curious, how did Don Pedro survive this Philippine revolution against the Spaniards. Was he hiding somewhere in Ilocos and was spared? Because if he was sent there as part of the civil guard, he was part of the repressive Spanish, who were to keep things in order. He’s lucky he wasn’t killed, but instead did he capitulate and ended up marrying a Filipino? I have a lot of questions about that.
Dissatisfaction with colonial rule was qualitatively transformed. Certain groups of people began thinking of themselves as no longer colonial subjects to the absolute rule of the Spanish king. But now began to think of themselves as possibly, potentially as equal citizens who would acclaim to equal treatment of the law; when that was denied to them they began to turn to the possibilities of separation, dreams of independence, movements to overthrow first through reform and then eventually by revolution to overthrow the rule of the Spaniards. Global changes as well as changes within the colony, economic, political, and social changes within the colony would spur this movement towards more radical attempts at revolution rather than the local events that preceded it in the colony. When Philippine nationalism did emerge in full bloom it was in some ways a result of conflict between church and state. Christian conversion and the catholic church were important players in the colonial regime. An emergent bunch of Filipino priests who were mestizos as well as Creole and Indio priests or native priests began to demand equal treatment with the Spanish friars who had monopolized the running of and the management of Filipino parishes and they were denied equal rights on the basis that they were not Spanish, they were treated as racially inferior to Spaniards and deemed to be incapable of running these parish churches and would emerge as sustained protests to this racist treatment on the part of Filipino priests and discourse among the Filipinos became a starting point for protest against Spanish rule on the basis of racist treatment by the Spaniards. This was in the 1860’s. By the 1870s and the 1880s many of the folks who were influenced by these Filipino priests looked to their discourse and their protests to demand equal treatment from the Spaniards at that time who were embroiled in the series of uprisings in Cuba were totally spooked and freaked out, they did not want to lose the Philippines like they did Latin America and so they responded with enormous amounts of repression, of censorship, with violence and the more violence they used against these Filipino nationalists the more militant they be came. Some of them were exiled, some of them were tortured and killed. By the time you came to the 1880s and 1890s things had wrapped up and intensified and many Filipinos who were nationalist were forced to go into exile some of them to Spain and France, where they continued to lobby for support. When these reforms were denied and Spain refused to listen, there was a turn towards movement to separation, of armed uprisings. By 1892, the emergence of the first organization that was dedicated toward Revolutionary armed struggle, and by 1896, after a series of events, this armed struggle exploded and continued through fits and starts until 1898 when the United States appeared on the scene as a consequence of the Spanish American war.
I’m curious, how did Don Pedro survive this Philippine revolution against the Spaniards. Was he hiding somewhere in Ilocos and was spared? Because if he was sent there as part of the civil guard, he was part of the repressive Spanish, who were to keep things in order. He’s lucky he wasn’t killed, but instead did he capitulate and ended up marrying a Filipino? I have a lot of questions about that.
(N.B.: Don Pedro Medina Benítez, our paternal great-grandfather from Montoro, Spain, who arrived in Filipinas in the 1880s, became a Guardia Civil in Dingrás,
Ilocos Norte. He sired our paternal grandfather Emilio Medina with our paternal grandmother Librada Lazo, and after that common-law relationship ended, he married another Dingrás lady, Prisca del Prado, had five sons and two daughters with her. One of them was Enrique Medina who was Public Service Commissioner of Manila in the 1960s. Lolo Pedro died in the 1930s in Manila.)
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| 3:56 PM (2 hours ago) | |||
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I'll watch it, thanks Hon.
Also speaking of the origins of the revolt against the Spaniards. It’s interesting how your take on Spanish rule has not really touched on the unequal treatment and racism of the Spaniards but rather the romanticizing of the era.
Well, this is true, and I think there is nothing wrong with feeling affection for the past. We were taught to hate it, and cling to simplistic beliefs like "the Spanish mestizos are assholes", "the Spanish colonial period was medieval, the U.S. modernized the Philippines" and "the Spaniards were bad colonialists, the Americans were the good colonialists who taught us democracy".
Yiiiiiikeeessss!!!
It's true that (as I am reading a young Cuban woman's account of her capture by the katipuneros and their murder of her Spanish husband), as Avelina Correa said in her testimonial memoir, the native Filipinos hated the Spanish mestizos even more than the Spaniards --- and they put them in the same bag as "kastilas". Even I as a child learned that Spanish mestizos are swangit, suplado(a), have a superiority complex (the other side of our inferiority complex), and so on and so forth.
I also saw my Dad, who was a Spanish mestizo and very much a señorito, as the most charming, handsome, attractive
character. He was also cultured, loved history, classical music, and he had certain principles he held to, such as not sucking up to anybody, having a sense of honor and behaving
with an air of quiet dignity.
Lolo Pedro probably survived the revolution because in the Ilocos Region the revolutionary fighting was not intense, as it was in the Tagalog provinces. It was bloodiest in the provinces of Manila (yes, Manila was referred to as a province), Tarlac, Bulacán, CAVITE, Laguna, Pampanga, BATANGAS, La Union...
And the native Filipinos became quite fond of the Spaniards who had intermarried and lived in the Philippines for decades. But if they were Spanish friars who were cruel or immoral, they were the targets of revolutionary vigilanteeism.
I did not write about our history just to perpetrate the "racism" accusations against the Spanish colonizers. No, my intention was to _make the Filipinos today realize that we were not really taught about the past in a balanced fashion_. That we were taught history FROM THE U.S. POINT OF VIEW, to make us better vassals of American imperialists. (I.e., New World Order, Illuminati).
This, honey, has never been done, because a huge mind control number was carried out on the future generations of Filipinos, under the U.S.
And so everything was conveniently blamed on the Spanish,
such as: "I don't want to speak Spanish, it was the language of the conquistadors!" (English, was not!)
Our historians and educators have never acknowledged that we were (and still are!) a _Hispanic-Filipino_ Republic, nation, culture, RACE.
We are a multicultural nation. The PURE FILIPINO was turned into some kind of fake hero. This was RACISM, honey.
It's called INDIGENISM. And it became politically correct during and after the U.S. period, when everything Spanish became anathema.
But we were not Spanish, we were Hispanic Filipinos.
And the Hispanic-Filipino was put in the same bag as
"Spanish". The weird concept was sneaked into our minds that the American-era Filipino was the same exact Filipino under Spain. I.e., that Bonifacio and Rizal were
identical to Ramon Magsaysay and Ferdinand Marcos.
The same thing has happened in practically all formerly colonized nations under Spain, or anywhere where the colonized were a different color and culture from the colonizers.
There is a period where fanaticism promotes a distorted historical vision of the past.
But we as new generations have to gain OUR OWN vision, and this vision must HONOR the past by STUDYING IT SERIOUSLY.
Because in the case of Filipinas, not only did a fanatical anti-Spanish era follow during the U.S. era, it CONTINUED and STILL CONTINUES IN THE 21ST CENTURY.
And it is SO SUBTLE that most Filipinos (especially pro-U.S. Filipinos) still cling to the craziness that we are Malay because we are brown, and to claim that Filipinos are Hispanic is delusional because we are not handsome mestizos de español.
And we never spoke Spanish!
I mean, this is the HEIGHT OF IGNORANCE, RACISM and
STUPIDITY.
Actually, it is the same exact thing that our "historians" accused the kastila of doing: claiming the natives were an inferior race, without superior intelligence, little children incapable of reaching the development of the superior European race.
Then José Rizal appeared (who was just the most brilliant in the brilliant Pleyades of the Hispanic Filipino youth), to tear down the false pride of the ignoramus Spaniards (not all Spaniards were ignorant, stupid racists and cruel). And HE WAS HISPANIC-FILIPINO. He was NOT an AMERICANIZED FILIPINO of the 20th Century.
I had to end up in Chile and go back to high school to realize how FASCINATING our colonial history is. Because when I was in school in Manila, I was taught A CARICATURIZED HISTORY. You didn't even go through it, because you left very young. But believe me, honey, Filipinos have a lack of identity precisely because we were not taught to LOVE OUR HISTORY.
To UNDERSTAND IT. The way we were taught was just an eternalization of false beliefs, false prejudices, and political correctness. Because the U.S. wanted us to worship the American period. Of course, there were a lot of university troublemakers, because there has been an underlying hostility against the U.S. for its invisible continued control over the Philippines.
And you know, we were brainwashed to believe the lie that Spanish was never the language of the Filipinos.
This is just SO ABSURD. This is why we can't even read the history books because they were written in Spanish. So we can only read books in English. So we cannot own our own history, if we can only study the English versions.
DUH!!!! You know, I don't read anything written in English anymore about our history. I'm just not interested. They have plenty of readers. They won't miss me.
Besides, FILIPINOS DON'T EVEN READ ANY BOOKS ABOUT THEIR HISTORY IN ENGLISH unless they are written about tsismis, by Filipino authors. But there is no tradition of scholarship in Spanish. In a country that was ruled by Spain for more than three centuries.
But there is A GIGANTIC scholarship in English, when we were only a formal colony of the U.S. for 46 years.
Hmmm.... don't you think that would mean there is a bias????
Sorry about this rant.
Because I am outside of academe, you never hear about my work, my voice, my contribution. But because that guy is from academe, he gets to be heard and read, and I don't know if I'm going to find his work interesting.
But seriously, I have to write a novel, hopefully a blockbuster, just so people might hear a "PEEP" from me, or about me.
Of course, my writings that were disseminated on the net by Revista Filipina (and not much else) are in Spanish, because I am part of the very small circle of Filipinos (academics, most of them) and Spanish (academics) who believe that Spanish must be returned to its category as a valid linguistic, literary, cultural heritage of the Filipino nation. So of course, I have to write in Spanish, and write VERY WELL. I have to prove my thesis: that our Spanish documentation is a wonderful treasure that can inspire a rebirth of Filipino letters _in Spanish_. This means, especially, the novel.
But again, hindi naman akong interesada na magpataasan nang ihi. Gusto ko lang, na bumalik ang espanyol sa Filipinas. At irespetohin ang ating kahapon, na napakahaba na bago dumating ang mga kanó sa Pilipinas at iniba nila ang pangalan nang ating bansa sa "Philippine Islands". Hindi eh, ang pangalan ng ating tinubuang lupa ay FILIPINAS.
xoxoxo
Liz
Vince Rafael
| 4:24 PM (1 hour ago) | |||
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Yeah, I met him in Valladolid in 1997. He's an
American Filipino, one of those academic superstars.
When I met him he
was famous for his application of Freudian concepts
to Filipino identity. But of course, he has also jumped
on the bandwagon of the "new take" (they call it
revisionism) on the Spanish period and its importance
for more complex historical insight, no longer simplis-
tic, boring theorizing about Filipino history or identity,
removed from its context (both internal and external,
national and global).
But notice how he _never_ mentions that a Hispanic-
Filipino identity and culture and HISTORY existed.
No, he talks about "resistance" against Spanish
colonization.
He doesn't talk about _coexistence_. He says that
the Phil. never became a settler colony like the Latin
American republics (many of which never became
settler colonies either!) because Filipinas was so far
away from Spain.
(There were many other reasons, btw, not just
physical distance. Most of all, a Social Contract was
established between the Spanish monarchy and the
Filipinos --- the principalía and the common tao, with
the important work of the missionaries' evangelization.
Without it, Spain could never have held on to the
archipelago for over three centuries.)
What I stated in my Valladolid paper in 1997 about
Hispanic-Filipino identity is that the native Filipinos
entered into a _marriage_, an agreement to accept
vassalage under the Spanish monarchs, in exchange
for _protection_ from a more powerful ruler who
promised to aid them against Muslim piracy and
mass harvesting of slaves.
No, they never mention this. Actually, it was super
easy for Spain to keep Filipinas because the native
Filipinos WANTED TO BE vassals. And the periodic
rebellions were due to INJUSTICES, ABUSES. But it
wasn't until 1896, upon the arrest of Rizal, that
Bonifacio founded the KKK because, like Rizal, the
TAGALOGS lost faith in the
goodwill of the Spanish administration, and because
hatred of the friar orders had become widespread
throughout the TAGALOG PROVINCES.
Actually, Hon, our 1896 Revolution was the revolution
of the Tagalogs. Even the Spanish called it "La
rebelión tagala". The Visayans went along, the
norteños (Ilocanos) went along, and the moros had
never stopped fighting the Spanish, but they did
support the Tagalog revolutionary cause (because
Tagalog military leaders traveled to Mindanao and
asked them to join, and they said, fine).
(In any revolutionary history, the idea of
independence does not immediately arise. First,
there is a revolt against injustice and discrimination,
usurpation, enslavement. There is an aspiration for
self-rule, autonomy. Not immediate jettisoning of
an entire worldview. A PROCESS unfolds that
matures as the will to self-government, the project
of freedom from external control, a new moment
of collective self-empowerment and dignification.)
xoxoxo
L.
Anyway, Vince Rafael is among "our" elite historians. In
my opinion, he is a politically correct U.S.-sponsored
Filipino historian. He will never cross that line.
He just makes sure he keeps his tenure and his
research grants keep coming; he has perks like
getting sent to Italy for three weeks so he can
concentrate on his latest book... he's cited in all the
papers and publications. It's his job.
(Meanwhile, in our land, the chaos grows, ignorance
reigns supreme, children grow up without parents....)
