You can pay them US$25 for a sub, or read/get it here, my gift to you.
Don Guillermo Gómez Rivera brought me to UST that stormy night in July 2000. Manila was flooded, there had been three typhoons already within two weeks, but GGR's car had a special carburetor that was raised and made it amphibious. Also with us was Professor Lápuz.
I presented a short version, a capella, to the audience of teachers, several of whom chose to stay and probably were going to have to sleep over on campus that night, because it would be impossible for them to get home.
After my talk the Dean of Liberal Arts (his name must be in my diary --- he was a class act through and through) presented me with a bouquet of yellow roses and don Guillermo's son drove me to the airport to catch my flight to Madrid.
A wonderful experience I shall never cease to be grateful for.
ESPECIALLY TO DON GUILLERMO GÓMEZ RIVERA.
Dios le bendiga, don Guillermo.
There was a Spanish priest present, as well.
They had mentioned to me that they had a first edition of Noli Me Tangere in the UST Library. Unfortunately, it was impossible for me to visit the Library on that visit. Maybe someday.
A New Perspective
on
Philippine History
Paper presented at the Dean’s Colloquium,
Dept. of Arts & Letters, University of Santo Tomás, July 7, 2000.
July 5, 2000
Elizabeth Medina
For some time now we have observed a
marked intensification of the tendency among certain sectors of national
society to manipulate and adapt the public truth with respect to the last
half-century of Chilean history, in order to justify certain events, magnify
certain results, and silence others.
Almost always, with the aim of legitimizing something that is difficult
to legitimize, and render as true or objective what is not such, or is merely
the image that a few groups sustain.
This tendency is facilitated by the virtually monopolistic access of
these sectors and groups to mass communications media, which allows them,
through wide-spread and impositive dissemination, to give the appearance of
public truth to what is, at bottom, merely the expression of a private interest
using the vehicle of historical distortion.
…When the civil community’s legislative
will is respected, the most fundamental human right is respected as well – the
possibility for that community to build for itself, the reality it considers as
most favorable for it. When civil
sovereignty is usurped by a few, when those few pass laws for the few but which
they mean to apply to all, when such laws are imposed by force of arms and not
through the free and informed will of all citizens, then we are not in the
presence of sovereignty, but of acts which usurp sovereignty. The laws passed in a state of usurpation of
sovereignty are not legitimate. The
courts, judges and police who enforce them do not express sovereign justice,
but interests of usurpation and of the (few) who are benefited by it. It is not true justice. The legal instruments
imposed by the usurpers to protect themselves from sovereign justice, or from
international justice, are not an expression of sovereignty. They are, quite simply, its violation.
…History is not just the past, but also –
and principally – present and future.
History is forward projection. It
is the social construction of a future reality.
The most important of all human rights consists of respecting the right
of citizens to produce for themselves the future reality that they need. Not to recognize this right, to usurp or
adulterate this right, is above all to impose, not historical truth, but a
historical lie. It is to empty the true
moral reserves of humanity.
Santiago, January 25, 1999.[1]
The above quote is
taken from Manifiesto de Historiadores, a document issued in Santiago de
Chile and signed by 73 historians and academics, the majority of them of left
and center political orientation.
However, the document also includes a commentary from the most renowned
living Chilean historian, Sergio Villalobos, of conservative tendencies.
The Manifiesto
was issued in answer to and refutation of the writings of a conservative
pro-Pinochet historian, Gonzalo Vial, who published a series of articles in a
Santiago daily on Chilean history from 1964 to 1973, fundamentally based on his
vision that the Allende government had left Chile in a virtual state of civil
war, and the military coup led by General Pinochet on September 11, 1973 had in
effect prevented such civil war from taking place.
The Manifiesto,
which has been translated and disseminated throughout Europe and the United
States, has received the endorsement of international historians and was
published in booklet format, including a signed declaration by 36 North
American doctors of history. In this declaration,
the American historians state that despite their government’s official policy
of silence regarding the issue of General Pinochet’s extradition to Spain, they
are fully aware of the United States’ historical responsibility in the 1973
coup and support the ex dictator’s international judgment for crimes of lèse
humanité.
One of the most
salient points in the Manifiesto is, in my opinion, the clear
distinction it establishes that can exist -- as it states is the case of
Chilean historiography -- between the official history disseminated by the
State and the other history that consists of popular memory and the experience
of each generation’s struggle to construct the reality it sees as most
favorable for its development, the reality it aspires to attain. Today, the younger generation of Chilean
historians are devoting their research to writing the stories of the hidden
protagonists of their history: labor
unions, the civic-minded middle class, the rural poor, and the indigenous
minority – the historical protagonists who are most discriminated against or
abandoned by their government, and yet are by far the primary builders of
Chile’s national development and identity.
In the
Philippines’ case, I believe the Chilean historians’ thesis is likewise borne
out: in our country there have also existed two histories: an official history and a real history; an
official history that appears in the textbooks, and a real history that largely
lives in unwritten, oral accounts and in the popular memory. However, I perceive an added dimension in
Philippine historiography, which I define as a subtle distortion that was
introduced into our post-Hispanic era historiography, in official history as
well as in the popular memory, as a result of the fact that what we may call
the development of sovereign Filipino historiography began during the period of
our history when our people had broken off all links with Spain and were under
the political dominion and overweening cultural influence of the United States.
Some of you may
exclaim, “Oh no, not again – Philippine history from the foreigner’s
perspective!” But I will ask you to hear
me out with a little patience. The
perspective I shall present is not quite the same one that, in the past,
propounded, and today, rejects, the historical narrative of a Philippines that
only came into existence in 1521 upon discovery by Magellan and whose history
was protagonized and written by Spaniards, or of a Philippines whose democratic
training and international debut as a Republic was the inspired and noble
achievement of the United States.
It is in fact true
that our official history has been marked and marred by our colonial past, by
what was an inevitable approach to it from a colonized mentality. The Philippines in the past was invariably
written about either as a Spanish colony, as a North American colony, or as a
former colony still burdened and plagued by the consequences of her colonial
legacy. The backlash however, against
this focus have been the currents whose vision is that the Philippines’ history
should be written and taught only in Tagalog and should give the least
importance to her experiences of colonization.
The new
perspective I propose is neither one nor the other, but suggests an approach
that would be capable of encompassing both, and thus be a qualitative leap
beyond the old dichotomy, because it would break out of the dualistic
perspective of colonialism vs. anti-colonialism. I propose to situate the Philippines within
her authentic context, which is a global, multi-cultural, multi-racial historical
process. For I believe that the Pearl of
the Orient must have an appropriate setting, for us to properly appreciate and
correctly envision the dimensions and beauty of this natural jewel, and that
setting is the world as a totalizing geographical space, with its totalizing,
planetary narrative.
If we adopt global
and structural vision (the word ‘structural’ meaning: in living and dynamic relationship with other
nations and not in isolation) to the Philippines’ historical process, we
immediately perceive the fact that the Philippines evolved as a nation within
the context of the Hispanic empire, and the latter within the context in turn
of Western civilization.
You will say: but the Philippines is in the Far East! She is Asian, not Western!
I will reply that
yes, indeed -- the Philippines is by natural geography Asian; but she is also
-- by history, culture and society -- Hispanic American. And I base this statement on the underlying
premise on which this proposal on our history is based: that the human being,
more than merely a natural being, is a historical being whose accumulating
historical experience and social action continually modify both his social and
natural environment, and even his very own nature.
Now then, this
writing does not mean to claim that there is only one approach possible for
studying the written history of the Philippines. The Philippines can definitely be studied
within the general process of Asia.
However, from the point of view of the human intentionality that erupted
on the scene of our pre-Hispanic ancestral world, it was decidedly the
appearance in our horizon of the Magellanic caravels that marked the beginning
of our difficult evolution toward becoming a nation state.
The
General Western Historical Context of the Archipelago’s Discovery by Spain
The Age of
Discovery and the Age of Colonization were the consequences of world
developments far from our archipelago’s shores, impelled by nations, empires
and civilizations and marked by defining human events, among them the
scientific discoveries of the Renaissance, the economic consequences of China’s
discovery by Marco Polo, the 800-year formation of Spain, as a nation and then
as an empire, upon the reconquest of Granada and during the race with Portugal
to find a new route to the East Indies.
This race led in turn to the discovery of America and Oceania, which
were given the names “West Indies” and “Western Islands.”
Europe’s discovery
of the New World affected the destinies of many peoples and civilizations, many
of which today constitute the regions called the Third and Fourth Worlds -- the
former Spanish and Portuguese possessions of America, Oceania and Africa.
The continent and
the archipelago that later became known, respectively, as America and
Felipenas, were discovered and claimed by Portugal and Spain for the Catholic
Pope and the Spanish and Portuguese empires between 1492 and 1521. These lands were ruled and Christianized by
the Spanish and the Portuguese according to the same mental structure (white
racial and cultural superiority), pattern of development (monopolistic
exploitation, public subsidy/private profit) and philosophy (medieval
Scholasticism), which clashed with the native societies and communities that
inhabited these vast geographical spaces, and which had attained at the time of
the Discovery varying degrees of social and state development, from full-blown
civilizations to hunter-gatherers and isolated Stone Age tribes.
By 1823, Hispanic
America had emancipated herself. The
Philippines only won independence 75 years later, in 1898. However, she was immediately invaded and
annexed by the United States. Today, the
then-new imperial power has also extended its dominion to its “back yard” –
Latin America – with very different, yet also very similar characteristics and
consequences for all our countries and cultures.
How
I Was Taught Philippine History
I am sure my
readers will find nothing very new in what I have just expounded, however I
would point out that, as a young student, I was taught Philippine history from
an isolationist and fragmentary perspective, which confused and made me feel
distanced from it. We were given no
historical context, no background on Spain’s formation as a nation and empire,
nor on the general historical, political and cultural conditions then existing
in Asia and Oceania. All the context we
received was a summary account of the various waves of Pygmy and Malay settlers
that arrived in the islands, and then we were abruptly informed of the Papal
Bull issued by Alexander VI and the signing by Portugal and Spain of the Treaty
of Tordesillas. Then came Magellan’s
discovery (it was actually his and not the archipelago’s, which many Asiatic
peoples had discovered long before him), and an enumeration of subsequent
expeditions. Soon we plunged into the
administrative system of the Spanish era with its incomprehensible Spanish terms
and the religious culture of Spanish Philippines. Latin America was never mentioned except to
teach us that the archipelago was ruled through the viceroyship of Mexico, and
that the galleon trade with Acapulco was practically the islands’ only successful
and important economic activity for 200 years, but with many negative effects
which were not very well clarified.
Throughout our studies of the Spanish period, we were always returning
to the same puzzling point, which was that the Philippines was a millstone
around the Metropoli’s neck, nevertheless she resolutely refused to relinquish
us, miserable as we were under her rule and profitless as it was to have our
islands as a colony. Even as a colony,
the Philippines was a resounding failure!
Things began to
make more sense as we got into revolutionary history, especially when we
studied GomBurZa, Rizal, Bonifacio, Aguinaldo, the Malolos Republic and
American perfidy. Just as we were
getting fired up over this history, however, we began a subject called Oriental
History, which was again bewildering, dry, and impossible to learn because it
seemed so strange, so unrelated.
We read about the Madjapahit empire, the Chinese dynasties, the Japanese
shogunates, Oriental religions, and much more which I was unable to digest and
retain.
Following this, in
senior high school and college we returned to the Philippines to study the
American period, but it was not interesting because it dealt exclusively with
incomprehensible economic legislation and political controversies until
independence in 1946. After independence, more politics and economics followed
with the post-war presidencies, accompanied by vague side references to the
peasant revolts, the labor and leftist political movements. I left the Philippines in 1973, in the second
year of Martial Law, and therefore I cannot speak for the history texts and
treatment of that period and of the post-martial law years. However, I doubt that since 1973 the official
presentation of our history has changed radically aside from its now being
taught mainly in Tagalog. I would hazard
– and please correct me if I am wrong – that our history still mystifies and
confuses students, and gives them the idea that the Philippines had nothing to
do with Latin America (indeed they hardly know where it even is), that she has
a lot to do with the United States though in a very ambivalent sense, and that
she is an Asian country struggling to overcome the nightmare of Westernization,
and recover and affirm her authentic pre-Hispanic roots and identity.
When in point of
fact, the history of the Philippines is a synthesis of many histories,
geographical spaces, temporal eras, races, tongues and cultures, and it can
only be understood when it is studied as such.
A
Complex, Surreal History
Ours is a complex,
far ranging, even bizarre and surrealistic history, which has tended to be
utilized at different moments as a battleground for rival ideologies or as a
theater for anecdotal, parochial interpretations. Clearly we are Asian by geography and racial
provenance, but by history we are part of Western civilization, Western culture
and Western politics. We can rightly
claim to be Hispanic American Asians -- “American” signifying our having
incorporated cultural legacies from both North and South America – though we
are unaware of the historical, cultural and racial bonds we share with the
latter.
For the sake of
brevity I will not develop here my perception of how drastically and
deleteriously the writing and teaching of our history –- and the formation of
our identity –- were affected by the official history disseminated during
American rule and by post-1946 Filipino educational policies which increasingly
followed an indigenist orientation that defined itself as anti-colonialist, but
above all, anti-Spanish.
I will share with
you my discovery and understanding of the deep importance of our Hispanic
heritage, achieved through 17 years lived in Latin America, the observation of
her present reality and the study of her history.
The
Mutual Non-Awareness between the Philippines and Latin America
Our non-awareness
of Latin America is the product of historical and geopolitical vicissitudes
beyond our control, but today our non-awareness can and should end, for by
learning about Latin America we will overcome our imperfect comprehension of
our Hispanic past, and thus be able to support ourselves over the bedrock of a
forgotten Hispanic Filipino identity that, without our knowing it, still lives
within us, and -- I firmly believe -- holds the key to our empowerment.
Those historical
vicissitudes made us see ourselves in extreme contraposition to Spain, and
later to North America, which impressed on us the impossibility of identifying
with or being mirrored by either image, so different from us in so many glaring
respects. Having lost the few
connections we had with Hispanic America – especially the visible, logistical
ones with Mexico and Peru – it was inevitable that the 20th-century
generations of historians would increasingly look to Asia and our pre-Hispanic
identity, a stance that paradoxically was first championed by our national
hero, Dr. Jose Rizal – who was the prototypical Hispanic Filipino.
Because of our
separation from Hispanic America, we have likewise not learned about the
historical and social experiences of Latin America, presented in the works of
her many outstanding writers, historians and thinkers, works which could have
enriched and clarified our relationship with our own Hispanic legacy and the
difficulties we faced in recognizing and positively channeling our evolving
cultural identity.
Latin America has
also been deprived of learning about our history and profiting from the study
of our own historical experience and cultural achievements. Amazingly, most Latin Americans are ignorant,
both of our country’s geographic location, and of our having been a Spanish
colony 88 years longer than they.
Importance
of a New Understanding of the Hispanic Filipino World
Unless we, the
Filipinos of today, widen our historical and cultural horizon to include
Hispanic America, we will continue to suffer from a forced, partial and
flattened vision of our own history and our truly complex and astonishing
cultural legacy and identity.
The fact is that
that Hispanic Filipino society did exist.
It was the product of centuries of evolution; a valid social and
cultural construct that included all Filipinos then living in the
Philippines, regardless of their blood lineage, skin color, social class, educational
level, religious faith. The Chinese and
the Muslims were likewise encompassed and included within that Hispanic
Filipino cosmos, even when they were largely in a relationship of
radical differentiation from its ruling paradigm. They nevertheless were coexisting in dynamic
relationship with the christianized Filipinos and the Spanish, within a
Philippines that was already, after almost 19 generations, hispanized in her
unique, hybrid way, whose development resembled that of the Hispanic
American societies, even long after they had become independent from Spain.
The Generation of
1896 was the final fruit of the Hispanic Filipino society and culture that had
evolved in the course of 333 years of coexistence with the Spanish, under the
rule of that European power. We may say
many things in criticism of that period, but if we are able to exercise a
modicum of objectivity – meaning if we can look at the past consciously setting
aside our pre-formed judgments about it – we must admit that the modern Filipino
nation state had its genesis during Spanish colonization and not
before it, nor during or after North American rule. The Hispanic Filipino Generation of 1896
birthed Filipino nationhood and national identity, they were the first
Filipinos – however, their generation was not made up of Filipinos as we are
today, but of a quite different sort of Filipino. To speak in a generality -- but a powerful
and respect-worthy generality no less -– they were Filipinos who made the
decision for the very first time to collectively and consciously forge a
nation.
From the point of
view of the Muslim Filipinos, it was an imperfect decision, granted, and they
were marginated from the articulation of the Constitution. Nevertheless, the Muslim Filipinos joined the
struggle to end Spanish domination and they also joined the Republic’s
resistance against the North American invader.
Morally and historically speaking, therefore, even Muslim Philippines
was part of the revolutionary and republican processes.
The Forgetting of Hispanic Philippines
Today, very few
persons are left in the Philippines who can still remember the personality, the
social attitudes and customs, the world view, the soul of the Hispanic
Filipinos. Modern biases have led to the
erroneous belief that the only Hispanic Filipinos were the so-called mestizos
and criollos, the fair-skinned, Spanish-speaking worshippers of the
anti-Filipino kastilas, who were a bane on our land and deserved to be
banished from our memory. In fact, our
entire culture is mestizo, our entire nation is mestizo, because our
culture and our blood are the product of much mixture, even before the arrival
of the Spanish, the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Germans and the
North Americans in our land. In fact,
under the North Americans there was pressure brought to bear on our educational
institutions to abandon instruction in Spanish, and English finally triumphed
only because the power of modern telecommunications, of popular U.S. culture,
reduced the native Hispanic image and its idiom to a politically-incorrect
anachronism for the youth. The imposition of English, American technology and
popular culture swept away our precious and painfully-won cultural moorings --
our pre-American values, our pre-American Self -- with the force of a cultural
hurricane. It was a first successful
experiment in massive cultural reprogramming that confused subsequent
generations into taking as an article of faith that what was purely Filipino
ought to have nothing Hispanic in it –- the better to ingrain in us the fatal
worship of their alien image. In the new
cultural landscape introduced and institutionalized under North America, our
world became the United States.
We adopted the Anglo-Saxon way of life as the most valid construct, and
it was only a matter of time before the last Hispanic Filipino generation died
away –- from the upper class down to the middle class and the servant class –-
and Filipinas finally became in all our minds, only either The Philippine
Islands, or Republikang Pilipinas.
Finally, the chauvinism of defining pure Filipinoness as synonymous with
speaking Tagalog erroneously elevated the Tagalogs as the most authentic
Filipinos who possess the most genuinely Filipino tongue! And yet, being Filipino had to mean being
capable of transcending dialect, region, even religion, even as it did not deny
them. For to be a Filipino nation
required our ability to be proud and respectful of our own dialect and regional
identity, but never to the detriment of our pride in and respect for all other
Filipinos’ dialects and regional identities.
The
Filipino Republic of 1898 and the Latin American Republics
The Hispanic
Filipino Republic that was founded in 1898 differed from the Latin American
republics founded between 1810 and 1823 only in the fact that the founders of
the Malolos Republic were racially and culturally more heterogeneous than the
Latin American founders, who were in their great majority creoles from the
landowning classes.
We are all aware
of the exogenous reasons for the destruction of the project to create a
Hispanic Filipino Republic, but little study and analysis has been devoted to
the endogenous reasons, which I propose as having to do essentially with the
problem of fragmented, alienating micro-identities, even as the unifying image
of Filipino nationhood had arisen in all its brilliance and force. Perhaps we could still have worked out a modus
vivendi among ourselves, or we would have entered into subsequent phases of
internal power struggle, as happened in the case of Mexico. However, the invasion by the United States
created a new polarization between the revolutionary/republican and the
counter-revolutionary/pro-American factions, and all of us know what was the outcome.
Today, after
generations of efforts to minimize the importance of the Hispanic culture and
era to the Filipinos, we must acknowledge the truth that it is simply
unscientific to continue to believe that 333 years of written – even more
important, lived – history as a Spanish colony, as Spanish subjects,
left absolutely no profound imprint in our Filipino soul, in our collective
historical consciousness. This is
inconceivable because human beings are culturally permeable in their essence
and exist in symbiotic union with their environment, which is human as well as
natural. It is enough to look at the
engravings, drawings, paintings, photographs of the Hispanic past to see the
uncontestable reality of a Hispanic Filipino world that was peopled by the
entire gamut of beings and creatures, from Europeans to Chinese to natives;
from rulers to subjects; the old, the young and the middle-aged; men, women and
children; urban dwellers and rural folk -- with their machines, vehicles,
animals, buildings, homes, tools, dress, music, wares, social rituals, and so
on and so forth. It was in fact a world
of rich and varied presences, a mixture of races, codes, rituals, languages,
customs, creeds. There was no pressure
to all be the same, to act the same, to look the same, to talk the same. Rather there were serious social problems and
political grievances that demanded solution and a process that urgently
required social progress. There was a
nation on the threshold of maturity, to which her very Metropolis had led her;
unfortunately, the Mother Country was immobilized and herself in crisis.
Whether it pleases
us or not, and notwithstanding our particular cultural or political
susceptibilities and sensitivities, that Hispanic Filipino world was the
birthplace of our historical and moral reality as a nation.
Even Muslim
Mindanao had reinforced her separate cultural reality and affirmed her
autonomous identity throughout the centuries of alternating armed conflict and
establishment of pacts with the Spanish colonial government.
Can we therefore
deny the facts and realities of our own evolution as a people without any
deleterious consequences? Equally
impossible. What has happened, it seems
to me, is that by forcing a falsely purist historical image of ourselves, we
have precisely made it impossible to affirm our own national development over a
bedrock of true identity and reality.
And without the greater world to mirror our misconceptions, born of our
own geographical and historical isolation, it could not have been any other way
-- until the blessed arrival of this era of planetary synthesis.
Societal
Transition from Outer to Inner Awareness
According to
Arnold Toynbee, as a society or nation’s attention increasingly moves toward
the inner dimension of collective life, it acquires a deepening awareness of
itself that signals the arising of a new stage of maturity. At first a collectivity’s focus is on its
external spheres of existence – survival, territorial consolidation,
adaptation, technique. But as time
passes, its attention is increasingly drawn towards the inner sphere –-
coexistence, ethos, morals and ethics, regulation of social relations, internal
development –- in a word, culture, the encoding and externalization of its
spiritual experience and essential character.
This seems to me to be happening within the Filipino nation once again,
after a hundred years of emphasis on the external sphere.
And am I being
presumptuous in speaking of a new perspective on our history when I am not a
professional historian? I believe that
in thinking about our history and offering a contribution with a positive and
constructive intention, I only express the intelligence of our own people, our
capacity to observe ourselves. In our
young country’s history, the first Filipino historiographer was not a
professional historian but a writer and social critic: Dr. Jose Rizal. Though I am far from putting my modest effort
at the same level as Dr. Rizal’s work, I would nevertheless state the following
idea, which I believe Dr. Rizal would have endorsed:
The arising of an
independent, self-critical, open-minded intelligentsia, made up of citizens
from all walks of life and all the social classes, is an indicator of a new
stage of social maturity. And a society
that respects its thinkers, artists and socially-aware elements, that gives
them value and spaces of participation as a group above all and not
merely as individuals, will assure its own viability and capacity to grow in an
original, self-determined direction. It
will develop its particular, original and positive identity, which is always
based on self-awareness and inner-directed action toward clear, constructive
goals.
A society, on the
other hand, that marginalizes and closes avenues of development, expression and
participation to its most dynamic, self-critical and creative elements in the
inner spheres of study, thought, artistic creation –-especially those spheres
of work not directly related to commerce –- manifests absence of vision and
self-destructiveness because of its decreasing capacity to adapt to the ever
more complex conditions and demands of human civilization.
When a nation
begins to look into itself with intellectual honesty and collective compassion,
dramatic changes can be expected in its behavior, in the relations among its
members, as well as in its relationships with other societies.
I envision the
Philippines and the Filipinos as standing on the threshold of a great change
that will see the reversion of our unclarified, largely external and ambivalent
relationship with our past and present.
As a humanist writer and thinker on my people’s historical process, my
self-elected task is to facilitate this great change in the sphere of
historical reflection and interpretation, and to persuade my fellow Filipinos
to do everything they can to be the midwives and obstetricians of our country’s
rebirth, and not its inquisitors and abortionists.
Conclusion
The new
perspective proposed on Philippine history can be summarized as follows:
If one wishes to
study the Philippines from the point of view of geography and the Filipino
people as Asians whose modern nationality was formed in the course of a history
of two Western colonizations, separated by a brief interregnum in which the
first republic of Asia was born, then the current approach is an appropriate
and adequate perspective.
Moreover, if one’s
interest is to study the Philippines as a part of Asia and the Filipinos’
purely Asiatic history, then one should undertake the compilation of all Asian
sources documenting the historical relations between the archipelago’s
inhabitants and other Asiatic peoples, both before and during Hispanic
colonization, during the short-lived First Republic, and during and after the
American regime and the post-1946 period.
The above
perspective would consist, however, of an approach more in keeping with that of
official history – an aseptically scientific, rationalist focus that would pose
difficulties for understanding the Philippines’ evolution as a modern nation in
a totalizing way. It would enable us to
understand the “what”, “where”, even the “how” of the Philippine Republic
today, but it would not rigorously describe or clarify the “who” and the “why”
of the Filipino people.
On the other hand,
if one’s interest is to understand the human, historical process and the
cultural evolution of the Filipinos, then one requires a meaningful larger
context and other parameters that will enable one to establish relations of
contiguity, similitude and contrast between the Philippines and other national
processes. When one takes the Asian
stage as the historical frame of reference, however, one discovers that the
Philippines is a special case. Though
there are other former Spanish colonies in Oceania, none has a historical
process that equals or surpasses the complexity of the Philippines’. In terms of history and culture, the
Philippines and the Filipinos are in a certain sense an aberration in Asia, a
fluke, because almost our entire written history situates us within the
historical and cultural process of the West.
Thus, to
understand the Philippines’ historical and cultural narrative – its “real”
human history – Latin American history and culture offer the most adequate and
intelligible points of comparison and contrast, as another geographical space
and collective historical protagonist that, like the Philippines, experienced a
pre-Western era of indigenous development, a paradigmatic clash with Europe
during the Age of Discovery, and the formation of hybrid, mestizo cultures,
followed by emancipation and the founding of republics patterned like ours on
the Western constitutional model of government.
And leading this
line of thinking to its logical conclusion, the macroprocess that contains both
Philippine and Latin American history is that of the Spanish nation and empire.
Thus, what Toynbee
termed “an intelligible field of study” would either be Philippine history
within the context of Asian geography and the historical interrelationships
among the Asian countries and nations, or Philippine history within the context
of the process of the Spanish empire and comparatively studied alongside the
processes and cultures of Hispanic America.
I posit that,
studied as it is now, in isolation, without a clear major frame of reference,
or a frame of reference that is ambiguous and erratic, jumping from Asia to
Europe to the United States, Philippine history and culture does not constitute
an intelligible field of study.
It is my opinion
that the second frame of reference (the Hispanic one), is also meaningful and
useful for this present moment of globalization, in which the Pacific Rim is
acquiring increasing importance for the Philippines as a new economic sphere
for expanded trade relations and opportunities.
But even more importantly, such a perspective would be enormously
beneficial for the revaluation and dispassionate, balanced comprehension of the
Hispanic Filipino past, which I believe is essential for us to understand our
true cultural identity and historical experience.
Up until today,
because of the rupture of our identification with the Hispanic world in 1898,
the subsequent disappearance of the Hispanic Filipino generations, and the
destruction -- whether material and evident (the fire bombing of Intramuros,
the demolition of Spanish-era structures and the decay of our remanent
architectural patrimony) or cultural and implicit (the irreflexive adoption of
all things North American and the traditional disparagement of all things native)
–- of that cosmology, we have been divesting ourselves of a precious and essentially
Filipino cultural heritage, instead
of studying it seriously and drawing strength and inspiration from it. Rather, we have tended to support ourselves
solely on our North Americanized selves or on a pure ideal that is
pre-Hispanic, pre-Western, that is even more remote in time and – despite our
wish to believe the contrary – a more elemental paradigm that is not enough, by
itself, to enable us to effectively respond to the challenges of our syncretic,
complex reality, to anchor and give us a sound comprehension of our
intermediate and immediate past, and how they have led to our present.
Definitely, if we
wish to be holistic and non-discriminatory toward ourselves, and work for an
authentically Filipino union, we must unify and fully integrate all periods and
stages of our history –- the ancient indigenous, the Hispanic, the Hispanic
Filipino, and the American -- into the historical consciousness of the modern
Hispanic Amerasian people called the Filipinos.
In synthesis, I have put forward that our official
Filipino history has been largely shaped by a naturalistic, indigenist, Asian
perspective, and I posit that our “real history” and process as a nation state,
though it unfolded in Asia and we are an Asian people, is fully intelligible
only when we apply to it a global and structural focus and study it within the
larger framework of the Hispanic empire.
The advantage of this broader perspective on Philippine history is that
it will enable us to understand the past in a holistic way and free us from
prejudices toward it that were in fact imposed by the pressures of U.S. rule,
creating an anti-Spanish period bias in our official history. When we separate our old image of the kastilas
(our colonial “black legend”) from what Spain and the Spanish people were 500
years ago and today, when we distinguish between the degraded image of the
oppressed indios under the kastilas and what was a new, dignified
and powerful Hispanic Filipino people through the comparative study of Latin
American history and the understanding of Hispanic culture that it will give
us, we will be able to perceive our real past and better understand our
present. The understanding of our real
history will necessarily lead to the formation of a positive Filipino identity
that will respect all differences among us but will also value, above all, what
unites us. We will then be empowered to
reach consensus and undertake the construction of the future we aspire to as a
nation, that we see as most favorable for us all.
[1] Manifiesto de Historiadores.
Sergio Grez, Gabriel Salazar, eds.
LOM Ediciones: Santiago, 1999.
Concha y Toro 23, Santiago. Tels.
688-3508, 688-5273, 688-1968, 688-3942.
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