Introduction: War, Race, and Nation in Philippine Colonial Transitions

Vicente L. Rafael*

* Department of History, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195–3560, U. S. A.

e-mail: vrafael@uw. edu

The late nineteenth to the early twentieth century is the most intensely studied period in Philippine history. For students of Southeast Asia, the reasons are well known. It was during this period that the Philippines suffered through a series of dramatic transformations, going from colony to revolution to Republic, then back to being a colony within a span of six years (1896–1902). Igniting the first anti-colonial Revolution in Asia, Filipinos established the first Republic in Malolos, only to see it fall to the brutal invasion and subsequent occupation of an emergent United States. The articles in this special issue of Southeast Asian Studies seek to address and account for specific episodes of these transformations. What follows is a brief and necessarily attenuated sketch of the larger context of these transitions from one power regime to another.

From the Spanish conquest of 1565 to its demise in 1899, las islas Filipinas was located at the western most end of the Spanish empire, furnishing a vital link between Western Europe and East and Southeast Asia. New World silver monetized Asian economies just as Asian goods brokered by non-Han merchants and shipped on galleons constructed and powered by native labor enriched Spanish and other European traders. However, in the wake of Spanish liberal reforms from the later eighteenth to the nineteenth century that sought to establish closer political and economic ties between the colonies and the metropole, the Philippines proved to be the exception. It was administered by the most illiberal authorities of the Catholic Church, the Spanish regular orders, while its populace, regardless of wealth or ethnicity were considered racially inferior and thereby excluded from participating in metropolitan politics. While Cuban and Puerto Rican creoles enjoyed political rights and representation in the Spanish Parliament, Filipinos were ridiculed as recalcitrant savages and potential subversives. In a similar vein, the U. S. annexed the Philippines as the most distant of its overseas frontiers in the aftermath of its war against Spain. But unlike the predominantly white settler colonies of the continental Southwest such as Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma that were designated for eventual admission into the union, the Philippines was legally defined along with Puerto Rico, Hawai‘i and Guam as part of a series of “unincorporated territories.” Filipinos were consigned to the status of wards, unfit for self-government and thus in need of American instruction. This imperial schooling meant, however, that American sovereignty, always articulated in white supremacist terms, was imposed without the juridical rights and protections of the American constitution. Thus the paradox of imperial liberalism, whether coming from Madrid or Washington, D. C. On the one hand, both defined the archipelago as a state of exception, which is to say a site of continuing war and incomplete conquest, where whatever rights were conferred to a populace thought to be racially inferior could be arbitrarily and often violently taken away. On the other hand, fin de siècle liberalism also meant opening the economy and society of the colony to the currents of global trade, cosmopolitan cultures, technological and medical innovations, penal and educational reform, the movement of new ideas, and the irresistible, often catastrophic effects of inter-imperial and revolutionary wars.

Spain’s defeat in the Seven Years War and its need to match growing British imperial power led it to instigate a series of major reforms that transformed the economic and military basis on which its empire was run. In the Philippines between the 1760s to the 1860s, such reforms included the hugely profitable Tobacco Monopoly, paving the way for the agricultural revolution of the 1820s, the rationalization of revenue collection, the re-organization of the colonial militias, the opening of the archipelago to world trade allowing for the entrance of British, American, French, German merchant houses, the lifting of the ban on Chinese immigration, the beginnings of a public school system, the reform of the penal code, the easing of press censorship and many other developments. Such were attempts to modernize the Philippines, increase its profitability especially in light of the loss of Spanish America, and prevent its separation from the imperio. But it was precisely out of fear of losing las islas Filipinas that the Spanish colonial authorities, no matter liberal or conservative, intensified their dependence on the Catholic church and in particular on the Spanish friars to maintain what they considered to be gullible because racially inferior population of indios, mestizos and other Filipinos subservient to Spain. Whereas the liberal revolution in the Peninsula had taken away the power and property of the friar orders in Spain and the colonies, their influence increased as never before in the archipelago thanks to the cynical racism of the colonial state.

At odds with itself, Spanish colonial liberalism crashed on the weight of its own contradictions. Filipino nationalists claiming to be Spaniards in every equal measure blamed the most retrograde agents of the empire, the Spanish friars in frustrating their efforts at gaining political recognition in the metropole and dignity and justice in the colony. Seething with resentment, many were driven to consider separation and plot revolution. Thus did Jose Rizal organize the separatist, Freemason-like society, La Liga Filipina upon his return to the colony in 1892, that in turn begat Andres Bonifacio’s secret society, the Katipunan, which launched the Revolution in 1896. By the latter part of 1897 and most dramatically between 1898 to 1899, the Revolutionary forces in tense and fragile coalition with wealthier, more conservative elites, drafted the constitutional basis for what would become the short-lived Malolos Republic. Frantically seeking recognition abroad while attempting, at times violently, to establish its hegemony across the archipelago, the Malolos Republic was welcomed by many of the people as the acme of revolutionary accomplishment. At the same time, it met with stiff resistance from some peasant armies who saw the Republic as an elite-dominated government unable to control the abuses of its soldiers while its leaders sought to continue where the Spanish colonizers had left off. Indeed, a cursory reading of the Malolos Constitution shows how the Republic’s leaders drew from some of the more liberal features of the Spanish and American constitutions, from the inclusive definition of the basis of citizenship to the separation of Church and State. But its laws also favored a strong legislature over the executive, insuring that the more conservative elite faction would gain greater control of the new government, shaping its policies to guard its economic advantages and social privileges. In this sense, the Republic was far from being a democracy and arguably set the pattern for the emergence of a Republican oligarchy. Given the social tensions and military fragility of the new Republic, it was not surprising that it would fall rapidly to the advancing forces of the United States.

The protracted and valiant Filipino resistance against the U. S. was initially so effective precisely because it was not led by a centralized Republic. Emilio Aguinaldo, the Republic’s president spent much of his time retreating and hiding from the Americans. As with all sustained guerrilla movements, Filipino resistance was decentralized and largely under local initiatives led by charismatic commanders. The capture and cooptation of these commanders alongside the use of brutal tactics ranging from torture to mass killings, political exile to the reconcentration of entire villages that spawned illness, famine, economic and ecological collapse led to the eventual dissipation of Filipino resistance and the conditional hegemony of the U. S. Furthermore, active elite collaboration with the new imperial masters, buttressed by an extensive network of spies, an emergent infrastructure for gathering intelligence and infiltrating sites of militant resistance like labor unions, and the calculated censorship of nationalist sentiments by way of legislation and libel suits, quickly drove radical politics to the margins. U. S. “pacification” was further consolidated with the spread of an extensive public school system, secular in organization and liberal in outlook, with English as the lingua franca, through which other government programs could be channeled: public health that sought to link proper sanitary practices with rationality and bodily control; a liberal notion of citizenship that envisioned uplifting the sub-standard lives of the rural and urban population into a common “average” that would mitigate the “feudal” power of the rich; the suppression of heterogeneous labor regimes in favor of the standardization of work into wage labor that would allow for the colony’s integration with the global capitalist market; and so on.

What we might think of as the biopolitical practices of the U. S. colonial state—that is, policies and procedures meant not only to brutally suppress insurgent challenges to its sovereignty but also to reinvent the very conditions for living life itself in the colony—were ordered towards preparing the people to become recognizably liberal subjects fit for self-government. U. S. colonial governance while comprehensive and profound in its penetration into everyday lives was at the same time conceived to be temporally limited in its formal, external presence. Filipinos from the start were seen to be vital agents in the realization of imperial rule. Initially ambiguous about the status of the Philippines, the U. S. Congress as early as 1916 decided that independence would be the ultimate fate of the colony. However, it would be an independence whose terms would be dependent on the U. S., and thus always conditional, deferred and subject to continuous surveillance, testing and periodic re-evaluation. The eventual outcome of this bizarre vision of a dependent independence was the non-sovereign sovereignty of the elite dominated Commonwealth of the Philippines between 1935–41. Like the Malolos Republic before it, the Commonwealth would be decisively shattered by yet another foreign invasion, this time at the hands of the Japanese imperial army. Though briefly revived in the early months of 1946, the Commonwealth would give way by July 4, 1946 to the post-war Republic. It was a Republic that bore more than a striking resemblance to its colonial ancestor. Its formal sovereignty was contingent on the continuing material, military and cultural hegemony of the United States as much as its offices were dominated by the same oligarchy. However, it was also a Republic that was, as Reynaldo Ileto’s essay in this issue points out, at constant war with itself. Haunted by the specters of an unfinished Revolution now filtered and mediated by cultural nationalist notions fostered under the Japanese occupation and besieged by a communist-influenced peasant uprising, the Republic would struggle with the meaning of independence, the limits of its sovereignty, and the possible future of freedom in the country.

The articles in this special issue of Southeast Asian Studies grapple with the history of these transformative years. They map both the disruptive and productive effects of wars, the formation of colonial subjectivities predicated on the categories of race and ethnicity that directly emerge from such wars, the shifting definitions of colonial citizenship, the conflict of aesthetic sensibilities rooted in the languages of Spanish, English and the vernaculars, the radicalization and repression of hispanophile nationalists, and the contests over the meaning of the Revolution amid the mass movements and social unrest of the post World War II era.

War was an indispensable means for imposing sovereignty, whether imperial and national. John Blanco notes how sovereignty itself, the power to decide on who dies and who lives, was invariably shaped by shifting notions of race. He explores a set of related contradictions to illuminate the co-constitutive relationship between war and race. First, he looks at the economic and social liberalization of the Spanish Philippines as that which simultaneously opened the door for the most virulently racist and exclusionary depictions of Filipinos; second, the seeming dissonance between the official U. S. proclamations of “benevolent assimilation” and the racially charged exterminatory campaign of the U. S. military against Filipino insurgents; and finally, the ethnological insistence in the nineteenth century that there was no such thing as a “Filipino race,” only heterogeneous “tribes” organized into a racial hierarchy as against the racially inclusive rhetoric of “the Filipino race” invoked by nationalists from Rizal to Bonifacio in their attempts to conjure a community emancipated from colonial rule. War as the means for establishing sovereign power, whether that of the imperial authorities or nationalist fighters, thus mobilizes racial projects even as these projects determine war’s unfolding and outcomes. In this sense, one could think of Philippine history as a specific instance of the global unfolding of modernity characterized by the contradictory and complementary workings of race making (coincident with nation-making) and racism (as a weapon of reactionary colonialism).

Race also figures significantly in Filomeno Aguilar’s nuanced reading of the vicissitudes of citizenship traversing three regimes. He asks: what did it mean to be a Filipino citizen in the eyes of the law? What did the law see when someone, for example, a mixed race person with Chinese ancestry, sought recognition as “Filipino”? How was the same law interpreted differently between the metropole and the colony, between the Spanish and the U. S. regimes, and among the Malolos Republic, the Commonwealth and post-war Republic? Legal definitions of citizenship were predicated on three rights: jus soli, the right of birth; jus sanguinis, the right of blood; and jus domicile, the right of residence. Each regime emphasized one or the other in deciding appeals for naturalization especially for what was until the latter nineteenth century referred to as “Chinese mestizos”: individuals with Chinese fathers and Filipina mothers. Surprisingly, the Malolos Republic proved to be the most liberal in its grants of citizenship, placing equal value on all three rights. Aguilar explains this liberality in terms of the dire needs of the new Republic under siege to attract as many different supporters into its ranks. Just as significant was the fact that the colonial Supreme Court under the U. S. made up of Filipino and American justices often proved to be far more liberal than the U. S. State Department in following the Fourteenth Amendment of the U. S. Constitution in recognizing citizenship on the basis of jus soli. Such rulings were particularly striking given the racist context of U. S. immigration law. The U. S. had extended the Chinese Exclusion Act to the colony to prevent “Asiatics” from using the Philippines as a backdoor to enter the U. S. Additionally, the American Supreme Court defined the Philippines along with Hawai‘i, Guam and Puerto Rico as “unincorporated territories,” designating the status of its racially mixed inhabitants in denigrating terms as “foreign in a domestic sense.” Yet, in deciding naturalization cases on the basis of jus soli, the colonial Supreme Court, as Aguilar points out, set aside considerations of race in favor of taking into account the specific conditions of the individual. By contrast, the Commonwealth and then the Republic revised earlier rulings and ignored the Fourteenth Amendment, shifting decisively to jus sanguinis as the main determinant of citizenship. Filipino legislators sought to use limits on naturalization to stem the putatively deleterious economic and cultural effects of the Chinese. Indulging its racist fears under nationalist cover, the postwar Republic tended to adhere to a conservative, exclusionary understanding of the law.

The exclusionary racial project of Filipino nationalism in relation to the Chinese, however, takes on a different significance in the anti-Americanism of early twentieth century hispanophile nationalists. Heirs to the ilustrado legacy of the Propaganda Movement and the Malolos Republic, they were united in their use of Spanish as a lingua franca of opposition to what they regarded as the arrogant philistinism of the English language Anglo-Saxon culture and imperial policies of the U. S. regime. Gloria Cano’s reconstruction of the history of the nationalist newspaper El Renacimiento provides us with an important window into this vital movement. Events in Spain between 1812 to 1868 were crucial in instituting the basis for the emergence of a liberal public sphere sustained by the flowering of numerous media of publicity, principally the political newspaper. From the 1880s on, numerous publications emerged in the colony, echoing the political debates in the metropole. As Cano points out, much attention has been devoted to the premier nationalist newspaper based in Spain, La Solidaridad. But what has been almost completely forgotten is the fact that the colony’s print media such as Pascual Poblete’s El Resumen, the initially liberal La Voz de España, Isabelo de los Reyes’ bilingual El Ilocano, and Diariong Tagalog where Marcelo H. del Pilar had cut his editorial teeth before fleeing to Spain and editing the Sol, preceded and influenced La Solidaridad in their vigorous debates with several conservative publications. It is within this longer history of bilingual political journalism that Cano situates the emergence of El Renacimiento during the first decade of American rule. Its editors were dedicated critics of the colonial regime as much as they were advocates of a revolutionary nationalist tradition in Spanish and the vernaculars. With the inclusion of a Tagalog language section, Muling Pagsilang edited by Lope K. Santos, the circulation of the paper increased considerably, alarming colonial authorities and the small but vociferous American community. Colonial officials responded by resorting to censorship through legal means. Officials such as the Philippine Constabulary commander George Allen who objected to the newspaper’s dogged investigation of PC corruption and that great pontificating windbag, Dean C. Worcester, harassed the editors of El Renacimiento with libel suits that eventually bankrupted the paper. Yet the legacy of El Renacimiento—its critique of the abuses and hypocrisies of state power, its advocacy of nationalist culture, its highly polemical responses to injustice—is all still very much alive in the practice of Filipino and Filipino-American journalism today.

This persistent attempt and recurrent failure of state power, imperial as well as national, to colonize the life worlds of its citizens and transform their heterogeneity into a set of measurable standards and calculable values is the overarching theme of Neferti Tadiar’s article. She examines the U. S. colonial regime from the perspective of a history of mediation, looking specifically at the media technologies which laid the infrastructures for what she calls the “milieu” of colonial citizenship. In this way, her article compliments those of the previous three while clarifying how something like a colonized consciousness came about. Education was the key apparatus in this process and Tadiar takes particular aim at the formative history of Filipino literature in English. Beginning the early twentieth century, the short story emerged as the pre-eminent genre of literature in English. Such authors as Paz Marquez Benitez and Manuel Arguilla came to embody in their work an aesthetic of transparency, one related to the emergent technologies of photography and the cinema. Their accomplishments, or so colonial literary critics claimed, lay in their ability to make English seem unrhetorical, as if it were a kind of local dialect that organically grew out of everyday experience.

The mystification of English as the aesthetic equivalent of local speech made it seem that English could substitute for Spanish and the vernaculars. Additionally, the seeming transparency of English, and thus its power to convey worldly reality, made it appear as if the aesthetic qualities of other literary forms such as vernacular and Spanish poetry, the komedya, the cenaculo, the pasyon, the zarzuela, and so forth were excessively ornamental, epistemologically obtuse and woefully anachronistic. Colonial literary education thus consigned an entire range of indigenous and Spanish literary practices to be backward and obsolete. Freighted by rhetorical flourishes that supposedly distorted rather than conveyed the really real—the “meaning” that lay behind a story, for example, or the “revelation” that was conveyed by a symbol—these other literary forms were devalued as not quite modern. Aesthetic education under the U. S. regime thus sought to use literature as a way of “redistributing the senses” in order to produce citizens who were on their way to a democratic society. That strange formation, “colonial democracy” required that colonial subjects think of themselves as individuals with inalienable rights but also with alienable and negotiable interests; as juridical subjects before the law who were also subjected to the irresistible rhythms and irrational movements of the global capitalist marketplace; as the origins of their labor rather than mere servants of feudal masters, but also as receptacles of measurable amounts of labor power exchangeable for commodities. Aesthetic education, including the short story in English, was part of a larger apparatus for instilling and mediating the contradictions inherent in these notions. Yet, as Tadiar points out, this aesthetic education came at the cost of suppressing other expressive forms which nonetheless continued to circulate, “infecting” prescribed colonial aesthetics in the way of mimicry or fantasy beyond the limits of capitalist-democracy.

The survival of alternative modes of imagining and living in excess of colonial forms is a topic that pervades Reynaldo Ileto’s essay. It deals with the contests over the mediation and meanings of the Revolution, which is to say, of the unsettled origins of Filipino nationhood. In his masterful analysis of the career of the historian Teodoro Agoncillo, we see how the latter’s most important book, The Revolt of the Masses [[1956] 2002], could be read as a telling episode in the struggles between the 1930s to the 1950s to control the narrative and interpretation of what has been regarded as the “unfinished” and thus inconclusive Revolution. Steeped in the traditions of vernacular literature that as Tadiar pointed out tended to be marginalized by colonial aesthetic education, Agoncillo did not begin doing serious historical research until the Japanese occupation. Despite the everyday brutality of the Japanese military regime, Agoncillo and other nationalist artists and intellectuals managed to take advantage of the regime’s cultural policies which encouraged more critical views of the United States alongside the recuperation of the anti-colonial revolutionary legacy. As Ileto points out, the Japanese occupation was a formative period in Agoncillo’s thinking as he began the research that would go into the writing of his book about the Katipunan.

The book itself had a remarkable career. As a prize-winning manuscript in 1948, its publication was blocked by the anti-communist Committee on Un-Filipino Activities whose membership included the future president Ramon Magsaysay. Limited copies were finally allowed to be published in 1956, coinciding with the tumultuous debates that led to the passage of the Rizal bill requiring schools to teach the hero’s two novels. As Ileto argues, Agoncillo’s book stirred controversy precisely because it sought to counter official narratives of the Revolution. Such views held that U. S. rule was truly beneficial. Its tutelary trajectory allowed for the attainment of revolutionary goals. U. S. intervention in the revolution against Spain foreshadowed its role in the fight against the Japanese. Both resulted in the liberation of the Philippines, culminating in the grant of Independence in 1946. Agoncillo like the hispanophile nationalists Claro M. Recto and Jose P. Laurel, along with the members of the Communist Party and the Hukbalahap movement thought otherwise. They saw U. S. colonialism as a disaster, and experienced Independence as a betrayal insofar as the Americans and their Filipino elite allies refused to recognize the efforts of the Huks in fighting the Japanese. For Agoncillo, the social discontent that boiled over into the Huk rebellion was evidence of the unfinished revolution of 1896. The class antagonism that characterized the Revolution and deferred its success was similar to the sort of class struggle that animated the Huk revolt. The continuing greatness of Agoncillo’s book, as Ileto shows, lies in the way it foregrounds the historicity of the present. Arising organically from the intense political debates and social turmoil of its times, the book put forth the anti-colonial revolutionary origins of the nation that were decisively at odds with the official view that understood the country’s emergence to be the product of America’s benevolent tutelage and unstinting patronage. Agoncillo’s legacy infuses Ileto’s own work as the “unfinished revolution” continues to be the dominant trope that animates the nationalist understanding of Filipino history. From this perspective, history is not merely a record of transitions, or an accounting of transformations. It is rather the anticipation of that which is to come: perhaps a future reckoning, or the arrival of a kind of justice that outstrips the law. It would be the promise of freedom, however conceived, which, as a promise, is always yet to be fulfilled.

References

Agoncillo, Teodoro. [1956] 2002. The Revolt of the Masses: The Story of Bonifacio and the Katipunan. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press.

—. 1960. Malolos, the Crisis of the Republic. Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press.

Aguilar, Filomeno V. 1998. Clash of Spirits: The History of Power and Sugar Planter Hegemony on a Visayan Island. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

Anderson, Benedict. 2005. Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination. London: Verso.

Anderson, Warwick. 2006. Colonial Pathologies: American Tropical Medicine, Race and Hygiene in the Philippines. Durham: Duke University Press.

Blanco, John D. 2009. Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth Century Philippines. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Cullinane, Michael. 2005. Ilustrado Politics: Filipino Elite Responses to American Rule, 1898–1908. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

Fradera, Josep. 1999. Filipinas, la Colonia Más Peculiar: La Hacienda Pública en la Definición de la Política Colonial, 1762–1868. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas.

—. 2005. Colonias para Después de un Imperio. Barcelona: Edicions Bellaterra.

—. 2009. Reading Imperial Transitions: Spanish Contraction, British Expansion and American Irruption. In The Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State, edited by Alfred W. McCoy and Francisco A. Scarano, pp. 34–62. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Guerrero, Milagros. 1977. Luzon at War: Contradictions in Philippine Society, 1898–1902. PhD dissertation, University of Michigan.

Ileto, Reynaldo C. 1980. Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

—. 1998. Filipinos and Their Revolution: Event, Discourse and History. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

Kramer, Paul. 2006. The Blood of Government: Race, Emire, the United States and the Philippines. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Legarda, Benito. 2009. After the Galleons: Foreign Trade, Economic Change and Entrepreneurship in the Nineteenth Century Philippines. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

McCoy, Alfred W. 2009. Policing America’s Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

McCoy, Alfred W.; and Scarano, Francisco A., eds. 2009. Colonial Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American State. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.

Miller, Stuart Creighton. 1984. Benevolent Assimilation: The American Conquest of the Philippines, 1899–1903. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Mojares, Resil. 2008. Brains of the Nation: Pedro Paterno, T. H. Pardo de Tavera, Isabelo de los Reyes and the Production of Modern Knowledge. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

Rafael, Vicente L. 2005. The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of Translation in the Spanish Philippines. Durham: Duke University Press.

—. 2010. Welcoming What Comes: Sovereignty and Revolution in the Colonial Philippines. Comparative Studies in Society and History 52(1): 157–179.

Robles, Eliodoro G. 1969. The Philippines in the Nineteenth Century. Quezon City: Malaya Books.

Schumacher, John. 1973. The Propaganda Movement, 1880–1895: The Creators of a Filipino Consciousness, the Makers of Revolution. Manila: Solidaridad Publishing House.

Scott, William Henry. 1986. Ilocano Resistance to American Rule. Quezon City: New Day Press.

Stanley, Peter W. 1974. A Nation in the Making: The Philippines and the United States, 1899–1921. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Wickberg, Edgar. 1965. The Chinese in the Philippines, 1850–1898. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Race as Praxis in the Philippines at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

John D. Blanco*

* Faculty for the Department of Literature, 0410, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive, La Jolla, CA 92093–0410

e-mail: jdblanco@ucsd.edu

Abstract

This article takes as its point of departure the disparity between the empirical poverty of race and its survival, even growth, as a way of understanding history and politics—or more specifically, history as politics and politics as history in the Philippines during the nineteenth century. What interested me primarily was how race as a form of praxis is too often and easily ascribed to a discredited science that came into vogue during the nineteenth century. While race rhetoric certainly drew its authority from scientific positivism, its spokespeople also invoked the fields of law, philosophy, and religion. Yet for most people, race was not a question to be resolved by scientific investigation, but a weapon in a war or conflict between unequal opponents. Not surprisingly, questions around the existence or impossibility of a Filipino race were most fully debated and developed in a time of war—the 1896 Philippine Revolution, and the 1899 Philippine-American War, which began just after the outbreak of war between the U. S. and Spain in 1898. My article charts the genealogy of these debates, and the relationship of race to the narration of anti-imperial movements and alternative cosmopolitanism.

Keywords: Philippine-American War, Philippine revolution, colonialism, U. S. imperialism, race, racism, religion, counter-history

When we speak of the “Unfinished Revolution”... we should ask, which one?... What do we mean when we speak of memory? Is it the memory of Presidents and Judges or that of Warriors and Revolutionaries? Is it the memory of winners or of losers? Of rich or poor? Of the academic or the shaman in her mountain vastness recalling a noble race of brown people before the coming of the white?

Charlson Ong[1]

What is a Filipino race? The question today seems absurd, if we understand race as a social construct: a fabrication of biological origins and human predispositions that have no scientific basis. Most scholars would agree with this basic premise: that every claim to racial identity and difference lays claim to a myth of scientific “truth” that has been either discredited or identified as particularly susceptible to ideological manipulation. Even the social science most closely associated with the idea of race has felt it necessary to publicly distance itself from its original object of inquiry, and to subject it to a rigorous historical reading. Thus in the American Anthropological Association’s Statement on Race, passed by the executive board in 1998, we read:

“Race” thus evolved as a worldview, a body of prejudgments that distorts our ideas about human differences and group behavior. Racial beliefs constitute myths about the diversity in the human species and about the abilities and behavior of people homogenized into “racial” categories. The myths fused behavior and physical features together in the public mind, impeding our comprehension of both biological variations and cultural behavior, implying that both are genetically determined. Racial myths bear no relationship to the reality of human capabilities or behavior. Scientists today find that reliance on such folk beliefs about human differences in research has led to countless errors.

“Statement on Race” [American Anthropological Association 1998]

This clarification, along with a significant bibliography on the role of anthropology and the study of race in furthering colonial undertakings and imperialist endeavors, allows us to correct the aforementioned “errors” of fact and judgment inherent in the concept of race, by returning such errors to the historical specificity from which they emerged—the genocide and depopulation of native Americans, the trans-Atlantic slave trade, the depredations of commercial war in Asia and the Americas, the rise of colonial states in Asia, the scramble for Africa, and the First World War, to name only the most familiar ones. And yet, historical revision and cultural critique can neither resurrect the past nor change the “truth” for which people have killed and died. This observation, however banal, leads us to consider the stark differences between the ways we narrate the histories of race as a social construct today, and the way race rhetoric narrates and stakes its claim to truth on its own counter-history, which is the subject of this article.

In recent years, scholars in American and U. S. Ethnic Studies, as well as Philippine and postcolonial studies, have shown us the central role of racism and race prejudice in the making of U. S. Empire, particularly in the 1898 U. S. War with Spain and the Philippine-American War (1899–1902). While Philippine historians have long been attentive to the institutional and cultural racism of U. S. officials and magistrates throughout the early decades of U. S. colonial rule, later debates on U. S. participation in colonial genocide, along with the unfavorable comparison of the Philippine-American War with colonial wars in Africa and U. S. wars in Southeast Asia (particularly Vietnam), brought to task both the “benevolent” aims of U. S. institutions and the “positive” effects of the U. S. colonial legacy [see Francisco 1973; Miller 1984; Blanco 2005; 109–115; Rodriguez 2009: 98–149].[2] This has allowed a new generation of scholars to explore the complex ramifications of racial discourse in the Philippines as well as the Philippine diaspora, whether it concerns the postcolonial displacement of racism onto Philippine indigenous and ethnic minorities in elite nationalism [Salman 2001; Aguilar 2005; Kramer 2006]; the racialized and gendered character of the globalizing service sector, composed of workers without the protection or rights of citizenship [Parreñas 2003; Tadiar 2009]; or the race and gender formations of Filipina/o-Americans in the U. S. [Bonus 2000; Campomanes 1995: 145–200; Le Espiritu 1993; Manalansan 2003; Rodriguez 2009; See 2009]. While my study draws on these and other works, my primary interest lies in the hidden histories that racial conflict and partisanship seek to tell, and the deep affinities these histories share in a time of war. Posed in the form of a question, that question would be: in our haste to expose the hidden histories of economic exploitation, imperialist ideology, and colonial depredation, all of which employ categories of race for their ideological justification, is it possible that we miss or disregard the stakes of the rank and file who take up the banner of race as a way to understand the present?

This article takes as its point of departure this disparity between the empirical poverty of race and its survival, even growth, as a way of understanding history and politics—or more specifically, history as politics and politics as history. What interests me primarily is how race as a form of praxis is too often and easily ascribed to a discredited science that came into vogue during the nineteenth century: a science that adopted and vulgarized one or more theories of scientific positivism, evolutionism, or orthogenesis, and that served the cynical imperialist doctrines of Europe and the United States on the eve of World War I. While race rhetoric certainly drew its authority from scientific positivism, its spokespeople also invoked the fields of law, philosophy, and religion. For most people, race was not a question to be resolved by scientific investigation, but a weapon in a war or conflict between unequal opponents. Not surprisingly, questions around the existence or impossibility of a Filipino race were most fully debated and developed in a time of war—the 1896 Philippine Revolution, and the 1899 Philippine-American War, which began just after the outbreak of war between the U. S. and Spain in 1898.[3]

Three paradoxes frame this understanding of race formation in the late Spanish colonial period and the two phases of the Philippine Revolution, which ended with the fall of the First Philippine Republic and 40 years of U. S. colonial rule. The first is the contradiction between the relative liberalization of various economic and social reforms promoted by the Spanish colonial state in the 1880s and the emergence of the most vicious racism expressed by Spanish officials and writers in the same period. The second is the contradiction between the understanding among most ethnologists at the end of the nineteenth century, Philippine-born as well as European, that there was no such thing as a Filipino race, and the predominance of race rhetoric in revolutionary and messianic movements. The third is the radical disjunction between the stated aims and strategies of U. S. benevolent assimilation as it was formulated by U. S. leaders at the outbreak of the Philippine-American War, and the pursuit of the same war by the military rank and file as a genocidal campaign against the native population. Not coincidentally, these genocidal campaigns were also framed by the rhetoric of race and racism, but in a very different way from the race rhetoric of the Philippine Commission that governed the archipelago during the first five years of U. S. rule. The full-blown expression of Spanish colonial racism, expressed in cultural terms, the appearance and persistence of the idea of a Filipino race, and the hidden signification of “benevolent assimilation” as genocide frame this study of race rhetoric at the turn of the century and its role in fashioning a historical memory for political purposes, as well as creating or enforcing certain forms of historical amnesia. To borrow a phrase from Lisa Lowe, each race formation propels an “economy of affirmation and forgetting,” both in the intersection and divergence of each from the establishment and exercise of imperial U. S. hegemony [2006: 206].

From Implicit to Explicit Colonial Racism

In John Schumacher’s synthetic history of the Propaganda Movement for colonial reforms by the Filipino expatriate students and editors living in Spain during the 1880s, the author observes that the coalescence of anti-Spanish sentiment and the outbreak of the 1896 Philippine Revolution did not occur in a vacuum. The 1868 opening of the Suez Canal, the 1872 Cavite rebellion (which led to the exile of prominent Philippine-born creoles and mestizos (mixed-blood) to Europe), the 1887 publication of Jose Rizal’s Noli me Tangere, and the representation of the indigenous tribes of the Philippines during the 1887 Philippine Exposition in Madrid, all served as the primary catalysts for the spread of popular discontent, and its convergence with the rancor of the native-born educated classes for their unjust persecution [Schumacher [1972]1997: 40–104]. All of these events also contributed to attuning these educated classes to the larger contradiction emerging in the Philippines, in which the impetus for economic liberalization and industrial development foundered on the continuity of colonial society—based as it was on a caste-like hierarchy of peninsular Spaniards, creoles, mestizos, Indios, and Chinese (each assigned different privileges and duties); and a system of political expediency that gave colonial officials and religious missionaries wide latitude in their interpretation and exercise of the law [see Blanco 2009: 64–94]. In this historical context, individual acts and independent events took on the added symbolic meaning of pointing toward the future direction of colonial policy as a whole in the archipelago. As national martyr Jose Rizal so succinctly put it in his famous 1889 essay “The Philippines a Century Hence”: “The batteries are being charged little by little, and if the prudence of the government does not give vent to the grievances that are accumulating, the fatal spark may one day fly” [cited in La Solidaridad I 1996: 434].

Schumacher’s account, based as it is on a close reading of works by members of the so-called “enlightened” or ilustrado generation of Philippine expatriates studying in Europe after 1872, rightly stresses the influence of Spanish republicanism, German enlightenment, and economic liberalism on these writers, all of which drew them into the contentious debates waged in the public press regarding the relationship of Spain to their native land. It is in the context of these debates that the early ilustrado interest in the history of Filipinos as either a race or collection of races inhabiting the archipelago takes shape. At the same time, however, these influences themselves must be examined against the explicit racist character of the modern colonial state, because it is only this racist character that explains the outbreak of peninsular Spanish cultural racism that propelled ilustrado scholarship from the very beginning.

Religious missionaries from the colonial period never ceased to remark on the relatively “peaceful” conquest and colonization of the archipelago: the Spanish king Philip II went so far as to mandate that the conquest be referred to as a “pacification,” owing to the exemplary prudence of certain conquistadores and the strategic deployment of religious missionaries. With rare exceptions [e. g., see Constantino 1975; Corpuz 1989], modern scholars concur that no genocide or wholesale slaughter of indigenous inhabitants took place as they did in the Americas and Caribbean, and that religious missionaries from within the first 30 years of the conquest began to provide legal sanctions against (many forms of) institutionalized slavery and for limiting Spanish contact with the natives (a situation that almost always resulted in the abuse of power and enslavement).

Such considerations have led many to wonder what accounts for the specificity of Spanish colonial racism in the nineteenth century. Should one begin, as Aníbal Quijano does, with the time of the Spanish conquest of the Americas, from which the colonial system justified and managed from top to bottom a division and hierarchy between the conquerors and the conquered?[4] Following this view, any presumed benevolence or cultural sensitivity the early conquistadores and missionaries may have shown neither contradicts nor qualifies the coerced incorporation of indigenous communities into colonial society, which took place along the lines of a fundamental, racial disparity between the privileges of the conquerors and the duties and obligations of the conquered.[5] At the opposite extreme of the spectrum, Colette Guillaumin demands that we study race according to the historical moment in which race as a reification of human diversity—race as an idea—first takes place: “the idea,” she argues, “that a human social group is a natural formation grew up in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries”[Guillaumin [1980]1995: 67].[6] Following Guillaumin’s assertion, race and racism are thoroughly modern ideas of recent invention, which one can only apply to past centuries anachronistically.

This divergence of opinion, however, becomes secondary, perhaps “academic,” when we try to approach the question of race as a form of praxis—that is, participation and agency in a field of laws, decrees, discourses, institutions, and contingencies (both natural and human) that create or unmake colonial hegemony. However ancient or modern race may have been considered as a form of administration in the seventeenth century or a science in the nineteenth century, we must bear in mind that in both cases, race attempts to lay claim to a knowledge or science of history. It not only attempts an account of human difference, but it does so in and through a narrative whose function it was to inform the prudence of colonial practices—decrees, policies, and their enforcement or disregard. Foucault links the two approaches to “race-thinking” and racism “proper” by emphasizing how both enact a practice of politicizing history under the guise of historicizing political relationships, which go under the name of counter-histories:

Although this [counter-historical] discourse speaks of races, and although the term “race” appears at a very early stage, it is quite obvious that the word “race” itself is not pinned to a stable biological meaning. And yet the word is not completely free-floating.... One might say—and this [seventeenth-century] discourse does say that two races exist whenever one writes the history of two groups that do not, at least to begin with, have the same language, or, in many cases, the same religion. The two groups form a unity and a single polity only as a result of wars, invasions, victories, and defeats, or, in other words, acts of violence. The only link between them is the link established by the violence of war. [2003: 77]

When we turn our eyes to the theater of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines, two observations regarding the idea of race in colonial practice present themselves. The first is that the sheer diversity of ethno-linguistic and social groups that came under the administration of Spain’s claim to the islands—from the many indigenous tribes that refused or resisted Christianization by the religious missionaries, to the Chinese traders that maintained the internal domestic economy, to the regional differences of the pacified populations universally labeled Indios, not to mention all the human combinations produced among these groups and Spaniards—precluded any easy, unqualified statements about racial difference. In fact, this very heterogeneity was invoked as the primary reason that the islands were prohibited from electing representatives to the Spanish parliament (Cortes) in the nineteenth century. The second observation is that, in the aftermath of the Seven Years War between Britain and France (1756–63), during which the British temporarily occupied Spain’s colonial cities Havana and Manila, the colonial government launched a project of administrative and economic reform that lasted all the way to the end of Spanish rule, and the reforms initiated by the colonial state could not but reorganize colonial society along explicitly racial lines.

Even though Great Britain returned Havana and Manila to Spain, the Seven Years War made plain the fact that Spain lacked the necessary force to repel an invasion by Britain in the Caribbean or the Pacific and that the wealth produced by Spain’s right of conquest from the sixteenth century was not sufficient to allow Spain to compete with other European powers in the expansion of world trade of the eighteenth. This recognition served as the basis of Bourbon colonial reform, whose task it would be to create a modern colonial state in the overseas viceroyalties. Yet while we tend to characterize this reform in broad strokes as the corollary of economic liberalization, religious secularization, and flirtation with admitting political representatives into the Spanish legislature (Cortes) after 1812, the reality was more complicated. On the one hand, the government had to reform the colonial Treasury (Hacienda); stimulate the production of export commodities; open Manila and other port cities to world trade; circulate information and communication through media (which would lead to the opening of new markets); and generally find more effective ways of drafting or soliciting and profiting from native or (in the case of Cuba) slave labor. On the other hand, the colonial state had to centralize economic and political authority in fewer hands, the better to harness and manage the consequences of social transformation [Elizalde Pérez-Grueso 2002: 123–142; Fradera 2004: 307–320].

The colonial dilemma in turn engendered at least two possible attitudes toward the racial separation and hierarchy of Spanish and native subjects. To follow the structural parallel, on the one hand, Spanish advisors and administrators imagined native subjects playing a more assertive role in providing for the economic, military, and even “spiritual” welfare of the colony. This would involve the mastery of skills that could only be learned through an educational system; the creation of new needs that would provide the incentive (or coercion) to labor; the monetarization of all forms of tribute payment; the fomentation of public opinion; the Christianization of non-tribute paying populations; and the enlistment of native and mestizo priests in the administration of parishes. On the other hand, the colonial state had to ensure against future attacks by both rival European powers and the threat of internal anti-colonial revolt. This latter threat became all the more pressing after the 1793 Haitian revolution, which was led and propelled by African slaves, as well as the Latin American wars of independence between 1810–21. For colonial military officers and Spanish missionaries, these dangers warranted an even more pronounced segregation of colonial subjects from access to any and all institutional forms of authority.

One might say that the contradiction of these two tendencies constituted the “late colonial dialectic” of the nineteenth century, in which racial consciousness for both Spaniards and colonial subjects arose in the ever-pervasive urgency of preserving Spanish “prestige”(prestigio) in the islands over and against Spain’s increasing dependence on the colonial population for its welfare and security. The loyalty of native and Chinese populations to Spanish rule becomes tied to the questioned (in)capacity of native and Chinese mestizo priests to administer parishes over Spanish religious missionaries; or native and mestizo military officers to wield authority; or the capacity of a vernacular language like Tagalog to effectively communicate the Gospel to the common folk.[7] Then in 1840, Spanish authorities realized that the same racial exclusion that the colonial administration had applied to native priests was being applied to Spaniards in the by-laws of a religious confraternity dedicated to the devotion of St. Joseph in the southern Tagalog region of Luzon [Ileto 1989: 29–73; Sweet 1970: 94–119]. The suppression of this confraternity, under the leadership of Apolinario de la Cruz, would lead to the massacre of up to a thousand devotees [Ileto 1989: 62].

Sinibaldo de Mas’s 1841 secret report to the king perhaps best expresses the perceived urgency of the colonial state to pursue an explicit racial policy in conformity with the permanence of colonial rule in the archipelago. His three recommendations were: 1) the reduction to the point of elimination of the Spanish Creole population; 2) the “voluntary” obedience of all colored people (gente de color) to all whites; and 3) the overhaul of the colonial administration, which included the prohibition of colored people from positions of authority [Mas 1963: 50].[8] Decades before the indio Filipino became a subject of anthropology, the racialization of colonial subjects as “colored people” allowed colonial administrators to homogenize its target of reform under a common identity. In asking what measures, short of enslavement (which was forbidden by the Spanish monarch from the time of the conquest and colonization of the archipelago), would lead colonial subjects to accept their subservience and inferiority, Mas was already engaged in the process of naturalizing the relations of Spanish superiority/native inferiority, years before Charles Darwin and the Comte de Gobineau would provide their theses on natural selection and racial pedigree.

In the case of the Philippines, then, we see how the implicit racial character of colonial hierarchy between conquerors and conquered no longer sufficed to maintain order while coping with the social and economic transformations taking place in Southeast Asia. The project of reform would have to render explicit racial division and hierarchy in colonial policies and institutions, even as the colonial state introduced liberal reforms in the economy and society. The reversal of colonial policy to secularize religious missions into parishes, the Spanish military expeditions to “pacify” Muslim Jolo and Mindanao, the “reconquest” of the mountain tribes of Luzon for the purpose of subjecting these groups to Spain’s financial monopolies, the return of the Jesuits for the purpose of evangelizing the unincorporated mountain tribes and Muslim populations, the vacillating policies regarding Chinese immigration (from exclusion to assimilation) in the nineteenth century, and the stimulation of agriculture through the land tenancy of Chinese mestizos (who proceeded to sub-contract their lands to native labor), may not individually exhibit a fully formed “racist ideology.” Yet they brought Spaniards into ever-closer contact with the subject populations, forcing the former to measure these populations against their presumed capacity to increase economic productivity and political security. Even as reform initiatives became internally differentiated, the overall attempt to move from “theoretical” to “actual” centralization entailed the penetration and ramification of racial division and hierarchy into all spheres of society.[9]

The transition from the implicitly racial character of colonial rule to the explicit racism of the colonial state adds a dimension of desperation to the otherwise smug sense of racial superiority expressed by peninsular Spanish writers in the Philippines during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1887, during the Philippine Exposition that was at that moment transpiring in Madrid, the Spanish journalist Pablo Feced, otherwise known as Quioquiap, published what would become the exemplary artifact of Spanish racism, “Them and Us” (“Ellos y nosotros”).[10] At first sight, the author seems merely content to parrot the same stupidities developed by the social Darwinism of his more illustrious European counterparts over the course of the last century. Additionally, he draws on the well-known longstanding antagonism between Spanish peninsular missionaries and the native-born secular clergy in the Philippines, as well as more recent attempts by officials to bring Spanish traditionalism to bear on the formation of colonial policy. Yet while more recent critics have struggled to give us a more nuanced portrait of both Feced and his time, it remains to this day for many readers the almost incontrovertible proof of the backwardness, ignorance, and malice of Spanish authoritarianism and traditionalism, even as a new century of imperial powers came to obliterate any memory of Spain in most of the extra-European world.

At the same time, however, a closer look at Quioquiap’s sketch illustrates how truly off-center this dichotomy between colonizer and colonial subject would have appeared to readers of the late nineteenth century. The disjunction between the expression of anti-native racism in the colonial and peninsular Spanish press, on the one hand, and the changing social conditions of the colony in the latter half of the nineteenth century, on the other hand becomes clear when we highlight some of these major changes. To begin with, the 1840s saw the full-blown entrance of foreign commerce into Manila Bay. The 1863 education decree mandated the opening of public schools and the training of teachers. The abolition of the state tobacco monopoly and the subsequent entrance of private entrepreneurship in the tobacco industry occurred in 1880. Finally, we must mention the formal abolition of caste-distinction through the abolition of tribute in 1884. When we string these events together, we can imagine how the central feature that had characterized colonial society from its inception—the division and segregation of the colonizers from their colonial subject populations—had reached a threshold of collapse. As Edgar Wickberg has pointed out in his pioneering study, the Chinese-native mestizo emblematized this breakdown of social hierarchy on multiple levels: s/he served at once as tenant and rentier, pupil and teacher (particularly in the arts), acolyte and parish priest, equally “Hispanized” and “Filipinized” without clearly belonging to either class status.[11] Strangely, yet not coincidentally, this figure of great significance in the changing relationship between Spaniards and native-born colonial subjects is not even mentioned in Feced’s essay, even as he goes to great lengths to denounce the mountain tribes as incapable and unfit for the arts of civilization, comparable only to Chinese “coolies,” “blacks,” and “gypsies” [Feced [1887] 1998]. The naturalization of these groups as “people of color” was anticipated by Mas: Quioquiap merely adds the findings of physical anthropology to the polemic.

The reaffirmation of a sovereign division between Spaniard and native subject thus appears at a moment when the institutional bases of such a division were perceived to be in crisis, and the implicit racial foundations of colonial rule had to manifest themselves in explicit racist policies and practices.[12] It is at such a moment that Quioquiap invokes the sign of race in order to narrate a counter-history.

What does this mean? First, race introduces or reintroduces the theme of unfinished war or conflict to the analysis of civil society: in this case, the prestige (prestigio) and privileges of the conquerors over the subjection of the conquered. “Spain,” Quioquiap writes, “implanted its dominion here from almost the first day: it organized its administration as best as it could, it gave to the subjected race, after many years of contact, a certain social domesticity, it rescued [Philippine natives] for the most part from primitive backwardness and the darkness of the jungle, liberating them from piracy and the Muslim scourge...” [cited in Sánchez-Gómez 1998: 317, italics added].[13] The invocation of the original rights of conquest mixes freely with the more familiar references to both the emancipatory rhetoric of the liberal revolutions as well as social Darwinism. In fact, at a certain point the historical violence of one becomes completely conflated with the “natural” violence of the other: “The law insofar as it is a conventional and manufactured thing, may attempt to erase the differences (between us and them); but Nature, insurmountable in its power, casts down every bureaucratic edifice ... and always, in the end, portrays the Spaniard standing proud and straight, and the Malayan submissive and on his knees” [ibid.].[14]

Second, the theme of racial division as inseparably tied to the sense of an unfinished war, in addition to serving as a critical history, also serves as a partisan history, a call to arms in the present, to enjoin or conscript that history’s audience to an unresolved event. This involves the performance of certain sacrifices to that side in order reap the spoils of the future victor, as well as the division within a given population between one’s friends and enemies with the question of life at stake. The repeated instance of qualifiers in Quioquiap’s editorial gestures toward the incomplete state of conquest and colonization: a “certain social domesticity,” the gift of civilization “for the most part,” endowed to a subjected [sumisa] race.[15] On a larger level, the unresolved and partisan aspect of this history feeds directly into Quioquiap’s call for the necessity of Special Laws for the archipelago, which would formalize the colonial nature of Spain’s relationship to the Philippines: “No one [in Spain] knows the primitive and markedly infantile character of these herds, [determined] ... by inescapable physiological factors, which hence demand ... a special policy [política especial], adapted to their special nature [especial naturaleza] [Feced 1888: 361, italics added].[16] As we know, no “special policy” or legislation, which Spain promised to grant its remaining colonies after the Latin American wars of Independence, was ever produced. Even if Spain had managed to enact such legislation, the very differentiation of the law in Spain from that of the colonies could not but take on an explicitly racist character. In Cuba and Puerto Rico, the main obstacle to the enactment of a special legislation was the emerging population of “free” blacks and mulattoes who claimed the same rights and privileges as the white landowning Creoles. In the Philippines, the “savage” and “un-Christianized” state of the archipelago rendered most native subjects unfit for public office, even on a reduced colonial scale [Fradera 1999: 71–93; Celdrán Ruano 1994: 95–126].

The politicization of colonial history, in and through the racial abjection of colonial subjects and Feced’s recourse to identifying Spaniards as the emissaries of “the divine law of progress” [Feced 1888: 226], thus corresponds to an impasse in the contradictions of the colonial state. On the one hand, the liberalization of the economy was forcing Spain to allow natives a greater place and participation in certain aspects of colonial society. “The Filipino is a Spaniard,” Feced would say with all the sarcasm he could muster, “he is our compatriot” [Feced [1887]1998: 317]. Yet in doing so, the colonial government threatened to cut itself adrift from the anchor of Spanish authority from the time of the conquest—the right of conquest, both temporal and spiritual. Beyond mere claims about the survival of the fittest and random musings on the difference between primitive and civilized people thus lies another claim about sovereign right and its implications. As Quioquiap says elsewhere: “Ay! The laws of history are as ineluctable as those of nature, and it is through these harsh laws that all cultured peoples have passed. Everywhere in the world the scepter has served as the first instrument of progress, and the scepter signifies a club” [Feced 1888: 114].[17]

Race, Colonialism, and the Concept of the Political

While native-born Philippine propagandists like Graciano López Jaena saw it necessary to respond to the calumnies of Feced and others with a point-for-point rebuttal of their claims, Jose Rizal’s response was more complex. As Rizal wrote to his German friend and fellow ethnologist Ferdinand Blumentritt in 1888: “I do not fight seriously with such persons, for I need my nerves and my intelligence for better causes. From the fight only filth could be gathered and perhaps something worse. I shall not use my time and my life to attack the prejudices of Quioquiap and his kind, for that is useless labor” [Rizal 1992: vol. 2, 246]. And yet, it would be disingenuous to believe that Rizal ignored it. When publicists like Wenceslao Retana began accusing Rizal’s writings of fomenting racial division, Rizal wrote to Blumentritt: “Let [Retana] say what he wants, but let us see. Who among the Filipinos and Spaniards wrote the first insulting books? Who started slandering? Who was the first to compare people to animals? Who tried first to humiliate an obedient people? ... If he believes that my book is an emanation of racial hatred, how then should I describe the books of Cañamaque, San Agustín, and Sinibaldo de Mas, and the writings of Quioquiap, Barrantes, and the rest?”[ibid.: 203–204]. Rizal’s private correspondence here anticipates and illuminates the peculiar appearance of a Filipino race in his famous essay “The Philippines a Century Hence.”

What constitutes a Filipino race in Rizal’s essay? Acentury of commentary on this essay by scholars and politicians alike does not make the answer an easy one. One of the more recent compelling arguments appears in an article by Filomeno Aguilar tracing the ilustrado origins of race-thinking. In it, the author highlights the influential role of Ferdinand Blumentritt, the German ethnologist, in advancing the (now discredited) theory of ethnic “migration waves” to the archipelago. Rizal and his fellow ilustrados presumably used this theory to distinguish the growth of a pre-Hispanic, lowland Tagalog civilization from the nomadic and semi-nomadic Negritos and mountain tribes of the hinterlands—a necessary distinction, Aguilar maintains, in that it allowed Rizal and his fellow ilustrados to read history against the grain of the narrative of Western progress and civilization. The ancient Tagalogs, so the argument would run, had contributed and participated in Asian maritime commerce and society centuries before the arrival of the Spaniards. As Rizal’s essay, “The Philippines a Century Hence,” as well as his annotations to the publication of Antonio de Morga’s 1609 history of the Philippines both emphasize, the Tagalogs had their own laws, writing system, religion, and settlements. In conclusion, such a vindication of a lowland Tagalog civilization would serve not only to refute the common Spanish presumption that Philippine history began with the arrival of the conquistadores, but also to suggest that an indigenous or in any case ancient racial identity had possessed (and might one day reclaim) a prior, competing claim to the future welfare of the islands, which diverged from Spain’s.

Reading Rizal’s essay as a by-product of Blumentritt’s theory of migration waves (an assumption that will be questioned later), Aguilar derives two main implications for the production of race rhetoric among the ilustrados and the colonial elites under the American regime that followed. The first was that the allegations of the Philippine native incapacity for civilization spewed by Quioquiap and others neglected the possibility that native industry, commerce, and creativity had suffered, not benefited, from Spanish “civilization.” The second was that the alleged savagery and ungovernability of the Luzon highland and southern Muslim populations could be explained away by the simple fact that they did not necessarily belong to the same ethnic or racial stock as the Tagalogs. These two implications would determine the two main lines of development of race-thinking and racism among nationalists in the early twentieth century. The first resulted in the narration of a “counter-history” that sought to resurrect pre-Hispanic past glories while decrying the pernicious legacy of Spanish repression and obscurantism. The second was the displacement of Spanish racism against the native colonial subject as Indios, onto the Negritos, Igorot, Ifugao, and Tinguian mountain tribes of northern Luzon as well as the sultanates of the Muslim South.[18]

Yet Aguilar’s claim concerning the derivativeness of ilustrado thought in the nineteenth century flies in the face of what is most original in Rizal’s essay, something that Rizal’s contemporary readers (including Quioquiap) would not have failed to grasp. This is especially surprising, given that Aguilar himself expresses an intuition of this insight: “given his political project,” Aguilar writes, “Rizal posed a question different from that of Blumentritt, who was concerned with classifying and ordering ‘the races’ found in the Philippine islands. From the ethnologist’s tacit question of ‘What races are found in the Philippines? ’ Rizal drew and transposed the information to answer the question with which he grappled: ‘Who are we?’” [2005: 608, italics added]. Strangely, instead of following this insight, Aguilar devotes the rest of his analysis to interpolating the gaps and ambiguities of Rizal’s writing as evidence that his thought did, in fact, unquestioningly follow Blumentritt’s categorization of racial types in the archipelago. Such an aspersion implies that Rizal’s silences make him complicit in the compromised nationalism of the educated elite during and after the Philippine revolution. Rizal’s complicity, if we are to believe Aguilar, makes of him a pioneer of what historian Paul Kramer would call “nationalist colonialism,” an argument for independence among elite nationalists during the first two decades of U. S. rule in the Philippines, based on the presumed knowledge and capacity of Philippine elites to govern and subject their “own” minorities.[19]

By contrast, a close reading of Rizal’s essay shows that for Rizal, the concept of race depended less on an acknowledgment and study of what he calls the scientific or quasi-scientific “physical forces” that are responsible for the fashioning of races than on the “moral forces” that set these physical forces into motion. Here is the key passage:

If the population is not assimilated to the Spanish nation, if the dominators do not enter into the spirit of their inhabitants, if equitable laws and free and liberal reforms do not make each forget that they belong to different races, or if both peoples are not amalgamated to constitute one mass, socially and politically, homogeneous ... some day the Philippines will fatally and infallibly declare themselves independent.... Necessity is the most powerful divinity the world knows, and necessity is the result of physical forces set in operation by moral ones. [La Solidaridad I 1996: 32].[20]

The ethnological coordinates of a Filipino race throughout Rizal’s essay remain fuzzy and ambiguous: in one passage, he identifies Filipinos as “Malays”; in another, he speaks of “Filipino races” in the plural. Yet even as the putative scientific coordinates of a Filipino race remain slippery and imprecise, the historico-political ones acquire a notable consistency and force as the essay progresses. However one wants to theorize the existence of a Filipino race, Rizal argues, the fact is that racial division, the identification of two races in conflict, has become the basis of public opinion and colonial policy:

With the native inhabitants having arrived at this state of moral debasement, disenchanted and filled with self-loathing, an attempt was made to give the ultimate coup de grâce ... to reduce these individuals to a species of brawn, of brutes, beasts of burden, a form of humanity without intelligence and heart.... It was then made public, what was attempted was openly admitted, an insult to the entire race was made.... [cited in ibid.: 378, italics added]

However one wants to theorize the existence of a Filipino race, the fact is that it has already become the basis for an emergent collective consciousness:

[But] at this point what [Spaniards] believed would be [the native Indio’s] death was precisely his salvation.... So many hardships were crowned with insults, and the lethargic spirit returned to life. The Indio’s sensitivity, his characteristic par excellence, was wounded, and if he once had the patience to suffer and die at the foot of a foreign flag, he had no such patience when those [Spaniards] for whom he died, repaid the sacrifice with insults and rubbish. At that point he began to examine himself little by little, and became conscious of his misfortune. [ibid., italics added][21]

“Ancient enmities among different provinces have become erased by one and the same sore, a general affront addressed to an entire race,” he says at one point; “One and the same misfortune and the same abjection has united all the inhabitants of these islands,” he says later. The point of these assertions, for Rizal, is not the questioned orthodoxy of an academically generated racial science of migration waves, but rather the genealogy of racial consciousness—or, to be more specific, race as consciousness, race as a praxis of political historicism. To reiterate Rizal’s words, “Necessity is the most powerful divinity the world knows, and necessity is the result of physical forces set in operation by moral ones.” Like Quioquiap, Rizal’s gesture towards another nineteenth century philosophy—this time, positivism—masks the voluntarism of “moral forces” to allow the presumed authority of Nature to dictate necessity and scientific fate (i.e., not Nature itself). To put it another way, colonialism does not simply reproduce an already existing difference or set of differences anchored in science and awaiting future discovery. Rather, colonial rule creates and ramifies differences that do not preexist the historical event of conquest and domination, and sets in motion identities that become tied to the historical themes of fall and redemption.

How does Rizal’s political historicism compare and contrast with Quioquiap’s? Like Quioquiap, Rizal imagines an irreducible and centuries-long conflict between colonial occupier and colonized subject, which inheres in the institutional racism of every colonial order. And like Quioquiap, Rizal’s prose duplicitously pretends to address one audience when he is in fact addressing another [see Blanco 2004: 32–41]. The provocative character of Rizal’s partisan history becomes clear in the concluding statement of the essay: “Spain! Will we have to tell the Philippines one day that you have no ears for their ills, and that if the Philippines wants to save itself it must redeem itself alone? [La Solidaridad II 1996: 32].[22] While Rizal’s histrionic gesture here appears to be leveled at Spain, it also anticipates a future addressee, the Philippines, who awaits the bad news that Spain is not listening. As we know, the writings of Katipunan leader Andres Bonifacio and Philippine revolutionary prime minister Apolinario Mabini reflect the degree to which they understood themselves as the true addressees of Rizal’s message.[23]

Another feature that both Quioquiap and Rizal’s works share is the erasure of both the Chinese and the mestizo in the anticipation of the irreducible dichotomy between the rulers and the ruled. This disavowal makes no sense if we try to understand it merely as Rizal’s attempt to square some knowledge of his ethnic origins with the available categories of social classification of the time. Rather, Rizal was in fact trying to be systematic about his political historicism—a historicism that entailed the partisan division between rulers and ruled, in which the historical movement of consciousness substantiates the integrity of a race irrespective of its supposed biological moorings.

On a larger level, race as a form of colonialist and anti-colonial praxis recalls Carl Schmitt’s classic study on the concept of the political, which he distinguished from other spheres of society while at the same time providing their ultimate foundation (religion, economics, science, and culture). For Schmitt [2007], the concept of the political accounts for that threshold upon which all normative ideas that determine the terms of hegemony within (and between) these spheres cede to the “existential meaning” in which partisans face “a real combat situation with a real enemy” [ibid.: 49].[24] For both Quioquiap and Rizal, science serves as a pretext for “existential questions” around the right of conquest or the right of revolution. It is these concerns, and the mythic past or messianic future that they engender, that determine the concept of race on the eve of the Philippine revolution.

“To Reiterate, There Is No Such Thing as a Filipino Race...”

In 1913, secretary of the Philippine Bureau of the Interior Dean Worcester sought to silence all future talk of a Filipino race through his exhaustive classification of native groups in the islands. Against Philippine assembly speaker Sergio Osmeña and the Nacionalista Party advocating independence from U. S. rule, Worcester argued that the Philippines was essentially unfit for self-government and that this essential unfitness derived from racial difference: “The Filipinos are not a nation, but a variegated assemblage of different tribes and peoples, and their loyalty is still of the tribal type” [cited in Kramer 2006: 123]. Worcester’s claim was revised several years later, when the eminent scholar and pro-U. S. advocate Dr. Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera declared that the very concept of race and racial origins was itself “primitive,” and that its ideological manipulation far outweighed its contribution to scientific veracity:

We Filipinos should not continue our former error of speaking of our race, because there is no such Filipino race. We are the result of the union and fusion of very different races.... We should not recall our origin, because it will be of no avail in strengthening our union, which should be our objective. The idea of race has always been invoked among us in order to brand some men with inferiority and to attribute superiority to others. Our origin should not engage our attention, but rather our orderly movement, our future. [Pardo de Tavera 1928: 341][25]

Pardo de Tavera’s statement no doubt received inspiration from the rise of cultural anthropology, which had begun to dispute the kinds of claims associated with racial genealogies and physical anthropology’s theories of orthogenesis, monogenesis, and polygenesis, as exercises in pure theoretical speculation. As early as 1911, the founder of cultural anthropology in the U. S. Franz Boas had declared: “The old idea of absolute stability of human types must ... evidently be given up, and with it the belief of the hereditary superiority of certain types over others” [1912: 103]. And yet, even as ilustrados like Pardo de Tavera debated theories of “migration waves” to the Philippines, Rizal’s deployment of race as political historicism would pervade the 1896 Philippine revolution and its aftermath.

As we know, the first phase of the Philippine Revolution began in 1896, and led to the execution of Jose Rizal by firing squad for sedition. After a brief hiatus, the second phase of the Philippine Revolution coincided with the 1898 U. S. war with Spain, in which Spain agreed to sell the archipelago to the United States for the sum of $20 million before its colonial government in Manila collapsed against the combined U. S. and Philippine revolutionary forces. The U. S. takeover of the Philippines quickly succeeded the fall of the colonial government, with first president of the short-lived Philippine republic (1899–1900) and military general Emilio Aguinaldo, along with many of the leading officers of the revolution, being captured by the end of 1901. For most inhabitants, these years were characterized by chaos and catastrophe, with the U. S. would-be liberators launching military campaigns of genocidal proportions. It is in such a context that the political historicism of race war takes on increasingly spiritual and messianic proportions.

In Andres Bonifacio’s well known 1896 text, “Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog”(“What All Tagalogs Should Know”), the revolutionary leader begins with a retelling of the history of a Tagalog people (Katagalugan), reminiscent of Rizal’s own condensed history of the Philippines but with a focus on this people’s confrontation and deception by the “Spanish race,” “ang lahi ni Legaspi” [in Lumbera B. and Lumbera C. L. 1982: 93–94]. In this context the word lahi is used to represent a Filipino people bound by primordial ties as well as the desire for independence.[26] Ancient rites like the blood compact (Sandugo), which the painter Juan Luna famously depicted (in 1886) as taking place between sixteenth-century Spanish conquistador Miguel López de Legazpi and Bohol native leader Rajah Sikatuna, are revived as a way of imagining and inventing kinship [see Blanco 2004]. This “fictive ethnicity” was certainly what prime minister of the revolutionary government Apolinario Mabini projected in his “Decalogue” when he wrote: “Love thy Country next to God and thy honor and more than thyself, for it is the only patrimony of thy race, the only inheritance from thy ancestors, and the only future of thy descendants: through it, thou hast life, love and interests, happiness, honor, and God” [cited in Aglipay y Labayan 1926: 26].[27] The most popular play written and performed in the U. S. -pacified area of Manila at the time was Severino Reyes’ Walang Sugat [1898], which featured the tried and tested but true and enduring love between two cousins threatened by the lustful desires of a foreign American official.

With the passage of the 1902 Sedition Act by the U. S. colonial government, in which the U. S. no longer recognizes a state of war as existing between U. S. forces and a Philippine “insurrection,” race rhetoric morphs in at least two directions, adapting to the changing nature of resistance without relinquishing that common identification of race with partisanship in the state of war or emergency. The first direction appears in revolutionary leader (now identified as an outlaw) Macario Sakay’s constitution of the Tagalog Republic (Republika ng Katagalugan), pronounced in 1902 when virtually the entire central leadership of the revolution had been captured or killed. In this text, he redefines the very definition of Tagalog, which began as an ethnolinguistic category designating the population in and around central and southern Luzon, particularly Manila. In Sakay’s rhetoric, the Tagalog people becomes synonymous with a pan-Filipino one. “Sino mang tagalog tungkol [sic] anak dito sa Kapuluang Katagalugan,” he writes,

ay walang itatangi sino man tungkol sa dugo gayon din sa kulay nang balat nang isa’t isa; maputi, maitim, mayaman, dukha, marunong, at mangmang lahat ay magkakapantay na walang higit at kulang, dapat magkaisang loób, maaring humigit sa dunong, sa yaman, sa ganda, dapwa’t hindi mahihigitan sa pagkatao ng sino man, at sa paglilingkod nang kahit alin.

No Tagalog, born in this Tagalog archipelago, shall exalt anyone else on account of his or her blood, or the color of one’s skin; white, black, rich, poor, educated and illiterate are all completely equal, and must be one in spirit/will (loób). Whatever differences exist in one’s education, wealth, beauty, these do not surpass the humanity of each and every one, and one’s capacity to serve whatever cause. [quoted in Ileto 1989: 177]

In a radical sense, Sakay takes an understanding of race and the state of emergency to its ultimate implication, stripping race of any constituent features (blood, skin color, as well as education, wealth, beauty) other than the concept of political partisanship in the existential condition of war.[28] Readers of Jose Rizal’s second novel El Filibusterismo [1891] will recognize the same logic at work in the anti-hero Simoun’s plan to “renew the race!” by destroying the concentration of colonial elites at a wedding banquet:

...“Cabesang Tales and I will join one another in the city and take possession of it, while you in the suburbs will seize the bridges and throw up barricades, and then be ready to come to our aid to butcher not only those opposing the revolution but also every man who refuses to take up arms and join us.”

“All?” stammered Basilio in a choking voice.

“All!” repeated Simoun in a sinister tone. “All Indians, mestizos, Chinese, Spaniards, all who are found to be without courage, without energy. The race must be renewed! Cowardly fathers will only breed slavish sons, and it wouldn’t be worth while to destroy and then try to rebuild with rotten materials....” [Rizal [1891]1912: 316][29]

The key word that supplements all those determining characteristics that colonial science had sought to fill is loób, which I translated as “spirit” or “will” (in the sense of consent or initiative) but which literally designates the “inner” or “inside” in purely conventional terms to the “outside” (labas). The ambiguity of the word—which was used by Christian missionaries to speak of the soul but whose normal application is purely relational and possesses no signified or content—helps to explain the facility with which Sakay exploits the word’s polysemy: one soul, one spirit, one will, but also one “inside,” opposed to the “outside” invader who encroaches upon it.[30] The convergence of an almost universalist transcendence of race by one’s humanity (pagkatao) is brought right back to the scene of battle, where the Tagalog Republic exists first and foremost to witness the defeat of the American Empire.

The spiritualization of loób anticipates the second, related articulation of the Filipino race, which appears in the transculturation of Christianity by nationalism in folk religious movements and the birth of the nationalist Protestant sect Aglipayanism. It is in these groups that theodicies of the founding of a Filipino race continue to be produced and practiced, even today. While the individual doctrines and practices vary, a common theme to emerge with Aglipayanism (later developed in folk religious sects) was the transformation of Christian spiritual fraternity (kapatiran) into a national(ist) fraternity organized around the incarnation of the Mother Country (Inang Bayan) as the Virgin Mary and her children as “children of the country” (anak ng bayan). In Aglipay’s self-benediction of a civic-religious cult dedicated to the “Mother of Balintawak” (Balintawak being the site where the Philippine Revolution was first declared), he writes:

In this Image of the Motherland, we symbolize all our natural drive for national independence. The Virgin-Mother is the country, for the Country is the only mother that can truly be called virgin, virgin as it is of all lust. The Katipunero child represents the People, eager for their liberty and their spokesmen, prophets and evangelists are the great Filipino teachers Rizal, Mabini, and Bonifacio and our other countrymen whose modern sapient teachings will form the best national Gospel. [Aglipay y Labayan 1926: 32][31]

The transposition of the Virgin Mother to the native country and the identification of the young revolutionary as a synecdoche of a nation’s people, together reintroduce the theme of divine kinship and a promised land that the virgin birth of Christ and his fulfillment of Jewish law were meant to transcend or suppress.

From this incarnation, folk religious groups were able to articulate the link to race in various ways. “Oh mga kalahi!” a popular song from the period of the Philippine revolution goes. “Lakad, pagpilitang/tunguhin ang bundok, kalawakang parang/gamitin ang gulok at sibat sa kamay,/ating ipagtanggol lupang tinubuan” (“Oh racial brethren! Walk on, strive/to reach the mountain and the forest/use the bolos and spears in your hands/let us defend the land of our birth”) [quoted in Ileto 1989: 107]. In the proliferation of religious cults developing alongside or in the wake of Aglipayanism, Jose Rizal appears as a messianic Christ; other sects have written their own biblical Testaments, in which the idea of a Jewish elect reappears in the form of the Brown Race (Lahing Kayumanggi).[32] The “Decalogue” of this Rizal sect lists as its second commandment that one put her or his fate in the hands of the brown race: “sa inyo oh LAHING KAYUMANGGI [mapalad]. Sapagka’t ang aba po ninyong kapatid, ay TUNAY ninyong KALAHI” (“(Trust) in yourselves, oh Brown Race. Because your disgraced brothers and sisters, are your true racial brethren”) [Alaras 1988: 152]. “Lahing kayumanggi” leaves no doubt as to the manner by which racial difference is associated with political partisanship. Through a retelling of the Judaeo-Christian texts, a racial genealogy transposes the miracle of Christ (the Divinity made flesh) into the miracle of Mary—the Divinity made mother, giving birth to those most deserving of her infinite mercy. As late as 1940, the emergence of a later Rizalist cult Watawat ng Lahi (Flag of the Race) conveys the immediate political meaning of race: race as a flag, a color whose primary signification becomes clear in a time of war or conflict.[33]

With the forced economic diaspora of Filipinos from the archipelago under U. S. rule to places like Hawai‘i and California, the constantly deferred promise of Philippine independence in the homeland began to merge with other experiences of racial discrimination and racial redemption. Steffi San Buenaventura’s invaluable work on nativism and ethnicity in the context of early U. S. Filipino immigration demonstrates how these experiences continued to be expressed in religious terms. The formation of mutual aid societies such as the Filipino Federation of America (FFA) in California and Hawai‘i allowed diasporic Filipinos to make sense of their displacement in theosophical terms, while also inviting them to participate in both the independence movement in the Philippines and civic life in the U. S. Under the leadership of former agricultural worker, self-styled mystic, and political maverick Hilario Moncado, the FFA provided a framework that allowed Filipinos in the diaspora to overcome their regional divisions, which were often cast in religious as well as ethnic and linguistic terms. Indeed, one may go so far as to say that the cultural project of identifying oneself as Filipino took place not only within the boundaries of elite nationalism in the Philippines, but also through the collective experience of displacement and self-redefinition in the United States. As one writer for the FFA periodical Filipino Nation wrote:

Every native of the Philippine Islands should ask himself the question: “Am I a Filipino or am I a tribesman?” If his answer is that he is a Filipino, he will ... forget tribal and sectional jealousies and remember the words of our martyred hero, Rizal, “unity of purpose is certainty of success.” [cited in San Buenaventura 1990: 225]

Yet this consciousness of being (or becoming) Filipino could not but take on a racial character, with this unity of purpose expressed in terms of a “brown” or “Malayan” race who is destined to inhabit a “New Jerusalem” that would emerge from Lake Lanao in the Philippine southern island of Mindanao [ibid.: 274–276]. This racial identity was channeled through both the official and popular cultural memory of Jose Rizal, as well as the charismatic leadership of Hilario Moncado. For the latter, the future of Philippine independence was inseparable from the racial redemption of Filipinos in the diaspora, as in the following statement: “it is our born right to govern our own land, the land of our fathers and the land of the brown race” [Moncado, in San Buenaventura 1990: 290]. In the words of one member: “aking namamasdan nga na tayong mga kayomangui, ay pag hahandogan ng poong may kapal sa ikaluluwalhati sa ating buhay at ikaluluwalhati ng ating Inang Bayang Filipinas” [ibid.: 291] (I observe that we brown people have been granted by the Lord Almighty gloriousness in our lives and that of our “Inang Bayan”/Mother Country the Philippines).[34] Amore recent member of the Federation would render this dichotomy even more explicit:

The next God after Christ is a brown God. The white people killed their God, Christ. They rejected him. They had their chance. Moncado is God. The Filipinos will rule the world.... Those who are not Filipinos, like the white people, can also be saved if their heart is like a Filipino. [Arcadio Amper, cited in San Buenaventura 1990: 288]

In Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution, the author writes: “independence was regarded by many people from the lower classes of Tagalog society as an imminent event to which their loób (inside) must be directed. Having experienced the turmoil and dislocation of five years of war, they expected such chaos to lead its inevitable conclusion, when society would be turned on its head, when all men would be brothers, leaders would be Christ-like, all form of oppression would end and property would be shared” [1989: 209]. For these groups, the state of emergency that defined the war against the Americans becomes indistinguishable from life in general, life as the ceaseless process of distinguishing the inside from the outside, the friend from the enemy, where the question of life and death was at stake.[35] For these groups, to paraphrase a well-known thesis of Walter Benjamin, the state of emergency was not an exception but the rule.[36]

Counter-history under/against U. S. Imperial Hegemony

The political historicism of a Filipino race, which flourished in a time of war and became spiritualized in messianic movements and the proliferation of a New Jerusalem in Pangasinan, Hawai‘i and California, contrasts sharply with the racialization of Filipinos as blacks in the U. S. press and the rank and file of the U. S. military in the Philippines. And yet, they are intimately related. For the U. S. soldiers as well as for Filipinos, the colonial war could not but be expressed in racial terms, just as it had been expressed in the previous era. In the last part of this article, I want to turn our attention to this parallel movement of racialization that came out of the Philippine-American War at the turn of the century, to show how the political historicism of race war from the perspective of U. S. soldiers reflected the unfinished war legacy of the U. S. Civil War (1862–65) and the failure of Reconstruction by the turn of the twentieth century.

When we examine the race formations in a time of war, we find that what is taking place in the Philippines in 1896 also takes place in the U. S. in 1898. That year, the subject of war filled newspaper headlines and sparked heated debates on the floor of the U. S. Congress. But an inattentive listener might have missed the fact that publishers, editors, and congressional representatives were not talking about one war, but two.[37] There was the Spanish-American War, which began in February with the sinking of the U. S. battleship Maine in the Havana harbor and the U. S. declaration of war. And there were also the public pronouncements of a race war between blacks and whites, with allegations ranging from a black campaign to “colonize and control North Carolina” in October, to public hysteria around the imagined rape of white women by black men. According to the Cleveland Gazette, between 1882 and 1903 there were 3,233 lynchings, in one form or another, in the country. The Tuskegee Institute chronicled over 4,000 lynchings during a similar period. The year 1901, which marked the height of U.S. atrocities and what might legitimately be identified as genocidal campaigns in the Philippines, also coincided with the escalation of black lynchings to 105 reported cases. On the floor of the 56th U.S. Congress, Senator Ben “Pitchfork” Tillman of South Carolina summarized his war against “black domination”: “We have done our level best; we have scratched our heads to find out how we could eliminate the last one of them. We stuffed ballot boxes. We shot them. We are not ashamed of it” [cited in Dray 2008: 302].

While seemingly unrelated, the two wars became conflated among the white soldiers of the rank and file fighting in the United States’ first overseas colonial war. In one early (1899) editorial of the black press opposing U.S. involvement in the war, the editors write: “whenever the soldiers send letters home to their relatives and parents they all breathe an utter contempt ‘for the niggers which they are engaged in slaying’.... In view of these facts, no negro possessing any race pride can enter heartily into the prosecution of the war against the Filipinos” [cited in Marks 1971: 126]. According to the Stuart Creighton Miller, from the beginning of the war, “the most common assertion of the volunteers in the months preceding the war was that they were ‘just itching to get at the niggers’” [Miller 1984: 176]. One private writes: “With an enemy like this to fight, it is not surprising that the boys should soon adopt ‘no quarter’ as a motto, and fill the blacks full of lead before finding out whether they are friends or enemies” [ibid.: 189].

Some members of the black press sought to rationalize the explicit racism with which the atrocities in the Philippines were committed on a regular basis. Others used the war to attempt to reorient the discussion in U. S. politics toward the failure of Reconstruction by the end of the nineteenth century. “Why use a telescope to sweep the horizon for wrongdoing,” wrote the anonymous author of an editorial titled “Afro-American Reflections on ‘Killing Niggers’ in the Philippines,” “when the cries of lynched Negroes can almost be heard at the White House and the odors from the funeral pyre fall scarcely short of the Capitol, where Congress is engaged in solving the problem of government?” [cited in Literary Digest 24, 1902]. Still other editors challenged white soldiers to take responsibility for the fires of race war that were being stoked: “Every soldier in the Philippines who uses the term ‘nigger,’” writes one editorial from the Progress in Omaha, “does so with hell-born contempt for the negro of the United States, and it is our one desire that he be cured of his fiendish malady by a Filipino bullet buried in the heart of such a wretch” [cited in Marks 1971: 128].[38]

Fig. 1 “The Forbidden Book”

Source: The Literary Digest 20: 4 (January 27, 1900), 105. Reprinted in Ignacio et al. [2005: 1]

Fig. 2 “Expansion, Before And After”

Blacks, Bative Americans and Filipinos all became tied up in the symbolic matrix of U. S. paternalism, often to the point of being identified with one another by the racist press.

Source: The Boston Sunday Globe (March 5, 1899). Reprinted in Ignacio et al. [2005: 80].

Fig. 3 “For One Negro and against the Other. Dr. Jekyll ‘Bryan’ and Mr. Hyde ‘Bryan.’” Thes political Dr. Jekyll professes to love and would give enfranchisement and liberty to the Filipino negro, while Mr. Hyde would destroy and disfranchise our southern Negro.

Source: Judge (November 3, 1900). Reprinted in Ignacio et al. [2005: 85].

Fig. 4 “Civilization Begins at Home”

Source: The Literary Digest 27: 22 (November 26, 1898). Reprinted in Ignacio et al. [2005: 86].

Above the clash of public opinion, however, Southern senators like Ben Tillman (SC), John McLaurin (SC) and John Morgan (AL), were taking advantage of the popular racism of the rank and file in order to establish a more direct correspondence between blacks and Filipinos in the larger context of an unfinished U. S. civil war and the permanence of race war and racial conflict. In 1899 McLaurin proposed an amendment to the constitution, “placing all the inferior races in this country and the inhabitants of the Philippines beneath the plane of the white men, and that it is the divine right of the Caucasian or the whites to govern the negro races. That by pursuing such a course the negro or the race problem will be forever settled in this country” [cited in ibid.: 111]. In 1900, Tillman paradoxically used the permanence of race war to argue against the U. S. imperial project in the Philippines. “The mysterious influence of race antagonism and caste feeling,” he writes,

has always existed; it is ineradicable; and it will continue as a governing factor wherever the races come into contact.... The Anglo-Saxon is pretty much the same wherever you find him, and he walks on the necks of every colored race he comes into contact with. Resistance to his will or interests means destruction to the weaker race. Confronted, as we are, within our own borders with this perplexing problem, why do we seek to incorporate nine millions more of brown men under the flag? [1900: 443–444]

In 1902, Alabama Senator John Tyler Morgan of the 56th Congress went so far as to draw up a plan for the U. S. government to deport blacks to the Philippines after it had been subdued [see Lemus 1903; Baylen and Moore 1968].[39] Thornton sincerely believed that, in addition to resolving the state of siege on blacks throughout many parts of the United States, blacks would also create the basis of new commercial trade opportunities across the hemispheres but south of the equator—from Africa to Latin America to the Philippines.

Summing up, these and other examples demonstrate how the state of exception unleashed in the Philippines contributed not only to the racialization of Filipinos as Afro-Americans in the U. S.; it actually sought to turn Afro-Americans into Filipinos. In this project, a constant slippage occurs between the understanding of race as a product of biological or theoretical racism, and race as the sign of war, the state of war as constitutive of race relations. Thus, while one may attempt to underline the “newness, immediacy, and localism of U. S. soldiers’ racial formation,” as Paul Kramer does in his otherwise comprehensive history of racial discourse in the U. S. during the Philippine-American War [2006: 128], the praxis of race as the articulation of counter-histories moves in the opposite direction. In other words, the counter-history of white redemption draws from the popular memories of the Confederacy’s wars against the emancipation of slavery, as well as the self-identified Anglo-Saxon wars against the indigenous populations on the westward frontier.[40] These are the counter-histories that find their way to the Philippines, and narrate the new episode of imperial conquest as the concluding chapter to the unfinished racial conquest of whites over blacks and native Americans.

At the same time, however, we can agree with Kramer’s insight regarding the internal contradictions of race formation in this period, where one can distinguish between the racism that spurred the scorched earth and genocidal policies pursued by U. S. military leaders in the Philippines like Generals Arthur MacArthur and J. Franklin Bell, and the project of racial hegemony, “an inclusionary racial formation that both invited and delimited Filipino political agency in colonial state-building” [ibid.: 5]. It is against the latter that Dylan Rodriguez’s critique of race formation is addressed. Rodriguez decries the efficacy of imperial hegemony, which leads to what he calls “arrested raciality” among Filipinos and Filipino-Americans: “a structurally disrupted articulation of racial and protoracial history ... constituted by the grammatical presence of racial signification in Filipino discourses and the simultaneous sanitization of that signification by a labor of critical illiteracy” [2009: 98]. What we are dealing with here, then, are two distinct racial formations, each of which incorporates and mimics the language and rhetoric of the other without being collapsed into one and the same trajectory.

This labor of sanitizing the violence of colonial conquest was certainly evident in the early years of the war [see Ileto 1995: 51–82; Warwick Anderson 2006: 83–112]. While the U. S. press and public reacted with horror to the atrocities visited upon Filipinos by the U. S. military, U. S. officials and the members of the second Philippine Commission (headed by future president William H. Taft) attempted to frame the violence of war in domestic metaphors and the discourses of civil society. Countless political cartoons of the period attest to the domestication of violence in paternalistic metaphors of discipline, education, and hygiene (see Figs. 5, 6, 7 “Because I love you,” “School,” and “The Filipino’s First Bath”). These metaphors interfaced with the continuation of the war through military as well as civil institutions.[41] Yet the trajectory of this rhetoric led not to the political historicism of race war we saw earlier, but rather the suppression of war in both the U. S. and Philippines, through metaphors and the discourses of civil institutions. With the 1902 “Sedition Act” classifying any and all signs of revolutionary activity as a civil crime, the criminalization of war served to internalize the violence through civil institutions like the Bureau of Health under Victor Heiser, the Bureau of the Interior under Dean Worcester, and the Bureau of public security under Cameron Forbes. Victor Heiser’s memoirs render stark the contradictions brought about in the name of civilization: “The Bureau of Health,” he writes, “was like the tree of life.... Necessarily we had to invade the rights of homes, commerce, and parliaments. We had to guard against the entrance of dangerous communicable diseases by strict measures, even when they conflicted with convenience or personal necessity...” [Heiser 1936: 151, italics added]. Charles B. Elliott, the chief of police was even more explicit: “[Sanitary] work, to be effective, required the arbitrary disregard of ordinary personal rights.... Sanitary rules are useless unless backed by the power and will to compel their enforcement, and punish their breach, which means infringement on the assumed rights of men to do as they please on their own premises. A health officer is necessarily ... a tyrant. He sometimes abuses the power with which it is necessary to invest him. The temptation to do so is peculiarly strong when white men are dealing with an inferior and less informed race of people” [Elliott 1916: 215, italics added].

Fig. 5 “Popular Song Illustrated—‘Because I Love You’”

Source: Chicago Record (November 28, 1899). Reprinted in Ignacio et al. [2005: 103].

Fig. 6 “School”

UNCLE SAM to his new class in Civilization: “Now children, you’ve got to learn these lessons whether you want to or not! But just take a look at the class ahead of you, and remember that, in a little while, you will be as glad to be here as they are!”

Source: Puck (January 25, 1899). Reprinted in Ignacio et al. [2005: 64].

Fig. 7 “The Filipino’s First Bath”

MCKINLEY: Oh, you dirty boy!

Source: Judge (June 10, 1899). Reprinted in Ignacio et al. [2005: 70].

The undercurrent of brute domination in these paternal metaphors is evident. Yet the impersonality of the terms by which Heiser and Elliott justify the regular violation of civil order performs an effacing operation on the racial dichotomy that finds its fullest expression in a time of war: what Heiser and Elliott give us instead is a pervasive, invisible threat whose face can only be glimpsed in microscopes, hospitals, and laboratories. What we see instead is an increasingly sanitized, clinical, and systematic rhetoric wielded by the officers of civil institutions, who meticulously document the improvement of the infant mortality rate in the first year after the formal declaration of the war’s end, or that distribute vaccines to the furthest reaches of the archipelago, or that organize a leper colony, create a national library and national laboratory, teach children in new American schools how to go home and recite their lessons on sanitation to their parents [Heiser 1907: 861]. In place of race as a form of praxis, we find the humanitarianism of colonial rule as the new norm under which concepts of racial conflict and cooperation will have to be subordinated.

When the discourses of public health, world trade, domestic security, and industry (however limited) become the primary referents under which the legality of colonial rule is to be divided, weighed, and measured, the existential immediacy of both race and war—race as the cultural expression of war, or the concept of the political—loses its exceptional character, and becomes one factor among others by which social scientists gauge the reproduction and management of systemic inequalities. U. S. imperial hegemony thus found itself able to institute two forms of historical amnesia that would secure the legitimacy of its overseas possessions: the forgetfulness of the rancor that left open the unresolved contradictions at the close of the Civil War, and the forgetfulness of the colonial subject that she or he was, in fact, still living under colonial rule.[42]

Coda: War, Race, and Religion in America’s Trans-Pacific Possession

In the epilogue to Resil Mojares’s work on Cebu’s experience of the Philippine-American War, the author writes: “A war never really ends. When the causes for resistance remain, then a war never really ends. It assumes other forms, becomes an illusion of itself, a subversion of what it intends; it is submerged and yet can rise again, find oneself once more in the tenacious imagining of a better order of things” [1999: 205]. Mojares’s reflection captures well the praxis of race as the production of counter-histories, and the messianic implications of race consciousness among Spaniards, Filipinos, and Americans in the Philippines at the turn of the century. As long as the perception persists that we live in a state of war, the racialization of self and other will continue to express the immediate, urgent task that the past is charged to convey to the present. Where the historian sees original causes or influences, the counter-historian sees original conflict. Where the rabbi or theologian speaks of the First Day, the counter-historian speaks of the eon preceding it: of wars between God and the Devil, and the secret names of angels and nature.[43]

The marginalization of race as a form of political historicism—banished to the obscure folk religious cults in the Philippines and the United States, except for the occasional populist gesture by Philippine congressmen and celebrities—can be ascribed to factors that are both global and specific to the Philippines. In Arendt and Foucault’s analyses of racial discourse in the West, the obscuration of counter-histories (or “race-thinking”) derives from their appropriation and sublation (Arendt would say rationalization and bureaucratization) by the biological racism embedded in all modern historical discourses of “the human race”[see also Balibar 1991: 57]. Despite their significant differences, both Darwinism and Marxism achieved this sublation through their respective theories of natural selection (the “natural” war of all against all) and the class struggle. By simultaneously generalizing and abstracting counter-histories from their immediate field of application, these discourses render the specific memories of war, conquest, and planned retribution the subject of economic individualism and ideology, along with new forms of humanism and its respective teleologies (progress, emancipation, and so forth).

Yet, while Arendt (and to a lesser degree, Foucault) tends to see the rationalization of racial discourse into scientific racism along the lines of a unilinear development, both Spanish and U. S. racism at the turn of the century demonstrate how counter-histories continue to speak in and through the very discourses of social Darwinism and Manifest Destiny, even after these had, in effect, colonized and sterilized the “existential” question of partisanship in a state of emergency on which the praxis of race is based. Seen from afar, the rationalities of biological racism appear to supersede or neutralize the concrete stakes and historical contingencies that shaped colonial conflict in the Philippines under Spain and later the U. S. On closer inspection, however, the rationalization of race praxis is inseparable from the racialization of rationality. It is the latter that constituted the “fringe” of political discourse at the turn of the century. Just as Quioquiap’s exacerbated racism and Rizal’s Filipino race helped to catalyze revolutionary sentiments among the Philippine native-born educated elite, so too did America’s race war against Philippine “nig—rs” threaten to derail the larger project of U. S. imperial hegemony. Both Southern white supremacy and Filipino racial redemption, however different or opposed, were thus strangely allied. For both, the question of war was inseparable from the question of racial difference, in which the right of conquest and its history—or conversely, the immanence of resistance to a fundamentally illegitimate form of foreign rule—was stamped on the faces that distinguished nations and peoples. In both instances, it is the concept of the political, not ethnicity or science, which provides the basis of race as a form of praxis.

The reciprocal relationship between race and religious formation, too, can be seen at once through global and local lenses. The nineteenth-century policies of the modern Spanish colonial state in the Philippines intended to transform the relationship of metropolis to colony as a response to and engagement with the economic and military penetration of the Western powers to all parts of the globe. Yet the full incorporation of the religious orders and Christianity into the colonial project—from the dismantling and rationalization of the respublica Christiana as it had existed on the frontiers of Spanish empire from the seventeenth century, to the vacillating policies on the secularization of religious missions into parishes (to be administered by native and mestizo secular priests)—had unforeseen consequences [see Blanco 2009]. The preaching of the Gospel and the administration of parishes had become a racial issue; conversely, the vernacular translation of the Gospel in texts like the Pasyon Henesis paved the way for new interpretations of Christian texts and religious experiences outside the control of the religious orders [Ileto 1989].

From a broad perspective, one may argue that there is little to say about the “originality” of these interpretations: myths of a chosen Elect, a New Jerusalem or Promised Land, speaking in ciphers, and the anticipation of trials and temptations that would test the faithful, are themes that reappear with some regularity among folk Christian sects, not to mention Jewish messianism.[44] Yet beginning with Rizal’s ruminations on the inseparability of race, political historicism, and historical redemption, what is original is the “interface” Rizal establishes between scientific and religious understandings of enlightenment, which allowed folk Christianity to absorb and reinterpret the colonial legacy. Against the colonial state’s incorporation of religious Christian discourse and institutions in order to make racial claims about Spanish “prestige” (a euphemistic shorthand term for the longer expression prestigio de la raza), there corresponded a new articulation between Christianity and revolution in and through the adoption and reevaluation or even “transvaluation” of racial discourse. While Philippine elite nationalists under U. S. colonial rule attempted in various ways to appropriate and manipulate race rhetoric for their own variants of culturalism—the Filipino as “Oriental,” the Filipino as “Latin”—they clearly neither understood nor identified with the existential question behind which the racial signifier arises.[45]

For the latter, war and revolution only represented one among many ways to envision the Philippines “a century hence.” For the witnesses to the historical appearance of the Brown Race, however, there would be no “orderly movement [towards] the future,” as Pardo de Tavera so anxiously urged, without the simultaneous and full redemption of the past.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people whose careful readings and commentaries on earlier drafts of this paper were invaluable: Caroline Hau, Mario López, Lisa Lowe, Lisa Yoneyama, Yen Le Espiritu, Lieba Faier, Shelley Streeby, Jin Lee, Sara Johnson, Curtis Marez, Danny Widener, Sarita See, David Lloyd. Needless to say, all errors of fact or judgment are mine.

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1) See “A Question of Memories” [Ong 2011] (web).

2) For a contrary opinion, see May [1991] and Linn [2000: 322–328].

3) For recent studies on the discourse and rhetoric of race in this period, see Salman [2001], Rafael [2000], Aguilar [2005] and Kramer [2006].

4) The division of manual slave and intellectual management labor, Quijano would argue, inheres in the colonization of the Americas from the fifteenth century, a model that was repeated throughout the world until after World War II [Quijano 2000: 534–535]. One may go further, adding that the imposition and enforcement of this order by conquest and “just war” on the Indians of the Americas and the indigenous peoples of the Philippines acquired the expression of legal sanction by the Salamancan Dominican priest and jurist Francisco de Vitoria (widely considered one of the founding fathers of international law). “Indeed,” writes legal scholar Anthony Anghie, “in the final analysis, the most uequivocal proposition Vitoria advances as to the character of the sovereign is that the sovereign, the entity empowered to wage a just war, cannot, by definition, be an Indian. Since the Indians are by definition incapable of waging a just war, they exist within the Vitorian framework only as violators of the law” [1996: 330].

5) While one may debate whether it is proper or anachronistic to call this division and hierarchy of labor and privilege “racist,” by the end of the seventeenth century the use of the word and concept of race to distinguish aristocratic lineage and training (“breeding”) from the heritage and customs of the vulgar populace was also used to distinguish between people inhabiting different territories and environments. For a distinction between “race-thinking” prior to the nineteenth century and scientific racism, see Arendt [1994]. These distinctions were already common to debates in Spain’s overseas territories over the ordination of priests and bishops who were identified as creoles (castas) or natives, under the criterion of a candidate’s limpieza de sangre [see Poole 1999: 360–370]. In France, François Bernier wrote his Nouvelle division de la terre par les différentes espèces ou races quil’habitent, in 1684, in which the “new division of the Earth extend[ed] the concept [of breeding] to mankind in general, but also focuses, as modern racial distinctions do, on fixed physical features...” [cited in Boulle 2003: 15]. Bernier, writes the historian Pierre Boulle, also insisted: “the transmission of characteristics by inheritance predominates over environmental or cultural determinants” [ibid.]. The same year as Bernier’s article was published King Louis XIV passed the French Black Code (Code Noir), one of the most comprehensive forms of legislation on black slavery and anti-Semitism of the modern period [ibid.: 26 [n. 44]].

6) Guillaumin’s argument follows Hannah Arendt’s earlier distinction between “race-thinking” and nineteenth-century “racism” proper. See Arendt [1994: 38–64].

7) For an extended version of this argument, see Blanco [2009: 64–94].

8) Regarding the native clergy, Mas writes: “It is of the greatest important to break their pride completely, and that in all places and occasions they consider the Spaniard as their superior, not their equal” (Es preciso quebrantar enteramente su orgullo, y que en todos lugares y ocasiones consideren al español como señor, no como igual) [Mas 1963: 50].

9) The transition from theoretical to actual centralization has been analyzed by Eliodoro Robles [1969].

10) For commentaries and interpretations of this essay, see Schumacher [[1972]1997: 62–63], Sánchez-Gómez [2003: 162–163], and Kramer [2006: 52–54].

11) See also Fast and Richardson [1979], Corpuz [1989], B. Anderson [1988: 4–8], and Aguilar [1998: 156–188].

12) As María Dolores Elizalde reminds us, debates regarding the capacity of indigenous colonized groups to learn the arts of “civilization” need to be placed in the context of the late nineteenth century emergence of imperialist appropriation of lands and their sanction in international law. The 1885 Berlin Conference provided the international legal framework for imperial conquest and colonization, which coincided with the penetration of European military powers in Africa and Asia. In this context, Spanish anxiety over native “capacity” for civilization merely distorts and masks anxiety over Spain’s “capacity” to maintain the remnants of its empire when faced with the military and industrial supremacy of other European nations. See Elizalde Pérez-Grueso [1992: 133–222], and Blanco [2004: 31–32].

13) España implantó aquí su dominio casi desde el primer día, organizó como pudo su administración, dio a esta raza sumisa, tras largos años de contacto, cierta domesticidad social, la sacó en gran parte del atraso primitivo y de la oscuridad de las selvas, la libertó de la piratería y la morisma.

14) “La ley convencional y artificiosa podrá pretender borrar esas diferencias; pero la Naturaleza, incontrastable en su poder, echa por tierra todo el edificio oficinesco, y ... siempre, allá en el fondo del cuadro, se destaca altivo y de pie el castila, sumiso y de rodillas el malayo.” Quioquiap employs this argument to criticize the policy that the governor-generals of his time had adopted, which was to invite and entertain guests at the governor-general’s Malacañang Palace, regardless of their class or geographical origin. As Governor-General Carlos María de la Torre (1869–1871) was known to say to his guests: “Aquí no hay mas que españoles,” here there are only Spaniards. See Feced [[1887]1998].

15) Elsewhere, Josep Fradera has underlined the inseparability of economic liberalization in the Philippines and the “reconquest” of the archipelago’s hinterlands as well as southern regions, which had remained economically marginalized by the Spanish tobacco monopoly until 1880 [see 2004: 314].

16) No se conoce el carácter primitivo y acentuadamente infantil de estas muchedumbres ... [determinado] por factores fisiológicos ineludibles, que demandan por tanto una política especial, adaptada a su especial naturaleza.

17) ¡Ay! Las leyes de la historia son tan ineludibles como las de la naturaleza, y por estas asperezas han pasado todos los pueblos cultos. El cetro ha sido en todas partes el primer instrumento de progreso, y cetro significa palo.

18) This second argument appears in an earlier work by Michael Salman, in which the author demonstrates how Filipino elites reproduced U. S. discourses of benevolence and racism, while reorienting the object of uplift from Filipinos as colonial subjects to the racialized minorities of the mountain tribes [2001: 259–270]. The development of Salman and Aguilar’s arguments find their full force in a recent work by Paul Kramer, who documents the shift from a U. S. promoted “imperial indigenism” to a Philippine “nationalist colonialism.” For a parallel argument made in the context of postcolonial India, see Guha [1997: 100–151] and Chatterjee [1993: 131–166].

19) “Ultimately, nationalist colonialism ‘internalized’ empire by arguing that those who were civilized among the colonized—in this case, the Hispanicized Filipino descendants of a ‘third wave’ of invaders—had the capacity, right, and duty to rule over those who were not civilized. The justification for, and means toward, national self-fulfillment would be founding internal empire” [Kramer 2006: 73].

20) Si no se asimila su población á la patria española, si los dominadores no se apropian el espíritu de sus habitantes, si leyes equitativas y reformas francas y liberales no les hacen olvidar á los unos y á los otros de que son de razas diferentes, ó si ambos pueblos no se funden para constituir una masa social y políticamente homogénea que no esté trabajada por opuestas tendencias y antagónicos pensamientos é intereses, las Filipinas se han de declarar un día fatal é infaliblemente independientes. Contra esta ley del destino no podrán oponerse ni el patriotismo español, ni el clamoreo de todos los tiranuelos de Ultramar, ni el amor á España de todos los filipinos, ni el dudoso porvenir de la desmembración y las luchas intestinas de las islas entre sí. La necesidad es la divinidad más fuerte que el mundo conoce, y la necesidad es el resultado de las leyes físicas puestas en movimiento por las fuerzas morales.

21) Llegado á este estado el rebajamiento moral de los habitantes, el desaliento, el disgusto de sí mismo, se quiso dar entonces el último golpe de gracia... para hacer de los individuos una especie de brazos, de brutos, de bestias de carga, así como una humanidad sin cerebro y sin corazón. Entonces díjose, dióse por admitido lo que se pretendía, se insultó á la raza.... Entonces esto que creyeron que iba á ser la muerte fué precisamente su salvación.... Tantos sufrimientos se colmaron con los insultos, y el aletargado espíritu volvió á la vida. La sensibilidad, la cualidad por excelencia del Indio, fué herida, y si paciencia tuvo para sufrir y morir al pie de una bandera extranjera, no la tuvo cuando aquel, por quien moría, le pagaba su sacrificio con insultos y sandeces. Entonces examinóse poco á poco, y conoció su desgracia.

22) ¡España!, ¿le habremos de decir un día á Filipinas que no tienes oídos para sus males, y que si desea salvarse que se redima ella sola?

23) Bonifacio’s manifesto presents a summary of Rizal’s essay. For Mabini’s interpretation of Rizal’s novels, see Mabini [[1969]1998] (web).

24) The relation of Schmitt’s concept of the political and the theory of partisanship to the question of race has been a frequent subject of debate. Political theorists like Slavoj Žižek and Chantal Mouffe, for example, speculate on the possibility of using Schmitt’s theory of partisanship against him, i.e., as a potentially progressive structuring principle of domestic and international relations [see Žižek 1999: 18–37; Mouffe 1999: 38–53]. For a sobering counter-assessment of this tendency, see Wolin [1990: 389–416]. Wolin rightly points out the inseparability of charismatic authority, the total state, and racial identity in Schmitt’s affiliation with the Nationalist-Socialist party (1933). As Schmitt himself writes: “We not only feel but also know from the most rigorous scientific insight that all justice is the law of a certain people. It is an epistemological truth that only whoever is capable of seeing the facts accurately ... and of weighing impressions about people and things properly joins in the law-creating community of kith and kin in his own modest way and belongs to it existentially. Down, inside, to the deepest and most instinctive stirrings of his emotions ... man stands in the reality of this belongingness of people and race” [Schmitt [1933] 2001: 51]. Or again: “We seek a commitment which is deeper, more reliable and more imbued with life than the deceptive attachment to the distorted letter of thousands of paragraphs of the law. Where else can it rest but in ourselves, and in our kin ... all the questions and answers flow into the exigency of an ethnic identity without which a total leader-State could not stand its ground a single day” [ibid.: 52]. These statements suggest that to propose the concept of the political cleansed of its racial moorings is pure mystification, whether one disavows the necessity of the conquest of the Americas for the foundation of a jus publicum Europaeum or one theorizes a racially neutral form of partisanship.

25) Compare this statement to the one found in pro-imperialist Katherine Mayo’s 1924 sensationalist popular study of the Philippines, The Isles of Fear, which cites the speech which served as the occasion for Pardo de Tavera’s words: “What do you mean when you speak of the people of the Philippine Islands? Do you think of them as a political body? Asocial body? Adistinct race.... If you do, you start wrong. The pre-eminent native scholar of the Islands, Dr. Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera, lecturing on February 26, 1924, in the University of the Philippines, said: ‘Let us not indulge in idle dreams. Let us admit that there is no such thing as a Filipino race’” [1924: 9].

26) The word lahi refers simply to a male in Chamorro and Malagasy, both of which belong to the family of Austronesian languages from which Tagalog, Ilocano, and Cebuano developed (and which use the word lalaki to refer to the same). The Austronesian morpheme is laki, “husband” [Kempler-Cohen 1999: 213]. It is interesting that lahi appears as the translation to the Spanish word for race (raza) in the appendix to Juan de Noceda and Pedro de Sanlúcar’s Vocabulario de la Lengua Tagala (originally published in 1753), yet the official entry for the word lahi in the main text has nothing to do with the concept of race: it signifies “to provoke, to enjoy oneself with someone at a festival” (incitar a mal, holgarse con otro en alguna fiesta) [ibid.: 166]. Even Jose Rizal had difficulty explaining the Spanish word for race (raza), as can be gleaned from his correspondence with Ferdinand Blumentritt [ibid.: 33]. In both cases, his advice seems appropriate: “One must be very careful in reading Tagalog words written by Spaniards. At home we give no value, absolutely none, to the Tagalog of the Spaniards” [ibid.: 59].

27) See also Emilio Jacinto’s “Teachings of the Katipunan,” where the latter writes: “Maitim man o maputi ang kulay ng balat, lahat ng tao’y magkakapantay; mangyayaring ang isa’y hihigtan sa dunong, sa yaman, sa ganda ...; ngunit di mahihigtan sa pagkatao” [Whether the color of one’s skin is black or white, all people are equal; it may turn out that one may possess greater intelligence, wealth, [or] beauty [than others] ...; but that does not make [him or her] any more human].

28) The partisan nature of the racial signifier has become an important point of departure for not only race studies but also psychoanalysis: “The question becomes not ‘What is race?’ but ‘Under what social and political circumstances do races (they must be plural) come into symbolic and imaginary existence? ’ I want to take a step beyond merely saying ... that ‘Race is never natural, it is a constructed social category,’ to saying, ‘It is always a political category’.... The term ‘race’ appears only when it is a question of enemies. Race is always the consequence of a lopsided political encounter between human groups” [MacCannell 1997: 41–42].

29) The original Spanish of the last passage reads: “A todos! Repitió con voz siniestra Smoun, a todos, indios, mestizos, chinos, españoles, á todos los que se encuentren sin valor, sin energía.... Es menester renovar la raza! Padres cobardes solo engendrarán hijos esclavos y no vale la pena destruir para volver á edificar con podridos materiales!” [Rizal 1891: 249]. I thank Caroline Hau for reminding me of this important passage.

30) On the multivalence of the word loób, see Rafael [1988: 121–135]. On the spiritualization of nationalism, see Ileto [1989: 1–27].

31) Katipunero refers to the name of the first revolutionary organization formed by Andres Bonifacio, the Katipunan.

32) The anthropological work of Prospero Covar and Consolacion Alaras has explored the lines of transculturation in these groups, focusing on the religious sects of Mt. Banahaw that exist to this day. See also the locus classicus of peasant based religious revolution in the Philippines, David Sturtevant’s Popular Uprisings in the Philippines; and Nick Joaquin’s popular account of the Guardia de Honor religious movement in Pangasinan and Ilocos [1988: 263–311].

33) The adoption of race rhetoric among the southern Tagalog lowland regions can hardly be said to represent the Philippine population as a whole, even on the main island of Luzon. For an alternative perspective on the shifting racial frontier between the peoples of the Cordillera region and lowland colonial society, see the two essays by William Henry Scott, in Scott [1993]. Among the main points highlighted in these essays, Scott dispenses with the myth that “Igorots and lowlanders were enemies from time immemorial,” an idea disproven by the flourishing of contraband in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries [ibid.: 11, 29–36]. He also emphasizes the 350-year continuity of Igorot resistance to Spanish resettlement mandates [ibid.: 39, 49] and the racialization of the term by Spaniards to mean “infidel” and by the Americans to mean “uncivilized” [ibid.: 52–60].

34) Translation slightly modified. Following the lead of Luciano Santiago, the word luwalhati also conveys a meaning closer to the word “redemption”: it is a compound word composed of the root hati (division, partition) and its prefix luwal (outside, “extruded”). The word can be contrasted with other words that possess the same root, such as pighati (grief) and dalamhati (suffering, with the prefix dala- meaning either “carried,” or a contraction of the word for two, dalawa). See Santiago[1993: 277–283].

35) “The brutal exigencies of war,” David Joel Steinberg writes, “force an articulation of values which otherwise can remain inchoate. It is a catalyst that requires stark decisions of life or death, sacrifice or self-interest, allegiance or treason. It is an acid test for nationalism, since fissiparous divisions of language, geography, social class, religion, ethnicity and culture must be subordinated to the mass demands of national allegiance” [1972: 165].

36) See Benjamin [[1974] 2005: thesis 8] (web): “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism.”

37) I owe this insight to Nerissa Balce’s important study on the conflation of Filipino and black bodies during and after the Philippine-American War in the U. S. [see 2006: 44–58].

38) In 2002, the community organizers in Oakland Abe Ignacio and Helen Toribio teamed up with the environmental engineer and activist Dr. Jorge Emmanuel to publish a collection of political cartoons, many of which were exhibited throughout California and the Philippines just before and during the U. S. -Iraq war. The book is called The Forbidden Book, named after a political cartoon in which President William McKinley prevents Uncle Sam from opening a “forbidden book” that would reveal to him all the atrocities committed by the U. S. in the Philippines in the name of liberty and freedom (see Fig. 1). These images like no other demonstrate the efficacy of stereotypes as a technology of identification and interpellation, particularly in a time of war, for both the aggressors and the aggrieved. The Boston Sunday Globe depicts the Filipino’s progress under Uncle Sam by parodying the socialization of Afro-Americans; a cover page of Judge portrays democratic presidential candidate William Jennings Bryant as a hypocrite who is “For One Negro and Against the Other”; and an anti-imperialist critique of U.S. expansion reveals the necessity of measuring black lynching and overseas expansion by the same scales of justice (see Figs. 2, 3, and 4).

39) While President Theodore Roosevelt publicly acknowledged that the plan deserved “serious consideration,” it was never brought to the House of Representatives for a vote, in part due to the categorical rejection of the idea in editorials by the black press. See Baylen and Moore [1968: 69–75].

40) It is no coincidence that a number of U. S. military leaders in the Philippine campaign, including General Adna Chaffee and Lieutenant Jacob “Howling Jake” Smith were products of the Civil War and the extermination campaigns against the native Americans. See Schott [1964: 60–63] and Miller [1984: 31–56].

41) Ileto [1995] illustrates how the discourse of biopolitics that was wedded to the civilizational rhetoric frequently used by military leaders and civil officials, masks a dark underside. The genocidal campaign of J. Franklin Bell in 1900, for examples, deserves special attention for the remarkable way in which he describes the military offensive: “I expect first to clean out the Looboo Peninsula.... I shall then move command to the vicinity of Lake Taal, and sweep the country westward to the ocean.... I shall scour and clean up the Lipa mountains. Swinging northward, the country ... will be scoured.... Swinging back to the right, the same treatment will be given all the country” [ibid.: 59, italics added].

42) Indeed, if one were to seek the ideal appropriation and sterilization of race war rhetoric in the fashioning of U. S. imperial hegemony at the end of the nineteenth century, one need look no further than Frederick Jackson Turner’s theory of the American frontier. The “frontier thesis” was first propounded by Turner at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago: it appears as the first essay of his collection of essays on the role of the frontier as the foundational theme of U. S. history. Turner’s discussions of settler solidarity, for instance, or the transculturation between “civilized” and “savage” customs for taming the wilderness, seem to imply an autochthonous American egalitarianism that transcends racial divisions [1920: 1–38]. One might argue that these were radical claims, given that the formative years of Turner’s education take place during the collapse of the Reconstruction of the South, the presumed certainty of social Darwinism and its manifestations in theories of Teutonism and Anglo-Saxonism as America’s cultural and racial heritage. At the same time, however, Turner’s discussion of America’s “composite nationality” scrupulously avoids any mention of specific racial groups that might serve as the primary components. While this ambiguity has led certain scholars to criticize Turner for being ignorant of the role race played in the nineteenth century, reading Turner’s western frontier thesis alongside both the historiography of Anglo-Saxonism and Du Bois’s indictment of modern racism seems to suggest the opposite. That is, Turner’s frontier thesis, with its assertions of a composite nationality that resulted from the frontier, fully intended to displace the centrality of racial division and conflict in the late nineteenth century. Turner implies as much in his repeated insistence that the civil war, and the “slavery struggle” or “slavery question” remain incidental rather than central to U. S. history. Far from ignorance, Turner reveals in his repeated disavowal of the importance of racial conflict his close attention to the matter. In a sense, the frontier thesis solves an unsolvable problem by reducing its importance. For Turner, the only way to transcend the social divisions brought about by the civil war and the failure of Reconstruction in the writing of U. S. history would be to permanently displace the centrality of that conflict. This is in effect what the frontier thesis does, regardless of the veracity or inaccuracy of its many flawed corollaries. As Richard Slotkin has observed: “One can legitimately argue that Turner actually obscures the historical role of violence, which weakens his analysis. By rejecting the idea that racial violence is the principle around which both individual character and social organization develop, Turner devalues violence as a political symbol”[1998: 55].

43) For an exemplary text demonstrating the influence of Masonry and Kabbalism on folk Christianity, see Sabino[1955], and Covar [1977].

44) For an introduction to comparative millenarian movements, see Cohn [1970].

45) For examples, see the edited volume by Vicente Hilario. One may even go so far as to argue that such incomprehension corresponds to the “necessary forgetting” among many Philippine elites of their ancestral ties to China. For the ethnic ambiguity of ilustrado or educated elites, see Cullinane [2003: 26–35], and Hau [2011].

Filipino Press between Two Empires: El Renacimiento, a Newspaper with Too Much Alma Filipina

Glòria Cano*

* Departament d’Humanitats, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Edificio Jaume I (Campus de la Ciutadella), Ramon Trias Fargas, 25–27, 08005 Barcelona, Spain

e-mail: gloria. cano@upf. edu

Abstract

This article illustrates how important the Spanish press was in the Philippines during the last 30 years of Spanish colonial rule and the early period of American colonial administration. Using archival material from the period, it reveals how the American colonial administration complained that the newspapers in the Philippines were mainly political, a Spanish inheritance in the archipelago as many newspapers were founded in the Philippines in the 1890s of the nineteenth century after the law of press was passed in 1883. This article also emphasizes the political clout papers possessed and the threats that they posed to the new American administration. In particular, this article shows how newspapers such as El Resumen avoided censorship and dared to say what other parties did not. El Resumen was a voice for Philippine national hero Jose Rizal and what they published in “Our Wishes” were Rizal’s wishes for his country. An analysis of articles in El Resumen demonstrates that the censorship of the press was attenuated and depended on the governor-general. Therefore, this article questions the influential argument in Philippine historiography about Spanish censorship of the press. El Resumen served as an example for other newspapers that were founded during the beginning of the American colonial administration such as La Independencia and above all El Renacimiento. As an organ of the Nationalist party, El Renacimiento came to exert real power in Manila that influenced the government. The journal waged brilliant battles, the most important from 1904 onwards in the form of public reports of abuses committed by the constabulary. In addition, in September 1906, the journal El Renacimiento criticized, through several articles, James A. LeRoy’s statement about William H. Taft being “the best and most influential friend of the Filipinos.” El Renacimiento, which had become a potent political force, had stated that Taft showed himself in public to be a friend of the Filipinos, while in private he considered them to be “childish.” LeRoy felt annoyed with the journal and decided to write a long letter to El Renacimiento which was published in several supplements in January of 1907. As this article makes clear, LeRoy used his defense of Taft as an excuse to attack the enemies of American rule. In sum, El Renacimiento suffered real press censorship and was forced to close in 1908, leading to the demise of publications in the Spanish language.

Keywords: Spanish press, Filipino press, censorship of the press, freedom of the press, El Resumen, La Solidaridad, El Renacimiento

El águila, simbolizando libertad y fuerza, es el ave que ha encontrado más adepto. Y los hombres, colectivos e individualmente han querido copiar e imitar el ave más rapaz, para triunfar en el saqueo de sus semejantes.

The eagle, symbolizing liberty and strength, is the bird that has found the most admirers. And men, collectively and individually, have ever desired to copy and imitate this most rapacious of birds in order to triumph in the plundering of their fellowmen.

“Birds of Prey” [El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino Independiente 30 October 1908]

Introduction

In 1930 Joseph Ralston Hayden, in his introduction to the reissue of Dean C. Worcester’s book The Philippines Past and Present, categorically stated that newspapers were primarily political organs, not business institutions.[1] Hayden considered that their chief business was not the sale of news and advertising, but rather politics:

Editors were usually politicians, and there were no standards, either journalistic or political, to prevent them from using their news and editorial columns in whatever way seemed best calculated to advance their personal or group interests. [Worcester 1930: 52]

Hayden, like W. Cameron Forbes, believed this political trend of Filipino newspapers was due mainly to U. S. magnanimity that had duly brought freedom of the press and speech to the archipelago.[2] This newfound freedom apparently differed from, or contrasted with, the rigid control and censorship perceived to be prevalent under Spanish colonial rule. As will be explored in this article, the binary opposition between U. S. freedom of press and speech and Spanish censorship is a mythogenesis. In fact, as this article will make clear, control of public opinion was more rigid under U. S. colonial rule than under the rule of the Spanish. Certainly there was Spanish censorship, but this was attenuated depending on the governor-general. In fact, as will be developed in the first section of this article, in 1857 the Spanish Administration ordered the Reglamento de Asuntos de Imprenta (Rules of Printing Matters). This text was in force until 1883, when the Spanish Liberal government passed the bill known as de policía de imprenta o Gullón (Printing Order or Gullón).[3] This new law mitigated censorship, as is shown by the publication of the newspapers analyzed in this article.

These two laws were not as strict as the two acts passed by the U. S. Administration in 1901 with the object of repressing public criticism: the “Sedition” Act and the “Criminal Libel” Act. Section 8 of the Sedition Act stated that:

Every person who shall utter seditious words or speeches, write, publish, or circulate scurrilous libels against the government of the ... Philippine Islands, or which tend to disturb or obstruct any lawful officer in executing his office, or which tend to instigate others to cabal or meet together for unlawful purpose shall be punished by a fine not exceeding $2,000 or by imprisonment not exceeding two years, or both in the discretion of the court. [Willis 1905: 160–161]

The truth is that from outside of the U. S. regime in the Philippines it was essential to control the sources of public information in the islands. This article illustrates the control of the press through a paradigmatic journal, El Renacimiento. This publication suffered from the strictness of U. S. censorship. It was denounced several times for sedition and libel, for condemning abuses committed by American officials against Filipinos, and for openly advocating the continuity of Spanish as the official language in the Philippines. The editors of El Renacimiento displayed their love of the Castilian language and were mostly Hispanistas who openly asked for independence, simultaneously criticizing the policies of William Howard Taft.[4] Americans, particularly Dean C. Worcester,[5] finally achieved their goal of silencing the newspaper and brought it to an abrupt close in 1908, after the publication of an editorial titled “Birds of Prey” (Aves de Rapiña) that Worcester took to be an insult against his honor and goodwill.

The influence of U. S. historiography on the academe can be seen in the bibliographies that are still being used by historians working on the Philippines. Bibliographies such as The American in the Philippines written by James A. LeRoy [1914]; the 55 volumes of The Philippines Islands edited by Emma H. Blair and James A. Robertson [1903–09]; and official reports such as the Census of 1903, among others, have spread the idea that freedom of the press did not exist during the Spanish days. These books had a specific task: to furnish the black legend of Spanish colonial rule. Use of this bibliography has led to an absolute ignorance in relation to the press during Spanish colonial rule and under the U. S. Administration. As such, this article is a preliminary study of the Spanish press published in the Philippines during the last years of Spanish colonial rule. In addition, this article tries to revisit a specific issue of El Renacimiento because it was the voice of the nationalists and was able to speak out against the U. S. government.

The Press during Spanish Colonial Rule

Joseph Ralston Hayden and W. Cameron Forbes were right when they asserted that the Filipino press was primarily a political organ. The idea of using the press as a political weapon was a Spanish legacy. Despite press censorship imposed by the Spanish government to which U. S. historiography has repeatedly alluded, Cameron Forbes stated, “in the Spanish days freedom of the press, of existing at all, was limited” [Forbes 1928: 71]. Yet, the last 30 years of Spanish colonial rule, as it will be explained, were witness to the publication of many newspapers in the Philippines.

I take as a starting point the “Glorious” Revolution (La Gloriosa), which took place in Spain in 1868. This revolution was a landmark in Spanish history as it introduced modernity. The Glorious Revolution dethroned the despised Queen Isabel II with the cry “No more Bourbons.” The period 1868–74 saw the construction of the democratic state, initiated by a democratic revolution. As such, the revolution of 1868 was a national movement that awakened the conscience of the country [Gies 1999: 3]. In sum, the events of 1868 brought about many political projects that needed a transmission of ideological content. Political parties tried to project their agendas and electoral programs to a wider audience. The freedom of press decree of 14 October 1868 spread as an absolute value, creating a freedom that contrasted sharply with the atmosphere of repression that lasted for the final two years of Isabel II’s reign. As such, editing restrictions on newspapers—be they conservative, liberal, or republican—were lifted [Bahamonde and Martínez 2001: 549].

This period saw the founding of numerous newspapers; in Madrid alone, more than 300 papers across the political spectrum emerged, offering unprecedented freedom. Many of the newspapers and journals became ideological battlefields and propaganda organs for political parties. Here, we classify the press into four groups: Catholic absolutists, conservatives, progressive unionists, and democrats.

The Spanish press devoted an unusual amount of attention to the Philippines during this period, especially when the minister for the colonies decided to reform the institutions of the archipelago. The news of the triumph of the Glorious Revolution reached Manila on 28 October 1868 [Sánchez Fuertes 1989: 419]. However, the journal La Gaceta de Manila, which was founded in 1861 and was the official newspaper of the Spanish government, did not publish the telegrams related to the revolution and decided not to insert all of them [Retana 1895: 104]. This fact demonstrates that in spite of the freedom of the press decreed in Spain, the colonial government was not determined to concede that freedom in its colonies of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines.

It was not unusual for La Gaceta de Manila to conceal news, since from 1857 the press in the colonies had to follow the dictum of the Reglamento de Asuntos de Imprenta (Rules of Printing Matters). These rules were passed in the Philippines to control the production of the press [Cal 1999: 160]. They remained in force until 1883, when the greatest creation of newspapers in the history of the Filipino press was recorded. The censorship would depend on whether the government was liberal or conservative, and the spirit of the law is well defined in the first paragraphs of the preamble:

Profundamente convencido este Superior Gobierno de que sus cuidados y desvelos deben dirigirse con absoluta preferencia a prohibir todo aquello que pueda debilitar el principio religioso, base principal en que descansa el edificio social, así como a robustecer el principio de obediencia al Gobierno de S. M. Considerando que cierta clase de lecturas, atendida la sencillez y falta de ilustración de los fieles religiosos habitantes de estas Islas, pueden con el tiempo ser altamente perjudiciales y contribuir a enervar esos principios tan hondamente arraigados al presente. [ibid.: 161]

This Superior government is deeply convinced that its care and efforts must be addressed with absolute preference to prohibit all that might weaken the religious principle, the main foundation on which the social structure rests, as well as to strengthen the principle of obedience to the Government of His Majesty. This takes into account that certain readings, considering the simplicity and lack of education of the inhabitants of those islands, may eventually be highly detrimental and contribute to weakening these principles so deeply entrenched in the present.

The legal text had 51 articles divided into six titles: “De las impresiones en general” (On printing in general) (articles 1–12), “De los periódicos” (On newspapers) (13–28), “De la introducción de libros para el comercio” (On the introduction of books for commerce) (29–38), “De la introducción de libros para uso particular” (On the introduction of books for particular uses) (39–42), “De la introducción de estampas, telas y otros objetos con pinturas y grabados” (On the introduction of illustrations, fabrics, and other objects with paintings and engravings) (43–48), and “De las representaciones o comedias” (On representations or comedies) (49–51). The articles devoted to newspapers indicate how the authorities were afraid of their influence on readers.

To publish a newspaper, it was necessary to apply for a license that indicated in great detail its content. Newspaper publishers had to submit original manuscripts and galley proofs for prior censorship, and after printing they had to send a copy to the censor. Each newspaper had two censors in a permanent censorship commission. All these regulations highlight how insubstantial the press was during these years. In fact, until 1857 the press in the Philippines had a very specific function: to instruct the people. The insignificance of the press changed dramatically during the 1880s, when the Liberal government passed a press law known as de policía de imprenta o Gullón (Printing Order or Gullón). To a certain extent, this law softened the Reglamento de Asuntos de Imprenta.

It would be impossible to analyze in one article the Philippine press from 1880 to 1898, since more than 100 papers relating to conservative, liberal, and nationalist trends were published. Wenceslao Emilio Retana y Gamboa in El Periodismo Filipino Noticias para su Historia mentions that four Spanish authors included in their works a brief history of journalism:[6]

La intitulada Memorias Históricas y estadísticas de Filipinas, por D. Rafael Díaz Arenas: Manila 1855; Compendio de la Historia de Filipinas por D. Felipe María de Govantes: Manila 1877. Arrancan las noticias a partir de la fundación de la Ilustración filipina 1859; redúcense a consignar en qué año se fundaron los periódicos; pero en los más de los casos hay falta de precisión: Govantes omite algunas publicaciones. Y la obra de D. Francisco Javier Moya y Jiménez, Filipinas en 1882: Madrid, 1883. Inédita conozco una Memoria presentada por el Sr. D. Francisco Díaz Puertas en la Exposición de Filipinas celebrada en Madrid en 1887 titulase Ligeros apuntes sobre la Imprenta en Filipinas. [Retana 1895: 2–4]

Memorias Históricas y estadísticas de Filipinas (Historical Memories and Statistics of the Philippines), by Rafael Díaz Arenas: Manila 1855; Compendio de la Historia de Filipinas (Compendium of the History of the Philippines), by Felipe María de Govantes: Manila 1877. Govantes started with the creation of Ilustración Filipina (1859); he only records the years in which the newspapers were founded, but in many cases these are inaccurate. Govantes omits some publications. And Francisco Javier Moya y Jiménez’s work, las Filipinas en 1882 (The Philippines in 1882): Madrid, 1883. I know of an unpublished memoir presented by Francisco Díaz Puertas during the Exhibition of the Philippines held in Madrid in 1887 titled Ligeros apuntes sobre la Imprenta en Filipinas (Brief Overview of the Press in the Philippines).

In addition, in El Periodismo Filipino Retana included several appendixes on the history of journalism in the Philippines. These appendixes make clear what were the objectives of newspapers when they were first published in the Philippines. Appendix I collects J.T. Medina’s “The First Newspaper in the Philippines,” in which he considered that the emergence of journalism in the Spanish colonies obeyed different causes and took place in different periods.[7]

Termómetro fiel de la vitalidad de un país, un periódico es el reflejo de la sociedad en que nace, de las causas que le dan vida y de las necesidades a que responde. [ibid.: 532]

Atrue thermometer of the vitality of a country, a newspaper is the reflection of the society from which it emerges, the causes that give it life, and the needs to which it responds.

Therefore, for Medina, the emergence of the first newspaper was not a question of commerce or independence. It was a transmission of knowledge. Medina considered that the first paper published in the Philippines was founded in 1811 and that the content of this publication included information only from the metropolis. However, the Filipino physician and scholar Trinidad Pardo de Tavera categorically stated that the first newspaper of the Philippines, El Noticioso Filipino, was published in July 1821 [ibid.: 561]. Some authors have made a mistake with the title of this paper, calling it instead El Noticiero de Manila, yet it is worth noting that the term noticiero did not exist in 1821 and was included in the Royal Academy dictionary of the Spanish language only in 1869. Retana questions Pardo de Tavera by asserting that there were more journals before El Noticioso Filipino, such as Ramillete Patriótico, El Filipino, Latigazo, El Filipino Noticioso, all of them published in 1821.

Be that as it may, none of these newspapers dealt with political issues. We have to move toward 1880 and 1898 to find papers that served as media which, in spite of censorship, conveyed and heralded the opinions, views, sentiments, and positions of individuals and different sectors such as intellectuals, businesses, and the Church. We also come across opinion-centric newspapers, which focused more on views and opinions than on news. From 1880 to the collapse of Spanish colonial rule, the newspapers discussed topics such as politics, art, literature, fashion, religion, medicine, or justice, among others. These new interests, as mentioned above, were related to the press law passed in 1883 by the Liberal government. This law did away with censorship and special tribunals to judge crimes of printing. This law was not totally implemented in the Philippines, but up to a certain extent censorship in the archipelago was attenuated depending on the minister for the colonies and the general government.

As an example of the changes that took place, I want to highlight Diariong Tagalog, which emerged in 1882 in Manila. This was the first bilingual newspaper, and it can be considered as a predecessor of El Renacimiento. All the texts were written in Spanish and Tagalog, and this brought to the archipelago the new liberal atmosphere prevailing in Spain. The directors—the Liberals Francisco Calvo y Muñoz, member of parliament, and Francisco Bueno—defended the most liberal solutions for the country, such as that Filipinos could love the Philippines without despising Spain. Diariong Tagalog managed to merge into a single ideal both Filipino and Spanish interests.

Alongside Diariong Tagalog, the newspaper La Opinión, which had two relevant periods, was founded in Manila in 1887 [Retana 1906: 1628–1632]. This newspaper was political and literary. One of its directors was Benigno Quiroga, who belonged to the left wing of the Liberal Party. He arrived in Manila to reform anything that could be reformed, and the paper gradually became the political organ of the Liberal Party, causing scandal among the reactionary subjects. Quiroga won the will of the Filipinos, procuring their subscriptions. This saw the paper become both Spanish and Filipino in orientation. La Opinión was the first newspaper in the Philippines that dared to go against the religious orders and became the first newspaper to be eminently political.[8] According to Retana, La Opinión enjoyed absolute freedom [Retana 1895: 295]. However, the antagonisms as expressed in the paper against the religious orders were obliterated. Instead, the paper was remembered only in its second period, that is, as a conservative periodical defending the status quo of the religious orders under Retana and Camilo Millán’s editorial board.

No doubt there are more examples, but I would like to note two journals that emerged the same year as La Solidaridad as the most consulted and cited papers par excellence. These newspapers were characterized by their popular nature. The first one is El Ilocano, the first genuinely Filipino journal, which came out in Manila in 1889 [Retana 1906: 1653–1655]. It was founded, run, and edited by Isabelo de los Reyes. It was also bilingual—Spanish-Ilocano—with an essentially educative trend and political sense. De los Reyes used simple language to instill valuable lessons and at the same time liberal teachings of redemption [Artigas 1909: 187]. He criticized the prevalent censorship of the press in the Philippines, although he was able to express opinions freely.

The other popular journal and the most important to emerge in the Philippines (in part because it can be considered as the alter ego of La Solidaridad and a true predecessor of El Renacimiento) was El Resumen. This nationalist newspaper, founded by Pascual H. Poblete and Baldomero Hazañas, played a critical and valiant role. Poblete translated Spanish and Tagalog texts and wrote the novel Uliran nang Cabaitan ó Buhay ni Patricio Horacio (A Model of Kindness or the Life of Patricio Horacio), in which he questioned and criticized the predominance of the friars in the Philippines. Furthermore, he was an insistent founder and collaborator of several newspapers. He founded and owned Revista Popular de Filipinas, which was also published in Spanish and Tagalog and disappeared in 1889. Then he decided to publish El Resumen and a newspaper written entirely in Tagalog titled Patnubay nang Catolico (The Catholic’s Guide). Hazañas was a Spaniard who had lived in the archipelago since he was a child [Cal 1998: 29–30].

El Resumen was, first and foremost, a normal newspaper with the editorial occupying the front page. This editorial was almost always anonymous, although sometimes it carried Poblete’s pseudonym, “Juan Tatoo.” The most frequent byline was that of Javier Gómez de la Serna, a correspondent based in Madrid. The second and third pages focused on news about the archipelago. The last page was devoted to advertisements. In general, if we compare this newspaper with others we can highlight the abundance of Filipino news.

Retana asserted that Poblete demonstrated his political skills by recruiting Spanish writers in order not to come under suspicion. El Resumen celebrated Governor Despujol’s policy of attraction, daring to say:

Filipinas y sus hijos sólo ansían la completa españolización del territorio, su progreso y adelanto y su equiparación y asimilación en derechos y deberes, dentro de justos y equitativos límites, a las provincias metropolitanas.... [Retana 1906: 1668]

The Philippines and their children only desire the complete Hispanization of the territory, its progress and advancement as well as the provisioning and assimilation of rights and duties within fair and equitable limits, in the metropolitan provinces....

It should be noted that El Resumen was the organ of La Liga Filipina, which was founded by Jose Rizal in 1892. It was a civic organization that had five main objectives: to unite all Filipinos as a whole, mutual protection when faced with any difficulty, defense against violence and injustice, promotion of education, and implementation of reforms [Retana 1907: 236]. For instance, if we analyze El Resumen during July 1892 we see that the journal was publishing all the events related to Rizal’s deportation to Dapitan. On 10 July 1892 a long editorial appeared titled “Our Desires”; it was a kind of declaration of principles in favor of the Philippines and popular classes that was Rizal’s own wish:

Amantes como el que más de progreso filipino, aspiración constante de nuestra publicación humilde; del avance, españolización y equiparación en derechos y deberes de esta provincia española a sus hermanas de la Península, ostentamos esos lemas, ufanos y orgullosos, levantando la frente muy alta.... Justicia severa y recta para aquel que voluntaria y libérrimamente, tergiversa legítimas aspiraciones y con sus actos hace escarnio de los sentimientos más arraigados en el corazón de este pueblo tan católico como español.... [Cal 1998: 35–36]

True lovers of Filipino progress, the constant aspiration of our humble publication; for progress, Hispanization and the provision of rights and duties of this Spanish province to our brethren in the Spanish Peninsula, we show off these mottos, exultant and proud, holding our heads up high.... Strict and honest justice for those who voluntarily and freely pervert legitimate aspirations and with their acts scoff at the feelings that are deeply rooted in the hearts of this people as Catholic as the Spanish....

On 13 July the journal stood by the same thesis, on 15 July there was no editorial, and on 19 July the journal got involved with the conservative newspaper La Voz Española because of an article concerning parliamentary representation of 1812. El Resumen did not hesitate to recognize the need for parliamentary representation in Madrid, and at this time the newspaper discussed the means to attain this end.

In sum, El Resumen acknowledged itself as openly belonging to the Compañía Mercantil e Industrial Hispano-Filipina. This company was probably a subsidiary of the Asociación Hispano Filipina of Madrid, which claimed reforms for the archipelago. The Asociación had as its organ of propaganda La Solidaridad. The Compañía was an anonymous society, mainly nationalist. This fact is important, since some members of the company belonged to La Liga Filipina: the businessman Jose A. Ramos and the lawyer Ambrosio Rianzares [ibid.: 38]. The most evident conclusion is that El Resumen dared to debate on political and social issues in the Philippines, issues that originated from two factions in the Manilan press. On the one hand we find El Resumen, La Oceanía Española, and El Eco de Filipinas, which defended Filipino parliamentary representation; and on the other we have La Voz Española, Diario de Manila, Boletín de Cebú, and El Porvenir de Visayas. It is essential to illustrate that El Resumen was fresh and vivid in the topics it carried and how it expressed itself. It was, in fact, a Spanish-peninsular style newspaper. No one had made such statements calling for progress for the Philippines, assimilation, and equality in rights and duties with Spaniards. In sum, El Resumen undoubtedly claimed assimilation and reforms for the archipelago. It seems there are too many myths and legends in the history of the archipelago about the censorship of the press during Spanish colonial rule.

In 1890 El Eco de Filipinas emerged, substituting for La Opinión. El Eco de Filipinas was edited by the conservative journalist Camilo Millán. And last but not least, it is worth mentioning La Voz Española, a conservative newspaper that appeared on 5 March 1892—the day after La Voz de España, its homonym closed. La Voz de España, like La Voz Española, aimed to combat assimilationists and politiquillos (little politicians); at the same time, both periodicals championed the progress of the Conservatives’ claims defending the friars [Retana 1906: 1639]. La Voz Española was run by the conservative journalist Federico Hidalgo, who categorically claimed “the Philippines by Spain and for Spain” [ibid.: 1691]. As seen above, La Voz Española, like La Voz de España, negated Filipino parliamentary representation but did ask for freedom of the press. La Solidaridad highlighted this fact by stating, “we are therefore in agreement with La Voz de España and we are glad that this conservative organ of the country is one of the champions of this freedom” [La Solidaridad, Madrid, 30 June 1891, N. 58: 299].

However, the most widely cited and consulted journal by historians was La Solidaridad, which was conceived in Barcelona in 1889.[9] The collaborators of this journal were imbued with liberal, republican, and “autonomist” sentiments. The lawyer Pablo Rianzares was the first owner of the journal, and the first editor was Graciano Lopez Jaena,[10] who was above all an orator, demagogue, and writer. Lopez Jaena was protected by acknowledged Catalan radical republicans and journalists such as Joan Sol y Ortega and Emilio Junoy, who would defend the Filipinos and their reformism until the end [Retana 1906: 1149].

In 1890 La Solidaridad moved to Madrid, since the Asociación Hispano-Filipina had been founded there and the collaborators of the journal felt that their political aspirations would find a wider audience in Madrid rather than in Barcelona. Lopez Jaena decided to remain in Barcelona, and in 1893 he edited the republican paper El Latigo Nacional. Marcelo Hilario del Pilar became the new editor of La Solidaridad.[11] La Solidaridad was a journal written by Filipinos, but it is not clear whether it was “for Filipinos.” The cultural level of the journal, the high level of the language, and the political issues it tackled suggest that this journal was written for a Spanish audience. In fact, La Solidaridad was handed out to politicians and members of the Spanish parliament. Retana and his La Política de España en Filipinas did the same to counteract this Filipino journal.

It appears that the reformist discourse of La Solidaridad was not as extraordinary. El Resumen also played a similar role but in the archipelago, where the journal did not enjoy the same freedoms as in Spain. As a matter of fact, the journal is comparable with many other journals of the nineteenth century that became forums for political debate among liberal and conservative ideas. It was not rare to find in the Spanish press satires, parodies, and ironical treatments of the weaknesses of Spanish society—above all among the intellectuals and radicals. It was also quite common to read satires against the clergy. The anticlericalism of La Solidaridad was, in fact, a prevalent discourse in Spain at the turn of the nineteenth century. Actually, this was a typical Spanish-style newspaper, as some of its members had already written in Spanish Republican papers such as El Liberal of Madrid or La Publicidad of Barcelona. Republican and liberal periodicals such as El Imparcial, El Liberal, El Globo, La Justicia, El País, La Publicidad, La Vanguardia, El Noticiero Universal, and El Suplemento supported Filipino claims and La Solidaridad.

The historical prominence of La Solidaridad was really built up in the twentieth century for specific purposes, such as the minimization of Spanish reformism, the construction of stereotyped images of the Spanish regime, and, above all, the establishment of an evolutionist history that begins with the emergence of national consciousness in the pages of this newspaper.

La Solidaridad combated the conservative reactions by coming out with fierce criticism of the “apparent power of the friars.” This topic became a cliché during the twentieth century when American scholarship fostered this image. However, few scholars have noted the period when the collaborators of La Solidaridad applauded the liberal ideas and the reforms implemented in the archipelago. In sum, the periodical was above all a political journal imbued with republican ideas. I have checked carefully the issues from 1889 to 1895 and have noticed that traditional historiography such as the report of the Schurman Commission and LeRoy’s The Americans in the Philippines presented a distorted history of the Spanish regime by underscoring the power of the Church and denying the reforms. LeRoy wrote a long chapter devoted to the Spanish regime, with knowledge drawn from firsthand acquaintance. He had studied Spanish colonial history, and he furnished an important bibliography that did not question his arguments and suppressed the bibliography that mentioned any reform of Spanish colonial rule. In sum, Schurman and LeRoy were building up the dichotomies between the medieval Spanish regime versus the liberal and progressive U. S. Administration. They shaped what would become the stereotypical images of Spanish Administration in the Philippines. That is, despite the liberal and progressive people in Spain, the reforms were a dead letter.[12] The reports of the commission and LeRoy focused on just the following three topics treated in the newspaper: the reiterative claim for parliamentary representation and Spanish intransigence toward it, antifriar feeling, and the defense against the denigration of the race. These topics gave form and authority to a certain image of La Solidaridad by picking up its accounts of a lack of public improvements, defects in the administration of justice, defects in public services (especially education), and above all the lack of progress provoked in part by the prevalence of the religious orders. What LeRoy, Worcester, and Forbes, among other scholars, failed to mention is that the periodical also applauded the reforms of Liberal governments, published the decree of Maura, and expressed a commitment to Spanishness and to Spanish political dynamism.

The real significance of La Solidaridad lies in the fact that its history was co-opted for specific ends by American and Filipino intellectuals. The Americans argued that La Solidaridad advocated reform instead of independence. This idea was crucial for the colonial construction of Philippine history, since the Americans could then justify their occupation of the archipelago by inferring that the educated Filipinos, or ilustrados, only wanted more self-government, not independence. The argument follows that since the ilustrados knew that the Filipinos had not come of age, they therefore needed the tutelage of a progressive nation like the United States. Filipino intellectuals, in turn, could identify in La Solidaridad “the germ of Filipino consciousness” that would ultimately lead to the attainment of national independence. The U. S. Administration deliberately omitted other journals published in the Philippines in order to shape the dark age of Spanish colonial rule. El Resumen and La Opinion, among others, defined themselves as nationalist and liberal and asked for reformism. They also criticized the friars, as did La Solidaridad, but instead of being published in Spain they came out in the Philippines, which questions, to a certain extent, the censorship of the press.

Fictitious Freedom of the Press

In 1898 Spain lost the Philippines, and a new colonial master, the United States, occupied the archipelago with new promises. The Americans had promised national independence, freedom of the press, and freedom of speech. These freedoms were a fact for a few months, and in this short period of time the paper La Independencia emerged. It became the first separatist newspaper and was subsidized by revolutionaries. In 1898, La Independencia stated:

Nosotros defenderemos la independencia de Filipinas porque es la aspiración del país que ha llegado a su mayor edad; y cuando un pueblo se levanta como un solo hombre para protestar, arma al brazo, contra una política de opresión e injusticia, manifiesta vitalidad y suficiente para vivir libre. Funcionan ya en el breve período de tres meses los organismos de la Administración y la Justicia.... [Retana 1906: 1761]

We will defend Filipino independence because it is the ambition of a country that has come of age, and when a people rise as one to protest against a policy of oppression and injustice, they demonstrate enough vitality to live in freedom. The institutions of Administration and Justice were implemented in the brief period of three months....

La Independencia heralded the United States as “that great and strong country with which we are bonded by a sincere friendship ... they do not come here to make the war to any party, or to seize a piece of territory” [ibid.: 1762–1763]. These words implied that the Americans had made promises to the Filipinos, and that they presented themselves as saviors and champions of the freedom of oppressed countries. In fact, John Foreman in the second edition of his book The Philippine Islands [1899] devoted an entire chapter to Filipino insurrection against Spain. He explained in great detail the arrival of Emilio Aguinaldo in Singapore and his meeting with American Consul-General Spencer Pratt:

Emilio Aguinaldo and suite went to Singapore where they found Mr. Howard W. Bray, an Englishman and old personal friend of mine. The editor of the Singapore Free Press and Mr. Bray had become acquainted. The editor introduced Mr. Bray to the American Consul-General, Mr. Spencer Pratt, and Mr. Bray presented Emilio Aguinaldo to the Consul-General. The midnight meeting took place at “The Mansion,” River Valley Road, Singapore, on the 24th of April, the day following the outbreak of American Spanish hostilities. The original idea in making Aguinaldo and the Consul-General known to each other was to utilize Aguinaldo’s services and prestige with the armed natives to control them and prevent reprisals when the American forces should appear before Manila. The result of this Singapore meeting was that a “draft Agreement” between Consul-General Pratt and Emilio Aguinaldo was drawn up, subject to the approval of Commodore Dewey and subsequent confirmation from Washington. The essence of this provisional understanding was as follows, viz.: (1) Philippine Independence to be proclaimed.... [Foreman 1899: 567]

This information is significant as it categorically asserts that there was an agreement—one that, according to Foreman, was not only verbal but also written. Foreman was promptly denounced by Pratt for publishing this and other allegations in his book. Pratt was successful in pressuring Foreman to remove the “offending page and insert an apology” [Worcester 1900: 5]. Foreman published in the 1899 edition the same paragraph, but instead of mentioning a “draft agreement” stated that this extract was taken from an editorial of the Spanish journal El Liberal. “According to El Liberal newspaper of Madrid, dated the 28th June 1898 (which quotes from El Día), this date, as follow, viz.:—(1) Philippine Independence to be proclaimed” [Foreman 1899: 567].[13]

La Independencia stated that the United States was not going to seize Filipino territory since its mission was bigger and generous. They strongly believed that they felt sympathy for their cause. However, after some months the Filipinos realized that the Americans had come to seize their territory and that they were not going to receive independence. La Independencia became a problem for the U. S. Administration, and the journal was suppressed and destroyed.[14] In fact, this first issue of La Independencia was also extirpated from U. S. textbooks.

The second separatist newspaper was La República Filipina, which emerged in 1898. It was an organ of Pedro Paterno’s party and was also suppressed by the U. S. government.

Emergence of El Renacimiento

Before talking of the emergence of El Renacimiento, it is necessary to understand the historical context of the journal. The Americans convinced the Filipinos to help them expel the Spaniards from the archipelago, promising them independence, and the Filipino government proclaimed its independence on 12 June 1898. At that time, a congress was constituted in order to write the regulations of the government; the regulations were founded on those of the Spanish Congress. As history has shown us, the Americans never accepted the Filipino Republic, and they denied any promise of independence. On 4 February 1899, American forces suddenly attacked Filipino lines. General Elwell Stephen Otis sent a cablegram to Washington explaining that the Filipinos had sparked the hostilities. What General Otis said in that cablegram has become the dictum of the truth, as Americans immediately reacted by ratifying by a narrow margin the annexation of the Philippines.

Americans claimed to protect and to become the guardians of Filipinos, and in order to get to know their subjects President William McKinley sent the first commission to the Philippines—the well-known Schurman Commission. This commission initiated the suppression of terms such as “colony,” “war,” “independence,” and “possession,” which henceforth became taboo. The U. S. Administration would hereafter be able to disguise its imperialist policy through a discourse of Americanization of a backward country and the implementation of the sacred principles of democracy. The most important task, no doubt, was to fulfill the promise of a future self-government, when education would become general.

Jacob Schurman and his commissioners came back to the United States with their categorical conclusions: the United States could not withdraw from the Philippines, since the Filipinos were wholly unprepared for independence. The great mass of the people were ignorant, with a vague idea of what independence meant. And the educated class “is clearly desirous of peace here” [Schurman 1900: 352]. The latter statement was one of the misrepresentations of the Schurman Commission, since the reports implied that most of the Filipinos welcomed U. S. rule and that the insurrection was over. This optimistic news was beneficial for McKinley, who was preparing for his re-election. He could then mobilize public opinion around the fact that he (as the representative of the United States) had won the “respect and affection of the inhabitants of the Philippines” [Salamanca 1984: 23].

The conclusions of the Schurman Commission made McKinley undertake the task of establishing a civil government in the newly possessed territories. Toward this end, he appointed a second Philippine Commission, designating William Howard Taft as its president. This new commission had a specific mission: to continue and perfect the work of organizing and establishing civil government already commenced by the military authorities, subject in all respects to any laws that Congress may enact [Willis 1905: 29].

The new Taft Commission brought with it a long instruction promulgated by McKinley, which among other things stated:

In all the forms of government and administrative provisions which they are authorized to proscribe, the commission should bear in mind that the government they are establishing is not designed for our satisfaction or for the expression of our theoretical views but for the happiness, peace and prosperity of the people of the Philippine Islands.... At the same time the Commission should bear in mind, and the people of the islands should be made plainly to understand, that there are certain great principles of government which have been made the basis of our governmental system which we deem essential to the rule of law and the maintenance of individual freedom.... [Forbes 1928: 442]

Words such as “happiness,” “peace,” and “prosperity” disguised the real purposes of the United States: an indefinite retention of the Philippines. The maintenance of individual freedom became part of the democratic doctrine implanted in the Philippine islands in order to demonstrate that the Philippines had not prospered politically, economically, and socially, since the Spaniards did not believe in this principle. Taft carried out, in part, McKinley’s instructions; and in 1902 the peace was signed. Taft won many Filipinos over with his policy of attraction, and his slogan “The Philippines for the Filipinos” was understood as the Filipinization of the archipelago. From 1902 to 1914 he would intervene in the archipelago—as governor, secretary of war, and president of the United States—and it was during these years that he tried to Americanize and democratize the islands.

Taft became a friend to the Filipinos thanks to his sympathy for the Filipino cause and his motto “The Philippines for the Filipinos.” He captivated not only the so-called Americanists or collaborationists but also the nationalists. In fact, he allowed the establishment of political parties, although he recognized only the Federal Party [Taft 1902: 307–312]. According to an article written by Taft titled “The Political Parties in the Philippines,” published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, “the Federal party was the only party which had organized committees in each province of the Archipelago and in all important towns among the Christian Filipinos” [ibid.: 309]. Taft devoted this article to praising the Federal Party, which included such Filipino ilustrados as Trinidad Pardo de Tavera, Benito Legarda, and José Albert. As a propaganda platform, this party had the newspaper La Democracia, founded in Manila in 1899. Its stated purposes were as follows:

La proclama publicada por la comisión americana el día 4 de abril último, no puede haber dejado indiferente a ningún filipino, y al considerar con detención aquel documento, cada cual ha tratado de adivinar sin duda alguna los beneficios que pudieran resultar a Filipinas de la soberanía americana que en él se declara....

Queremos la paz: somos filipinos y como tales deploramos que se derrame inútilmente la sangre de nuestros hermanos.... Creemos en los nobles propósitos de pueblo americano, y atendiendo al llamamiento de la comisión nos proponemos en La Democracia prestarle nuestra cooperación para el logro de las justas aspiraciones de nuestro propio pueblo. [Retana 1906: 1785]

The proclamation issued by the American commission last 4 April cannot leave any Filipino indifferent, and by considering carefully that document, each one has tried to guess no doubt the benefits to the Philippines that can result from the American sovereignty thus declared....

We want peace: we are Filipinos and as such we regret the bloodshed of our brothers.... We believe the noble purposes of the American people, and in accordance with the appeal of the commission we propose in La Democracia to give [the commission] our cooperation to achieve the just aspirations of our own people.

With these purposes, La Democracia would not be censored or persecuted as El Renacimiento was. In fact, despite the split of the Federal Party from 1904 onward, the newspaper had a long life, running until 1917.

Taft recognized two more parties, although he gave them no importance. One was the Peace Party, based in the city of Manila. It had no organization outside of Manila “and were at present comparatively few in number” [Taft 1902: 310–311]. In addition to this party there was the Conservative Party, which was made up chiefly of Filipinos who sympathized more or less with Spain in the two revolutions. In this party there were nationalist followers, and as such, Taft demonized and discredited it claiming that members were hostile to the Americans and to the leaders of the Federal Party:

The tendency among them is always toward absolutism in the president of the town, in the governor of the province, and in the representative of the central government. [ibid.: 311]

Taft omitted the principal political body of the islands (in strength, though not perhaps in organization). This was the Nationalist Party, originally organized under the leadership of Pascual H. Poblete and Dominador Gómez.[15] Some 200,000 members were originally enrolled in this party. In a platform adopted in 1902, the party set before itself the object of attaining as soon as legally possible an autonomous government resulting in independence. This party quickly became so obnoxious to the government that it was practically obliged to disband [Willis 1905: 178]. It was in this context that El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino emerged.

El Renacimiento was a nationalist journal founded at the very beginning of September 1901 with the intention of providing “the best writing of those which had risen in the Philippines” [Retana 1906: 1791]. It was run from 1903 by Fernando Maria Guerrero, who had previously been the editor, under the editorial board of Rafael Palma:[16]

Hecho por filipinos, casi todos ellos de pura raza, El Renacimiento constituye la prueba más concluyente de la capacidad de los naturales de las Islas, no solo como escritores, sino como hombres de gran sentido político. Colaboran en este diario, el de mayor circulación del Archipiélago, las plumas más notables del país. [ibid.]

El Renacimiento constituted the most conclusive test of the capacity of the natives, not only as writers, but also as men with great political sense. The most outstanding quills of this country collaborate in this newspaper, which has the biggest circulation in the archipelago.

Retana was right in asserting it was the fastest-growing newspaper in the Philippines. The influence of this journal upset the U. S. Administration because not only was it read by Filipino Spanish speakers but there was also a Tagalog edition, called Muling Pasilang. The latter was not merely a translation of the Spanish; the Tagalog edition also published articles for Filipinos. Lope K. Santos ran this edition [ibid.: 1798].

What is clear is that El Renacimiento bothered the U. S. Administration because it became a real power in Manila and was able to erode the government. The journal waged brilliant battles, the most important from 1904 onward: that was the public denunciation of abuses committed by the constabulary. The staff of El Renacimiento were accused twice of libel. The constabulary was from the beginning a military force in the essential meaning of the term. The act of 18 July 1901 provided for the organization of a force not exceeding 150 privates, 4 sergeants, and 8 corporals in each province. These men were to be directed by a chief of constabulary and four assistant chiefs, who were to be “peace officers,” with headquarters in Manila. The force was to be armed and uniformed in a suitable way, and paid out of the insular treasury. Its members were, when necessary, authorized to make arrests without warrants. From the outset, the commission was exceedingly explicit in denying that this force possessed any military character [Willis 1905: 122]. The constabulary was made up of U. S. and Filipino Military members. On 3 May 1905, El Renacimiento defined the members of the constabulary as follows:

En las instituciones como la constabularia abundan los “presentados” que al igual de los “secretos-bandidos” comenzaron por ser tulisanes antes de ser “detectives” y en la actualidad son señores constabularios provistos de un springfield del que muchas veces se sirven para amedrentar y atropellar a los vecinos pacíficos. Aindividuos como éstos de costumbres tan depravadas, no se debería confiar cargo alguno ni siquiera el de servir al pueblo, pues a causa de su ignorancia se convierten en el terror del pueblo. [“El Problema del Bandolerismo,” (The Problem of Banditry) El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino Independiente, 3 May 1905, Year IV, Núm. 195]

In institutions such as the constabulary there are many “meddlers” who, just like “secret-bandits,” started out as tulisanes (bandits) before becoming “detectives,” and in actuality they are members of the constabulary with a Springfield which they use quite often to intimidate and knock down peaceful neighbors. Individuals such as these, with their depraved customs, should not be trusted with any position, even that of serving the people, as owing to their ignorance they have become the terror of the people.

Apart from this open cause against the constabulary, the staff of El Renacimiento fought and mobilized in almost all provinces of the archipelago in order to achieve the continuity of Spanish as the official language. These two causes and the critiques to Taft in 1905 represented the beginning of the end for El Renacimiento. Retana, who collaborated in the journal, wrote:

El Renacimiento es la evocación del espíritu de Rizal: con un gran sentido político, sin apelar nunca ni a lo grotesco ni al escándalo, lucha tenazmente por los fueros de la Justicia, de la Libertad y de la Cultura pública. Adiferencia de otros periódicos, El Renacimiento juzga con parsimonia todo lo tocante a los errores de los españoles, cuyo recuerdo no ataca; antes bien parece tener por ellos simpatía. [Retana 1906: 1792]

El Renacimiento is the evocation of Rizal’s spirit: with great political sense, without appealing to the grotesque or scandalous, fighting tenaciously for the privileges of justice, freedom, and public culture. Unlike other newspapers, El Renacimiento parsimoniously judges everything relating to the Spaniards’ mistakes, whose memory it does not attack; on the contrary, it seems to have sympathy toward them.

No doubt, the collaborators of El Renacimiento felt sympathy for the Spaniards since the directors—Fernando M. Guerrero, Teodoro M. Kalaw, and Rafael Palma—were real Hispanistas and lovers of the Spanish language who had no problem in praising Spanish culture [Kalaw 1950].

El Renacimiento received financial support from a number of prominent and influential Filipino Liberals. On its editorial staff were men of literary ability and political power such as Wenceslao Retana, Javier Gomez de la Serna, Dominador Gomez, Isabelo de los Reyes, and Felipe Calderon. As its name indicates, El Renacimiento was dedicated to the new birth of the Filipino people. Among its founders were Rafael Palma and Martin Ocampo, who declared that the publication’s purposes were:

First, to bring about a mutual understanding between the constituted government and the people; Second to encourage the bent of young Filipinos for newspaper work; Third, to defend the interests and ideals of the Filipino people. [Worcester 1930: 53]

No doubt, if we carefully analyze the journal, we perceive that the third purpose mentioned was the dominant one in the actual conduct of the paper. During the nine years of the journal’s existence, El Renacimiento was regarded by most Filipinos as a national institution. In fact, we can divide the nine years into two well-defined stages. The first covers 1901 to 1904, during which time the name of the newspaper was El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino; the second stage embraces the years 1905–08, in which the word “independent” was added to the title. The term was intended as a provocation, since independence was forbidden. The name El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino Independiente clearly demonstrates that the paper was not under the service of the U. S. Administration.

During the first years of the journal, there was a more or less tacit acceptance of the U. S. government. However, the journal discussed some sensitive issues, for instance, slavery in 1903. The U. S. Administration claimed that there was slavery in the Philippines, an argument that would emerge vehemently in 1913 to undermine and discredit the new policy of Filipinization implemented in the archipelago by Democratic President Woodrow Wilson. El Renacimiento in its editorial “Slavery in Manila?” categorically denied the existence of slavery:

Los jueces americanos que no están aún al tanto de las costumbres filipinas, pueden juzgar de lo que se llama “esclavitud” por nuestras explicaciones. No hay tal esclavitud. [“¿La esclavitud en Manila?” (Slavery in Manila?) El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino, 5 January, 1903, Year II, Núm. 3]

American judges, who do not know Filipino customs, can consider what is called “slavery” through our explanations. There is no such slavery.

Perhaps one of the most important topics defended by El Renacimiento in 1903 was Taft’s continuance in the archipelago. As has been explained, at the very beginning Filipinos felt sympathy from Taft; therefore, it was not rare to observe in local publications statements such as if Governor Taft left the islands, the established order could be de-structured/de-constructed (la prensa filipina pide continuación del mismo como garantía de paz y mejor éxito de la política americana en estas islas): “The Filipino press asks for the continuance of Taft as a peacekeeper and for the better success of American policy in the islands” [“La marcha de Taft” (Taft’s March), El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino, 10 January 1903, Year II, Núm. 399]. The editors and collaborators of El Renacimiento believed in the benevolent assimilation of the U. S. Administration and that the Americans would concede independence in the very near future. Despite this, in the second stage, American officials accused the newspaper of attacking the government. In 1903, the collaborators of the journal trusted Taft’s words when he asserted that the United States had remained in the Philippines in order to educate and to prepare the Filipinos for self-government [“Una gran manifestación popular Mr. Taft,” (A Great Popular Demonstration Mr. Taft), El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino, 12 January 1903, Year II, Núm. 401].

Another issue arose in 1903: a campaign for the continuity of Spanish as the official language in the archipelago. This became an aggressive propaganda campaign in 1905. The campaign contradicted U. S. official history, which stated that only 10 per cent of the Filipino population could speak or knew Spanish. El Renacimiento shows us that a large part of the population spoke Spanish. In fact, on 12 May 1905 El Renacimiento published an editorial titled “El Castellano como lenguaje oficial” (Spanish as an Official Language). Filipinos presented to the U. S. Administration six reasons for which Spanish had to continue to be the official language. The most important are the following:

1. Que la lengua de un pueblo no se improvisa (The language of a people cannot be improvised).

2. Que los esfuerzos del Gobierno y el pueblo no han dado al inglés el carácter de generalización necesaria para ser oficial (The efforts of the government and the people have not given English the generalized character necessary for it to become official).

3. Que es indispensable una generación por lo menos, para asimilarse un idioma extraño (At least one generation is required to assimilate a foreign language).

4. Que la declaración del inglés como lenguaje oficial equivaldría a excluir prácticamente a los filipinos de sus actuales puestos (The declaration of English as the official language would mean practically excluding Filipinos from their current jobs).

[“El Castellano como Lenguaje Oficial,” (Spanish as the Official Language) El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino Independiente, 12 May 1905, Year IV, Núm. 202]

In sum, El Renacimiento decided to undertake a mission, to give voice to the people to express their popular will in favor of Spanish. It voiced the general need for the continuity of Spanish. This mission was fulfilled, and from this editorial onward the editors published a free range of opinions on the issue of the Spanish language. The campaign was generalized, and newspapers such as El Grito del Pueblo, El Adelanto, El Mercantil, Libertas, La Democracia, and El Comercio advocated for the continuity of Spanish as the official language.

In fact, Cayetano Arellano, who was the first chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Philippines under the American Civil Government, categorically stated that Spanish would be the language of that generation. He even confirmed that after Spain lost the Philippines, Spanish improved and in 1905 there were more Spanish-speaking literati than during the period of Spanish sovereignty [“Información de El Renacimiento. Opiniones sobre el Lenguaje Oficial,” (Information from El Ranacimiento. View on the Official Language) El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino Independiente, 19 May 1905, Year IV, Núm. 208]. The preeminence of Spanish continued, in spite of the aggressive policy of Americanization instituted by the U. S. government. In 1916, Henry Jones Ford was sent by President Wilson on a secret mission to prepare a report on the state of the Philippines. This report was never published, because he questioned the statistics based on school reports that indicated encouraging progress in the spread of English as the common language. Ford says, although he does not provide statistics, that this was fallacious. In the book Ford wrote about Woodrow Wilson, he made categorical statements such as the following:

As a matter of fact Spanish is more than ever the language of polite society, of judicial proceedings and of legislation. More people are speaking Spanish than when American occupation began, and indirectly the American schools have promoted that result.... Step by step the government has been forced to take action making practical admission of defeat on the language question. The postponement to 1920 is in effect an abandonment of the struggle to force English into use. [Ford 1916: 216–217][17]

Finally, in 1903 the collaborators of El Renacimiento subtly and elegantly denounced the first criticism of severe censorship implemented by the U. S. government. They complained that the constabulary was controlling the theaters in order to examine the scripts of plays. They wondered whether the Filipino Bill had been revoked, as this bill did not allow the limitation of laws such as freedom of speech or freedom of the press or the right of peaceful meeting [“¿Censura Previa?” (Prior Censorship?) El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino, 18 February 1903, Year II, Núm. 430]. This bill had been really abolished, implementing instead the sedition act and the libel act.

In 1904, Taft gave a speech at Union Reading College titled “The Philippines for the Filipinos.” The Philippines for the Filipinos is the construction of Filipino history:

Filipinas para los filipinos es una doctrina que el honor de los Estados Unidos les exige a que se ponga en ejecución en estas islas. No solamente se le prometió a los filipinos cuando los americanos vinieron después de su llegada aquí durante la insurrecciónya su terminación pero no creo decir demasiado cuando digo que la reiteración de la promesa como se demuestra en la legislación que pone en práctica dichos principios, hizo mucho para hacer efectiva la tranquilidad que gozamos en la actualidad en el archipiélago o un estado de paz que me atrevo a decir no ha sido jamás tan completa en la historia de las Islas desde que los españoles se posesionaron de ella. [“Filipinas para los filipinos,” (Philippines for Filipinos) El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino, 12 January 1904, Year III, Núm. 106]

Philippines for Filipinos is a doctrine that U. S. honor requires them [Filipinos] to implement in these islands. Not only was it promised to the Filipinos when Americans came during the insurrection and upon its termination, but I do not think to say too much when I reiterate the promise as demonstrated in the legislation that implements the said principles. This legislation did much to enforce the peace we enjoy today in the archipelago or a state of peace that I dare say has never been so complete in the history of the islands since Spain took possession of it.

Taft was ambiguous in his discourse by reiterating the promise of independence when Filipinos established a stable government, but he never stated openly when independence would take place, as privately he confessed that the Philippines would never be prepared for independence. However, it is worth noting the last sentence, in which Taft categorically stated that peace in the archipelago had never been so complete in the history of the islands since Spain took possession of them. This assertion is inaccurate and clearly propagandistic, since Parker Willis in his article published in Political Science Quarterly contradicted this argument:

The Spanish did in the Philippines and in many of their other colonies a work for which they have received scant credit at the hands of their “Anglo-Saxon” critics. In the Philippines their system of rule was much more acceptable to the natives during the greater part of their stay than is that of the Americans. There has been more profound dissatisfaction, more unrest and more military activity since the Americans took charge, than there was under Spanish rule. [Willis 1907: 105–128]

This was a universal opinion among the military and officials, and for the first time, the members of El Renacimiento did not trust Taft. In April 1904, they wrote an article titled “Some False Assessments.” They regarded the statement that Filipinos were polite and brave but completely unready for self-government as hypocritical. However, Taft counterattacked El Renacimiento by denying Americans had limited liberties or had forbidden declarations of independence [“Algunas apreciaciones falsas,” (Some False Assessments) El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino, 18 April 1904, Year III, Núm. 184].“Some False Assessments” would not be the only editorial that would question Taft; later, in “Routine and Prejudice” the journal severely criticized Taft’s discourse on a promise of independence, which would cause unrest and riots in the Philippines. El Renacimiento asserted the opposite and thought that a state of indefiniteness such as the Filipinos were suffering in 1904 was more dangerous [“Rutina y Prejuicio,” (Routine and Prejudiced) El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino, 10 June 1904, Year III, Núm. 223].

In addition to these first critiques of Taft, El Renacimiento raised an issue in 1904 that would continue into 1905: denouncing the abuses committed by the constabulary. Not only did the constabulary arrest nationalist politicians such as Dominador Gomez and Vicente Lukban, but under the pretext that there was ladronism (acts of thievery) they were imprisoning and killing all those Filipinos who bothered them to implement the sacred principles of U. S. democracy. These Filipinos did not accept U. S. subjugation. Batangas was one of the provinces that suffered abuses at the hands of the constabulary:

Algunos oficiales constabularios destacados en mi provincia tienen la costumbre de ordenar a sus soldados que se vistan de tulisanes e ir por los barrios, para vigilarlos seguramente. Los constabularios vestidos de ladrones llegan de noche a las casas se presentan a los pobres vecinos intimidándoles para que les preparen comida y diciéndoles además que ellos (los constabularios) son soldados de Ricarte que Ricarte está acampado en Banahaw con algunos cabecillas más que se han librado combates y otras cosas por el estilo. [“El Orden Público en Batangas,” (Public Order in Batangas) El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino, 23 February 1904, Year III, Núm. 114]

Some prominent officials of the constabulary in my province have a habit of ordering their soldiers to dress as tulisanes (bandits) and to go to the barrios in order to watch them closely. The constabulary dressed as robbers arrive at night in the houses of the poor neighbors, intimidating them in order to have food prepared for them and telling them that they [the constabulary] are Ricarte’s soldiers and Ricarte is camped in Banahaw with some leaders who have fought battles, and other things like that.[18]

The denouncement campaign against the abuses of the constabulary that began in 1904 intensified in 1905. In 1905, El Renacimiento changed its name to El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino Independiente and became more politically combative. In fact, the term “independent” was a direct provocation to the U. S. Administration, since this word was taboo and could create incalculable damage.

There were five topics raised by El Renacimiento in 1905 and 1906 that really annoyed the U. S. government: the denunciation of the constabulary, the exaltation of the continuity of Spanish in the Philippines, the question of the Filipino soul, the publication of a copy of the Memorial asking for the independence of the Philippines presented to Taft’s party by Filipino citizens in 1905, and, last but not least, the complaints about Taft’s double standards.

All these issues provoked the U. S. Administration, which started to persecute the journal. In June 1905, General Henry Tureman Allen took legal action for libel against El Renacimiento. General Allen was simply a puppet of the government, and under this libel lawsuit the U. S. government found the press campaign against the constabulary unjustified and accused the journal of partiality and vehemence [“La libertad de la prensa,” (The Freedom of the Press) El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino Independiente, 16 June 1905, Year IV, Núm. 230]. On 30 June 1905 Fernando M. Guerrero, Martin Ocampo, and Lope K. Santos received the second libel lawsuit. The U. S. government, in order not to arouse suspicion that they were behind the reports, asked Lieutenant Lorenzo Ramos to bring legal action against the director and the editors of the newspaper. Officials started to accuse El Renacimiento of being hostile to the government. U. S. newspapers in the Philippines, such as Cablenews and the Manila Times, supported this accusation. For instance, Cablenews stated:

El Renacimiento no es honrado ni digno de apoyo. Su diaria difamación a la constabularia ha producido el asesinato, el robo y descontento. El Renacimiento se ha hecho para el ladronismo y para el odio al Gobierno de los Estados Unidos. [“Alrededor de nuestro proceso,” (Concerning our Process) El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino Independiente, 13 July 1905, Year IV, Núm. 250]

El Renacimiento is not honest or worthy of support. Its everyday defamation of the constabulary has produced murder, theft and discontent. El Renacimiento has been constructed for ladronism and for the hatred of the U. S. Government.

The U. S. newspapers followed the trial against El Renacimiento, creating a divergence of opinion among republican journals which persistently accused El Renacimiento of being hostile. According to the Republicans, the staff of El Renacimiento would never accept U. S. dictum because they hated everything Anglo-Saxon and they were too Latin. Instead, the Democrats supported the newspaper and advocated independence for the Philippines. No doubt the Spanish press fully supported the newspaper, as Kalaw asserted in his book “El Renacimiento” Libel Suit [1950].

In 1906 LeRoy, Taft’s brain, reacted to an editorial in El Renacimiento titled “No, Mr. LeRoy” [El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino Independiente, 18 September 1906, Year V, Núm. 13]. In this editorial, the journal denounced Taft’s double standards—while in the Philippines, he had shown his sympathy to the Filipino cause. He accused Filipinos of being obstinately childish, and as such this article was simply an excuse. The U. S. government felt threatened by the publication of the Memorial asking for the independence of the Philippines on 29 August 1905. This Memorial finished with a sentence written in capital letters: Immediate independence of the Philippines. The authors of the Memorial presented it before Taft’s party, which had forbidden it. El Renacimiento, before this prohibition, decided to publish it. These facts angered LeRoy, who wrote a long letter to El Renacimiento in November 1906.

LeRoy and His Subtle Indictment against El Renacimiento

LeRoy’s letter to El Renacimiento was an attempt to undermine the Spanish imprint by emphasizing the medieval character of Spanish rule. LeRoy wrote a counterargument to Felipe Calderon’s Mis Memorias sobre la Revolución Filipina (Memories of the Filipino Revolution) published by El Renacimiento in 1907. Calderon had decided to publish these Memorias since he felt that Filipino students were forgetting their own history by learning a history of the Philippines from the perspective of the United States. LeRoy sought to neutralize collaborators or defendants of the newspaper, such as Henry Parker Willis, Pedro Paterno, Isabelo de los Reyes, Dominador Gomez, Felipe Del Pan, and Leon M. Guerrero.

At the end of 1906, LeRoy sent his letter to El Renacimiento. According to him, its main purpose was to reply to some ironic and sarcastic comments against Taft published in the newspaper. He specifically addressed the editorial “No Mr. LeRoy.” The journal stated that Taft showed himself in public to be a friend of the Filipinos, while in private he considered them “distinctly childish, whimsically, often unreasonably childish, sometimes obstinately childish.”[19] LeRoy used his defense of Taft as an excuse to attack the enemies of U. S. rule and above all the most Latinized segment of the Philippine population. As such, his letter can be seen as part of the campaign to Americanize the archipelago. He was to emphasize the dark age of Spanish misrule, stating:

La verdad es que los que sostienen que el “alma filipina” está en peligro de su vida, ante el monstruo “Anglo-Saxonismo,” son los que se han educado en moldes latinos y españoles, que prefieren la civilización latina, la literatura latina, las costumbres latinas, que si lean algo de los productos literarios o de la ciencia y política americana, inglesa y alemana, lo leen en la lengua española y en traducciones muy malas. Para esta clase de filipinos, todo lo que implique un cambio en la educación tradicional española, en la organización política y el procedimiento administrativo español, es malo en las Filipinas. [James A. LeRoy to El Renacimiento 1906: 3]

The truth is that those who supported the alma Filipina (Filipino soul) are in danger of their life, faced with the monstrous “Anglo-Saxonism,” they are those who have been educated in the Latin and Spanish molds, who prefer Latin civilization, Latin literature and Latin customs and if they read American, English and German literature, science or politics, they read in Spanish and in bad translations. For this class of Filipinos, all that involves a change in the traditional Spanish education, political organization and administrative procedure is bad for the Philippines.

This excerpt is a subtle criticism of very influential Filipinos, those who LeRoy thought would never accept the U. S. language, culture, and institutions and had promoted the campaign of Spanish continuity.[20] He was directing his criticism, first of all, at Fernando Maria Guerrero, editor of El Renacimiento, whom he considered egotistical and too grounded in a preference for Latin ways and Latin ideas. Guerrero had published editorials and given recognition to those whom LeRoy called “demagogues, vicious liars and mental weaklings as Sandiko or Isabelo de los Reyes sort” and Calderon, who had published “The Filipino Soul,” a very happy Filipino soul too Hispanized, which will never disappear [“¿Desaparecerá el Alma Filipina?” (Will the Filipino Soul Disappear?) El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino Independiente, 10 June 1905, Year IV, Núm. 225].

More than Guerrero and Calderon, however, LeRoy was targeting Del Pan, who was co-founder with Guerrero of a conservative nationalist party and who had been surreptitiously attacking Taft in the press. Del Pan’s family was Spanish, which made it all the more obvious that LeRoy was attacking the Spanish legacy itself. LeRoy’s second argument to discredit Del Pan and Guerrero concerned their clamor for independence. Athird argument was built around the fact that Del Pan and Guerrero were in touch with some important anti-imperialists such as Parker Willis. El Renacimiento echoed Parker Willis’s book Our Philippine Problem [1905], a caustic criticism of the U. S. Administration. Roosevelt, knowing of Parker Willis’s critique of the constabulary, telegraphed General Allen and Commissioner Cameron Forbes in order to organize a conference. They invited Parker Willis to the meeting to discuss all the issues related to the constabulary. The result was the expulsion of thirty detectives of the constabulary [“Censura de la Constabularia en América,” (Censorship of the Constabulary in America) El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino Independiente, 17 November 1905, Year IV, Núm. 63].

LeRoy’s letter was no less than a lesson in history. He had always appealed to history in order to understand present conditions. However, this and other history lessons he gave were always just a means to support the idea that all of the United States’ problems were inherited from the old regime or were inherent in the Filipinos. LeRoy accused the Filipino newspapers of forgetting or ignoring the country’s more recent history, such as the revolt of 1896. Focusing on this revolt has its raison d’être. LeRoy wanted to make clear that this revolt was still reformist in character and that the Katipunan was a “minor French Revolution” on the part of the poor and ignorant masses.

The nationalists and their newspapers, such as La Independencia—which emerged again in 1906 with the same spirit as that of 1898—and El Renacimiento, were claiming Andres Bonifacio as the model of patriotism during the revolt of 1896. Bonifacio was starting to become an icon of independence. He and the Katipunan were to become potent signs to attract the masses in the future, but at this point in time, when El Renacimiento and La Independencia were advocating for Bonifacio to be seen as a martyr and hero, Bonifacio was not part of the discourse of political rallies.[21] In 1907, advocating for Bonifacio and the Katipunan signified a tacit refusal against U. S. institutions being imposed by the administration. The nationalists were complaining that the Americans had neglected Bonifacio from the beginning. They were right, since in their reports and in their official histories, the Americans considered Bonifacio and his adherents as the less-educated men of the insurrection. LeRoy was to underpin his history lecture with the following argument:

La verdad es que muy pocos Filipinos demuestran saber la historia de su país, aún de estos diez años pasados, y hacen continuamente los periódicos filipinos asertos en cuanto a los sucesos de 1896 y 1898 y 1899 que carecen enteramente de fundamento histórico. Yo no digo que Andrés Bonifacio no era patriota y, hasta cierto grado, que hizo bien en organizar el katipunan. Pero, en vez de los mal considerados elogios de Bonifacio que se oyen ahora constantemente, y de labios de Filipinos que le despreciaron a él en su vida y se renegaron de su causa, daría yo a recordar a los Filipinos que lo que predicó él era una guerra de razas, y el asesinato (no hay otra palabra por ello) de los blancos. Y antes de llamar su trabajo “glorioso” y de querer glorificar también la rebelión de 1896 como una legítima etapa en la verdadera Revolución Filipina, es decir, en la evolución hacia más libertades sociales y políticas, recuérdese que ninguna nación estable se ha establecido sobre el asesinato y el crimen como base. [James A. LeRoy to El Renacimiento 1906: 15]

The truth is that few Filipinos know the history of their country, even that of the past ten years, and Filipino newspapers continuously make assertions regarding the events of 1896, 1898 and 1899 which lack any historical foundation. I do not say that Andres Bonifacio was not a patriot as, up to a certain extent, he did well in organizing the Katipunan. Yet, instead of the ill-considered eulogies of Bonifacio, which are now constantly heard from some Filipinos who despised him and renounced his cause, I would remind them that what he preached was a war of races and the assassination (there is no other word for it) of the whites. And before claiming his work was “glorious” and before glorifying the revolt of 1896 as a legitimate phase in the real Filipino revolution, that is to say, in the evolution toward more social and political freedoms, it must be remembered that no stable nation has ever been established on the basis of assassination and crime.

LeRoy bases his argument of the war of races in the documents published by Retana in Archivo del Bibliófilo Filipino. These documents were written by friars and the more conservative sector. General Ramón Blanco did not mention in his memoir any war of races. LeRoy was furnishing an important argument for future scholars: Bonifacio as a symbol of violence, armed insurrection and anger [Ileto 1998: 183]. LeRoy excuses Bonifacio’s behavior by saying that this man had been educated in a medieval atmosphere. This is the picture of the long dark age of Spanish rule. By giving Spanish rule a layer of medievalism, LeRoy was subtly insulting the collaborators of El Renacimiento.

LeRoy continued his history lesson for Filipinos by arguing that if Admiral George Dewey had not helped them get rid of the Spanish yoke, the most reactionary party of Spain would have denied them any reform:

Si no hubiera intervenido E.U. en 1898 ¿en qué estado estarían los filipinos ahora? Los movimientos insurreccionales de 1898 habrían continuado, pero ¿qué esperanzas había de echar a España de las Islas? Y como resultado de las insurrecciones, los reaccionarios de España habrían podido, probablemente, restringir más las libertades y cortar las reformas ya comenzadas, bajo España.[22]

If the United States had not interfered in 1898, what kind of state would the Filipinos be in now? The insurgent movement of 1898 would have continued, but what hopes were there to expel Spain? And as a result of the insurgencies, the Spanish reactionaries might have possibly further restricted the freedoms and stop the reforms already began by Spain.

The good Americans had liberated the Filipinos from the bad Spanish. The Filipinos could not complain. According to LeRoy, it was impossible for the Filipinos to have more freedom than that which they enjoyed under the U. S. regime. LeRoy was not giving a lesson in history, but he was constructing a new history by suppressing Filipino voices hostile to the Americans.

The next target of LeRoy’s attack was the Malolos government. El Renacimiento and the different nationalist parties were claiming that the Malolos government had demonstrated its capacity for self-government and public order. Then, as now, they were ready for independence. This argument had already been put forward by La Independencia in 1898, and Calderon asserted it as well in his Mis Memorias [1907]. LeRoy could not entirely deny this fact. However, he argued that the insurrection was based only in the provinces around Manila and dominated by Tagalogs:

El relativamente buen orden público de 1898–99 no fue obra del gobierno de Malolos, sino resultado del carácter del Filipino, generalmente dócil y pacífico. Y esto no por si solo la capacidad del gobierno de Malolos para regir bien los destinos no solamente de unas cuantas provincias del centro de Luzon, sino de todo el archipiélago con sus diversos intereses, lenguas, etc. Hay otros requisitos muy importantes para el buen gobierno, a parte del orden público. [James A. LeRoy to El Renacimiento 1906: 18]

The relatively good public order of 1898–99 was not due to the government of Malolos, but the result of the Filipino’s nature, generally docile and peaceful. This would not have demonstrated the capacity of the government of Malolos to rule the destiny of not just some provinces in the center of Luzon, but the whole archipelago with its diverse interests and languages, etc. There are other very important requirements for good government, aside from public order.

Furthermore, LeRoy pursued the old argument that the Americans had never promised independence to Aguinaldo during the meeting in Singapore. He discredited entirely Aguinaldo’s 1899 account in Reseña Verídica:

Dewey y Anderson han negado muy terminantemente haber dicho al Sr. Aguinaldo las cosas que pone en sus bocas la Reseña Verídica del Sr. Aguinaldo. Yo supongo que él no escribió dicho documento, y prefiero entenderlo así, porque contiene la Reseña varias falsedades categóricas. [ibid.: 21]

Dewey and Anderson have categorically denied having said to Mr. Aguinaldo the things that Aguinaldo’s Reseña Verídica quotes them as saying. I suppose that he did not write the said document and I prefer to believe so, because it contains several categorical lies.

LeRoy was very subtle in questioning Aguinaldo’s words. He alluded to the misinterpretation of terms by Aguinaldo. What Dewey and the consul conceded to him was merely a future recognition of independence. LeRoy again was making an isomorphism, reading back into Taft’s policy of a future independence. This future was to remain uncertain, according to LeRoy: “I think independence will take place after generations, but it will not be soon” (Yo creo que se realizará la independencia Filipina antes de generaciones pero no será pronto).[23]

LeRoy did not say how many generations it would take before Filipinos could expect to gain their independence. The term “generations” here is completely ambiguous, although the following sentences clarify that independence would not come soon: “En vez de pedir más y más derechos, es tiempo de que los filipinos probaran su capacidad para usar los derechos y privilegios que tienen. Y no lo han probado todavía en el ramo municipal ni provincial” (Instead of claiming more rights, it is time that Filipinos show their capacity to use the rights and privileges they have. And for now they have not showed it in the municipal or provincial government).[24]

LeRoy told Albert he did not know what might happen in ten or twenty years, but Filipinos in 1906 were not in any condition to carry on national life and maintain a national government.[25] LeRoy was not as frank in his piece for El Renacimiento as he was in his correspondence, but we can see that Taft and LeRoy thought of holding the archipelago forever.

LeRoy wrote in El Renacimiento of the Spanish “dark age” in the Philippines. This time, instead of constructing history, he criticized and discredited some important people. The first one was Wenceslao Retana. LeRoy had a special aversion for Retana since the latter potentially represented a serious challenge to the arguments he (LeRoy) had constructed about the medievalism of Spanish rule until 1898. He accused Retana of being anti-Filipino and above all anti-reformist. He said that those who tried to keep alive the latinismo tradition in the Philippines had resurrected Retana in their desire to resist the changes brought about by the Americans.[26]

Retana was to be the pretext for attacking two important leaders in the Philippines in 1906, for different reasons. The first one was Del Pan. LeRoy accused Del Pan of being Spanish or Mexican instead of Filipino and of being an anti-reformist in the Philippines, as Del Pan had been making innuendoes against Taft and the Federal Party and calling for independence. The second was Dominador Gomez. It seems that Gomez had a more relevant role than Del Pan since he was one of the ciudadanos Filipinos (Filipino citizens) who presented the Memorial to Taft asking for immediate independence. Gomez was a natural born leader and in 1906 was involved in organizing labor unions. He campaigned against the use of forced labor in La Laguna, pitting himself against the governor, Juan Cailles, who had been appointed by American officials. Cailles promoted an electoral campaign in order to ask whether forced labor should be used in La Laguna. Cailles needed the majority of votes in order to implement his project. Gomez began a campaign of agitation against the use of forced labor by appealing for the support of the proletariat. Cailles’s party accused Gomez of sedition by inciting the masses to independence and rebellion. Governor Cailles did not get the votes for the implementation of forced labor, and Gomez was arrested. El Renacimiento echoed this fact and denounced Cailles, who had ordered the arrest of Gomez. The journal did not hesitate to protest against this arbitrary and illegal act. [“El Doctor Gomez. Su llegada a Manila,” (Doctor Gomez. His Arrival in Manila) El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino Independiente, 10 September 1906, Year VI, Núm. 6].

LeRoy justified Cailles’s position on the labor issue by recalling that he had been an insurgent fighting for the Filipino cause. Dominador Gomez, on the other hand, had been in Cuba with the Spanish Army. LeRoy was presenting a contrast between a good Filipino and a bad Filipino.

Finally, LeRoy concluded his long letter by misrepresenting the Democratic Party and exalting the Republicans. The main purpose was to undermine the campaign of independence for the Philippines presented by Democratic candidate William Jennings Bryan, who had visited the Philippines and had been received as a hero. He said that the Republicans had always supported the independence of the Philippines in an indefinite future:

La verdad es que el Partido Demócrata no existe en realidad como un gran partido nacional, está tan desorganizado y dividido por personalidades y diversidades de criterio. Y aún si Bryan u otro candidato demócrata se eligiera presidente en 1908 (lo cual es mucho suponer), y tuviera mayoría en la Cámara de Representantes ¿qué podría hacer en el sentido de la independencia? [James A. LeRoy to El Renacimiento 1906: 3]

The truth is that the Democratic Party does not exist as a great national party and is disorganized and split by personalities and diverse criteria. If Bryan or another democrat candidate becomes president in 1908 (which is highly likely) and were to gain the majority in the House of Representatives, what could they do about the sense of independence?

LeRoy was discouraging Filipinos from thinking of immediate independence by misrepresenting the Democrats. Moreover, he distorted U. S. public opinion saying that most Americans had accepted the ongoing policy, meaning Taft’s policy.

LeRoy’s letter to El Renacimiento provoked a significant reaction in the Philippines. LeRoy had proposed divorcing the young Filipino nationalists from the old Hispanophiles:

It seems to me the time has now come when we should win over the best element among the radicals, the young men who have been led around by the nose too often by Isabelo de los Reyes and others, but who are honest enough and well-intentioned. In order to do this, they must be divorced so far as may be not only from men like Don Isabelo and his ilk, but also from some of the older men who are never going to like us and our ways, and who are at the same time too intellectually egotistical and too grounded in a preference for Latin ways and Latin ideas ever to accept, in their hearts our ideas.[27]

LeRoy knew that to attract these radical young men, the U. S. Administration had to be reconciled with them and to convert them into a new political element. LeRoy achieved this aim by dismembering the Federal Party; suppressing key persons such as Pardo de Tavera, Legarda, and Albert; and discrediting egotistic and Hispanized elements such as Guerrero, Del Pan, De los Reyes, Barretto, and Lukban. This letter published by El Renacimiento marked the beginning of the end for the newspaper.

“Birds of Prey”

LeRoy’s letter was published in supplements of El Renacimiento on 17, 19, 22 and 24 January 1907. LeRoy had given arguments to put an end to the newspaper. Finally, in 1908, the journal was closed. LeRoy was too ill to continue to discredit El Renacimiento, and Taft, who was preparing his campaign for the presidency of the United States, decided Worcester would take over from LeRoy.

In 1908, El Renacimiento continued to denounce unscrupulous government officials. Following the same philosophy from 1901, on 30 October 1908 it published an editorial titled “Birds of Prey.” Worcester felt that the journal was explicitly attacking his integrity and reviled his reputation as a private citizen. He was said to possess “racial prejudices” against the people of the country in which he lived, and to be by “predilection a convinced anti-Filipino.” Worcester’s scientific activities were pictured as laying a heavy burden upon the Filipino taxpayers without rendering any proportionate service to them. He was said to have used his official position to further speculation in lands. For all these issues, Worcester accused Martin Ocampo, Fidel A. Reyes (the author of the editorial), Teodoro M. Kalaw, Lope K. Santos, Faustino Aguilar, Leoncio C. Linquete, Manuel Palma, Arcadio Arellano, Angel Jose, Galo Lichauco, Felipe Barreto, and Gregorio M. Cansipit of libel. It was coincidence indeed that this new suit against the staff of El Renacimiento was presented just after it was definitely known in Manila that the Imperialists had triumphed in the U. S. elections. Taft was the new president of the United States [Kalaw 1950: 7].

Judge Jenkins pronounced sentence against the staff of El Renacimiento because he understood there was a paragraph explicitly alluding to Worcester:

He ascends the mountains of Benguet ostensibly to classify and measure Igorot skulls, to study and to civilize the Igorots but at the same time, he also spies during his flight, with the keen eye of the bird of prey where the large deposits of gold are, the real prey concealed in the lonely mountains and then he appropriates these all to himself afterward, thanks to the legal facilities he can make and unmake at will, always, however, redounding in his own benefit. [ibid.: 9]

All the staff were condemned, and some of them were in jail for six months. The court found that Worcester had sustained damages on account of wounded feelings, mental suffering, and injuries to his standing and reputation to the sum of thirty-five thousand pesos [Jenkins 1910: 24]. El Renacimiento and Muling Pasilang were forced to relinquish the hard task undertaken eight years before. The entire Spanish and Filipino press unanimously took up the part of the staff and defended them with great earnestness and sincerity:

The misfortunes of the Filipino press are also those of the Spanish press. Its victories are also ours, for the Filipino newspaper cannot deny its Spanish ancestry. Let us, therefore, promise to unite ourselves in tribulation, to help each other in adversity ... we cannot deny that the campaigns they waged are those of a nation desiring justice, seeking liberty demanding a blessing to which it has a right. [Kalaw 1950: 11]

All the newspapers echoed and showed their sadness because the alleged freedom of the press in the Philippines did not exist. We find an example of the said sadness in March 1910, when the newspaper The Public published an editorial titled “Farewell El Renacimiento.” This paper asserted:

... the Americans came to these islands impelled (they say) by the love of humanity, and announcing that they brought with them liberty and prosperity; all in short, that an oppressed people dream of. For a moment, they believed that the hour of redemption was at hand. When the armed opposition of the people was overcome, and the Americans found themselves undisputed lords of the land, redemption became domination under the guise of preparing the Philippines people for self-government. [Zwick 1996][28]

For the U. S. Administration, El Renacimiento had become a real force. They considered, as LeRoy clearly stated in his letters, that in the hearts of the men who were the mainsprings of the periodical, a thoroughgoing hatred toward everything American appeared at regular intervals. To a certain extent, LeRoy and the U. S. Administration were right and El Renacimiento was a defender of Spanish culture and Spanish language. Teodoro M. Kalaw was a real Hispanista and a lover of the Castilian language. He was not afraid to show his gratitude to the motherland. In this sense, Spanish culture signified the preservation of the culture of the past and, by extension, of the Philippine culture.

Worcester fulfilled his aims, but he could not silence the critical voices against U. S. imperialism since another journal, La Vanguardia, was founded with the same combative spirit. American officials and scholars continued to carry out campaigns against Filipino newspapers so that future scholars could forget their past, in fact, the most combative past. Cameron Forbes tried to bring about this mission and in his book The Philippine Islands stated: “El Renacimiento and La Vanguardia which has taken the place of El Renacimiento is engaged in stirring up hatred of the Americans and trying to make trouble” [Forbes 1928: 74–75]. It seems that the U. S. Administration fulfilled its objectives, as these newspapers are now cited mainly through secondary sources.

Conclusion

This article has illustrated through examples how important the press was in the Philippines between the Spanish and U. S. empires. The U. S. Administration complained that the newspapers in the Philippines were mainly political. This was a Spanish legacy in the archipelago—as has been explained, many newspapers were founded in the Philippines in the 1890s, after the press law was passed in 1883. In addition, this article has emphasized, through a historical analysis of the newspaper El Resumen, how Spanish censorship was avoided (in spite of the fact that the publication was an organ of La Liga Filipina); El Resumen dared say what other newspapers did not. In fact, El Resumen was Rizal’s voice, and what the newspaper published in “Our Wishes” was, finally, Rizal’s wishes for his patria (homeland). Therefore, this article wants to open a new line of research: It is necessary for scholars to start consulting papers, aside from La Solidaridad, that played an important role in the Spanish colonial era. The rich variety of publications can help us understand the complex power politics and the lesser-known aspects of Filipino history during Spanish and U. S. colonial rule. If anything, this article has made clear that the alleged Spanish censorship was not as strict as has been discursively argued by American and Filipino scholars. However, we cannot categorically state that U. S. rule was enlightened, except for the period 1914–20, when Governor-General Francis Burton Harrison implemented the policy of Filipinization in the archipelago. This policy allowed Filipinos to express themselves freely. However, from the very outset there had been a persistent attempt to conceal the facts, and thus to muzzle public sentiment. Censorship and strict suppression of facts occurred as soon as the “Criminal Libel” and “Sedition” acts were passed in 1901. These two acts were passed with the object of repressing public criticism. It is clear that El Renacimiento suffered the consequences of real censorship. The Americans came to the islands promising to safeguard freedom of speech and freedom of the press, but, as argued in this article, they quickly broke their promises. Soon El Renacimiento realized and denounced the arbitrariness of officials and government and advocated the continuity of Spanish as the official language. This campaign was effective, as in 1920 Spanish was still the language of the courts, politics, administration and press. El Renacimiento was able to demand immediate independence. All these issues, which provoked the U. S. Administration into applying pressure on the publication, forced the paper to relinquish the task it had undertaken for eight years, thus bringing to a close a chapter in Filipino history at the turn of the twentieth century. How we read this chapter will influence future archival research on the complexities that existed in the transition from the Spanish to the U. S. colonial periods in the Philippines.

Acknowledgements

This work is part of a collective research project titled “Transiciones Imperiales, cambio institucional y divergencia. Un análisis comparado de la trayectoria colonial y postcolonial de las posesiones españolas América, Asia y África (1500–1900),” funded by the Ministry of Education and Science Program I+D+I HAR2009–14099–C02–01.

I wish to dedicate this article to Professor Josep M. Delgado, because when I suggested acquiring the publication El Renacimiento, he did not express any doubts about doing so. In addition, I want to thank Caroline Hau for her helpful comments on earlier versions of this article and Mario López for his editing. They are not in any way responsible for the opinions presented in the article.

References

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Bahamonde, Ángel; and Martínez, Jesús A. 2001. Historia de España Siglo XIX. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra.

Blair, Emma H.; and Robertson, James A., eds. 1903–09. The Philippine Islands 1493–1898. 55 vols. Ohio, Cleveland: Arthur H. Clark Company.

Cal, Rosa. 1998. Propaganda Revolucionaria en Filipinas: El Resumen y la Liga Filipinas. Historia y Comunicación Social 3: 27–39.

—. 1999. Filipinas 1898: El Control de la Prensa. Investigaciones Históricas: Época Moderna y Contemporánea 19: 159–168.

Calderon, Felipe G. 1907. Mis Memorias sobre la Revolución Filipina. Segunda Etapa (1898 a 1901.) Manila: El Renacimiento.

Cano, Glòria. 2008. Wenceslao Retana Revisited: ANew Historical Assessment. In More Hispanic than We Admit: Insights into Philippine Cultural History, edited by Isaac Donoso, pp. 263–301. Quezon City: Vibal Foundation.

—. “La Solidaridad” y el Periodismo en Filipinas en Tiempos de Rizal. In Entre España y Filipinas: José Rizal, Escritor. Catálogo: Estudios Crísticos, edited by Elizalde María Dolores. Madrid: AECID-Ministerio de Asuntos Exteriores y de Cooperación, forthcoming.

“Farewell El Renacimiento.” 1996. The Public 13 (25 March 1910). Accessed November 11, 2011. http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/unofficial/students/fjzwick/vof/er011510.html. In Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898–1935, edited by Jim Zwick. http://web.syr.edu/˜fjzwick/ail98-35.html (January).

Forbes, W. Cameron. 1928. The Philippine Islands. Vol. II. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Ford, Henry J. 1916. Woodrow Wilson: The Man and His Work. New York: D. Appleton and Company.

“Ford sobre la Situación Filipina.” 1917. The Philippine Review 2 (May): 43.

Foreman, John. 1899. The Philippine Islands: A Political, Geographical, Ethnographical, Social and Commercial History of the Philippine Archipelago and Its Political Dependencies, Embracing the Whole Period of Spanish Rule. New York: C. Scribner’s Sons.

Gies, David T., ed. 1999. The Cambridge Companion to Modern Spanish Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hayden, Joseph Ralston. 1942. The Philippines: A Study in National Development. New York: Macmillan.

Ileto, Reynaldo C. 1998. Filipinos and Their Revolution: Event, Discourse and Historiography. Manila: Ateneo de Manila University Press.

Jenkins, J.C. 1910. Decision of Judge J.C. Jenkins of the Court of First Instance for the Judicial District of Manila, Part IV, in the Action for Damages Brought by Dean C. Worcester Against the Owners, Directors, Writers, Editors and Administrators of the Newspaper Known as El Renacimiento y Muling Pagsilang. Charleston: Nabu Press.

Kalaw, Teodoro M. 1950. “El Renacimiento” Libel Suit. Manila: n.p.

LeRoy, James A. 1914. The Americans in the Philippines. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co.

May, Glenn. 1997. Inventing a Hero: The Posthumous Re-creation of Andres Bonifacio. Quezon City: New Day Publishers.

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—. 1891. Frailes y Clérigos. Madrid: Librería de Fernando Fé.

—. 1895. El Periodismo Filipino. Noticias para su Historia (1811–1894). Apuntes Bibliográficos, Indicaciones Biográficas, Notas Críticas, Semblanzas, Anécdotas. Madrid: Imp. de la Viuda de M. de Minuesa de los Ríos.

—. 1906. Aparato Bibliográfico de la Historia General de Filipinas. Madrid: Imprenta de la Sucesora de M. Minuesa de los Ríos.

—. 1907. Vida y Escritos del Dr. José Rizal. Madrid: Librería General de V. Suárez.

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—. 1906. Annapolis, Md. Manuscripts, Box 2, Folder Letters 1902–06. Durham, N. C.: Special Collections Library, Duke University.

—. 1907–39. Manuscripts. Letters, Box 3, James A. LeRoy to El Renacimiento, Durango, México, 1 November 1906. Published in supplements of El Renacimiento 17, 19, 22 and 24 January 1907. Durham, N. C.: Special Collections Library, Duke University.

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—. 1907. The Philippines and the Filipinos: A Reply. Political Science Quarterly 22(1): 105–128.

Worcester, Dean C. 1898. The Philippine Islands and Their People: A Record of Personal Observation and Experience, with a Short Summary of the More Important Facts in the History of the Archipelago. New York: Macmillan.

—. 1900. “Some Aspects of the Philippine Question,” address delivered under the auspices of the Club at Central Music Hall, Chicago, 15 November 1899. Washington, D. C.: Library and Publication Committee.

—. 1930. The Philippines Past and Present. New ed. New York: The Macmillan Company.

Newspapers

El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino, 1901–05.

El Renacimiento: Diario Filipino Independiente, 1905–08.

La Solidaridad, Barcelona 1889, Madrid 1890–95.

1) Joseph Ralston Hayden (1887–1945) was a professor of political science, a specialist in Philippine politics and government at the University of Michigan. He also was vice governor of the Philippines in the 1930s. He wrote a bibliographical sketch and four additional chapters in the new edition of Dean C. Worcester’s The Philippines Past and Present [1930]; he also wrote the book The Philippines: A Study in National Development [Hayden 1942].

2) William Cameron Forbes (1870–1959) was an American investment banker and diplomat. During the administration of President William Howard Taft, Forbes was governor-general of the Philippines (1909–13).

3) Gullón is the last name of Minister of Governation Pío Gullón, who signed the Law of Printing under the Liberal government of Prime Minister Práxedes Mateo Sagasta (1825–1903).

4) In 1900 William Howard Taft (1857–1930) was appointed chairman of a commission to organize a civilian government in the Philippines, which had been ceded to the United States by Spain following the Spanish-American War and the 1898 Treaty of Paris. From 1901 to 1903, Taft served as the first civilian governor-general of the Philippines, a position in which he was very popular with both Americans and Filipinos. In 1904, he was appointed secretary of war. From 1909 to 1913, he was the president of the United States.

5) Dean C. Worcester (1866–1924) was an American zoologist, public official, and authority on the Philippines. From 1899 to 1901, he was a member of the United States Philippine Commission; thenceforth, until 1913 he served as secretary of the interior for the Insular Government of the Philippine Islands. In 1898 he wrote The Philippine Islands and Their People and in 1914 the two volumes of The Philippines Past and Present.

6) Wenceslao E. Retana y Gamboa (1862–1924) is perhaps, since the nineteenth century, the most cited Filipinologist by historians and scholars dedicated to the study of the Philippines. Retana was well known in the Philippines, United States, and obviously Spain, thus becoming the historian and bibliographer par excellence of the time. In fact, he worked in the Philippines and established relations with prominent Filipinos.

7) José Toribio Medina (1852–1930) was a Chilean bibliographer and historian. He spent part of his life collecting sources to study the history of his country.

8) La Opinión disappeared in 1889, when Retana and Camilo Millán started to work in this newspaper. Retana was considered an anti-Filipino reactionary; and Millán was also an anti-Filipino, furious and reactionary. Obviously, Filipino progressives immediately canceled their subscriptions and the newspaper was shut down. See W.E. Retana, Aparato Bibliográfico [1906: entry 4498, 1628–1632].

9) This section is a brief summary of a forthcoming paper titled “‘La Solidaridad’ y el Periodismo en Filipinas en Tiempos de Rizal (La Solidaridad and Journalism in the Philippines during Rizal’s Time).”

10) Graciano Lopez Jaena (1856–96) was a Filipino journalist, orator, and revolutionary well known for his important collaboration in La Solidaridad. He edited the journal in 1889, while it was published in Barcelona. He is considered the great orator of the Propaganda Movement. He was in touch with important Catalan journalists and politicians. In fact, he was a member of a Catalan institution called Ateneu Barcelonès. In this club, he learned about Catalan nationalism.

11) Marcelo Hilario del Pilar (1850–96) was a Filipino writer, journalist, satirist, and revolutionary leader of the Philippine Revolution and one of the leading ilustrado propagandists of the Philippines. He served as editor of the vernacular section of Diariong Tagalog. From 1890 to around 1895, he edited the newspaper La Solidaridad. Like Lopez Jaena, he was in touch with Spanish journalists and politicians.

12) This discourse has been perpetuated. Aclear example is The Emergence of Modern Southeast Asia. The chapter devoted to the Philippines furnishes the same stereotypic images of Spanish colonial rule. It is not rare to read categorical sentences such as “Whether liberal or conservative, pro-church or antichurch, pro- or anti-monarchy, Spain became a backwater, incapable of sustaining any policy that could win consensus ...” [Owen 2005: 151].

13) The paper El Día [28 June 1898, Núm. 6505] published an editorial titled “Orígenes del Pacto Yankée-Filipino” (Origins of the Yankee-Filipino Pact). In this article the newspaper categorically asserts that there was a draft agreement and Dewey could read this draft. According to this editorial, the archipelago would become a democracy (Estado de derecho).

14) La Independencia was destroyed by the Americans. The last issue was published on 4 February 1899. Clemente J. Zulueta had the whole collection.

15) Dominador Gomez (1868–1929) was a physician, propagandist, labor leader, and legislator. He succeeded Isabelo de los Reyes as the Unión Obrera Democrática leader. He also collaborated in La Solidaridad.

16) Rafael Palma (1874–1939) was a Filipino politician, member of the Nationalist Party, journalist, and mason. He wrote for the newspapers La Independencia, El Nuevo Día, and obviously El Renacimiento.

17) The journal The Philippine Review echoed Ford’s book in an article titled “Ford sobre la situación Filipina” [1917: 43]. This journal was published in Manila in Spanish and English.

18) Artemio Ricarte (1866–1945) was a Filipino general during the Filipino Revolution and the Philippine-American War. He is considered the father of the Filipino Army. Ricarte is famous for not having made an oath to the U. S. government.

19) James A. LeRoy to El Renacimiento, Durango, México, 1 November 1906; published in supplements of El Renacimiento17, 19, 22, and 24 January 1907 [Robertson, Manuscripts, Box 2, Folder Letters 1902–06].

20) James A. LeRoy to William H. Taft, Durango, México, 6 February 1906 [Robertson, Manuscripts, Box 2, Folder Letters 1902–06].

21) In 1997, Glenn May published Inventing a Hero: The Posthumous Re-creation of Andres Bonifacio. He questioned the sources about Bonifacio used by some Filipino historians, beginning with Epifanio de los Santos and Manuel Artigas. He supports the argument that the writings of Artigas, Andres Bonifacio y el Katipunan, and De los Santos, Andres Bonifacio, honored the memory of an earlier anti-colonial struggle and transformed the life of the leader of that struggle into a classic heroic story “intended to build pride in things Filipino and keep alive the notion of an independent Philippines. By attempting to promote nationalist feeling in a colonial environment, they directly attacked the traditional order” [May 1997: 164]. This argument is valid when May assumes that they tried to attack the traditional colonial order. However, he is wrong in asserting that De los Santos and Artigas were promoting Bonifacio like a hero. Artigas’s biography is from 1911, and De los Santos’s is from 1917. The elevation of Bonifacio as hero and martyr came about as early as 1900, when the Taft Commission fostered a worship of Rizal. According to LeRoy, Bonifacio’s adherents resented this and considered that Bonifacio was being “neglected.” Bonifacio emerged again in 1906. LeRoy promoted a campaign to discredit Bonifacio.

22) LeRoy was trying to convince his Filipino friends about this argument. He wrote this letter to José Albert the same month and year he sent his letter to El Renacimiento. James A. LeRoy to José Albert, Durango, Mexico, 23 November 1906. [Robertson, Manuscripts, Box 2, Folder Letters 1902–06].

23) James A. LeRoy to José Albert, 23 November 1906 [Robertson, Manuscripts, Box 2, Folder Letters 1902–06].

24) James A. LeRoy to José Albert, Durango, México, 23 November 1906.

25) James A. LeRoy to José Albert, Durango, México, 23 November 1906.

26) James A. LeRoy to Fernando M. Guerrero, Durango, México, 23 March 1905 [Robertson, Manu-scripts, Box 2, Folder Letters 1902–06].

27) James A. LeRoy to William H. Taft, México, 6 February 1906.

28) “Farewell El Renacimiento.” The Public 13 (March 25,1910). http://www.maxwell.syr.edu/unofficial/students/fjzwick/vof/er011510.html. In Jim Zwick, ed., Anti-Imperialism in the United States, 1898–1935. http://web.syr.edu/˜fjzwick/ail98-35.html (January 1996).

Between the Letter and Spirit of the Law: Ethnic Chinese and Philippine Citizenship by Jus Soli, 1899–1947

Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr.*

* Department of History, School of Social Sciences, Ateneo de Manila University, Leong Hall, Loyola Heights, Quezon City 1108, Philippines

e-mail: fvaguilar@ateneo. edu

Abstract

Through an examination of archival materials and decisions of the Philippine Supreme Court, this article documents and analyzes the history of citizenship laws and jurisprudence in the Philippines from the close of the nineteenth century to the immediate postwar period. It demonstrates that the articulation between race and nation, mediated by citizenship, varied according to historical and geopolitical contexts, which informed citizenship debates, policies, and interpretations of legal texts. The short-lived 1899 Malolos Constitution offered an inclusive principle of jus soli, but it was superseded by the concept of Philippine citizenship enunciated in the 1902 Philippine Bill. Emblematic of contradictions within the U. S. imperial apparatus, the same legal framework that was used to exclude Filipinos from U. S. citizenship provided the means for individuals of Chinese or part-Chinese parentage to be granted Philippine citizenship based on jus soli starting in 1911, a direction the U. S. State Department began to oppose in 1920. The Commonwealth period and the crafting of the 1935 Philippine Constitution gave ascendancy to the principle of jus sanguinis, but only after the formal end of U. S. rule did the Supreme Court reverse its stance on jus soli in favor of a myth of descent.

Keywords: citizenship, racism, nationalism, U. S. imperialism, Chinese mestizos

In Philippine legal history, the case of Jose Tan Chong vs. The Secretary of Labor (1947) marks a watershed in the jurisprudence on Philippine citizenship. Records indicate that Jose Tan Chong was born in San Pablo, Laguna, in July 1915 of a “Chinese” father named Tan Chong Hong and a “Filipino” mother named Antonia Mangahis. His parents took him to China in 1925 when he was about 10 years old, and he returned to the Philippines on 25 January 1940 when he was 24 years old. The board of special inquiry that heard his case denied him entry for being a Chinese citizen, a decision affirmed by the Secretary of Labor who also ordered his deportation. Tan Chong sued for a writ of habeas corpus in Manila’s Court of First of Instance to secure his release from the custody of the Secretary of Labor, which the court granted. But the solicitor-general, representing the executive branch of government, appealed [Supreme Court of the Philippines (SCP) 1951: 307–308].

On 15 October 1941 the Supreme Court—with an all-Filipino Bench but still under the jurisdiction of the United States—affirmed the judgment of the lower court that Tan Chong, “having been born in the Philippines before the approval of our (1935) Constitution, of a Chinese father and a Filipino mother, is a Filipino citizen” [ibid.: 308]. The Supreme Court also provided an explanation for Tan Chong’s delayed return to the Philippines when it noted that after two years he had wanted to leave China “but his father would not allow him to come, and he did not have the means to pay for his transportation back to the Philippines until the date of his return” [ibid.]. A week after the high court made its decision the solicitor-general filed a motion for reconsideration, contending that Tan Chong was not a citizen based on the laws at the time of his birth. Dramatically the war intervened before the case could be resolved, destroying the records that had to be reconstituted in 1946.

On 16 September 1947, the Supreme Court—now of the formally independent Republic of the Philippines—proceeded to resolve the prewar motion for reconsideration. It admitted: “In a long line of decisions, this court has held that the principle of jus soli applies in this jurisdiction” [SCP 1954: 252].[1] However, after providing a different reading of previous case decisions, and cognizant that its decision was “momentous,” it proceeded to assert that “While birth is an important element of citizenship, it alone does not make a person a citizen of the country of his birth” [ibid.: 256]. Arguing that the U. S. tenet of jus soli embodied in the Fourteenth Amendment was never extended to the Philippines and restating Section 4 of the Philippine Bill of 1902 as amended in 1912, the court abandoned jus soli once and for all. Jus sanguinis, with its myth of descent, has since been the regnant principle in Philippine citizenship.[2] Jose Tan Chong, then 32 years old, was declared not a citizen of the Philippines.

One could only speculate that, had the case been resolved prior to the end of U. S. rule, Tan Chong would have been declared a Filipino citizen. The case was doubly ironic because, although the Fourteenth Amendment (1868)—which provides that “[a]ll persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside”—was indeed not extended to the Philippines on racial grounds and thus required the invention of Philippine citizenship [Aguilar 2010], a similar type of prejudice was now at work in using this nonextension to deny a person like Tan Chong access to Philippine citizenship. In an altered historical setting, a different sentiment could emerge and express itself in terms of a radically divergent interpretation of the law. The legal text had not changed, but the changed context allowed it to be read differently. Evincing that the law is ultimately malleable, the Supreme Court’s seemingly belated discovery that it had not been all that fair was reason enough to act in a manner the court saw as patriotic and—“now that we’re independent!”—withhold Philippine citizenship from someone deemed undeserving for being a racial Other.[3]

As I have shown elsewhere [Aguilar 1999], the history of Southeast Asia suggests that, despite the separate origins of nationalism and racism, these ideologies were not to be easily disentangled in practice. The delineation of membership and national belonging through access to the gate of citizenship was influenced heavily by the cartographic and cultural-ethnic politics of colonial states and their definitions of race and minority groups. In the postcolonial period, citizenship was seized upon by ruling elites to promote a narrow, conservative, and homogenizing nationalism. Excluded from the fold, barred from entry to the gate of citizenship—though sometimes admitted on an inferior and highly contentious juridical status [Aguilar 2001]—were the racial Others who were supposedly outside the culture, history, heritage, and destiny of the dominant social group.

In the Philippines, among all Others, the “Chinese” represented the test case of debates on inclusion and exclusion during the period of American rule. Under Spain there had been a long history of migration between the southeastern coast of the Chinese mainland and the islands that comprised the Philippines, with many Chinese men settling down and marrying local women, in the absence of women from China. From the mid-eighteenth century, especially after the mass expulsion of ethnic Chinese (but for the few who converted to Catholicism) for cooperating with a short-lived British occupation of the islands, these mixed unions produced the category of Chinese mestizos that formed the core of the Filipino native elite, who had a vexed relationship with their Chinese heritage [Wickberg 1964; 1965]. The ascendancy of Chinese mestizos in Philippine history is traced to the period from 1741 to 1850, when no substantial Chinese presence existed to either compete economically with the mestizos or serve culturally as a pole of identification. Spain’s lifting of immigration barriers in the 1850s resulted in a new influx of Chinese male migrants. An identifiable and distinct “Chinese community” existed, members of whom had greater liberty than in the past to travel within the colony. They dislodged the older generation of Chinese mestizos from their established economic niches, as in the native textile industry in Iloilo whence the local mestizos shifted to sugar production on Negros Island [Aguilar 1998]. The new generation of mestizos that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century, issuing from Chinese migrants’ marriage or cohabitation with local women, had the greater possibility of identifying with the Chinese, even as they also deployed flexible identities in pursuit of familial as well as capitalist interests. Given the liberal atmosphere of travel, a steady stream of border crossings ensued, with children of these mixed unions visiting the Chinese mainland briefly or for prolonged periods. These border crossings persisted through the United States’ period of invasion and subsequent colonization of the Philippines, which early on saw the imposition of Chinese exclusion. In 1909 it was estimated that about 5,000 Chinese “domiciled in the Philippine Islands visit the homes of relatives and friends” in the Amoy (Xiamen) region.[4]

What was the legal status of Chinese travelers who claimed the Philippines as their place of birth and residence? Were they to be barred from entry for being Chinese or allowed into the territory as citizens of the Philippines? How did they stand vis-à-vis the law, given the then widespread anti-Chinese sentiment among Filipinos in the Philippines and among Americans in the U. S. mainland? As this article seeks to show, the entwining of racism and nationalism is not unilinear, as the history of citizenship laws and jurisprudence in the Philippines from the close of the nineteenth century to the immediate postwar period demonstrates. In particular, this article hopes to shed light on the broad historical circumstances that occasionally lift the gate of citizenship for a category of the excluded, whose entry to the territory was contingent upon a different reading of the law. Citizenship for this class of individuals, then, is a case study that is also a sign of the complexity of the history of U. S. imperialism in the Philippines.

The Inclusiveness of the Malolos Constitution

The principle of jus soli (law of the soil) was not an American introduction. It had been enunciated in the 1899 Malolos Constitution, which was liberal on many counts, not just in terms of the rights and duties of citizenship, but also in its ideology of political inclusion. Title IV, Article 6 (1), of the constitution declared that “Filipinos” included “all persons born on Filipino territory” (Todas las personas nacidas en territorio filipino).[5] In Article 6 (2), a form of jus sanguinis (law of the blood) was stipulated for birth outside the territory, but patrilineality was not favored: children of either a Filipino father or mother, although born outside of the Philippines, were deemed to be Filipinos (Los hijos de padre ó madre filipinos, aunque hayan nacido fuera de Filipinas). Article 6 (3) specified that foreigners could become Filipinos through naturalization. Finally, Article 6 (4) reiterated the spatial element through a form of jus domicile (law of residence), at that time a very advanced notion—considering that only now in the early twenty-first century is this “additional principle ... gaining momentum” [Levanon and Lewin-Epstein 2010: 421]—anyone, even if not naturalized, who had lived for two uninterrupted years in any locality within Philippine territory and performed the duties of a citizen (primarily paying taxes) was considered a Filipino.

The citizenship provision of the Malolos Constitution was remarkably politically inclusive. In considering all persons born on Philippine territory as Filipinos, regardless of ethnicity, the Malolos charter transcended the anti-Chinese racial sentiment found in the writings of ilustrados in the 1880s–90s. It also seemed prepared to acknowledge members of “tribal” ethnic communities as fellow Filipinos, social groups that had been excluded from the Propaganda Movement’s campaign for civil and constitutional liberties for being beneath lowland groups, such as the Tagalog, in the cultural and civilizational hierarchy [Aguilar 2005]. What could explain the inclusiveness of Malolos in delineating the body politic?

The constitution as a whole was said to have derived “inspiration” from the charters of several Latin American countries [Agoncillo 1960: 297]. One could argue that the citizenship provision was simply copied from an external model. In particular, it appears to have been patterned directly from the Spanish Civil Code, which was already in force in Spain since May 1888,[6] but which became applicable in the Philippines, as well as Cuba and Puerto Rico, on 8 December 1889. In form Article 6 of the 1899 Malolos Constitution and Article 17 of the 1889 Spanish Civil Code are alike, with “Filipinos” being substituted for “Spaniards.” Perhaps the Malolos drafters were simply imitating the inclusive pluralism of the Spanish Civil Code—itself intended to accommodate the complexity of civil laws and local customs in Spain [Brown 1956] as well as embrace Cuba and Puerto Rico, with its large Hispanic population (and the Philippines, too, probably by default), within what remained of the Spanish empire.[7] Nonetheless, there were significant divergences between the Malolos Constitution and the Spanish Civil Code, with the archipelagic Philippines emphasizing a broader application of jus soli in that a Philippine-registered vessel was deemed part of its territory and, while the civil code did not specify a period of time to be considered domiciled, the Malolos text supplied a definite timeframe of two years.[8] However, Article 25 of the civil code required naturalized citizens to renounce their former nationality, swear allegiance, and “inscribe themselves as Spaniards in the civil registry,”[9] a stipulation not found in the Malolos document, the requirements of two years’ legal residence and payment of taxes being sufficient for one to be considered a Filipino citizen.

Despite the use of external models, the specification of citizenship in the Malolos Constitution can be seen as a product of the exigency of state formation. In a highly unsettled context, a united territory and polity was of utmost value, as evinced by Aguinaldo’s reaching out to ethnic communities as brethren. Rather than creating residuals of otherness, one could build a solid state by claiming all peoples and all localities within a predefined territory as belonging to the state.[10] All the more so as inclusiveness had already been put to effect and tested in the many soldiers of diverse races and ethnicities—Chinese, Japanese, and with the onset of the Filipino-American War Spaniards, Cubans, French, British, Italians, as well as White and Black Americans—who served in Aguinaldo’s army and fought for the Filipino cause [Dery 2005: 3–15].[11] Moreover, driven by the desire to be accepted by other states as a free, independent nation, the Malolos government had little time and few alternatives. The delegates needed a template, and the Spanish code was a good one. If the ideals of the civil code were not fully realized under Spain, perhaps the constitutional framers felt those ideals finally could become reality under a Filipino government. This conjecture, however, cannot be supported by any direct evidence because, although the issue of state religion was intensely debated, accounts of the making of the Malolos Constitution make no mention at all of citizenship [Agoncillo 1960: 294–309; Zafra 1963]. Because the Malolos government was cut short by the U. S. invasion and the ensuing war, there was no opportunity to probe its tenet on citizenship before a court of law.

What is clear is that, soon after the U. S. takeover of the Philippines, the application of the Chinese Exclusion Law to the Philippines provided the opportunity for the expression of Filipino anti-Chinese sentiments. On 26 September 1898, one month after the establishment of a military government that he headed, Brig.-Gen. Elwell S. Otis ordered what was in effect the extension of the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Law in the U. S. to the Philippines. In formulating its recommendation on the question of Chinese immigration, the Philippine Commission indicated it was “primarily a political question insofar as the Filipinos were concerned,” particularly as Commission member Benito Legarda “expressed the belief that the adoption of a policy of Chinese exclusion by the United States in the Philippines would be a very good political measure” [Fonacier 1949: 12–13].

In 1901 the U. S. War Department affirmed Otis’s order. With the exception of former Philippine residents and those who belonged to the “exempt classes,”[12] all other Chinese immigrants were barred from entry to the Philippines.[13] American civilian authorities in Manila pleaded to be granted room to maneuver and adapt to local conditions. The American and Chinese chambers of commerce advocated the entry of Chinese coolie labor.[14] However, the Chinese Exclusion Law in the Philippines became official legislation by an act of the U. S. Congress, which Pres. Theodore Roosevelt signed into law in April 1902.

Belatedly joining the tussle over this legislation was Isabelo de los Reyes who, as president of the Unión Obrera Democrática, addressed a petition to the U. S. president in August 1902 in support of Chinese exclusion. The reasons he adduced were that “Asiatic immigration” was “very dangerous to public order and the sovereignty of the U. S.”; it caused “a competition injurious to Filipinos and Americans”; it fomented vagrancy and brigandage among Filipinos who could not compete with Asiatic migrants; “yellow immigration was anti-civilizational” for the bad examples displayed by Chinese migrants; there was no lack of Filipino workmen; and there was the “peril” arising from the “falsifications of Chinese merchandise.”[15] Given the expressed desire of key Filipinos, Chinese exclusion could be framed as intended for, in the words of an American colonial official, “the Filipino people for whose protection the exclusion laws have been applied to these Islands.”[16] Gone was the inclusiveness of Malolos.

The American Invention of Philippine Citizenship

Having acquired possession of the Philippines from Spain in the 1898 Treaty of Paris, American authorities proceeded to exclude it from the territory of the United States by citing a Congressional resolution that was passed during the intense deliberations: “That by the ratification of the treaty of peace with Spain it is not intended to incorporate the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands into citizenship of the United States, nor is it intended to permanently annex said islands as an integral part of the United States” [Magoon 1900: 11]. Considered an “objectionable race” [ibid.: 72] and inassimilable to American society, Filipinos were deemed inherently undeserving of U. S. citizenship, which justified the nonextension of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Philippines. George Malcolm [1916: 549], then the Dean of the College of Law of the University of the Philippines, described the Philippines in relation to the U. S. as “not a foreign country; not sovereign or semi-sovereign; not a State or an organized, incorporated territory; not a part of the United States in a domestic sense; not under the Constitution, except as it operates on the President and Congress; and not a colony.” The Philippines was a “dependency—an unincorporated territory belonging to the United States and under its complete sovereignty a part of the United States in an international sense” [ibid.]. Sardonically Malcolm concluded, “If these statements were put in parallel columns, the anomalous status of the Philippines Islands and its people would be graphically portrayed” [ibid.: 550].

Thus anomalously Philippine citizenship was invented when the Cooper Act or the Philippine Bill of 1902 was signed into law on 1 July 1902 to become the Philippines’s “first organic act.” As I have demonstrated elsewhere [Aguilar 2010], the necessary precedents of this act appear to have been the passage of a similar legislation for Puerto Rico and the application of the U. S. Chinese Exclusion Law to the Philippines. Section 4 of the Philippine Bill of 1902 declared:

That all inhabitants of the Philippine Islands continuing to reside therein who were Spanish subjects on the eleventh day of April, eighteen hundred and ninety-nine and then resided in said Islands, and their children born subsequent thereto, shall be deemed and held to be citizens of the Philippine Islands and as such entitled to the protection of the United States, except as shall have elected to preserve their allegiance to the Crown of Spain in accordance with the provisions of the treaty of peace between the United States and Spain signed at Paris, December tenth, eighteen hundred and ninety-eight.

By this stipulation the “inhabitants” of the nonsovereign Philippine Islands who were Spanish subjects on 11 April 1899, the date when the Treaty of Paris was proclaimed as duly ratified by both Spain and the U. S., became “citizens of the Philippine Islands.” Philippine citizenship was presented as a break from yet also a direct successor to Spanish subjecthood. In specifying the Philippine citizenship of “children born subsequent thereto,” this clause also established jus sanguinis as one of the means to determine Philippine citizenship, unless their parents opted to preserve their Spanish nationality.

The invention of Philippine citizenship could have appeased many Filipinos as a foretaste of autonomy and independence. It served to bestow a collective national identity and anticipated a presumed state that, although deferred, would materialize in the distant future. There seemed to have been no major debate in the Philippines questioning the validity of Philippine citizenship. However, citizenship conferred by an entity that was not a sovereign and independent state was plainly vacuous, a fact of which U. S. authorities should have been cognizant.[17] The notion of Philippine citizenship acquired legal weight only because of the simultaneous extension of “protection by the United States.” The legal mythology of Section 4 held that U. S. protection was contingent upon Philippine citizenship as though Philippine citizenship was a prior reality: once “deemed and held to be citizens of the Philippine Islands” they merited protection: “as such [they were] entitled to the protection of the United States.”

A U. S. court later declared in 1950 in its decision concerning a citizenship case filed by a Filipino that the status of Philippine citizenship “had no international effect prior to the relinquishment of the United States sovereignty but rather served a useful internal American function” [cited in Isaac 2006: 37]. That “internal American function,” evidently, served the desires and requisites of U. S. racialized citizenship and differential imperialist strategies [Aguilar 2010]. However, because Filipinos owed allegiance to the United States, migrants to the U. S. could not be classified as aliens. In 1912 Filipinos, who carried U. S. passports, were categorized as noncitizen U. S. nationals. Along with other groups of people, Filipinos as U. S. nationals did not possess “all the rights of ‘full’ citizens” in the U. S. but nonetheless were subjected to U. S. “plenary power” and “consistently treated as ‘outsiders’ both in popular consciousness and in U. S. jurisprudence” [Saito 2002: 437]. Nevertheless, there were instances, particularly in the late 1930s, when the U. S. government recognized the de facto U. S. citizenship of Filipinos, even as the Philippine independence bill (the 1934 Tydings-McDuffie Act) resulted in their widespread perception as aliens [Aguilar 2010]. Despite its contradictions “Philippine citizenship,” once invented, acquired a life of its own. Its desirability was heightened by immigrants to the Philippines who sought this juridical status lest they face nonadmission or be haunted by deportation. Backed by the force of an imperial ruler, the legal fiction became fact.

“Asiatics” and the Philippine Citizenship Bill of 1916

The original provision that invented Philippine citizenship in 1902 was retained in Section 2 of the Jones Law, or the Philippine Autonomy Act, which was signed into law by Pres. Woodrow Wilson on 29 August 1916. However, it contained the additional provision that had been stipulated in an amendment passed in 1912:

That the Philippine Legislature, herein provided for, is hereby authorized to provide by law for the acquisition of the Philippine citizenship by those natives of the Philippine Islands who do not come within the foregoing provisions, the natives of the insular possessions of the United States, and such other persons residing in the Philippine Islands who are citizens of the United States, or who could become citizens of the United States under the laws of the United States if residing therein.

This proviso devolved authority to the Philippine Assembly to enact a law on Philippine citizenship within the parameters of U. S. law for persons inadvertently excluded by the Philippine Bill of 1902.

However, even before the passage of the Jones Law, by early 1916 Filipino prejudice had converged with American racism to produce a piece of legislation crafted by the Philippine Assembly that barred “Asiatics” from acquiring Philippine citizenship. The passage of this citizenship bill provoked a major debate in the Manila Spanish-language press between Jose Alejandrino, a general in the revolution and a member of the Malolos Congress, and Pedro Guevara, a lawyer and member of the assembly who voted with the majority.[18]

Alejandrino argued that the citizenship bill was “one of the greatest errors” committed by the Philippine Assembly; he contended that the barring of other Asians from Philippine citizenship was a mistake, as it would antagonize Japan whom he saw as a strong power and deserving to be cultivated as an ally.[19] He opined that no Japanese would take on Philippine citizenship even if that right were extended to them; he considered the Japanese people “very sensitive” about national honor and would “not pardon nor forget an injury,” emphasizing that “only the intelligent Japanese of goodwill would understand our difficult situation, while it is indubitable that the jingoistic leaders would take advantage of this opportunity to excite against us the indignation of the masses.”[20]

Emphasizing the uncertain political status of the Philippines, Alejandrino reckoned that Europeans would not be offended for “no European who respects himself and enjoys in the Philippines greater considerations and privileges than any native would be willing to exchange his well-defined and respected nationality for that of a country which is not a territory, colony nor dependency, which is unowned and the future of which is so insecure.”[21] Given the indeterminacy of its political status, no citizenship bills need be passed: “If we cannot legislate according to our interests and our convenience, we had better abstain from doing so,” Alejandrino urged, adding—out of concern for “our future external relations”—that “if we are not free to make the laws most convenient for us, neither are we obliged to adopt those which might create for us conflicts in the future.”[22] “Besides,” he contended, “we have done without this law for so many years that I believe that we could have been able to get along perfectly well without it for a few more years.”[23]

Moreover, he argued that if the logic of U. S. law, which excluded “Malays and Mongolians from naturalization” in American territory, were to be pursued it “should also exclude the Filipinos from citizenship in our own country” since it was essentially American territory, “unless the Honorable Guevara can prove that we are neither Malays nor Mongolians.”[24] Because of the discriminatory nature of “the American naturalization and citizenship law, which excludes the Yellow Race (including Filipinos) from its benefits,” Filipinos “should not lend ourselves as instruments to humiliate our own race and place obstacles in the way of the policy of equal opportunity for all.”[25] Alejandrino’s argumentation evoked the state building concerns of Malolos, particularly in seeing the need to establish good relations with a country like Japan, which he visited from February to March 1897 in pursuit of arms for the revolution against Spain [Alejandrino 1949: 64–74]. Through Mariano Ponce’s close association with Sun Yat-sen, which grew in Japan, Alejandrino would have been well acquainted with Chinese intellectuals in the pan-Asianist network [Mojares 2009]. Despite Japan’s turn to expansionism beginning with the Twenty-One Demands in 1915 and the retreat of anticolonial pan-Asianist discourse in the late 1910s to the 1920s [Aydin 2007], Alejandrino had a vision of the Philippines in a broader regional context, an Asianism—which he conceived as a “sentimental, altruistic, and noble pan-Orientalism” [Mojares 2009: 6]—that would build a world free of imperialism and colonialism.[26]

Guevara’s response could only stress the fact that the Philippine Assembly was “limited by the Constitution and Laws now in vigor in the United States,” and within that framework the assembly could not have “committed any error.”[27] Guevara argued that there was no need to be defensive because “The Japanese people, as well as the Chinese and others of the Oriental race who are included in the exclusion law of the United States, understand perfectly that the Philippine Legislature has no faculty for approving a law by virtue of which they may be admitted.”[28] Like Alejandrino, Guevara pointed out that the Philippines was a country with “no political personality.”[29] Although he admitted that the exclusion law in California caused “popular indignation” in Japan, Guevara rebutted that the Japanese should know that “we are not responsible for the making of certain laws in vigor in the United States.”[30] Besides, in his view, raising the specter of Japan was fanning “a fear of a monster which does not exist.” He charged Alejandrino with damaging the Philippines by saying that “our people” nurtured “asperities and prejudice against the neighboring countries.”[31] Guevara’s defense was either disingenuous in using U. S. racism and imperial control to give vent to his “anti-Oriental” prejudice, or plain mendicant in hewing closely to what he deemed were the wishes of the United States, serving as a form of self-absolution for favoring an exclusionary bill on citizenship that was in keeping with the racist laws of the sovereign imperial power.

Even if final responsibility could be passed to the U. S., evidently most Filipino legislators in the Philippine Assembly, much like the ilustrados of the late nineteenth century, harbored anti-Chinese sentiments that could be mobilized to curtail access to Philippine citizenship. Except for a few like Alejandrino, these legislators appeared not to sense the kind of historical urgency that confronted Malolos or the importance of forging ties with other Asian nations as part of the nationalist struggle. By the early 1930s “anti-foreigner” bills were increasingly being filed in the Philippine legislature, aimed chiefly at the Chinese who dominated the retail trade, but also at the Japanese who held extensive fishing interests in Manila and hemp plantations in Davao.[32] These proposed measures, which aimed to nationalize industries dominated by foreigners, embodied the intertwining of economic interests and race-based sentiments.

The eventual fate of the citizenship bill that was at the center of the debate between Alejandrino and Guevara is uncertain, for there is hardly a trace of it in the annals of Philippine citizenship laws. If it did pass the Philippine Assembly, it could have been squelched in Washington, D. C., which would have nullified Guevara’s position. However, pursuant to the Jones Law the Philippine Assembly reportedly enacted a law “declaring that persons born in the Philippine Islands are citizens thereof, aside from those who are already Filipino citizens by virtue of the Act of Congress of July 1, 1902, as amended by the Jones Law.”[33] This act of the Philippine legislature was incorporated as Section 2 of the Administrative Code of 1917, stating that the category

“Citizens of the Philippine Islands” includes not only those who acquire the status of citizens of the Philippine Islands by birth or naturalization, but also persons who have acquired the status of Filipinos under Article IX of the Treaty of Paris, of the tenth of December, one thousand eight hundred and ninety-eight.[34]

Semantically, citizens of the Philippine Islands became equated with “Filipinos,” which really meant “Filipino citizens.” But more significant was the ambiguous phrase “by birth” as a means of acquiring Philippine citizenship. Perhaps the Filipino legislators, secure in their Philippine citizenship, had merely intended to pass on their citizenship status to the next generation members of whom, by birth, would acquire Philippine citizenship, effectively the principle of jus sanguinis. However, the governor-general’s office interpreted the phrase as birth in the territory, taking the act of the Philippine legislature specifically as adopting jus soli, “the same as the 14th amendment to the Constitution of the United States”; however, as the American governor-general’s secretary admitted, there was “no chance in this country” to test the law’s validity and “to have this question decided by the courts here for the Supreme Court of these Islands has already upheld the doctrine of jus soli.”[35]

The Supreme Court and Jus Soli: Invoking the Spirit of the Law

Even before the 1916 citizenship law was passed, and in opposition to the Chinese Exclusion Law and the withholding of the Fourteenth Amendment from the Philippines, in 1911 the Supreme Court began to apply the principle of jus soli and grant Philippine citizenship primarily to persons with “Chinese” fathers and “Filipino” mothers, usually travelers from China whom local authorities initially sought to exclude from entry for being Chinese in the non-exempt category.

Until the 1880s persons with such mixed parentage would have been classified as “Chinese mestizos,” but the Spanish colonial state’s shift to a modern taxation system formally abolished this sociolegal category. Forming the basis of an optional identity, identification with the mestizo category diminished considerably in the 1880s and 1890s [Doeppers 1994]. The last two decades of the nineteenth century appeared to be the period of greatest flexibility in identities—even as, at the same time, many (male) mestizos identified themselves as indios or naturales, a moment of redrawing boundary lines for mestizos whose families had been in the mestizo category for several generations. Emblematized by Jose Rizal, these mestizos identified with the majority lowland colonial subjects of Spain [Aguilar 2005]. Although under American rule some persisted in employing mestizo as a self-designation, a number of wealthy persons of mixed background—members of a new generation of mestizos—identified themselves with the Chinese [Chu 2010]. However, the fluidities of social and personal identities and their relationship to these court cases cannot be determined. Most basic is the absence of information on the individuals’ self-identification and the ethnic markers of their public persona in the case decisions upon which this discussion relies.[36] These court decisions indicate, for instance, that the parties to a case had legal representation, but whether the persons concerned actually appeared in court cannot be ascertained. Because as a rule the Supreme Court is not a hearing court,[37] personal factors, such as the appellant’s more “Filipino” than “Chinese” countenance or vice versa, might not have influenced the court. However, the Supreme Court studied the proceedings of the boards of special inquiry and courts of first instance that heard the cases of passengers from China seeking to enter the Philippines without the requisite documentation, and in the boards of special inquiry it was judicially acceptable to assess a person on the basis of appearance to determine claims of identity based on age [e.g., Tan Beko in SCP 1914; Jose Felipe Braca in SCP 1919d] as well as ethnic identity [e. g., Lim Yiong in SCP 1919a].

If we set aside ethnic self-identification as a determining factor, it becomes clear that what were most pertinent to the Supreme Court’s decisions were the concerned persons’ place of birth and domicile in the Philippines, especially before the age of majority for those who had lived overseas for a time. In the court’s view, “the effect of the earlier Spanish laws was to make a child born in the Philippines of alien parents a Spanish subject” [Peck 1965: 464] and therefore covered by the citizenship clause of the 1902 Philippine Bill. In a decision reached in 1910, “the Supreme Court expressed the view that a Chinese person who had acquired a residence and permanent domicile in the Philippines during the period prior to the effective date of the Civil Code had the same rights as any nationalized citizen” [ibid.: n. 33]. This view was also pertinent in the court’s assessment of the petitioners’ fathers. In other words, the court did not wield race or ethnicity to discriminate against persons seeking Philippine citizenship.

The history of jus soli citizenship is traced to the case of Go Siaco, who was born in Pampanga on 8 September 1876, the legitimate son of a Chinese father and Filipina mother. He left the Philippines in 1892, but returned permanently in 1896 [SCP 1909: 491]. In July 1908 Go was arrested, brought before a justice of the peace, and remitted to the Court of First Instance of Tarlac for not possessing a “certificate of registration” as a laborer, which Act 702 of the Philippine Commission required. The lower court’s judgment, issued in September 1908, ordered his deportation [ibid.]. The case was elevated to the Supreme Court, not to decide on citizenship but on Go’s request to post bail, which the Supreme Court granted on 14 January 1909 [ibid.: 496]. In rendering that decision, the court noted that Go “was born in this country, has lived here for more than 35 years and is now living here with his mother, a native of the Islands” [ibid.]. When the Supreme Court finally decided the merits of the case on 1 September 1911, it stated simply that the Chinese Registration Act was not applicable to Go Siaco [SCP 1912b: 582–583]. In 1914 the solicitor-general observed, “when this case is referred to in subsequent cases, the Court takes it as a matter of fact that Go-Siaco was held to be a citizen of the Philippine Islands.”[38]

The Supreme Court’s first clear enunciation of jus soli citizenship was made in the case of Benito Muñoz, who was born in Camalig, Albay, on 17 January 1880. Muñoz was denied admission in January 1911 as he returned to the Philippines from China, where his Chinese father and Filipina mother had sent him when he was 11 years old.[39] Muñoz, who asserted he was a “native and citizen” of the Philippines, had “presented satisfactory proof that he would have returned sooner to the Philippine Islands had it not been for certain financial difficulties, and that he had never intended to expatriate himself and had never taken any active steps to that end” [SCP 1912a: 496–497]. The Supreme Court ruled on 23 November 1911 that Muñoz was a Philippine citizen, declaring that it had already held in the case of Go Siaco “that a male person born in the Philippine Islands, of a Filipino mother and Chinese father, said father being domiciled with his permanent home in the Philippine Islands and subject to the jurisdiction of the government thereof, is, prima facie, a citizen of the Philippine Islands” [ibid.]. The court also emphasized that Muñoz, who stayed in China for some twenty years until he was 31 years old, had the “honest” intention to return to the Philippines (“the animus revertendi existed”) “to make it his permanent home and country” but “the return was prevented by circumstances over which the applicant had no control,” conditions that did not forfeit his Philippine citizenship [ibid.: 498].[40]

Tranquilino Roa, who was born in Luculan, Mindanao, on 6 July 1889, was similarly denied entry as he returned to the Philippines from China in October 1910. Roa’s father was named as Basilio Roa Uy Tiong Co, “a native of China,” while his mother was Basilia Rodriguez, a “native of this country” [SCP 1913a: 317]. Roa’s father went to China in 1895 and died there about five years later in 1900; subsequently his mother sent him to China to study—“and always with the intention of returning” to the Philippines—which he did in 1910 when he was “a few days under 21 years old and 3 months of age” [ibid.]. The court emphasized that “From the date of his birth to the time he returned to this country he had never in a legal sense changed his domicile. Aminor cannot change his own domicile” [ibid.: 337]. In addition to stressing Roa’s right to “reënter the land of his birth,” the court also argued that Roa followed “the nationality” of his mother, who reacquired her Philippine citizenship after her husband’s death, which occurred prior to Roa’s departure for China [ibid.: 340–341]. In its decision of 30 October 1912 the Supreme Court declared Roa “a citizen of the Philippine Islands on July 1, 1902, and never having expatriated himself, he still remains a citizen of this country” [ibid.: 341].[41]

Also denied admission as he landed in Manila from China in October 1909 was Santiago Vañó Uy Tat Tong, who was born in Cebu on 11 October 1892. His Filipina mother had been dead when, “by reason of ill health,” his father went to China, taking him and two younger sisters along while leaving his older brother in Cebu [SCP 1913b: 482]. After about six months the father died and “immediately” the three siblings returned to the Philippines. The board of special inquiry permitted Matilde Vañó, 15 years old, and Celestina Vañó, 10 years of age, to enter the country, but Santiago Vañó, who was 18, was not [ibid.: 481]. However, the Supreme Court, stressing his domicile and immediate family ties, noted that Santiago had “lived in the Islands ever since his birth, except for a period of about six months ... [that his older brother] was to look after him and his two sisters; that the only relatives which he has are residents of the Philippine Islands ... [and] that at the time he accompanied his father and sisters to China it was with the express intention of returning to the Philippine Islands” [ibid.: 482]. The court declared in its decision of 20 November 1912 that, “even though he is of Chinese descent,” Santiago Vañó was “a citizen of the Philippine Islands by virtue of his birth and residence” [ibid.: 483]. Invoking the Chinese Exclusion Law “for the purpose of keeping out of the Philippine Islands actual bona fide citizens” was “an abuse of authority” [ibid.].[42]

In 1914 the application for a passport by Cesareo V. Lim Keng In, who was born in Davao on 13 February 1893 by a Chinese father and a “Moro-Chinese mestiza” mother, led the solicitor-general to review the previous cases and proffer the observation that in the cases mentioned above the persons concerned had been in China

temporarily, but with the intention of returning to the Philippine islands; that on the date of the Treaty of Paris they were all minors, but at the time of the passage of the Philippine Bill, some of them had attained majority. In none of the cases mentioned above has the Supreme Court discussed the nationality of the father. It seems that the Court only had in mind the fact that they (the fathers) were Chinese subjects lawfully married to Filipino women, with a permanent residence in these Islands, and some of them having acquired property.[43]

Permanent domicile in the Philippines was emphasized for both fathers and sons, in accordance with the citizenship clause of the 1902 Philippine Bill [Aguilar 2010: 217–219].

The appellant’s choice of the Philippines as one’s country upon reaching the age of majority was deemed crucial, following a rule adopted by the U. S. State Department (cited in Muñoz’s case) “to the effect that a continued residence abroad for three years, after the attainment of majority, produces a loss of citizenship, unless it is clearly proved that the animus revertendi existed” [SCP 1912a: 498].

The domiciliary principle was already evident when, on 21 March 1910, the Supreme Court rendered its decision on the case of Eugenio Pascual Lorenzo, who claimed birth in Santa Maria, Bulacan, on 19 June 1881 of a Filipina mother named Apolonia Pascual and a Chinese father named Marcelino Lorenzo Vy Ju [SCP 1910: 564–565]. Lorenzo said he left the Philippines when he was about 15 years old and remained in China until he was 34, but the proceedings of the board of special inquiry noted he could only speak Chinese [ibid.: 574], seemingly with no knowledge of Tagalog. Although the Supreme Court did not settle the question of Lorenzo’s birthplace, it opined that, assuming he was a Philippine citizen by birth, “his long residence in China” after reaching 21 years of age and admission that he had no plans to return to the Philippines until he sought entry on 7 April 1908 resulted in the forfeiture of Philippine citizenship [ibid.: 592].

The selection of country of residence upon reaching the age of majority was deemed as resolving the conflict of dual nationality, an acute point in the case of Victorino Lim Teco, who was born in Manila on 8 November 1885 of a Chinese father, Apolinario Lim Teco, and a mother, Lucia Tiangco, who “was born in the Philippine Islands of a Chinese mestizo father and mother, who were likewise born here” [SCP 1913c: 85]. Lucia Tiangco was never described as a native of the islands, and “foreign parentage” was ascribed to Victorino [ibid.: 86]. He went to China when he was 5 years old and remained there until he returned to Manila in October 1910 [ibid.: 85]. The court stated he was “a citizen by birth of the Philippine Islands” but China’s jus sanguinis also had a claim on his nationality [ibid.]. The court noted that, after the father’s death in Manila in 1900, his mother, two brothers, and one sister continued to reside in the Philippines. Victorino, too, had the “legal right to claim a domicile within the Philippine Islands” until he became of age, but after he turned 21 he continued to reside in China for another five years, which the court “regarded as a strong presumption of his purpose to become definitely identified with the body politic of his father’s country” [ibid.: 86, 88]. Based on the standard that a person born in the U. S. who was in a foreign country when he turned 21 could elect to be a U. S. citizen “by promptly returning” to the United States, the Supreme Court stated in its decision of 15 January 1913 that Victorino Lim Teco had “irrevocably lost” the right to choose Philippine citizenship “by his failure to exercise it within a reasonable time after becoming of age,” thus he was “no longer a citizen of the Philippine Islands” [ibid.: 89–90].[44]

In seeking to understand the mind of the Supreme Court, in relation to the passport application of Cesareo V. Lim Keng In, the solicitor-general turned to the decision in Roa vs. the Collector of Customs, where he found “the question fully discussed.”[45] Penned by Justice Grant Trent, the decision considered at length the Spanish Civil Code, the Fourteenth Amendment, the Treaty of Paris, the Philippine Bill of 1902, various decisions of the Supreme Court of the United States, and other legal instruments. It quoted and discussed at length the landmark case of Wong Kim Ark (1898), which, based on the Fourteenth Amendment, recognized the U. S. citizenship of a male laborer who was born in San Francisco in 1873 of Chinese parents, who were legal migrants, despite their ineligibility for naturalization.[46] It also advanced an interpretation that by Section 4 of the Philippine Bill “the doctrine or principle of citizenship by place of birth which prevails in the United States was extended to the Philippine Islands, but with limitations” [SCP 1913a: 333]. In the case at bar the court “insisted that as the appellant was born in the Philippine Islands he under Spanish law became a Spanish subject by reason of the place of his birth,” although his Spanish nationality was “suspended during his minority in the absence of a declaration on the part of his father” [ibid.: 337–338]. However, Roa could no longer acquire Spanish nationality as the U. S. had terminated Spanish rule by the time he reached his 21st birthday.

The decision asked rhetorically if it would be in conflict with any act of the U. S. Congress, “any provision of the Constitution, any doctrine enunciated by the Supreme Court of the United States or the general policy of the United States to now declare that the appellant is, by reason of the place of his birth, residence, the death of his father, the present nationality of his widowed mother, and his election, a citizen of the Philippine Islands?” [ibid.: 339] Under these circumstances the court argued that Section 4 of the Philippine Bill

must be read according to its spirit and intent .... It should be construed to conform to the well-settled governmental policy of the United States on the subject of citizenship. It is to be given that construction which best comports with the principles of reason and justice. This section declares that a certain class of inhabitants shall be citizens of the Philippine Islands. It does not declare that other inhabitants shall not be citizens. Neither does it declare that other inhabitants shall be deemed to be aliens to the Philippine Islands, and especially it does not declare that a person situated as is the appellant shall not be nor shall not elect to be a citizen of the country of his birth .... While it has been decided that the [U. S.] Constitution and acts of Congress do not apply ex propio vigore to this country, but that they must be expressly extended by Congress, nevertheless, some of the basic principles upon which the government of the United States rests and the greater part of the Bill of Rights, which protects the citizens of that country, have been extended to the Philippine Islands by the instructions of the President to the first Philippine Commission and the Philippine Bill.... Then to hold, after all of this has been done, that Congress intended by section 4 to declare the appellant is an alien and not entitled, under the circumstances, to reënter the land of his birth and become a citizen thereof, would be a holding contrary to the manifest intent of that body. That Congress did not so intend is irresistibly inferred from these facts. [ibid.: 339–340]

In thus deciding Roa’s Philippine citizenship, the Supreme Court sought to uphold “the principles of reason and justice” and considered the best of the American democratic tradition as in fact extended to the Philippines. The court summarized its decision in a subsequent case by stating: “In the case of Tranquilino Roa ... we held that persons born of Chinese fathers and Filipina mothers within the Philippine Islands are citizens thereof ...” [SCP 1913c: 85].

The court cited approvingly a previous U. S. Supreme Court decision that “no principle has been more repeatedly announced by the judicial tribunals of the country, and more constantly acted upon, than that the leaning, in questions of citizenship, should always be in favor of the claimant of it” [SCP 1913a: 338]. In this light, it is understandable that the Supreme Court of the Philippines espoused a highly personal and compassionate view of Roa’s case, asserting that to construe the Philippine Bill as preventing his return to the Philippines “would have the effect of excluding the appellant from his native country, from home and all that home means, from his mother, brothers, and sisters, and compel him to live in practically a strange country and among strange people” [ibid.]. In effect, the Supreme Court suggested that, in addition to birth in the territory and one’s decisive return to the land of birth, personal sentiments and affection and familial ties were implicated in a territorially anchored sense of political belonging.[47] In emotively emphasizing the right of the individual to enter the land of his birth, rejoin his family, rekindle ties, and live in a meaningful social environment, the court nowhere described nor painted Roa as “Chinese.” On the contrary, the court imputed upon Roa an alienation from China: “a strange country” with its “strange people.” Whether or not the court was correct in making such attribution, what was exemplary was its insistence on treating Roa as an individual person, refusing to subsume him under a label or category that it probably realized could easily be manipulated to excite blind passions.

In a decision rendered on 27 September 1917, the Supreme Court took a further step in applying the principle of jus soli to a person whose parents were both Chinese, made even more remarkable by the fact that the man was a laborer. Lim Bin alias Fermin V. C. Bio Guan was born in Manila in July 1882; when he was about 5 or 6 years of age his parents took him to China; he returned to Manila in 1898 as a minor “for the purpose of making the Philippine Islands his home” and since then had lived continuously in Manila [SCP 1919c: 925]. In the decision written by Justice Elias Finley Johnson, the court noted that Lim was a minor when the Treaty of Paris was concluded and when Act 702 of the Philippine Commission was issued. The court invoked the Fourteenth Amendment to determine Lim’s Philippine citizenship and his exemption from Act 702. Anticipating possible objections the decision declared, “While this conclusion may be in conflict with the political laws in force here under the Spanish sovereignty, we believe that it is in harmony with the spirit of the law of the United States” [ibid.: 926–927]. In concurring, Justice Malcolm argued that Lim’s parents were Spanish subjects under Spanish law, that both he and his father became citizens of the Philippine Islands based on the Treaty of Paris, and that on attaining majority he elected Philippine citizenship. Malcolm stressed, “Chinese descent did not change Lin Bim’s status” [ibid.: 928].[48]

The U. S. State Department: Arbiter of Spanish Subjecthood

Also in 1911, when the Supreme Court of the Philippines began to apply jus soli on the basis of American legal principles, the U. S. State Department in Washington, D. C., made a landmark decision on the passport application of Jose Velasco based on a retroactive application of Spanish law.[49] Jose Velasco was born in Manila on 15 September 1887 to parents both of whom were described as “natives” of China.[50] His father, Mariano Velasco, “had been domiciled in the Philippine Islands for more than 50 years prior to December 16, 1908,” the date when Jose filed his application for a passport. Although both Mariano and Jose were engaged in business and had built up “a large fortune” in the Philippines, neither the father nor the son had been “inscribed as a Chinese citizen, or upon the Spanish Registry for the purpose of originally establishing Spanish nationality,” indicating ambiguity in their status.[51] Both, however, had been baptized as Catholics.

The favorable decision in Velasco’s case rested on the interpretation that “the elder Velasco had acquired residence in the Islands under Law 3, Title II, Book 6 of the Novísima Recopilación.”[52] This law of 1870 identified thirteen different ways by which migrants could be considered residents within the Spanish realm, including naturalization, birth within the Spanish kingdom, conversion to Catholicism, acquisition of immovable property, marriage to a native woman, and being a householder for ten years within the realm.[53] Further, the decision pointed out that Article 2 of the Royal Decree of 17 November 1852 stated that “Foreigners who have obtained naturalization papers or acquired residence in accordance with the law are considered as Spaniards.”[54] This point was reiterated in the decree of 18 September 1870, which provided that “Foreigners acquiring naturalization papers or residence according to law in any town in the Spanish Provinces beyond the seas are considered as Spaniards.”[55] Thus the State Department regarded the elder Velasco’s legal residence in the Spanish Philippines as having made him a Spanish subject, a nationality he was thought to share with his son.[56] Moreover, unlike most cases brought to the Supreme Court, in this instance no mention of travel to China on the part of either Mariano or Jose was made. On the basis of Section 4 of the Philippine Bill of 1902, on 11 September 1911 “the Department of State held that Jose Velasco was a citizen of the Philippine Islands.”[57]

Guided by this ruling, the governor-general’s office in Manila admitted to having “issued a number of passports to persons having the status of Velasco, upon showing to the satisfaction of this office that they complied with the provisions of the Novísima Recopilación”[58]—a statement that indicated several unnamed ethnic Chinese formalized their Philippine citizenship in this manner from 1911 until about 1920. The attorney general of the Philippine Islands used the same guidelines in deciding the case of Ty Kong Tin. Ty’s Chinese father had migrated to the Philippines in 1880 and had established a business firm there in 1885, during which time the attorney general in Manila regarded him to have been legally domiciled and therefore a Spanish subject. Ty, who was born in China on 10 March 1890, presumably of a Chinese mother, moved to the Philippines in April 1904 “where he has since resided.”[59] Ty’s application to register as a Philippine citizen, lodged in the U. S. consulate in Amoy, China, probably to ensure his readmission to the Philippines, received the attorney general’s approval.

In reviewing Ty’s case, the State Department emphasized the importance of Spanish subjecthood, which was now deemed to be contingent upon an active gesture of applying for residence. Setting aside the Novísima Recopilación for not having been “extended and applied to the Philippine Islands,”[60] the State Department put emphasis on a royal order issued in 1841, which stipulated that a formal petition must be made and government approval granted, otherwise a sojourner could not be considered a resident. It also stressed Article 25 of the Spanish Civil Code of 1889, which required the renunciation of one’s former nationality before naturalization could be granted and the inscription of one’s Spanish nationality in a civil registry. However, this civil registry before which aliens could make their declaration of Spanish nationality was never established in the Philippines [Peck 1965: 465]. Nevertheless, the State Department emphasized the need for evidence of having sought Spanish nationality and receipt of a favorable decision on such application. Because Ty could not furnish evidence that his father had complied with the 1889 Civil Code and was a Spanish subject on 11 April 1899, as stipulated in Section 4 of the Philippine Bill of 1902, the State Department, in a decision reached in June 1920, reversed Manila’s recommendation on Ty’s case. Ty was also deemed not to have been a Spanish subject on that date, and accordingly was not considered a citizen of the Philippines.[61]

Along with Ty’s case, the State Department also rendered a negative decision on the case of Atanacio Fernandez. His father, Dionisio Fernandez, moved to the Philippines in 1875 and married a local woman in 1885, Atanacio, who was born in the Philippines in 1888, being one of their children. When he was 9 years old, Atanacio was taken to China by his father to attend school there until 1914, when he returned to the Philippines where he was domiciled. However, his father was officially registered in the Philippines as a Chinese subject and was said not to have applied for residence, and thus was deemed not to have complied with the royal order of 1841 as well as with Article 25 of the Spanish Civil Code. In December 1921 the State Department concluded: “Since it is the opinion of the Department that neither Atanacio Fernandez nor his father was a Spanish subject on April 11, 1899, Atanacio Fernandez cannot be considered a citizen of the Philippine Islands, and therefore is not entitled to a passport of this Government.”[62]

A case elevated to Washington, D. C., in 1922 concerned Domingo Batlle Hernandez Chua Chiacoco, who was born in the Philippines of a “Filipino” mother and a Chinese father. The family went to China where the father died while Hernandez was still a minor; both mother and son continued to reside in China for the boy’s education. The governor-general’s office in Manila reckoned that Hernandez followed the citizenship of his mother, who “reacquired her Filipino citizenship” after the death of her husband. In fact that office opined that Hernandez’s case was very similar to Roa’s “the only difference being that after the death of the father of Domingo Batlle Hernandez Domingo did not return with his Filipino mother to the Philippine Islands but continued to reside in China for the purpose of study, and did not return to this country until after he reached the age of majority.”[63] The governor-general’s office asserted that Hernandez “returned to his native country within a sufficient time after reaching majority” and, as such, “he was, and still is, a citizen of this country to all intents and purposes.”[64] It considered Hernandez to be a Philippine citizen also on the basis of the principle of jus soli, which the Philippine legislature had enacted and was embodied in the Administrative Code of 1917.[65] Against such position, the State Department held that Hernandez was not a Philippine citizen because his father was not a Spanish subject on 11 April 1899 and accordingly not entitled to Philippine citizenship under U. S. legislation.

In appealing the cases of Dionisio Fernandez and Domingo Batlle Hernandez Chua Chiacoco, the governor-general’s office in Manila stressed that the Supreme Court of the Philippines had been applying the principle of jus soli. It recalled the case of Santiago Vañó Uy Tat Tong as an unequivocal application of this principle. In overturning the decision of the customs authorities, the Supreme Court declared that Vañó was a citizen of the Philippines “by virtue of his birth and residence” and it did not matter that he was “of Chinese descent.”[66] In view of such clarity in applying jus soli, the governor-general’s office admitted that it was

placed in a somewhat difficult position in view of the conflicting decisions of the State Department and the Supreme Court of the Philippine Islands, the highest tribunal in this country, and as such its decision should at least be respected in order that harmony and coordination will exist among the different branches of this government.[67]

The “liberality with which the doctrine [of jus soli] was enunciated by the court”[68] and emulated by the governor-general’s office in the Philippines stood in marked contrast to the views in Washington, D. C. Amid such conflicting opinions, the governor-general’s office in Manila reported to the Bureau of Insular Affairs that

As the matter now stands we are forced to disregard the decision of the Supreme Court of these Islands in so far as citizenship is concerned out of deference to the opinion of the State Department, and as a result of this difference in opinion between the two departments above mentioned many Filipinos, who, according to the several decisions of the Supreme Court are Filipino citizens, will have to be denationalized, in accordance with the decision of the State Department.[69]

In reviewing these cases, the Office of the Judge Advocate General of the War Department arrived at the “conclusion that there is a real and fundamental conflict between the holdings of the State Department and the Philippine Courts,” ending with the statement that “The matter appears to be of sufficient importance to call for a re-examination of the entire question.”[70]

At this point the paper trail ends, and we are left with the question: Why did American authorities in the Philippines adopt a liberal interpretation of the law in contrast to the stringency of the metropole? Although immigration authorities and lower courts were not necessarily accommodating of persons arriving from China who claimed Philippine citizenship, the American justices of the Supreme Court, along with their Filipino colleagues in the Bench, exemplified liberality throughout the period of U. S. colonial rule. The case decisions indicate that they were drawing from the “activist” or “reformist” edge of the U. S. Supreme Court, exemplified in its March 1898 decision on Wong Kim Ark’s case that diametrically contradicted the prevailing public sentiment and anti-Sinicism that were fuelling the Chinese Exclusion Laws at the time. That decision demonstrated the high court’s relative autonomy as a social institution, and that “no matter how extensive congressional and executive power is in the fields of exclusion, deportation, and naturalization, jus soli operates independently and solely by the fact of birth within the jurisdiction of the country” [Glen 2007: 76]. The recency of the Wong Kim Ark decision—when the United States was in the cusp of taking over the Philippines—exerted a powerful jurisprudential influence on the justices of the Philippine Supreme Court, its invocation made all the more stark by the parallel exclusion laws that immigrants confronted in both the Philippines and the United States. The force of this jurisprudence moved justices in the Philippines to uphold “the principles of reason and justice” by insisting on the extension of the Fourteenth Amendment to the Philippines as the spirit of the law and thus contradicting the earlier stance of the U. S. Congress and the executive branch, particularly the Bureau of Insular Affairs of the War Department.

That jus soli was applied in large measure to cases involving children of Chinese fathers and Filipina mothers was the result of a statistical probability. Because there were very few Chinese women in the Philippines in the late nineteenth century and in the early part of the twentieth—they constituted a mere 1. 26 per cent of the total Chinese population in the Philippines in 1902 [Alejandrino 2010: 98]—Chinese men were most likely to marry local women and have children by them. Consequently the cases presented to the Supreme Court that led to the affirmation of jus soli citizenship, starting very clearly in 1912, were overwhelmingly those of children of mixed unions. When the case of Lim Bin, whose parents were both Chinese, faced the high court in 1917, all that was needed was to call upon precedents.

In the Philippines, moreover, the Supreme Court decisions were highly influential upon the executive branch, particularly the office of the governor-general as well as that of the solicitor-general—which could be due to the imperatives of maintaining coherence of the colonial state. It could also be that those American authorities in the Philippines were guided by the pragmatics of governance and realized the indispensability of the ethnic Chinese to the economic advancement of the Philippines, as the Spaniards had also realized during their time. As early as 1909 an American living in Iloilo lamented that the failure “to provide any means whereby an alien may become a citizen ... is anything but in accord with the political beliefs of the American people and entails a say that business and industry will never forge ahead unless adequately represented in the body of lawmakers.” Evidently referring to the ethnic Chinese, he argued for a naturalization law that would allow “nine-tenths of the businessmen, now aliens, [to be] admitted to citizenship.”[71] Perhaps, too, personal acquaintances, if not friendships, might have altered the perceptions and views of key American officials in the Philippines, making them see Chinese persons as individuals rather than as depersonalized members of an ethnic category.

Conversely, Filipino migration to the U. S. mainland began to climb in 1920 and Filipinos began to become objects of white American racism [Aguilar 2010: 221–225]. The bureaucracy in Washington, D. C., might not have shared those popular sentiments, but the retrospective application of Spanish law explicitly “in order to avoid opening the door to fraud”[72] was meant to enforce the letter of Section 4 of the Philippine Bill of 1902. This action harked back to the onset of American rule in the Philippines, which treated Filipinos as undeserving of U. S. citizenship while seeing the territory as a potential backdoor for Chinese to enter the U. S., hence the need to apply the U. S. Chinese Exclusion Laws in the Philippines [ibid.: 214–216]. Whatever the exact motivations might have been, American authorities in the executive branch of the Philippine government were predisposed to abide by the Philippine Supreme Court’s enforcement of the principle of jus soli.

Jus Sanguinis: Of “Blood” and “High Privilege”

The question of citizenship and national belonging began to acquire a distinct Filipino inflection as Filipinos took the helm of government during the Commonwealth period. To prepare for the official end of U. S. rule, a convention was held to draft what became the 1935 Philippine Constitution. If citizenship was not debated in Malolos, it was an important issue in the drafting of the 1935 charter.

A “second draft” of the citizenship provisions sought to introduce a limited form of jus soli by considering as Filipinos “All persons born in the Philippines of foreign parents provided they adopt Philippine citizenship within one year after attaining legal age” [Aruego 1936-37: 198]. Evidently patterned after judicial decisions, this proposal was “very vigorously debated” [ibid.: 210]. Those who supported jus soli took a cosmopolitan view and stressed that it was a “sound liberal national policy” [ibid.] as well as economically beneficial: As Delegate Conrado Benitez[73] emphasized during the debate,

There may be some who would say that foreigners migrate here and decide to become Filipinos purely because of economic reasons. Why, what is wrong with migration for economic reasons? Gentlemen, if you analyze the history of migration all over the world, from time immemorial, you will see that great nations have attained greatness because of migrations. People who migrate from their native countries and are willing to give up their old citizenship are the ones who are endowed with the valuable traits that we need in this country. [Escareal 1966: 445–446]

Despite the required election of Philippine citizenship once a person was of legal age, the proposal was defeated because of “the feeling of fear among many members of the Convention that the policy enunciated by this precept might prove prejudicial to the economic interests of the country” [Aruego 1936–37: 211]. For instance, Delegate Miguel Cuaderno[74] stressed that the “national patrimony” might be lost to those who would exploit this provision:

a child without a drop of Filipino blood in his veins can, at the age of twenty-one, make himself appear that he selects Filipino citizenship perhaps for economic reasons, perhaps in order that he cannot be covered by the limitations as to the acquisition and enjoyment of national resources. Who knows if behind that idea of adopting local citizenship he is not mentally reserving the citizenship of his blood, his parents? [Escareal 1966: 444]

Thus the constitutional convention raised the specter of fraud, deceit, and thievery on the part of those of foreign parentage who would have been deemed citizens based on this proposition. One’s real political sentiments, it was believed, resided in the “blood,” which, conceived as acting independently, gave one a set of immutable personal as well as political characteristics. Citizenship was deemed “of his [or her] blood,” a view literally evoking jus sanguinis.

The discourse of blood citizenship so dominated the convention that even Delegate Jose Alejandrino, who by this time was probably disillusioned by Japan’s heightened militarism, also subscribed to blood citizenship, declaring “yo creo que no merece ser filipino el hombre que no tiene en sus venas una gota de sangre Filipina, no tiene educación filipina, no tiene sentimientos filipinos y que aun en nuestro país no quiere tratar con nosotros” (I believe a man without a drop of Filipino blood in his veins, without Filipino education, with no Filipino sentiments and who does not want to deal with us even if he is in our country does not deserve to be a Filipino) [ibid.: 422].

However, a fraction of “Filipino blood” in a mestizo was deemed sufficient to grant a concession. The 1935 Constitution recognized as citizens “those whose mothers are citizens of the Philippines, and, upon reaching the age of majority, elect Philippine citizenship”—defended by its proponents as “in keeping with the trend of modern constitutions, like those of Spain, the Irish Free State, Poland, and Czechoslovakia, and even the Malolos Constitution” [Aruego 1936–37: 208]. The objections arose from the fear that the “mother’s blood” could be overwhelmed, interestingly not by the father’s “foreign blood” but by socialization: such children “if reared under the influence and control of their foreign fathers, might not turn out to be devoted and loyal Filipino citizens” [ibid.]. Such children, it was also feared, could have conflicting dual political loyalties if de facto they had both the father’s and the mother’s nationality. The solution was found in the requirement—not imposed on those with Filipino fathers—to elect Philippine citizenship at the legal age, before which the child was not regarded a Filipino citizen, having “only an inchoate right to citizenship” [ibid.: 209]. With this provision the Supreme Court’s earlier favorable decision on Tan Chong—and by implication all previous cases on the Philippine citizenship of mestizos—was considered in harmony [SCP 1951: 308]. However, in the convention, the jurisprudence on jus soli was reinterpreted from a jus sanguinis perspective. During the debate on citizenship through the mother, Cuaderno alluded to Roa and other cases and suggested blood as compelling agency, thus erasing the Supreme Court’s emphasis on jus soli: “a child, who expresses his intention to retain his citizenship within the time specified by law, should not be denied the cry of his blood to come back to the place of his mother. In one case it was decided that even though the Chinese father was not married to the Philippine mother, their child nevertheless had a right to keep his Philippine citizenship because of jus sanguinis” [Escareal 1966: 426].[75]

Evidently, the theory of citizenship by blood was not followed consistently, given that routes to claim Philippine citizenship were made possible by “fractions of blood” and the constitution’s admission to citizenship of “those born in the Philippine Islands of foreign parents who, before the adoption of this Constitution, had been elected to public office in the Philippine Islands.” This latter provision, in fact, subscribed to an extremely restricted form of jus soli, which was made contingent upon election to public office and only for cases prior to the adoption of the constitution. This odd provision was intended as an “accommodation” of Delegate Fermin G. Caram, a 46-year-old physician who was born in the Philippines of Syrian parents, had never been naturalized, but was elected a member of the provincial board of Iloilo [ibid.: 29, 204]. Despite strong opposition, this provision was passed because the convention in effect was held hostage: “the most persuasive argument that swayed the body” was the assertion that “should this provision not be approved, there would be the anomalous situation that the Constitution would be signed by one who was not a citizen of the Philippines” [ibid.].

Just as jus soli lost favor in the constitution making process, in the executive branch during the Commonwealth period jus sanguinis began to be asserted—although the judiciary at this time, certainly until 1941 as we have seen in Tan Chong’s case, held fast to jus soli. This situation sowed confusion among many ethnic Chinese. Of the individuals with Filipino mothers and non-Filipino fathers who could elect Philippine citizenship upon reaching the requisite age, Jensen [1975: 164] stated that “It is recorded that few have gone to make such a declaration, since the Philippine government by the principle of jus soli, took for granted that they were Philippine citizens.” We can only speculate that, in the postwar period, many of them (and their children) would discover they were not deemed Filipino citizens after all. In any event, during this interregnum, the Supreme Court (which had always been headed by a Filipino chief justice) was asserting one doctrine, while Filipino politicians and the executive department were advancing another.

For instance, Secretary of Justice Jose Abad Santos formulated a crucial ruling in 1939 that rendered Mariano Sy Jueco, who was born in the Philippines, a noncitizen. The facts in his case paralleled those of earlier cases in which Philippine citizenship was granted, but the justice secretary held a different opinion, asserting—and echoing the U. S. State Department—that, because his father was not a Spanish subject when Mariano was born in 1892 in Malabon, he could not be a Philippine citizen. “Nor did Mariano’s birth in these Islands make him a citizen of the Philippines.” Tellingly, the ruling concluded with the statement: “considering that citizenship being a high privilege, doubts concerning a grant of citizenship are generally resolved in favor of the government and against the claimant.”[76] The justice secretary, it seemed, had conveniently forgotten the rulings of the Supreme Court. In a tone that was worlds apart from the court’s ruling in Roa’s case, Abad Santos sidestepped the humanity of the person involved by invoking citizenship as a “high privilege.”

The tide of legal opinion was undergoing a sea change, which would culminate in 1947 when the Supreme Court of the independent Philippines closed Tan Chong’s case. First it argued against the court’s decision in the case of Roa, stating:

If all the native inhabitants residing in the Philippines on the 11th day of April 1899, regardless of their alien parentage, are citizens thereof, the amendatory Act of Congress of 23 March 1912 empowering the Philippine Legislature to provide by legislation for the acquisition of Filipino citizenship by those natives excluded from such citizenship by the original section 4 of the Philippine Bill, would be meaningless. [SCP 1954: 256]

The court then declaimed:

While birth is an important element of citizenship, it alone does not make a person a citizen of the country of his birth. Youth spent in the country; intimate and endearing association with the citizens among whom he lives; knowledge and pride of the country’s past; belief in the greatness and security of its institutions, in the loftiness of its ideals, and in the ability of the country’s government to protect him, his children, and his earthly possessions against perils from within and from without; and his readiness to defend the country against such perils, are some of the important elements that would make a person living in a country its citizen. Citizenship is a political status. The citizen must be proud of his citizenship. He should treasure and cherish it. [ibid.]

Despite these unquantifiable and hard-to-ascertain qualities (“pride of the country’s past; belief in the greatness and security of its institutions ...”), the court assumed that the “natural-born” would possess them inherently—a highly problematic assumption. At the same time, the ruling implied that “youth spent in the country” by those whose parents were not Filipino citizens seemed useless in instilling civic virtues. Thus, the myth of blood propelled the Philippine political system as it shifted to jus sanguinis. In 2009, with an attitude bred by decades of implementing jus sanguinis as if it were absolute truth, the Supreme Court no longer needed to mince words as in 1947 and so declared flatly that what transpired in the past was a “mistaken application of jus soli” [De Leon 2009: 2].

The sentiment that predominated in the 1935 Constitution ultimately bore fruit in 1947 in the Supreme Court’s landmark decision on Tan Chong’s case. Already foreshadowed in the constitutional convention debates, the Retail Trade Nationalization Act was passed into law in 1954, some seven years after Tan Chong. Subsequent generations of Philippine-born persons of Chinese, South Asian, and other foreign heritage would not be considered Filipino citizens, unless they underwent a very costly process of naturalization. At the 1972 Constitutional Convention attempts to reintroduce jus soli, even of a “qualified” sort, came to naught. The citizenship committee of that convention, in justifying why majority of the committee members, as its report stated, “were for retaining the nationalistic features of the present provision on citizenship,” extolled the idea of citizenship using the very same words of the Supreme Court reproduced above, albeit without attribution [Ang 1974: 197–198]. The committee’s report also raised anew the specter of deception, saying citizenship “should be zealously guarded against aliens who may want to take Philippine citizenship for purely economic advantage and convenience” [ibid.: 198]. Ironically it would take the authoritarian regime of Ferdinand Marcos—in view of the opening of diplomatic ties with the People’s Republic of China—to institute the “mass naturalization” of aliens in the Philippines in 1975,[77] opening the gate of citizenship to those persons that democratic processes had shunted.

Res Adjudicata as Saving Grace

Without engaging in profound casuistry, the Supreme Court jettisoned the principle of jus soli in 1947. The saving grace of that decision was its clear statement, following the doctrine of res adjudicata, that those on whom Filipino citizenship had been conferred judicially would not be divested and deprived of that citizenship [SCP 1954: 258]. Unstated was the derivative citizenship of their children, who thus would be treated as Filipino citizens and as natural-born Filipinos had they been born after the judicial decision. Tan Chong and others in similar position might have been barred from entering the gate of citizenship, but those who had passed through the gate, such as Go, Muñoz, Roa, Vañó, Lim, and others like them, were now irrevocably part of the fold.

Evidently the myth of blood is not unbendable. As long as legal hurdles are overcome, or a legal concession found (even through naturalization), and a person obtains Filipino citizenship, the law is blind to one’s past life. It is as if one is “born again” as a Filipino: the foreign blood undergoes transubstantiation and becomes Filipino blood, with all the putative traits believed as its natural concomitants. Children inherit this blood and its accompanying citizenship. This point helps to illumine the nature of laws on citizenship: these are far from absolute but rather subject to historic negotiations. This process occurs, as the history presented in this article demonstrates, even when the legal statutes remain the same, as it did in the course of American rule of the Philippines. The interpretation of the law, for sure, does not occur in a historical vacuum. The context shapes the sentiments that are brought to bear in deciding which laws apply and in rendering an interpretation of those laws.

At the same time, a pattern is discernible, at least for the period covered in this discussion. Advocates of the principle of jus soli take the spirit of the law and give it a liberal interpretation, a stance accompanied by political inclusiveness and sensitivity to the humanity of the persons concerned. In contrast, believing in the determinative power of blood to dictate political beliefs and practices, opponents of jus soli and exponents of jus sanguinis conjure the fear of economic usurpation that is allayed by putting the state above the individual and privileging an abstract ideal of citizenship over the mundane reality of personal lives. Blood leans to the letter, soil evokes the spirit of the law.

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1) A copy of Tan Chong vs. The Secretary of Labor [SCP 1954] is available online, http://www.uniset.ca/phil/tan_chong.pdf, accessed 9 June 2010.

2) Jus sanguinis remains the dominant principle even with the Citizenship Retention and Reacquisition Act of 2003, a de facto law on dual citizenship available only to natural-born Filipinos [cf. Cariño 2007].

3) The case decision on Tan Chong included the concurrent case of Lam Swee Sang who was born in Sulu on 8 May 1900 of a Chinese father and a Filipina mother; he had lived continuously in the country, and was married to a Filipina by whom he had three children [SCP 1954: 257]. In 1938 he filed in the Court of First Instance of Zamboanga a petition for naturalization, which the Supreme Court declared in its decision of 15 October 1941 as unnecessary because Lam was a Philippine citizen [ibid.: 251]. In 1947, along with Tan Chong, Lam was declared to be not a Philippine citizen, but his petition for naturalization was granted.

4) Julean H. Arnold, American Consul, to the Assistant Sec. of State, Amoy, China, 11 May 1909, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 71, File 370–221, p. 1.

5) In English translation, the Malolos Constitution reads:

“Art. 6. The following are Filipinos:

1. All persons born in the Philippine territory. A vessel of Philippine registry is considered, for this purpose, as part of Philippine territory.

2. Children of a Filipino father or mother, although born outside of the Philippines.

3. Foreigners who have obtained certificate of naturalization.

4. Those who, without such certificate, have acquired a domicile in any town within Philippine territory.

It is understood that domicile is acquired by uninterrupted residence for two years in any locality within Philippine territory, with an open abode and known occupation, and contributing to all the taxes imposed by the Nation.

The condition of being Filipino is lost in accordance with law.” [Guevara 1972: 89–90, 105–106]

6) Charles Magoon, Law Officer, Division of insular Affairs, to the Secretary of War, 24 June 1901, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 75, File 425–41, p. 3.

7) The 1889 Spanish Civil Code has been described as the final “culmination” of a “modern codification impulse” that began in 1812 “and coinciding with the Spanish Constitution of that year” [Rodriguez Ramos 1970: 723]. Interestingly, both the 1812 constitution and the 1889 civil code served as grounds of contention in the Spanish Philippines. In espousing assimilation the Propaganda Movement asserted that the natives of the Philippines ought to be treated as of equal standing as Spaniards for the former were as much ciudadanos españoles (Spanish citizens) as the latter.

8) In English translation, the Spanish Civil Code reads:

“Art. 17. The following are Spaniards:

1. Persons born in Spanish territory.

2. Children of a Spanish father or mother, even though they were born out of Spain.

3. Foreigners who may have obtained naturalization papers.

4. Those who, without such papers, may have acquired a domicile in any town in the Monarchy.” [Peck 1965: 464, n. 35]

9) Article 25 reads: “In order that foreigners who have obtained letters of naturalization or gained a residence in any place in the monarchy may enjoy Spanish nationality, they have to previously renounce their former nationality, swear to the constitution of the monarchy, and inscribe themselves as Spaniards in the civil registry.” Cited in Wilbur J. Carr, for the Secretary of State, to Algar E. Carleton, American consul, Amoy, China, Washington, D. C., 5 Nov. 1921, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 1085, File 26526–25-A, p. 9. This and other aspects of Spanish laws on citizenship would become contentious in cases involving ethnic Chinese, as will become apparent later in this discussion.

10) Indonesia’s revolutionary constitution of 1945 was similarly inclusive, but at the same time it differentiated and provided the grounds for marginalizing “those of other races (orang-orang bangsa lain)” [Aguilar 2001: 514].

11) I thank Caroline S. Hau for pointing this out to me.

12) The exempt classes included Chinese officials, teachers, students, merchants, and “travelers for curiosity or pleasure.”

13) Clark Alejandrino [2003: 48] argues that the application of the same Chinese Exclusion Law in the U. S. to the Philippines “resulted in even more Chinese merchants entering the Philippines, and allowed the Chinese to continue holding on to important sections of the economy.”

14) F. E. Green, Pres. of the American Chamber of Commerce of Manila, An appeal to Congress for the enactment of laws, allowing coolie labor to enter the Philippine Islands, 3 Jan. 1902, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 70, File 370-68; J. G. G. Bunuan, Pres. of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce, Manila, 18 Nov. 1902, US NARA RG 250, Entry 5, Box 70, File 370-89; Cu-Unjieng, Pres. of the Chinese Chamber of Commerce for the Philippine Islands, to the Hon. William H. Taft, Sec. of War, Manila, 29 Aug. 1905, US NARA RG 250, Entry 5, Box 70, File 370-127.

15) Petición de exclusión de los chinos en Filipinas, Isabelo de los Reyes, president of the Unión Obrera Democrática, to the U. S. President, Manila, 16 Aug. 1902, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 70, File 370-86.

16) Insular Collector of Customs to the Secretary of Finance and Justice, Manila, 25 Apr. 1908, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 71, File 370-195.

17) “The United States is equally committed to the doctrine that an independent State may tender citizenship to any or all persons upon such terms and conditions as it sees fit to adopt; and, in so doing, is not accountable to any other State.” This statement was made in relation to Spain, but was conveniently forgotten in relation to the Philippines. Charles Magoon, Law Officer, Division of insular Affairs, to the Secretary of War, 24 June 1901, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 75, File 425-41, p. 4.

18) At the time Alejandrino was about 46 years old, while Guevara was about 36 years old [cf. Aruego 1936–37: 25, 33].

19) “The Citizenship Bill According to General Alejandrino: Present Points of View,” translation of article that appeared in La Vanguardia, 25 Jan. 1916, US NARA, RG 350, Entry 5, Box 586, File 5507-A.

20) [ibid.].

21) “Actual Interesting Polemic on the Citizenship Law. Gen. Alejandrino Replies to His Worthy Adversary, Hon. Pedro Guevara, Assemblyman,” translation of article that appeared in La Vanguardia, 1 Feb. 1916, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 586, File 5507-A.

22) “The Citizenship Bill According to General Alejandrino ...” (See footnote 19)

23) “Actual Interesting Polemic on the Citizenship Law. Gen. Alejandrino Replies ...” (See footnote 21)

24) [ibid.].

25) “The Citizenship Bill According to General Alejandrino ....” Cognizant of the opportunism of his fellow native elites, Alejandrino [ibid.] presciently chided the legislators: “I also hope that they will not be the first ones to don kimonos, to eat with the hashi, and become a chorus for the Japanese” should Japan become the hegemonic power.

26) According to Mojares [2009: 6], “While Alejandrino lamented the imperialistic turn of Japanese pan-Asianism, he believed that the original, emancipative spirit of the idea remained valid and needed and had to be promoted by Asians.”

27) “Political Note: Statements of Delegate Guevarra [sic]. The Citizenship Bill,” translation of article that appeared in El Mercantil, 27 Jan. 1916, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 586, File 5507-A.

28) [ibid.].

29) “Intellectual Flashes: Some More About the Citizenship Bill. Delegate Guevara Answers Gen. Alejandrino,” translation of article that appeared in La Vanguardia, 3 Feb. 1916, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 586, File 5507-A.

30) [ibid.]. Note, however, that unlike the Chinese Exclusion Law the Japanese were not barred from migrating to the Philippines.

31) [ibid.].

32) “Anti-foreigner bills increase in the Philippines,” New York Herald Tribune, 30 Oct. 1931, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 842, File 15309-14. After Japanese nationals were excluded from entry to the United States in 1924, “would-be Japanese emigrants looked increasingly to the possibilities of settlement in the Philippines,” with the number of Japanese arrivals in 1925 jumping four times from the previous year’s figure, the official count of Japanese residents in the Philippines rising to 19,281 by 1931. To the frustration of the Japanese who since 1937 lobbied hard against its passage, the Philippine Assembly passed the 1940 Immigration Law, which imposed an annual quota of 500 persons, regardless of the country of origin—the result of U. S. pressure in the wake of Japan’s attack on China in July 1937, which ignited the Second Sino-Japanese War, and the fear that Japanese in the Philippine could damage its security [Goodman 1967]. From another vantage point, Tomas Fonacier [1949: 3] hailed this immigration law as bringing “to a close the epoch of Chinese exclusion policy.”

33) C. W. Franks, Secretary to the Gov.-Gen., to the Chief, Bureau of Insular Affairs, War Department, 15 June 1922 p. 4, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 1085, File 26526-28, p. 3.

34) Cited in [ibid.: 4].

35) [ibid.: 4–5].

36) The discussion of these cases is constrained by whatever information is found in the published decisions of the Supreme Court.

37) Apart from exceptional cases, the Supreme Court of the Philippines, as that of the United States, does not hear oral testimonies, according to Justice Maria Lourdes Sereno in a conversation held on 2 March 2011.

38) Solicitor-General to the Bureau of Insular Affairs, Manila, 17 June 1914, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 586, file 5507-49, p. 3.

39) Benito Muñoz’s father was identified as Antonio Muñoz Ting Jian Co, who was born in China but migrated to the Philippines when he was about 15 years old; he obtained permission from the Spanish government to reside in the Philippines, and became a successful merchant; he became a Roman Catholic when he was about 25 years old; twice married, his second wife, Antonia Nacional, “a native of the Philippine Islands,” was the mother of Benito [SCP 1912a: 495–496].

40) Muñoz’s case is cited in Solicitor-General to the Bureau of Insular Affairs, Manila, 17 June 1914, pp. 3–4, 8. Chu [2010: 337–342] also presents summaries of the cases of Muñoz, Yu Kiao, Roa, Lim Teco, Ong Tianse, and Cayetano and Marcelino Lim.

41) Roa’s case is cited in Solicitor-General to the Bureau of Insular Affairs, Manila, 17 June 1914, pp. 4–5.

42) Vañó’s case is cited in [ibid.: 5–6].

43) [ibid.: 7]. No document was encountered to show the resolution of Cesareo V. Lim Keng In’s application for a passport.

44) Lim Teco’s case is cited in [ibid.: 6].

45) [ibid.: 8].

46) The full text of United States v. Wong Kim Ark may be found at http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0169_0649_ZO.html, accessed 31 Mar. 2011. Six justices voted to recognize Wong’s U. S. citizenship against the dissent of Chief Justice Melville Fuller, who was joined by Justice John Harlan. Because of the birth of children of unauthorized migrants in the United States today, the U. S. Supreme Court is seen by some critics to have erred in applying the Fourteenth Amendment to Wong’s case [e.g., Wolverton 2010].

47) Thanks to Caroline S. Hau for underscoring this point to me.

48) Jensen [1975: 163] claimed that in 1917 “the Philippine Supreme Court ruled that a child born of Chinese parents in the Philippines, was a Filipino citizen,” an assertion cited by Chu [2010: 290]. Jensen cited a source from the Bureau of Insular Affairs dated 30 Aug. 1917, but did not cite the actual Supreme Court decision. The case was probably that of Lim Bin.

49) The recourse to Spanish law was necessitated by Section 4 of the Philippine Bill, which crafted Philippine citizenship as the replacement for Spanish subjecthood. Prior to its passage, however, Spain was blamed for the unsettled political status of the inhabitants of Cuba, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico [Aguilar 2010: 208].

50) Memorandum of J. A. Hull, Acting Judge Advocate General, to the Chief of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, Washington, D. C., 13 June 1922, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 1085, File 26526-27, p. 1.

51) [ibid.].

52) [ibid.: 2].

53) This section of the Novísima Recopilación is cited in full in Wilbur J. Carr, for the Secretary of State, to Algar E. Carleton, American consul, Amoy, China, Washington, D. C., 5 Nov. 1921, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 1085, File 26526-25-A, p. 4.

54) Cited in [ibid.: 3].

55) Cited in [ibid.: 4].

56) Memorandum of J. A. Hull, Acting Judge Advocate General, to the Chief of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, p. 2.

57) [ibid.: 1].

58) C. W. Franks, Secretary to the Governor-General, to the Chief, Bureau of Insular Affairs, War Department, 21 Mar. 1922, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 1085, File 26526-26, p. 1.

59) Wilbur J. Carr, for the Secretary of State, to Algar E. Carleton, Esquire, American Consul, Amoy, China 5 Nov. 1921, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 1085, File 26526-25A, pp. 1–2.

60) C. W. Franks, Secretary to the Governor-General, to the Chief, Bureau of Insular Affairs, War Department, 21 Mar. 1992, p. 1.

61) [ibid.: 9–10].

62) Cited in Memorandum of J. A. Hull, Acting Judge Advocate General, to the Chief of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, p. 3.

63) C. W. Franks, Secretary to the Governor-General, to the Chief, Bureau of Insular Affairs, War Department, 15 June 1922, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 1085, File 26526-28, p. 2.

64) [ibid.].

65) [ibid.: 2–4].

66) C. W. Franks, Secretary to the Governor-General, to the Chief, Bureau of Insular Affairs, War Department, 21 Mar. 1992, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 1085, File 26526-26, pp. 2–3.

67) [ibid.: 3–4].

68) Solicitor-General to the Bureau of Insular Affairs, Manila, 17 June 1914, p. 14.

69) C. W. Franks, Secretary to the Governor-General, to the Chief, Bureau of Insular Affairs, War Department, 15 June 1922, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 1085, File 26526-28, p. 5.

70) Memorandum of J. A. Hull, Acting Judge Advocate General, to the Chief of the Bureau of Insular Affairs, p. 4.

71) “Wanted: Naturalization laws in the Philippines,” Arvid E. Gillquist, Iloilo, Panay, Philippine Islands 6 Jan. 1909, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 628, File 10968-7.

72) Wilbur J. Carr, for the Secretary of State, to Algar E. Carleton, American consul, Amoy, China, Washington, D. C., 5 Nov. 1921, p. 6.

73) At the time of the constitutional convention, Conrado Benitez from Laguna Province was 46 years old and had served as dean of the College of Liberal Arts of the University of the Philippines (U. P.) and dean of the U. P.’s College of Business Administration; he was also a former editor of Philippines Herald [Aruego 1936–37: 27].

74) Miguel Cuaderno from the Province of Rizal was 44 years old; he was a lawyer and a banker, having held the post of vice-president of the Philippine National Bank [ibid.: 31].

75) See the case of the brothers Cayetano Lim and Marciano Lim in SCP [1919b].

76) “Santos ruling on citizenship is held vital: Secretary says real estate man born here of Chinese father and Filipino mother is not a Filipino,” Tribune, 8 Nov. 1939, US NARA RG 350, Entry 5, Box 586, File 5507-A-1.

77) Marcos’s 1975 edict has borne fruit in the Administrative Naturalization Law of 2000 (RA 9139). Rather than requiring a court case, an application for naturalization can be lodged at the Office of the Solicitor General.

Remaindered Life of Citizen-Man, Medium of Democracy

Neferti X. M. Tadiar*

* Department of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University, NY 10027

e-mail: ntadiar@barnard. edu

Abstract

The widely-lauded progressive achievements of U. S. colonialism in the Philippines during the early decades of the twentieth century included the installation of modern technologies of public sanitation, mass transportation, communication and education as necessary conditions of a developing democracy and its underlying humanism. This article discusses how emergent media of communication established under U. S. colonial rule contributed to the implementing of universal standards of human life and experience towards the formation of citizen-man, as the currency and code required for Filipinos’ political self-rule. I analyze the reorganization of perceptual and subjective forms entailed by U. S. imperial forms of governmentality, including the gender and race effects of social accommodations to the protocols of personhood of citizen-man, through the media apparatuses of literature, photography, and radio. Finally, I examine other modes of sensorial experience and perceptibility and forms of human and social life, which are remaindered, devalued and/or rendered illegible in the reconfiguration of natives according to the normative ideals and structures of liberal democracy, in order to expand the parameters of our understanding of the relation between social media and democracy.

Keywords: Philippine education, U. S. imperialism, democracy, media technologies, humanization

In the mid-1960s, as a vigorous anti-imperialist nationalist movement gained ground in public debates over the direction of political, economic and cultural life in the Philippines, the historian Renato Constantino strongly criticized the nation’s existing educational system and its role in creating and maintaining the conditions of neocolonialism [Constantino 1975]. Constantino’s influential essay, “The Miseducation of the Filipino,” argued that, from its inception under U. S. colonial occupation at the turn of the twentieth century, the educational system in the Philippines was a weapon of colonial conquest, an instrument of the colonial policy of pacification, serving not only to defeat the Filipino nationalism that had just succeeded in overthrowing the earlier colonial power of Spain but also, and more lastingly, to inculcate ideas, attitudes and values that have kept the Filipino people in a chronic state of cultural self-alienation, political apathy, ideological captivity, and, consequently, in continuing political and economic subordination to the interests of its former colonizer. Constantino identified the decision to use English as the medium of instruction as “the master stroke” in U. S. colonial educational strategy. As he wrote:

English became the wedge that separated Filipinos from their past and later was to separate educated Filipinos from the masses of their countrymen. English introduced the Filipinos to a strange new world. With American textbooks, Filipinos started learning not only a new language but also a new way of life, alien to their traditions and yet a caricature of their model. [Constantino 1975: 18]

Ostensibly introduced as the language of democracy through which natives could imbibe the egalitarianism of “the American way of life,” English had in fact become “a barrier to democracy,” proving to be an impediment to the development of the broad communication and understanding and independent thinking that would produce a citizenry capable of achieving truly sovereign nationhood. Consonant with ideas about cultural imperialism then circulating in the decolonizing world, Constantino deplored the colonial educational system on the basis of its transplantation of an alien language and alien political institutions that effectively foreclosed “the evolution of native democratic ideas and institutions”[ibid.: 22].[1] Yet he held on to the foundational premise of this system that the goal of education was “the making of man,” in this case “the Filipino,” as citizen, who could meet the civic requirements and obligations of an independent democracy.

While in the succeeding decades ideas of cultural imperialism fell largely into disrepute within U. S. academia, since the unilateral wars of aggression of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, issues of U. S. imperialism and democracy have once again returned to the fore of public debate (though, given the transformed global context within which they are raised today, with no doubt altered political significance). Despite its seeming distance from this global present, Constantino’s essay frames the same concerns in ways that seem to me to remain relevant for us. Articulating the role of education, and particularly English, as a medium for “the making of man” and the introduction of “a new way of life,” Constantino broaches the importance of the mediatic (and not merely ideological) agency of education, language, as well as other communicative technologies (he mentions news, films, comics, press services, “western cultural materials”) not only in the production of hegemonic forms of subjective and social life, but also in the potential realization of a more substantive, liberatory form of democracy (“the full flowering of democracy”) than that exemplified by the formal democracy of independent Philippines. In doing so, he leads us to ask, what kinds of mediated social relations and subjectivities does the citizen-subject of democracy entail? How did negotiation with the emergent media apparatuses of imperial governmentality transform people’s shared affective and perceptual sensibilities, their senses of bodily selfhood and social relations? What forms of subjectivity, feeling, sensorial experience, and sociality are displaced and devalued, in a word, remaindered, in the process of Filipino social accommodation to imperial protocols of social and subjective life? And finally how do we understand such remaindered forms of life in relation to the question of an unfulfilled potential for democracy?

Values of Citizenship and Literature

In The Junior Citizen in the Commonwealth, an elementary textbook written by Filipino educators and published in 1937, we are introduced to the political, civic and human ideals propagated under U. S. colonial tutelage through a father’s instruction of his children in the duties and responsibilities of citizenship within the home [Fernandez and Carreon 1937]. From this domestic, paternal instruction, we learn first of all that national citizenship is the highest and most indispensable good. In the chapter, “Why It Is Bad Not To Have a Country,” Mr. Santos, the paternal figure, recounts to his son a story written in 1863 by an American patriot, Edward E. Hale, about the life-long misfortune of a man who betrays and disowns his country. The moral of the story, the father concludes, is “A man cannot live happily without a country any more than a child can live happily without a home”[ibid.: 27]. Represented in the permanent exile suffered by “the man without a country,” alienation from the land of one’s birth is an intrinsic evil that is at once the crime and its punishment. Therefore, one should be ready to give up one’s life rather than to give up one’s country.

“But what in our country is worth loving, living, and dying for?” the junior citizen asks his father. The father responds: “In the first place, it is the home of your father, mother, brother, sister, friends and all who are dear to you and to us all. In the second place, there are many things that our country gives us which cannot be paid for in terms of money. In the third place, there are many things in our country that we are proud to show to other people” [ibid.: 36]. In the father’s more elaborated answer to the question of patriotic sacrifice, we have a digest of some of the central socio-philosophical precepts that the commonwealth was to instill among Filipinos in their training for eventual citizenship under a democracy. On the one hand, we have a conception of one’s “country” as a form of inviolable belonging composed of indissoluble links tying together territory, natality, land, home, and relations of kinship and friendship. On the other hand, we have a conception of the value of one’s country (“worth loving, living, and dying for”) as composed of both the inalienable value and the exchange value of its nature, both human and non-human. The inalienable value of a country’s non-human nature is encapsulated by its comparative beauty, which is attested to by the admiration of people from other lands, and the comparative comfort of its agreeable climate. The inalienable value of a country’s human nature can be found in the degree of civilization and freedom achieved by its people, with the freedom of its people distinguished from independence as a nation and defined by liberal tenets of individual freedom and equality under the rule of modern, secular law.[2] Its exchange value is embodied in the potential wealth of its natural resources: “vast forests which contain some of the most valuable trees in the world... rich mines of gold, sulphur, coal, and many other minerals. It has millions of hectares of land that could be worked and cultivated” [ibid.: 39].

Insofar as work is the condition for the realization of this wealth, it becomes the paramount obligation of citizenship. Work becomes a form of service that one renders out of a prior debt to one’s government, for the blessings of education, infrastructure, public health, and law and order, and to one’s ancestors, whose continuous labor has yielded the wealth of cleared and cultivatable lands, churches and homes, and who have passed on native skills and knowledge. The value of work determines one’s value as a citizen. Hence the disparagement of “worthless citizens” as those with no regular occupation: “Some of them work only a few days each month. Many are lazy and shiftless. Some are gamblers and drunkards. All such citizens are undesirable. They are a source of poverty and a danger to our country. A nation of loafers and vicious people cannot become great, nor prosperous” [ibid.: 5].

I have dwelt on these formal ideals of citizenship explicitly articulated as the new values of imperial democracy because they express what I see as the organizing perceptual principles or precepts of that apparatus called Philippine literature in English, and best exemplified in early works of commonwealth literature. By apparatus, I refer less to Louis Althusser’s concept of Ideological State Apparatuses than to Vilém Flusser’s concept, which designates the black box programming the production of objects of information. Flusser’s concept refers to the apparatus of photography as a form of computational thinking or artificial intelligence encoded in the hardware or “extended matter” of the camera. For Flusser, “the programs of apparatuses consist of symbols. Functioning therefore means playing with symbols and combining them” [Flusser 2000: 38]. While Flusser doesn’t consider literature as an apparatus, and only resorts to the anachronistic example of writers serving as functionaries of the apparatus “language” as merely an analogical illustration of apparatuses proper (which emerge with the production of technical images), my own thinking about literature and literary texts within a broader history of media and communicative technologies finds Flusser’s concept very helpful. As he defines it, “It is a complex plaything, so complex that those playing with it are not able to get to the bottom of it; its game consists of combinations of the symbols contained within its program; at the same time this program was installed by a metaprogram and the game results in further programs; whereas fully automated apparatuses can do without human intervention, many apparatuses require the human being as a player and a functionary” [ibid.: 31].

A mediatic understanding of literature as apparatus and the writer as player and functionary is of course the antithesis of literature as it becomes defined or programmed under U. S. tutelage as the cultural achievement of a people, the very proof and vehicle of their humanity. As the writer Federico Mangahas proclaimed in 1940 at a conference celebrating the achievement of Philippine literature under the Commonwealth,

[Literature] gets the first choice as medium for immortality; the human race at large has learned to look upon it with uncommon respect and even reverence because, as biography of the human spirit, literature insures the continuance and progress of man towards the fruitful but elusive ideal of perfection and fulfillment. In no epoch of Philippine history is that spirit more aggressive, vital and vitalizing than today. [Mangahas 1973: vii]

The precept of an aggressive, vital and vitalizing spirit as the defining content of literature and “real writers” is, I would argue, precisely the metacategory through which the players and functionaries of literature produce their particular “works” or objects.[3] Put differently, that spirit, which would distinguish writing as “craft” from writing as “art,” is what Philippine literature under the commonwealth is programmed to produce, shaping the categories of attention and care through which writers represent and help to construct the world. We might say, this precept, broadly shared in the advanced Euro-American world into which Filipinos were to be benevolently assimilated, marks the reconfiguration of a shared sensible order that the institution of a national literature is tasked with carrying out.[4] That redistribution of the sensible (as Jacques Rancière defines primary aesthetics) is geared towards the reconfiguration of Filipinos’ mode of being human along the lines of ideal citizenship required by an emerging capitalist society modeled on the imperial liberal democracy of the United States.

Humanization: New Ideals of Life

Today, we witness renewed projects of “democratization” carried out through a civilizing globalizing war against terrorism as well as projects of political emancipation through the broadening of the “rule of law” of liberal democracies, which naturalize the violence of dominant everyday protocols of being human embedded in increasingly neoliberal, capitalist ways of life. This is the contemporary context of an ongoing process of “humanization,” whose longer colonial history I am interested in unraveling. To think about this longer colonial history of “humanization” on which contemporary projects of global governmentality depend, we have to see U. S. imperialism as more than simply a historical event of political-military occupation or a form of direct or indirect domination. We have to also understand it as a project of standardization of life forms, as a universalization of norms and their concomitant regimes of intelligibility. As we gleaned from the Junior Citizen textbook, these norms include the citizen as a subject of property, based on a conception of nature—specifically, land—as a thing bearing potential exchange value realizable through productive labor.

As an institution of governmentality, the system of mass education established by the U. S. colonizers was an apparatus for the generalization of the social bases of capitalist democracy through the “standardization” of life and the production of “the average” man. While education under Spanish colonialism had aimed to produce obedient subjects of religious doctrinal authority (and only later with the liberal reform of education in 1863, exemplary subjects of enlightened learning and civic as well as moral virtue), the educational system under U. S. imperialism sought to produce a broad citizenry capable of democratic self-government, which meant a new organizing conceit for its policies: “the masses.”[5] As the Filipino educator and statesman, Camilo Osias wrote, the Philippine Assembly’s passage of several Acts, which provided for the construction of schools in the rural areas, demonstrated the awareness of Philippine leaders that “the stability of democracy here in these Islands depends in a great measure upon the character and intelligence of the average people” [Osias 1921: 5]. The conception of “the greater part of the Philippine population” as “the average people” is intertwined with the emerging idea that democracy entails a certain raised “standard of life” among its citizenry as a condition of freedom. Reflecting an amalgamation of prevailing ideas on education in the U. S. that might be described as technocratic humanist, Osias understood the economic independence of individuals as an important component of the freedoms for which education was to train its pupils, a prerequisite for developing in them greater “social efficiency” and higher tastes that would ultimately lead to a richer, larger, better life [ibid.: 7–8].[6] He argued,“[I]n a community where the members are poor and contented, where the people are more or less indifferent to community needs and interests.... In such a community there is need of preaching the spirit of discontent. The people must be led to acquire higher tastes and a desire for better things. The standard of living must be raised” [ibid.: 29].[7] Discontent is the countermeasure to stagnation. It is the obverse of the progressive spirit that must be developed in the new citizen-subject, a spirit which is expressed in the demands and desires for better things and which enables life to be lived beyond the level of mere physical existence and mere family continuity.[8]

From its inception, the U. S. imperial project of education entailed tutelage in calibrating this equation between political ideals of citizenship and economic ideals of capitalist accumulation, despite shifts and differences in particular policies.[9] During the beginning of his tenure as Superintendent of the Philippine Commission from 1903–09, David P. Barrows, for example, proclaimed: “Material benefits can neither be taken advantage of nor enjoyed by a people illiterate and ignorant. Development of markets and of trade only accompany higher standards of life, and higher standards of life proceed nowhere so quickly as from an advance in education.”[10] While Barrows’ Jeffersonian educational model for developing those higher standards of life through a more literary (rather than industrial) “character-training” education was short-lived, what is important to note is the emergence of the central tenet around which educational projects as well as other national projects organized their efforts, which is the idea of particular “standards” of life as universal measure and norm by which native life could be restructured in order to transform and elevate “the average” people into proper subjects of democracy.[11] In this way, the U. S. imperial project of mass education, which other scholars have also described in terms of an “expansive, imperial project of sentimentalism” through which the full and complete extension of “humanity” to stigmatized others is facilitated [Wexler 2000: 101], can be understood as the metaprogram for the “humanization” of colonial peoples according to the protocols of subjectivity embedded in the practices of what Marx and Engels call “a definite mode of life” [Marx 1989]. In this metaprogram of “humanization,” the very figuration of valued life, and indeed, of Life itself, becomes essential.

In 1917, the Associate Justice of the Philippine Supreme Court, Charles Burke Elliott, already described the achievement of U. S. occupation in terms of introducing Filipinos to “new principles and ideals of life, and different conceptions of the essential legal and political rights of individuals,” a transplantation of a radically different civilizational culture that broke with the “continuity” of their history [Elliott 1917: i-ii]. As is well known, the so-called progressive achievements of American rule, which continue to be lauded today, included the installation of modern technologies of public sanitation, mass transportation, communication and education as necessary conditions of a developing democracy and its underlying norms of possessive individualism, value-productive labor, racialized citizenship, scientific-technocratic expertise and humanist culture.[12] These infrastructural technologies were tasked with producing not only the proper material and institutional environment for eventual political self-rule, but also the habits, behavior and sensibilities of proper citizen-subjects of capitalist democracy, that is, tasked with the shaping of the milieu of Filipinos as human beings with the potential for political self-rule. By “milieu,” I refer “not only to the medium that human beings are in, but equally to the medium that human being is” [Levitt 2008: 202]. Indeed, for Elliott, the challenge that American occupation had set for itself, “to give peace, order and justice to the country and prepare the natives, en masse, to manage their own affairs,” was an evolutionary process in which “new organs would be developed as new functions appeared,” that is, as the conditions necessary “to make good and efficient Filipinos” out of natives were created and set in place.

I approach literary works under U. S. colonial rule thus as practices of coding and mediating the relations constitutive of “citizen-man,” a globally emergent norm of being human as a privileged and compulsory form of social life, that would serve as the enabling medium of democracy. What mode of attention or care and what modality of inhabiting time constitute a valued form of life in these works?

In many ways, Life is itself the subject matter of many of these early works. Let us take for example Paz Marquez Benitez’s “Dead Stars,” the story that is proclaimed the birth of the Filipino short story in English [1925], the inaugural work of proper literature that marks the end of the literary historical period of imitation and apprentice. In this story, Life as love and the vitality of youth is imaged in its vanishing and closure. It is what escapes Alfredo Salazar, a social-climbing young man who allows the desires awakened in him by Julia Salas, a young woman identified with the simplicity of an unchanged small town (without a single American), to be compromised by his impulsive engagement to Esperanza and the proper, ordered life of the urban elite that marriage to her would bring. While Julia, “of a smooth rich brown with underlying tones of crimson which heightened the impression she gave of abounding vitality,” embodies this very life that he will lose, Alfredo, whose appearance “betokened little of exuberant masculinity,” embodies that “indolent ease” and “capitulation to what he recognized as irresistible forces of circumstances and of character” that constitute the condition of life’s loss and disappointment. Here, indolence and greed appear in contrast to patient, long-term work, with its cumulative sense of time realized in a future that is itself a form of happiness.

Why would men so mismanage their lives? Greed, he thought, was what ruined so many. Greed—the desire to crowd into a moment all the enjoyment it will hold, to squeeze from the hour all the emotion it will yield. Men commit themselves when but half-meaning to do so, sacrificing possible future fullness of ecstasy to the craving for immediate excitement. Greed—mortgaging the future for the sake of a present interesting reaction. Greed—forcing the hand of Time, or of Fate. [Benitez [1925] 1997: 2]

What we witness in this story is an attention to Life as fullness of meaning immanent in corporeal forms identified with the rural (indeed, a fetishisation of rural landscape and native corporeality as bearers of this hidden value, a fetishisation evident in the “local color” stories for which Manuel Arguilla is most famous).

Paradoxically, the sense or experience of the very diminishment or loss of life exemplified in the tragic or unhappy stories of some of these early writers, is already its affirmation in the subject, whose capacity to recognize and view this hidden value is precisely his defining human spirit. This diminishment or squelching of Life, as well as the reduction of the notion of lifetime to individual biographical time, is embodied in the physical appearance and emotional behavior of indolent, feckless men like Alfredo Salazar; or the meek and subservient masculinity of Mang Tonio in Casiano Calalang’s “Soft Clay” (“His lips had a way of twitching nervously that added to the impression of weakness shown by his less prominent chin.”), who forever regrets the destruction that his lack of courage wreaks on his life and the life of his true love; or the weak Gerardo Luna in another Paz Marquez Benitez’ story, “A Night in the Hills,” who chooses the comfort of a convenient remarriage in the terrifying face of the uncertainty broached by his own dreams of an “unlimited and unshackled” soul (embodied in the untamed wild of the rural forest).

Life is thus something that can be wasted, not lived; it becomes alienated as the measure and object of measure of things, of people, of time, with each of these (things, people, time) also serving as an object of aesthetic experience yielding the intangible value of meaning. Expressed by the passage of light of dead stars, the image of “the dear, dead loves of vanished youth,” time itself becomes the aestheticized object of Alfredo Salazar’s experience of loss. Like “the small key” which comes to stand in for a revelatory and transformative moment, an act of jealousy and betrayal expressive of a hidden but corrosive conflict between a husband and his second wife (“an incident [that] would always remain a shadow in their lives”) in Pat Latorena’s story of the same name, the aestheticized object bears the fullness of meaning not merely of the actions and the characters within the story but more importantly of the story as a whole—it encapsulates the prized “theme” that is the particular value of a work, the particular instantiation of the value of literature as a whole, which is the transcendent value of the ever-progressive human spirit that is Life itself.

Yabes calls this spirit “internal divine fire”—“It is that intangible something in an artist which, when transfused into a piece of work transforms it into an enduring, because living, art” [Yabes 1975: xxxi]. The decoding of meaning is thus the partaking of that “intangible something” that is the value of Life, for whom citizen-man is at once sower and reaper, writer and reader. What is human—what marks and makes the human, the process of subjectification that is the program of these literary works—is precisely this recognition of the portent of things, the immanent meaning embodied in material objects (including, exemplarily, the body), which, like the cow that suddenly makes an appearance at the end of Latorena’s story to embody a state of being “blissfully unaware” of such portent (“such things as a gnawing fear in the heart of a woman and a still smouldering resentment in a man’s”), animals do not have the capacity to register, much less fathom.

It is worth noting in these works, the new importance of the notion of “experience” as that fullness of meaning or “content” of existence that education was the very process of enriching and enlarging. This philosophy of education is articulated by Osias, who, besides being the first Filipino division superintendent of schools, was also the author of the 6-volume Philippine Reader textbook series, which served as instructional material for primary schools throughout the country for decades before. “Experience” is a form of “wealth” that can be passed down through the curriculum (“the sum total of individual and social experience worthy of transmission and perpetuation”), “through the agency of which these learners become freer, happier, and more efficient citizens” [Osias 1921: 58]. For Osias, following the pragmatist philosopher of education, John Dewey, the communication and transmission of such “wealth of experience” is a defining condition of democracy.[13]

Life is subject to progress; it has “value in itself beyond mere existence.”[14] Literature provides the software for the recognition of such value through the specific structure of “experience” that it crafts: experience here is precisely the interpretive, subjective event occasioned by the organically constructed aesthetic object. Here we must note the temporality of these stories’ constructive attention, which is developmental and cumulative, building to a revelatory or encapsulatory moment that then becomes the substance and effector of the meaning of the work, a form of attention yielding a definite return or symbolic value, no longer the product of a didactic or instrumental effort, but of an organic process. In contrast to the repetitive, formulaic verbal and performative gestures and movements and discontinuous, fragmented structure of popular literary-dramatic forms such as the komedya, whose aim, Resil Mojares argues, was the renewal of known ideas and sentiments rather than the discovery of new ones, the formal ideal for the short story, as articulated by Edgar Allan Poe and assiduously pursued by these writers is “an organic structure that creates a single unified impression or effect,” which required an efficiency or regulated economy of expression [Mojares 1985: 78].[15]

We might say that early Philippine writing in English, particularly the short story, exemplifies a striving towards the self-evidence of the modern, technical image and a transparency of the mediation of writing, towards the invisibility of the formal device. Charges of didacticism, sentimentality, verbosity and artifice, abounding in literary criticism up to the present moment, might on this view be seen as disciplining measures (or what Flusser refers to as human “feedback” for the system) against the exhibition of the instrumentality of the word and the extrinsic sources of value of literature, which this instrumentality betrays. Criticism of these qualities of flowery, didactic, sentimental expression deemed backward (and characteristic of outmoded writing as well as dramatic and musical arts of the Spanish era) place emphasis, in contrast, on “natural” expressions that do not betray their rhetorical status or for that matter the status of language and literature as media. And criticism of unrestrained, outbursts of emotion demonstrate the effort to ward off a violence that was everywhere the condition of the sentimental project of liberal humanization that this literature was tasked with carrying out.[16]

Status of the Image

What is upheld in the new literary striving is a new model of perception and experience, a new order of sensibility evident in the naturalist photographic depictions of the visible, physical surfaces of characters and their material surroundings. Such an order is marked by the production of representational objects as bearing a primarily symbolic (rather than, say, allegorical) significance (eg. dead stars, the small key), and the relegation and efficient containment of their potentially excessive, sensuous materiality to the symbolic work of synechdoche—or the creation of, as Paul de Man puts it, “the sensorial equivalence of a more general, ideal meaning” [de Man 1983: 190]. No longer reference to a metaphysical realm of significance to which representational objects correspond; instead an identity between matter and meaning, a continuity between material perception and symbolic imagination, symbol as part of the totality that it represents.

We have to view this transformed status of the representational object with respect to the changing character of the image in the context of the mass production and explosion of colonial photography and cinema at the turn of the twentieth century. Many scholars have written on the role of U. S. ethnological photographs in enacting the racializing dynamics of an imperial gaze. Vicente Rafael writes for example of the way such photographs, alongside the colonial census, serve as apparatuses of supervision and classification, technologies for producing natives as visible objects, made accessible to surveillance, measure, and control—“objects of transitional significance whose present is bound to fade into the past as they are wholly annexed to the civilizing embrace of the future” [Rafael 2000: 38]. Similarly, Laura Wexler shows how photographic images of natives in world’s fairs repeated and extended the construction and highlighting of differences from the unmarked norms of whiteness, “making material the abstract racial premise of the anthropological ‘display’” [Wexler 2000: 276–277]. And Amy Kaplan writes about early U. S. cinema’s exhibition and enactment of American global mobility as the spectacular correlative of imperial power itself [Kaplan 2005].

Photography did not, however, arrive in the Philippines with U. S. colonial rule. In fact, it first appeared in 1841, during late Spanish colonial rule. By the 1850s and 1860s portrait photography had become widespread among the “Filipino” elite classes as a medium of representation of social prestige and status [Guardiola 2008]. In concert with other scholars who note the continuity between early nineteenth century photography and artistic portraiture, Juan Guardiola suggests that, building on and secularizing a long representational tradition of Christian religious iconography, early photography during late Spanish rule exemplified an aestheticizing or “artistic” gaze, that is to say, a gaze that produced images of an enhanced and idealized, rather than naked, empirical, reality.[17] Portrait photography, particularly of the upper class, would often be enhanced with the use of Indian ink, pencil and watercolor, while more “ethnological” kinds of photographs of “natives” reflected folkloric conventions of social and natural “types” that can be seen as continuous with practices of representation within the literary genre of “costumbrismo”[18] (see Figs. 1 and 2).

Fig. 1 Digital Reproduction of Philippino Women Washing beneath a Banana Tree, an Oil Painting by C. W. Andrews

Source: [http://www.flickr.com/photos/rafael-minuesa/5302647947/] (accessed March 27, 2011)

Fig. 2 Digital Reproduction of Indigena de la Clase Rica, Photographic Print by Francisco von Camp.

Source: [http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fotograf%C3%ADa_en_Filipinas] (accessed March 23, 2011)

Note: “While Ilustraction Filipina benevolently aims to grant the native an aesthetic representation through his idealized harmony with a sublime and unexplored Filipino nature, the idealization itself contained a critique of both as lacking in civilization”[Blanco 2009: 167].

In each case, the production of the photographic image demonstrated a fidelity to the principles of representation of a world that the images sought to uphold, or to a prescribed order of proper sentiment, moral attitude, or philosophical regard with which they were to correspond. While undoubtedly the contradictions of liberal reforms in late Spanish colonial rule produced a context for the emergence of critical and antagonistic uses of prevailing genres of visual and literary representation, as evidenced by the paintings and writings of emergent Filipino nationalists in the late nineteenth century, a growing shift in the status of the image from expressive medium to reality artifact (that is, the technical image as evidentiary part of the reality it represents) becomes quite marked and arguably fully realized under U. S. imperialism.

U. S. imperial deployments of the photographic and cinematic image as technical reproduction of the objective reality of imperial power thus contrast sharply with the efforts of self-fashioning as well as gift practices that Rafael describes as characteristic of the production and circulation of the photographic image among Filipino nationalists in the nineteenth century [Rafael 1990] (see Fig. 3). In this context, the photographic image served as token of affection, commemorative object, proof and memory of love. While such practices would continue during the U. S. colonial period with the production and circulation of portrait photography in the early twentieth century, suggesting, as Rafael argues, “the existence of another world that existed within but was not wholly absorbed by colonial representation,”[19] a survey of the vast archive of photograph images “taken” and “captured” by amateur as well as professional photographers, with the development of “scientific,” anthropological, criminological and, later, snapshot photography, manifests a decidedly new perceptual sensibility reflected in the altered status of the image (see Figs. 4 and 5). As these photographs from the Dean Worcester collection show, the image became “evidence” of an objective reality that stood outside the process of production of the image, a mechanism of “truth”-revelation and surveillance, and the record-keeping and classifying activities of the normative, empiricist disciplines and institutions of the modern Euro-American order.[20]

Fig. 3 Jose Rizal, Marcelo H. del Pilar, Graciano Lopez Jaena

Source: [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Filipino_Ilustrados_Jose_Rizal_Marcelo_del_Pilar_Mariano_Ponce.jpg] (accessed March 27, 2011)

Note: “One could think about this photograph as part of a larger attempt at nationalist self-fashioning”[Rafael 1990: 605].

Fig. 4 Photograph from the Collection of Dean Worcester

Source: [Sinopoli and Fogelin 1998]

Fig. 5 Photograph from the Collection of Dean Worcester

Source: [Sinopoli and Fogelin 1998]

Within the reconfigured sensible order mediated by the democratized apparatuses of literature and photography under U. S. colonialism, to “author” the meaningful image that would capture something real (the elusive content of Life) would be to attain the status of that transparent imperial gaze, which Rafael argues is embodied in the ethnological photograph and the colonial census, and which, in an article on U. S. imperial nature photography, Donna Haraway argues is frozen in the hardware and logic of the camera and gun.[21] As in the aesthetic regime, which Rancière argues emerges in Europe in the nineteenth century, “the image is no longer the codified expression of thought or feeling.... It is a way in which things themselves speak and are silent” [Rancière 2007: 13]. The ideal of representation in commonwealth literature is this aspect of the technical image as “silent speech” or “the eloquence of the very thing that is silent, the capacity to exhibit signs written on a body, the marks directly imprinted by its history, which are more truthful than any discourse proffered by a mouth” [ibid.]. This ideal of “silent speech” is notably exemplified by one of Manuel Arguilla’s celebrated achievements as a short story writer, that is, his use of English as a vehicle of native dialect. In Arguilla’s stories, rather than an object or body, snippets of character dialogue act as the “things themselves [that] speak and are silent.” Representations of vernacular speech, like his “local color” representations of native landscape and bodies, are the marks of native life, bearing the immanent truth of its localized, and ultimately (racialized) national, humanity (see Figs. 6 and 7).

Fig. 6 Photograph from the Collection of Dean Worcester

Source: [Sinopoli and Fogelin 1998]

Fig. 7 Photograph from the Collection of Dean Worcester

Source: [Sinopoli and Fogelin 1998]

Note: The technical image as “silent speech”: “The capacity to exhibit signs written on a body, the marks directly imprinted by its history, which are more truthful than any discourse profferred by a mouth” [Rancière 2007: 13].

It is not surprising to find that Commonwealth stories’ approach to imagery and their realist aesthetics should appear vastly different from the social realism of Jose Rizal. Lucilla Hosillos notes that before his own discovery of “love of country and national consciousness,” and “under the influence of Flaubert, Anderson, and Hemingway, [Arguilla] had found Rizal ‘unbearably wordy, downright sentimental, embarrassingly inept, and inexcusably didactic’” [Hosillos 1984: 119]. In contrast to Rizal’s foregrounded rhetoric and authorial voice (the “flourishes” of direct address of the reader, the present tense frequently punctuating the proper past tense of the narrative, which Benedict Anderson [1998] shows to have been excised in Leon Ma. Guerrero’s English translation of Noli Me Tangere), Arguilla’s achievement would be precisely the transparency of language that would lend it to the conveyance of that difference of speech called dialect.[22] What Arguilla would later find to appreciate in Rizal—what he articulated as “the rediscovery of one’s native land,” and “the consciousness of a body of people weaving out of their separate and often clashing destinies the fabric of a national character”—would constitute the implicit program of Philippine literature, more generally, but it is in the representational craft of the short story where we can discern the new organizing perceptual rules that such a program entailed.

What is the principle of intelligibility or experientiability organizing these representations? Not simply a conception of the sovereign, possessive individual that is the substrate of liberal democracy, but more importantly the very form of value-abstraction intrinsic to the commodity. In the altered status of the aesthetic image as simultaneously matter and meaning, in the silent eloquence of things themselves, which short story writers strove to craft (Arguilla’s contribution to Philippine literature acknowledged as “his blending of fact and symbol, his creation of congruence of style and language and experience” [Hosillos 1984: 119]), we recognize the perceptual effects of the separation between abstract exchange-value and concrete use-value defining the commodity-form.[23]

The separation performed in this mode of symbolizing is crucial to the distanciation within the subject that the short story performs between the reflective self and his nature, a distanciation that Paul de Man argues is the structure of irony. Indeed, I would argue that the program of the short story is the performance of this structure of irony, which de Man reads in Baudelaire in terms of “dédoublement as the characteristic that sets apart a reflective activity, such as that of the philosopher, from the activity of the ordinary self caught in everyday concerns” [de Man 1983: 212]. Baudelaire’s description of the reflective self as “un homme qui ait acquis, par habitude, la force de se dédoubler rapidement et d’assister comme spectateur désinteressé aux phénomènes de son moi” articulates the subjectifying effect of this mode of symbolizing [quoted in ibid.: 211–212]. The “disinterested spectator” is constituted through the differentiation (alienation or separation) of the experiencing human self from the self caught in and as part of the (nonhuman) natural, empirical world. If irony is a synchronic structure, in which the process of distanciation between selves takes place in a single moment, the commonwealth short story distills this single moment in the instantaneity of the symbol.

The aesthetics of the commodity form, as a secularized, subjectifying relation to social power, thus becomes generalized as the principle for decoding social relations and individual behavior and for constructing meaningful experience, a hermeneutic or principle of intelligibility that was to apply more broadly to the world at large. Paradoxically, it is through the Filipinization of qualities and themes conveyed by the apparatus of “national literature” that a particular practice of abstraction is universalized and a colonial history of remaindering of alternative forms of life is extended.

Gender and Race Effects of “Freedom”: Citizen-Man

If the novel serves as a “modern technology of self-reflexivity” on the level of social identities, under imperial tutelage, the short story becomes a technology of “experience,” a technology of modes of perceptibility and sensibility for the humanist production of subjectivity. This emergent subjectivity is constituted as individual capacity through a mode of attention and care that seizes on an immanent meaningfulness and vitality that is shut down by a controlling sociality, which orders one’s existence into enervating or dead forms. Note the last line of Benitez’s “A Night in the Hills” in which the closure of the protagonist’s individual freedom is registered: “He felt, queerly, that something was closing above his head, and that whoever was closing it was rattling the keys.” The longing for freedom from social conventions that other women writers such as Angela Manalang Gloria also expressed, is in Benitez’s stories articulated through the construction of the individual male subject against an oppressive sociality that is gendered by the figures of women. Arguably entering the vocabulary of Philippine literature for the first time, “queer” marks the ambivalent effects of the gendered and racial entailments of that individual subject, citizen-man, as it becomes produced as the only site for the recognition and realization of an essential, natural freedom.[24] It signals the new conditions under which dominant U. S. gendered roles were being installed through institutions of governmentality such as the home economics educational programs which sutured private domestic life to a Jeffersonian domestic national economy and to an emerging international economic order.[25] Under these conditions, the challenges of freedom would have to be negotiated on the secular terrain of gendered, sexualized individual subjectivity, no longer on the mythical, even sacred, terrain of a shared social fate, on which revolutionary struggle had been waged.

If we understand racialization in terms of this program for the production of subjectivity rather than a visible mark of social difference, a code rather than a representation or a specific inscription, then the decoding of meaning through which one becomes this subject of freedom is the activation of a racial code. In the story above, what is “queerly felt”—a closing in, a caged feeling that is at once the recognition of one’s stymied, stunted freedom and the proof of one’s immanent, transcendent freedom—constitutes the condition and negative imperative of one’s underdeveloped humanity. This is the affective registration of that differentiation between the free self and the self of nature, a “splitting” that others have noted as constitutive of the colonial condition, which is also importantly a foreclosure of other gender and sexual relations and meanings.[26] The effect of personhood produced in these literary exercises is undoubtedly a racialized humanity though it remains submerged beneath the more legible inscription of race as discursive category of marked being (exhibited through skin color, behavior, demeanor, capacities). Yet the valorization of “brownness,” of “local color,” and ultimately of “culture” is not a deviation from a more pernicious, subterranean process of normalization. It is in fact the very technique of specification of humanity through which the universalization of the economic form of the human—the medium of liberal capitalist democracy, “citizen-man”—is achieved.

Remaindered Forms of Social Media

Despite its intermittent achievements, the work of commonwealth literature would produce imperfect, contradictory and surplus effects (never after all reaching the status and achievement of world literature, failing to register as having programmatic capacity, i.e., the creative capacity to alter or shape the software for the production of “man”). Meanwhile, other older as well as emergent kinds of media technologies—theater, radio and film—became spaces for both the refurbishing and capture of remaindered forms of sociality, sensual being, personhood and mediatic modes.

The citizen-making practices in the well-crafted short story in English can hence be contrasted to the practices of subjectivity and sociality enacted in these other media, including for example, the seditious plays, outlawed nationalist dramas which drew elements from the older popular and vernacular theatrical genres of the komedya, sinakulo, and sarsuwela. For Rafael, who counterposes these plays to the operation of the colonial census, they acted as a space of seditious sociality—practices of collectivity and social understanding that contested the sensibilities and social intelligences being carefully crafted through the media of imperial governmentality, by calling upon proclivities of behavior and sense, characterized in terms of mimicry, social indebtedness, and fated life, which were so racially denigrated by the new colonizers as a threat to their ideal freedoms.

While Philippine literature in English purveys a particular mode of abstraction attuned to the recognition of value, the seditious plays mobilized another mode of abstraction through the practice of allegory and emblematic naming. Using abstract nouns (“Suffering,” “Avarice”), allegorized and personified as social characters (Philippines, U. S. colonial government), this older “platform,” if you will, did not aim for a transparency of language, but rather foregrounded words, themselves made into objective agencies (proper names) as emblematic sites of collective sentiment and action. This older form of abstraction requires, as Rafael observes, “a way of conceiving the self as fated, and thereby obligated to the other and to a social order predicated on the circulation of mutual indebtedness” [Rafael 2000: 47]. Indeed, the forms of abstraction taught under the modern education system were to be the means of eradicating such backward forms of obligation and indebtedness, on which seditious plays relied for their social appeal. As the Superintendent of Education David P. Barrows (who subsequently became the ninth President of the University of California) exclaimed in 1904, “Two years of instruction in arithmetic given to every child will in a generation destroy that repellent peonage or bonded indebtedness that prevails throughout this country” [quoted in May 1984]. Against this desired mathematical (rational, cognitive) mode of abstraction, the older mode of abstraction mobilized by the seditious plays made use of, rather than disciplined, that Filipino penchant for mimicry so despised by the U. S. colonizers, and subsequently denigrated by nationalists, who both viewed this seemingly inordinate dependence on and openness to external stimuli for the making of one’s internal dispositions, this yielding, “immediate and sensuous relationship” to one’s surroundings, as the antithesis and defeat of autonomous sovereign agency.

The planned obsolescence of such forms of social mediation through the proper programming of education and literature did not however take place. Though not encoded and reified in the technical hardware of dominant media systems, these practices of coding and mediation glimpsed in the seditious plays and other outmoded media platforms can be seen to have migrated into other media technologies such as radio. Though radio was also geared towards the production of the communicative conditions of liberal democracy (in 1927 the services of the Radio Corporation of the Philippines was pronounced “equivalent to the service of thousands of schools, colleges, and universities” [The Independent Dec. 24 1927: 4]), the work of Elizabeth Enriquez [2009] shows that this apparatus also became the site for the expansion rather than the restriction of vernacular languages (which even during the time of Constantino was beginning to outpace English), the reinvention of the komedya and sarsuwela as “radio soap operas,” the spread of older musical forms such as the kundiman together with the spread of new forms such as jazz, and through these forms, the cultivation of other mediatic capacities thought to have been superseded. Beyond claims of cultural continuity, which tend to bolster an implicit, reified notion of national identity, whether in the service of apologist arguments for imperial “failure” or critical arguments for native “resistance,” or their opposite, i.e., claims of cultural discontinuity, which serve arguments disproving both, I see the development and movement of older genres of music and performance through emergent technologies not so much as expressions of some evolving substance called “culture,” attributable to a given set of people (defined geographically and racially/ethnically), but rather as an integral part of a more open, though no less specific, history of practices of social mediation (a social history of technologies) in their constitutive relation to dominant orders of social life.

Tracking older mediatic capacities in their migration and transformation across platforms allows us to see social struggle at the level of shifting sensorial and perceptual modes of being—that is, to see social struggle in the restructuring of selves and socialities, which is a constitutive part of the broader remaking of a dominant mode of life. It allows us to attend not only to those mediatic relations entailed by a new imperial order, but also to those that, despite being destined for obsolescence, persist in transformed ways or are newly innovated as tentative forms of living under new social conditions of exploitation. Not (yet or ever) reified and encoded in the hardware of mass technologies produced and distributed by capitalist enterprise or, in other words, not fully subsumed by capitalism, these other mediatic relations and capacities must nevertheless be viewed in close, even symbiotic, relation to those very emerging technologies of capitalist life that threaten to supersede them.

We might, in this context, read the imitative or mimetic capacities (observed as forms of “mimicry”) abundantly displayed in radio performances not simply in terms of colonial subordination and resistance (the terms in which mimicry has predominantly been discussed), but rather as a mode of reproducibility, a human media technology for the reproduction of art, performance, skills, know-how, looks, styles, and sounds. These mimetic capacities are deployed, in other words, to carry out new imperatives and possibilities of consumption in an age of “mechanical” or technological reproducibility though in a labor-intensive, rather than capital-intensive, form. Stephanie Ng writes indeed about the immense work of exacting imitations of other musical performers that present-day Filipino musicians in hotels and cruise ships around the world perform, whereby every inflection of the original singer is captured with an astonishingly high degree of accuracy. They do not only change their accents on stage, they also learn local songs in different Asian languages, demonstrating a linguistic virtuosity that is also a mediatic capacity.[27]

Radio becomes a space of enactment, transmission, and transformation of these mediatic capacities. Listening to an early radio recording of Katy de la Cruz singing “Planting Rice is Never Fun” in both its English translation and its Tagalog original, or German San Jose and Leonora Reyes meld two entirely different musical genres into a duet, “Halo-halo Blues,” one can hear the musical and linguistic transcoding practices of virtuosity displayed in these performances as mediatic capacities and sensibilities (of syncretism, synthesis, becoming other, sensuous play) that were to be displaced.

Vital Platforms of Techno-Social Reproducibility

To understand the “imitative” musical performances of these Filipino singers as actualizations of mediatic capacities might help us reflect more carefully on the role of Filipino jazz musicians coursing through East and Southeast Asia and other parts of the world from the late nineteenth century to the present and mediating different cultural negotiations with Western modernity. As Ng writes, by 1890, Filipinos were already widely-reputed as musicians throughout the region, performing in the first state brass bands and police bands in Malaya, in royal courts and nightclubs of Cambodia, in orchestras and dancehalls in French colonial Vietnam, and in the nightclubs of pre-revolution Shanghai (and subsequently British Hong Kong), as well as teachers and arrangers of music. In his own study of Filipino musicians in Hong Kong during the twentieth century, Lee Watkins shows that the bodily mimetic faculties for which the musicians are at once praised and denigrated are the means through which they negotiated their own passage into modernity and gained “admission to the global economy,” even as they played a pivotal role in the Western culture-infused development of the local popular music and entertainment industry [Watkins 2009: 79–84, 90].

Filipino musicians certainly wielded such abilities in both complicit and subversive ways—on the one hand sustaining colonial domination and authority through the emulation of colonial cultural repertoires and the dissemination of musical codes inherited from colonialism, and on the other hand transgressing the visuality of racial hierarchy and subverting hegemonic cultural practices through the ironic, humorous and carnivalesque qualities of their performance, which Watkins sees as a complex form of minstrelsy (“emulating and passing for the other through sound”) [ibid.: 76]. But what I find particularly noteworthy is the role that these mimetic capacities of Filipino musicians played in the new kind of communication infrastructure that Brian Larkin argues emerged as a crucially enabling means for the expansion of U. S. imperial power [Larkin 2010]. As “the first great transnational communications structure dominated by the United States,” cinema embodied the latter’s new decentralized mode of control as distinct from (and indeed challenging) the communicative infrastructure undergirding the older British Empire (and, I would add, that of the Spanish Empire). Cinema was a communications system that produced value not only as a material commodity but also as a generator and regulator of desires and affects that fed back into material production, a mechanism that brought “more and more widely disparate places into a single regime of distribution” [ibid.: 177]. Interestingly, migrant Filipino musicians in Hong Kong provided accompaniment for television stars and sound tracks for films as well as musical support for internationally touring U. S. stars (such as Sammy Davis Jr.), in this way serving as cost-reducing auxiliary and subsidiary components of this emergent global communication infrastructure and acting as the means of circulation of those very desires and affects that would aid in the formation of commodity cultures and the subjective protocols of capitalist life.[28]

Performing not only repertoires of U. S. popular music but also exact renditions of individual musical performances by popular U. S. singers, Filipino musicians were also low-cost versions of “original” performers and their recordings (somewhat like “pirated” CDs and DVDs in the current moment). While undoubtedly there were dimensions of their performances and of their broader social lives in general that exceeded the imperatives of the dominant mode of production, my argument here is less about the humanist question of their social agency conceived as resistance and/or assimilation to structures outside of their control (or for that matter social agency understood through a dialectic of self and other) than about the role of the informal cultivation of remaindered sensorial-perceptual mimetic faculties as low-cost communicative media technologies—technologies for the production and circulation of “immaterial” commodities.

While often denigrated as “original” musicians, migrant Filipino musicians were in broad demand for their abilities to bodily reproduce music from desired foreign sources, both as performers and arrangers. As Jum Sum Wong notes in his own study, “The musicianship of Filipinos was considered good and while they may have lacked originality their ability to play by ear had practical advantages. Their performing styles also displayed strong American and Spanish influences. They could finish a score for a medium sized orchestra within two or three hours. This was valuable given the demands of the industry in Hong Kong” [quoted in Watkins 2009: 83, emphasis mine]. In other words, it was their mimetic acoustic abilities to “play by ear”—bodily capacities not only of materially registering and performing (as well as notating) cultural musical codes other than their own, but also of aurally absorbing and vocally and instrumentally simulating (recording and replaying) very particular textures and qualities of sound upon hearing them—that were “practically” valued and exploited, and indeed effectively treated as technical capacities of analog reproduction. We can consider this mimetic work as a form of analog reproduction to the extent that the work of reproduction relies on the inscription of a material surface (in this case, the “ear” as well as the performing body) for the recording of the original and the “playback” of the copy. Like other analog technologies such as the camera, the phonograph, and the gramophone, “mimetically capacious” machines which Michael Taussig argues attest to the regeneration and refunctioning of the mimetic faculty in the age of technological reproducibility, Filipino performers were treated and served in the capacity of technical apparatuses of media, but without the capital investment in their production that other communicative technologies received in the context of increasing monopolization of media systems (in effect, making them much like third world, home-made technologies) [Taussig 1992].[29]

On this view, migrant Filipino musicians can be seen as enacting a form of mobility and facilitating a form of circulation that appear in contrast with, yet importantly participate in, the mobility and circulation enabled by and representative of communicative technologies of an expanding global capitalist modernity. Migrant musicians’ mobility continues to be viewed solely as the social effects of forces of an expansive movement that they are not an infrastructural part of. However, if we understand how they served in similar ways to and in tandem with the “mimetic machines” of the phonograph and the gramophone, we can also see how these musicians served as media of (re)production and media of circulation of desires and affects in an emergent global communication system. While these hegemonic desires and affects or codes of being may have issued from and ultimately profited the cultural industries of capital (feeding back into material production), they nevertheless also importantly depend on such “informal” (non-reified) social media for their circulation and, more, for their effective role in the generalization of the social bases of capital.

From a humanist perspective, it would be impossible to view migrant Filipino singers and musicians as media (rather than to see them simply as lesser musicians), precisely insofar as it is this kind of human being as medium (as tool) that continues to be the antithesis of the citizen-man capable of independent judgment. As an article written in 1938 in The Commonwealth Advocate proclaimed in its title, “The Function of Culture: Human Beings Are More Than Tools, Machines; They Are Human and Therefore Seek Culture,” the Humanities were indispensable to prevent the devolution of Filipino citizens into mere tools and machines, as they were considered wont to become under Spanish rule [Buenaventura 1938a: 25–28, 31].[30] Indeed, observing the results of the emphasis on the “rote,” machine-like memorization under the Spanish educational system, the first American superintendent of education Fred Atkinson disapprovingly remarked on “a tendency on the part of the Filipinos to give like phonographs what they had heard or read, and memorized, without seeming to have thought for themselves” [quoted in Robles 1984: 78, emphasis mine]. According to the advocates of citizen-man, such a tendency toward being a means or instrument of others on the part of the masses would make the latter “a travesty on democracy ... an anemic, enfeebled, exploited class ... undemocratic, inhuman, a standing menace to peace, law and order; a curse which all governments bent on the welfare of the greatest number should spare no efforts to eliminate and wipe out” [Buenaventura 1938b: 23]. And yet, ironically, the availability and capacity of performers to serve as means of recording and transmission of not only musical performances but also speech performances of others became part of the very communication infrastructure that undergirded the expansion of U. S. imperial “democracy.” Enriquez notes that early radio news programs included seemingly “live recordings” of the voices and public speeches of U. S. statesmen produced by Filipino vocal impersonators. Such early radio broadcasts comprised precisely the kind of communication between government and people expected to serve the ends of democracy.[31] Beyond the content of political ideas disseminated (as in the ideological content of the programming of the imperial news and information agency of the U. S., the Voice of America, a crucial transnational ideological state apparatus of the U. S. during the Cold War), the technologies of communication and transmission of cinema, radio and, later television, comprised the material, social environment for the forms of standardization, commodification, and circulation characteristic of liberal democracy.[32] As I have been arguing here, those very mediatic capacities for which Filipinos were deemed unfit as citizen-subjects for the new order of imperial democracy nevertheless became deployed as enabling media for the latter’s establishment and operation. Indeed, it is the Filipino performers’ analog capacities that enable them to bring expressive as well as political cultures from elsewhere “live” through the body: a local, vital platform of mediation and techno-social reproducibility.

We can trace precursors of this vital platform mobilized in the musical world in older oral practices of social negotiation and inhabitation as well as cognitive and aesthetic reception, which shocked and dismayed one Western traveler after another as scandalous cacophony—meaningless sound or noise—which they invariably invoked as betokening qualities of lack and underdevelopment. Here for example is Feder Jagor’s 1875 description of a moro-moro performance that he encountered during his travels:

The noise was so great that I could only catch a word here and there. The actors stalked on, chattering their parts, which not one of them understood, and moving their arms up and down; and when they reached the edge of the stage, they tacked and went back again like ships sailing against the wind. Their countenances were entirely devoid of expression, and they spoke like automatons. [quoted in Mojares 1985: 77, emphasis mine]

Jagor notes, “the contrast between [the words’] meaning [had he understood them, he says] and the machine-like movement of the actors would probably have been dull enough,” and concludes, “Both the theatrical performance and the whole festival bore the impress of laziness, indifference and mindless mimicry” [quoted in ibid.].

Compare Jagor’s reaction to that of the American teacher Mary Fee:

I went across the plaza and found two one-story buildings of stone with an American flag floating over one, and a noise which resembled the din of a boiler factory issuing from it. The noise was the vociferous outcry of one hundred and eighty-nine Filipino youths engaged in study or at least in a high, throaty clamor, over and over again, of their assigned lessons. [quoted in May 1984: 94]

In contrast to these responses of shock and dismay at the seeming “noise” of local modes of popular performance and reception, or cultural production and consumption (including reception/consumption within the context of education), Nikki Briones’ insightful study of the moro-moro shows how the modes of oral transmission and aural consumption characteristic of the moro-moro in fact constituted a distinct form of sensory experience and sensuous pleasure for the play’s audiences [Briones 2010: 82]. For these “aural connoisseurs,” the repetitious, stylized, seemingly arbitrary dictates of performance practices of dialogue as well as choreography were not only sensuous pleasures in themselves (independent of their production of “meaning”); these practices also lent themselves to additional pleasures of improvisation, innovation, and “flourish”—demonstrations of virtuosity rather than the principle of organic development cultivated by the new literary genre of the short story. Even as she observes an oral/aural shift now taking place in more “modernized” urban performances, Briones notes in particular the importance of oral and aural practices of dicho or dictation in contemporary versions of the genre, attesting to the continued operation of modes of sensory perception that the perceptual programming of capital-intensive technological apparatuses would ideally have made obsolete if not fully eliminated.

Against the “silent speech” cultivated by literature, “voicing” and “vociferous” speech were thus modes of attention and perceptual practice that people continued to mobilize within new media platforms. Paz Marquez Benitez’s former American high school principal wrote to her many years later, expressing his realization that the “chattering” of her 48–50 classmates, which exhausted him and his co-teacher, nearly driving them insane with such “bedlam,” was in fact the mode in which the students taught themselves English.[33] This bodily, vocal performativity that Benitez herself engaged in as a high school student is not far from the modality of musicians teaching themselves to inhabit and play other musical forms and styles. The phonograph, automaton, machine—such are the ways in which the analog capacities of human media are denigrated and relegated to the non-human, the political potentials of such media and their other orders of sensibility and community seemingly foreclosed in favor of the privileged medium of democracy, citizen-man. And yet, rather than fully eliminated, these analog capacities proliferated as informal and vital technologies of reproducibility (and as means of livelihood under conditions of capitalist life) in social spaces destined to fall short of the normative ideals of sovereign personhood. They were in effect “surplussed”—not so much foreclosed as much as devalued and abandoned in favor of the privileged medium of democracy, citizen-man.

It is no accident perhaps that radio played such a prominent role in calling forth a form of sociality that was the historic “event” of People Power in 1986, the popular mobilization against dictatorial rule, about which I have written elsewhere. Beyond the specific scripts of the moro-moro or komedya that scholars such as Raul Pertierra and Tess del Rosario glean in the political dramas leading up to and enacted in People Power II in 2001 and the mass uprising of Edsa Masa, shortly thereafter [Pertierra 2002][34] in the first People Power revolt as well as the two others we can recognize a regime of perception of orders of sense and event making that surpass particular human goals, interests and agencies.[35] We can also recognize in all three revolts the mobilization of “listener” as participant in a carnival of signs, gestures and performances through which people exercised ritual power and commanded transformation. What distribution or regime of perception and intelligibility characterizes the komedya and how does this medium transform into the mass media of the human platform? How is the stylized, ritualistic, formulaic and conventional character of delivery, facial expression, verbal style, and acting translated into social mediatic capacities mobilized and developed through radio (and to some extent television and cinema)? Although we might witness more “realistic” and “natural” performances in these broadcast media, these performances continue to be based on mimetic reproductions of material, surface properties (eg. for musicians, inflection, tone, timbre, rhythm, and so on). Rather than the hidden meaning (as value, as the accumulable content of “life”) that short story writers tried to perfect the craft of conveying, such performances continue to take and be carried away with sensuous pleasure in the material of the medium (language, sound)—what would be decried as excessive ornamentation. Besides such sensuous play, such performances also continue to display the perception of another level or order of event (what used to be a divine or supra-human plane of significances on which the meaning of social experience could be located).

Rafael’s understanding of the nineteenth century komedya as a kind of technology—specifically as a technical medium for the domestication, negotiation, and processing of the mysterious powers of the foreign through the vernacular—is particularly illuminating in this regard. He argues that the komedya produced “telecommunicative effects ... bringing distances up close and broadcasting these in a language accessible to those who heard it,” and in this way constituted audiences not wholly within clerical or state control, paving the way for a more proper nationalist imagination [Rafael 2003].[36] What I find especially illuminating in Rafael’s account for this context is his astute observation of the way “spectral signposts” of Europe and the foreign power it represented were grafted onto the bodies, costumes and speech of the actors—in other words, the way actors acted as a medium of representation and transmission of codes and signs of extrinsic power. On the one hand, in costume, actors assumed a telecommunicative agency that Rafael likens to photographs’ capacity to “convey the sense of nearness of what was absent.” On the other hand, in their seemingly atonal, non-affective rhythmic delivery of their lines, they served as “a medium for broadcasting the vernacular.” Rafael’s description of this mediatic agency is worth quoting at length:

The sonic quality of the actors’ voices made it seem as if the language of the play were mechanically reproduced rather than organically produced by the speakers. That is, their voices did not seem to express a self behind and in front of its words. Instead, no one in particular inhabited their speech. The words they spoke belonged neither to them nor to the characters they portrayed. Rather, they served as the media for the passage and transmission of language that they received from the prompter or dictador, literally one who dictates. [Rafael 2005: 115]

The apparent lack of a self that is conveyed by these actors in their seemingly “mechanically reproduced” performance as well as the lack of creative originality attributed to migrant musicians can certainly be taken as evidence of a broader postcolonial failure to accede to the normative subjective agency of citizen-man. However, we might instead view these forms of telecommunicative and mediatic agency as betokening a different (rather than lesser, less human) form of being, similar to the way that Flusser sees the actions and consciousness of the “non-Occidental,” minority branch of Brazilian society as an alternative, mythical form of being that conflicts with the dominant form of historical being of the majority branch of its Western, bourgeois elite [Flusser 2002: 119–122]. For Flusser, the abyss between such conflicting branches within Brazilian society demonstrates the impossibility of democracy in the sense of “a constructive dialogue between the two forms of being” [ibid.: 120]. It demonstrates the uneven and contradictory progression of the domination of the logic of the technical image, which he argues is tending toward the making of “a new society of programmed and programming functionaries ... the totalitarianism of apparatuses” [ibid.: 123].[37] While Flusser continues to maintain an understanding of freedom based on an implicit model of sovereign human agency (calling in effect for a reappropriation of this agency from its alienated form in the apparatuses of a programmed, technocratic society), my own view is that those forms of non-human agency and bodily, perceptual faculties and capacities, which are remaindered by the normative protocols of capitalist democracy, persist and even proliferate in transformed ways as collective means of life, bearing democratic potentials and indeed forms of freedom whose exercise can be fleetingly gleaned in the popular revolts of People Power in the last two decades of the twentieth century.

While I cannot fully expand on this claim here, I would go so far as to suggest that the dramatic, remarkable role of radio, television and cell phone technologies in the first two People Power events show the operation of modes of social being and communication, with their concomitant forms of aesthetic perceptual and sensorial practice, that anticipate the new social media technologies of the contemporary moment. In a sense, both events exemplify a kind of tentative reverse subsumption and transformation of the technologies of political rule: broadcast technologies of radio and television, in the first, and cellular communication technology in the second. Built out of extant outmoded social faculties, which Flusser associates with mythical being and magical consciousness and which, not unrelatedly, Taussig associates with a mimetic faculty reinvigorated under modernity and forms of sympathetic magic potentiated by postcoloniality, the mediatic capacities of reciprocal, even multidirectional transmission and networked connection that characterize the use of media for political mobilization during these events can be argued to have developed out of a subterranean or “hidden” social history of communicative technologies, which are not encoded or reified in the dominant technical hardware valorized and produced as means of production for capital (but which they nevertheless also course through, supplement, support as well as interrupt and contend with). I am not arguing that these mediatic capacities have any intrinsic or inherently greater democratic potential than the forms of human being and relation presumed and privileged by the ideal of citizen-man. I am, however, trying to expand the parameters by which we can recognize and understand the possible social relations and kinds of social and personal being that might comprise and define democratic life.

Claims about the waning of regimes of normativity focused on the formation of citizen-man (the so-called withering of civil society and the decline of disciplinary regimes) in the post-industrial, post-liberal democratic polities of the advanced global economy may eclipse the proliferation and transformative effects and inventions of social mediation built out of these formally remaindered yet vital social practices of communication. In the present context of the redefinition of citizenship within the terms of an expanding neoliberalist rationality, we need an archaeology of seemingly defunct forms of life, forms of personhood and sociality, which have been remaindered by a dominant history and understanding of democracy. Such an endeavor will help us move beyond what appears, in current debates about the relation between social media and democracy, to be the persistent restriction and closure of our imagination of revolutionary freedom in the celebration of the ever-advancing technological apparatuses of capitalist forms of life.

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1) In other words, his argument depended on a conception of a people with a distinct, given national-cultural identity that was fundamentally alienated from itself and as such made incapable of achieving sovereign agency over its fate and future survival.

2) “A Filipino is free to live the way he wishes and to follow any occupation that suits him. He is free to select his friends. He may be poor and uneducated, but our laws are made to treat alike the poor and the rich, the ignorant and the wise” [Fernandez and Carreon 1937: 41]. This freedom is contrasted with countries like India, whose caste system, as a form of customary law, takes precedence over modern liberal law.

3) “Vigorous and alive with the spirit of man,” as R. Zulueta Da Costa qualifies, in a familiar debate with Arturo B. Rotor, about the “function” of literature and the achievement of Philippine writers.

4) John D. Blanco argues that in the nineteenth century, with the liberalization of the economy and reform of Spanish political rule in response to the emerging world market, what we call Philippine literature became a profession tasked with the solicitation of native consent to colonial rule through the production of a new commodity, “culture,” that would synchronize native consent with the new political rationality of colonial governance. He writes: “The task of ‘culture’ under colonial modernity was to organize crowds around the reflection on the new constitution of their social relations, which were informed by the production and ordering of new needs and desires ... the production and elaboration of a society capable of disseminating, reflecting on, and multiplying the implications of native consent for colonial rule” [Blanco 2009: 62–63]. While this cultural production of native will and desire through Filipino literature had contradictory and ultimately inimical consequences for the Spanish modern colonial project, as exemplified in the anti-colonial nationalist works of Jose Rizal and Andres Bonifacio and the Philippine Revolution against Spain in 1898, it is also the case that the emergence of Philippine literature as a technology for the cultural production of “the life of a discretely and wholly Filipino nation” during this earlier moment of colonial transition becomes, from the beginning of the twentieth century, one of the most important institutions undergirding the imperial project of the Philippines’ new colonizer, the U. S.

5) In 1905, James A. LeRoy distinguished the system of education established by the U. S. from that of the Spanish (which despite the reforms of 1863 continued to reflect a trenchant “mediaevalism” in methods and curriculum) by this focus: “Characteristically American was also the determination from the very outset that it was the education of the masses which primarily required attention. Upon this decision has followed, naturally and logically, all the other features which have come to form what is called ‘American educational policy’ in the Philippines” [LeRoy 1905: 214].

6) The technocratic aspect of Osias’s vision is evidenced in his abundant emphasis on “efficiency” as simultaneously a capacity of individuals to be developed, a characteristic of schools to be measured and improved, and an ideal of individual and collective human life (alongside freedom and happiness).

7) Osias of course assumes, in this ideological vein, that poverty results in a default individualist self-interest at the expense of community.

8) Hence, higher economic standards of living could serve as indicators of higher standards of life. Osias reproduces the table provided by Patten in The New Basis of Civilization, which lines up increasing income levels in the U. S. with terms of increasing civilizational value, or “the income graduation whereby men pass from one stage of progress to another: Dissolution, Poverty, Family Continuity, Economic Freedom, Economic Independence, Economic Initiative, Economic Leisure” [Osias 1921: 30].

9) Although Glenn May argues that the U. S. educational project in the Philippines was a failure (limiting himself to the period under study 1900–13, yet implying the failure of U. S. colonial policy more generally beyond this period), the goals he identifies as driving U. S. colonial policy more generally (and shaping educational policy specifically), i. e., to prepare Filipinos for citizenship and for productive labor, constitute colonial precepts that I would argue has animated and shaped much symbolic production, as well as the material organization of social life, in the Philippines since then.

10) Quoted in LeRoy [1905: 231]. See also May [1984: 97–112]. Barrows subsequently became the ninth President of the University of California from 1919 to 1923.

11) The notion of “standards of living” becomes a conceptual tool for students of “comparative humanity.” See Keesing [1935: 21–34].

12) Quoting J.S. Furnivall, “the late distinguished student of British and Dutch colonial policies”—“education is not something given in the school or by way of formal instruction, but is the operation of the whole environment ...”—Glenn May suggests that after the failed Jeffersonian experiment of David Barrows, the Philippine Commission “gave more support to road building—to projects designed to change the ‘environment’—than to public schools” [May 1984: 112].

13) “Ademocracy is more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living, of conjoint communicated experience” [John Dewey, Democracy and Education, quoted in Osias 1921: 26].

14) Paul Monroe, quoted in Osias [1921: 59].

15) Lucilla Hosillos argues, “Poe’s method of achieving a single intended effect through organic unity lies deep in the Filipino short story. This basic single influence in the formative period of the Filipino short story in English has endured even in the Filipino short story in the vernaculars” [Hosillos 1984: 94].

16) Leonard Casper praised Manuel Arguilla for the subtlety and restraint shown in his “oppressed labor” stories: “Except for brief outbreaks of violence, even these are noteworthy for their welling but not yet overflowing emotion, their silent threat” [Casper 1966: 40].

17) Guardiola notes the way Francisco van Camp’s photographs of the 1880 earthquake in Manila reflected this extant aesthetic gaze shaping early photography: “these images of violence and devastation reflect an aesthetic interest in the photographic medium that goes beyond the documentary value all photographs entail; an artistic gaze that was shared by three other photographers, Félix Laureano, Manuel Avias Rodríguez and Francisco Pertierra in the last decade of the nineteenth century...” [Guardiola 2008: 213]. See also M. Bianet Castellanos [1999].

18) See John D. Blanco [2009] for a discussion of the role of “costumbrista” articles in staging the impasses of late Spanish colonial rule. Blanco argues that the costumbrista articles rehearsed the advent of authentic literary representation of an autochthonous reality, which would be fulfilled by the novel.

19) As Rafael argues, “Filipino portraits indicate another path for the recognition of native remains. They constitute a kind of anti-ethnology in their insistence on an empirically unassailable subjectivity and the evidence of their indeterminate and unknowable reception in the future” [Rafael 2000: 99].

20) The literature on the transformation and hegemony of vision under modernity is vast. See for example, Jonathan Crary [1992], David Michael Levin [1993].

21) Donna Haraway comments on the ideology of realism and construction of temporality informing U. S. imperial nature photography: “To make an exact image is to insure against disappearance, to cannibalize life until it is safely and permanently a specular image, a ghost. It arrested decay.” Nature photography hints at an apocalyptic future, provides “a transfusion for a steadily depleted sense of reality.” “The image and the real mutually define each other, as all reality in late capitalist culture lusts to become an image for its own security. Reality is assured, insured, by the image...” [Haraway 1993: 264].

22) Anderson notes the effect of Guerrero’s exclusion of Rizal’s direct address of the reader in the present tense: “At a stroke Rizal’s wittily insinuating voice is muffled, a silent wall is set up between author and reader, and, once again, everything urgent and contemporary in the text is dusted away into History” [Anderson 1998: 240]. This “silent wall” between author and reader is the effect of the new representational precept, which I discuss as a striving towards the “silent speech” of the technical image.

23) Following on Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s thesis that “the formal analysis of the commodity holds the key to ... the historical explanation of the abstract conceptual mode of thinking and of the division of intellectual and manual labor that came into existence with it,” Žižek argues that the structure of the commodity-form articulates the anatomy of the Kantian transcendental subject, which serves as “the a priori frame of ‘objective’ scientific knowledge” [Žižek 1997: 16]. My argument is slightly different in that I am not claiming that the short story installs the Kantian transcendental subject. Rather, I am arguing that writers labored to approximate the protocols of perception and proper “modern” mode of symbolizing, which they diligently learned from U. S. and European writers of the short story, in order to convey Filipino humanity to an international community, by participating in “the world republic of letters.” In doing so, they visibly display the aesthetic precepts of capitalist modernity.

24) See Ponce for discussion of the queer erotics of Jose Garcia Villa’s high modernist rebellion against the colonial project of Benevolent Assimilation and the nationalist reproductive heterosexuality generated as anti-colonial response [2012].

25) The gendered roles are manifest in the differences between the Barrio Boy’s Creed and Barrio Girl’s Creed and their respective areas of training, which Osias describes. It is clear that Jefferson’s ideal of an independent yeomanry continued to inform the rural education emphasis on training in farming and housekeeping, the growing of home gardens, and so on. While boys were to be trained in productive labor (“to kill weeds, increase crops, double the output of flock by keeping more chickens and careful breeding; growing larger crops; keeping a home garden to increase, vary and improve the diet; increasing the value of the land with fruit trees, fence vines, shrubs and flowers”), girls were trained for naturalized, free, domestic, “caring” labor (“to love chickens and pigs and goats and puppies as well as dolls and dresses ... to take care of some domestic animals as well as my brother, who does not love them as much as I; homemaking; to give away flowers and cook vegetables which I myself raised”) [Osias 1921: 37–38].

26) Fanon [1994]; Chakrabarty [2007]; Rey Chow notes some of the gender and sexual foreclosures performed by Fanon’s critique of this racial splitting [1998].

27) “Copying entails a high degree of accuracy, achieved through much effort. Singers often spend hours listening to the recordings by the original singers, in order to capture every inflection” [Ng 2002: 284].

28) Since they were widely acknowledged as having inherited Western musical sensibilities through the colonial influences of Spain and the U. S., Filipino bands were deemed adequate to provide backup for these stars, thereby cutting the costs of the international tours of U. S. singers and increasing the profits of their foreign and local organizers.

29) Taussig follows Walter Benjamin in this argument. He suggests, further, and drawing on Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critique of Western instrumental rationality, that the refunctioning of the mimetic faculty—“the art of becoming something else, of becoming Other”—proceeds from its repression, distortion and use as a hidden force by Western Enlightenment science and practice.

30) Teodosio F. Buenaventura proclaims, “an exclusive diet of vocational or technical training will make a student, not only a tool or machine merely in the economic process; but it will also violate the doctrine of the well-balanced nation” [1938a: 27].

31) Radio was seen as the “only means of direct communication between government and other social entities and the masses of the people” [“Radio Broadcasting in the Philippines” Philippine Magazine April 1932: 519]. Indeed, the very expansion of radio was spurred by political motivations, not only on the part of the colonial government (as implied in the notion of propaganda) but also on the part of the emergent “audience” of citizenry. The expansion of radio in the rural areas during the 1920s for example was partially attributed to stoked desires to hear the broadcast voice of colonial government: “The latest stunt which has led the provincianos to buy receiving sets is the broadcasting of the inaugural address of the new governor general by the Radio Corporation of the Philippines” [The Independent March 10, 1928: 4].

32) As Brian Larkin shows, the project of introducing radio in colonial Nigeria was about materializing a new relationship between the state and its subjects, creating material channels through which movement and circulation, valorized by liberalism as forms of modern freedom, could occur. The infrastructural achievement of radio was seen as an example of “technopolitics, the operation of political rule through the technical workings of social infrastructures” [Larkin 2008: 58–60].

33) In a letter to her written in 1958, Benitez’s old high school principal recounts: “you pupils drove us nearly insane chattering to each other in Tagalog, explaining our questions and what English words to use to answer our questions. It all exhausted us so much that we could not even sleep nights. It went on that way day after day for sometime. It looked hopeless that we could ever teach geography, history, grammar, mathematics, etcetera through English in such bedlam and often we were on the verge of giving up. But we soon discovered that you boys and girls were actually very intelligent human beings instead of the wild unmanageable savages we took you for, and through all that Tagalog uproar you were actually teaching each other English expressions and how to answer our questions much faster than Wardall and I were teaching you through our supposedly superior pedagogue technique” [quoted in Licuanan 1995: 23].

34) Raul Pertierra writes that people “flocked to EDSAto participate in a live spectacle” [2002: 60], in which people acted both as audience and as dramatis personae.

35) See my analysis of the 1986 People Power uprising in my Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order [Tadiar 2004]. Also see Vicente L. Rafael’s analysis of the role of cell phone technologies in People Power II, “The Cellphone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Philippines” [2003].

36) Rafael’s argument both amplifies and departs from Benedict Anderson’s famous argument about the role of print-capitalism in the constitution of national imaginations by showing the role of older vernacular theatrical genres such as the komedya in calling forth new self-imagining “audiences” (as social identities) into being. “Before the consolidation of ilustrado nationalism, comedias broached the possibility of intermittently imagined communities founded on the recognition of the foreign lodged in the vernacular.”

37) “The absurdity of the new way of being consists in the fact that man no longer plays games for others. Instead, the game is played for its own sake. The game becomes independent of man; it follows its own rules determined by chance; it becomes an autopathic game of permutations, thus transforming humans into game pieces, into numbers, and into functionaries. Programmed human beings—and the game programs themselves—are becoming increasingly well programmed for the programming of the game” [Flusser 2002: 123].

Reflections on Agoncillo’s The Revolt of the Masses and the Politics of History

Reynaldo C. Ileto*

* Department of Southeast Asian Studies, National University of Singapore, 3 Arts Link, Blk AS3#06–18 Singapore 117569

e-mail: reyileto@ozemail. com. au

Abstract

Teodoro Agoncillo’s classic work on Andres Bonifacio and the Katipunan revolt of 1896 is framed by the tumultuous events of the 1940s such as the Japanese occupation, nominal independence in 1943, Liberation, independence from the United States, and the onset of the Cold War. Was independence in 1946 really a culmination of the revolution of 1896? Was the revolution spearheaded by the Communist-led Huk movement legitimate? Agoncillo’s book was written in 1947 in order to hook the present onto the past. The 1890s themes of exploitation and betrayal by the propertied class, the rise of a plebeian leader, and the revolt of the masses against Spain, are implicitly being played out in the late 1940s. The politics of hooking the present onto past events and heroic figures led to the prize-winning manuscript’s suppression from 1948 to 1955. Finally seeing print in 1956, it provided a novel and timely reading of Bonifacio at a time when Rizal’s legacy was being debated in the Senate and as the Church hierarchy, priests, intellectuals, students, and even general public were getting caught up in heated controversies over national heroes. The circumstances of how Agoncillo’s work came to the attention of the author in the 1960s are also discussed.

Keywords: Philippine Revolution, Andres Bonifacio, Katipunan society, Cold War, Japanese occupation, Huk rebellion, Teodoro Agoncillo, Oliver Wolters

Teodoro Agoncillo’s The Revolt of the Masses: The Story of Bonifacio and the Katipunan is one of the most influential books on Philippine history. My essay pursues three questions, which are not always treated separately or in chronological order. One is why a work like this would have appeared right after World War II and the gaining of independence in 1946. We know it was written in 1947 as the author’s winning entry in a national Bonifacio biography contest held in 1948. Another focus of inquiry is the publication of the manuscript in 1956 by the College of Liberal Arts of the University of the Philippines. What was it about the mid-50s that made this book timely and controversial? And a third theme, treated in a postscript, concerns my own interest in this book, starting with how my Cornell mentor introduced me to its author in 1967, and how the Cold War thereby impinged upon my formation as a historian.

Agoncillo was born on November 9, 1912 in Lemery, Batangas, a Tagalog province southeast of Manila. He obtained a Bachelor of Arts in Philosophy from the University of the Philippines (UP) in 1934. His career as historian began quite late. From 1937 to 1941 he worked as a technical assistant in the Institute of National Language. He began writing in the late 1920s and early 1930s, his earliest publications being Tagalog poems. In fact, most of his writings up to the 1940s consisted of Tagalog poems and short stories in Tagalog and light essays in both Tagalog and English. There is a portent of his career, however, in the still unpublished M. A. thesis he submitted to the UP in 1935 titled “The Japanese Occupation of Manchuria,” for which he earned the Master’s degree in History in 1939.[1]

It was only in 1941 that Agoncillo published a historical work, Ang Kasaysayan ng Pilipinas (History of the Philippines), written jointly with Gregorio Zaide. He continued to devote his time to Tagalog poems and literary essays until the late 1940s when he began to write magazine articles on colorful rebels, bandits and revolutionaries of the past. By 1950 he seems to have decided upon a career as historian, publishing numerous essays on controversial events during Spanish times and the Philippine revolution. The Revolt of the Masses was published in 1956, followed in 1960 by Malolos: The Crisis of the Republic wherein he continued the saga of the revolution up to the fall of Aguinaldo. This same year (1960), Agoncillo published within the UP the first edition of the textbook that would make him a virtual household name: A Short History of the Filipino People (co-authored with Oscar Alfonso). This book, having seen several editions and with Milagros Guerrero as subsequent co-author, is still widely used in the schools. Agoncillo continued to publish books in the 1960s and 1970s, though these have been less influential than his earlier works. Up to his retirement from the UP in 1977 Agoncillo also produced a steady stream of short historical commentaries and essays in various local journals and week-end magazines, presaging the career of the journalist-historian Ambeth Ocampo.

The target of Agoncillo’s historical salvoes even in the late 1940s was history written from a colonial viewpoint. Agoncillo was probably influenced by the Japanese model of (and support for, during the occupation) an autonomous history of “oriental” civilization. He felt, however, that from the standpoint of surviving records alone “Filipinist” historians faced a bleak prospect. How could there be a truly Filipino viewpoint in history if pre-1872 documents were written by Spaniards in Spanish? Agoncillo’s background in Tagalog literature convinced him that without records in the language of the people their “soul” could not be captured. A history of the Katipunan revolt, for example, cannot be adequately written without materials in the language spoken by the Katipuneros, which for Agoncillo meant digging up Bonifacio’s poems and letters, and interviewing his family and associates in their language, Tagalog.[2]

Agoncillo’s solution was to drastically shorten the textbook treatment of the Spanish colonial period up to 1872.[3] This move was highly controversial, particularly outside the secular confines of the UP. It meant throwing out the standard lengthy accounts of Spanish contributions to Philippine civilization (such as the conversion to Catholicism), omitting mention of much of the activities of agents of the Church and colonial State to which a negative sign is attached, while glorifying every native disturbance or revolt. Agoncillo’s construction of history closely followed the model laid down by nineteenth century ilustrados like Jose Rizal and Gregorio Sanciangco, themselves deeply influenced by European liberal writings of their time. It is not surprising that Philippine histories for Agoncillo should begin in 1872 since from this year on the ilustrados are at the forefront of developments.

My first acquaintance with the name Agoncillo was not in Manila but in Ithaca, New York, at the office of my postgraduate supervisor Oliver Wolters. Seated behind his desk, he reached back and pulled out of the bookcase behind him the 1960 textbook history by Agoncillo and Alfonso. I didn’t know much about these Filipino historians in 1967 because I had attended the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Manila, a rival of the University of the Philippines, and had been assigned the textbook by Jesuit historian Horacio de la Costa. I was unaware of the history wars that raged in some university campuses in Manila from the late 50s on. I couldn’t grasp the full implications, then, of Wolters’ warning about this Agoncillo textbook: “Mr. Ileto, you are not going to write history like this!”

The admonition against writing like Agoncillo was followed up a year later by encouragement on the part of Wolters and his mentor D. G. E. Hall, who at that time was my acting supervisor during Wolters’ sabbatical leave, to write like De la Costa. They had found the skills of this Harvard-trained Jesuit historian to be exemplary and surely worthy of my emulation, in contrast to the “bad” historian Agoncillo. Perhaps they knew that De la Costa had earlier challenged Agoncillo’s emplotment of history that would begin in 1872, arguing instead for the importance of the Spanish legacy, particularly Christianity, in the making of the Filipino nation.[4] But I had not known much about Father De la Costa, either. During my Ateneo days, I hardly saw him because he was stationed in Rome most of the time. Being a neophyte in historical studies, I accepted the advice of my British teachers without hesitation.[5]

Even as a graduate student I could readily accept the shortcomings of Agoncillo’s Short History of the Filipino People, which, after all, had barely progressed from its original, crude, mimeographed format when Wolters obtained a copy of it in the mid-60s. However, sometime in 1969 I read Agoncillo’s The Revolt of the Masses and was so inspired by its treatment of Bonifacio and the Katipunan that I felt I should direct my research to the questions the book raised. In my dissertation proposal dated December 28, 1970, I applauded Agoncillo’s Revolt for showing that the armed independence movement “was initiated by laborers and artisans in Manila and that the upper classes were only reluctantly drawn into the struggle,” whereas other scholars like Gregorio Zaide (with whom Agoncillo had co-authored a textbook in 1941), had tended to view Philippine history as the handiwork of either Spaniards or upper-class Hispanized natives. My research was directed at what I felt were the limits of Agoncillo’s treatment of the revolution: His imposition upon his data of reified concepts of “revolution,” “nationalism” and “class struggle,” instead of describing how Filipinos in various strata of society actually perceived the events around them.

The timing of my discovery of The Revolt of the Masses was fortuitous. The Filipino student movement, which had been building up since the mid-1960s, had reached a head with the storming of the Presidential Palace gates by student activists in January 1970. There was talk of revolution in the campuses, a new “revolt of the masses,” and students started to forge ties with workers and peasants in order to rekindle the “unfinished revolution” of 1896. Agoncillo’s writings from the 1950s to the early 60s had pretty much laid the foundations for this new historical consciousness that swept the youth, to which I was not immune despite my Ateneo-Cornell academic pedigrees.

Looking back, decades later, I am surprised at how little I understood back then of the circumstances under which Agoncillo’s magnum opus was conceived, written and published, and of the deeper reasons why Hall, Wolters, and a host of other capable scholars were hostile to, or at least distrustful of, this Filipino historian. These are the questions I explore in this essay.

Japanese Rule and the Return of the Revolution, 1943

The Revolt of the Masses was entered in a contest conducted in 1947–48 and was unanimously judged best entry by a board composed of Jaime C. de Veyra (chair), Eulogio B. Rodriguez, and Faustino Aguilar. Not that Agoncillo had anticipated the contest and did the research especially for it; “The Revolt was written at the spur of the moment,” he says, “because it was a contest. As a matter of fact, talagang hindi ako sasali [I really wasn’t going to join]. It was [literary critic Leopoldo] Yabes who compelled me to. Sabing ganoon [The way he put it], ‘can you imagine the number of data that you have? You have the data, why can’t you?’” [Ocampo 1995: 20] Agoncillo already had the data at hand when asked to write the book in 1946 or 1947 because he had been collecting it during the previous years—meaning, the Japanese occupation period. His research on the revolution was of the type that the Japanese cultural policy or campaign encouraged and, as we shall see, there are visible traces of this influence in The Revolt of the Masses.

The importance to the writing of Revolt of Agoncillo’s experience of Japanese rule and the revival during this period of the discourse of unfinished revolution cannot be overstated. In Agoncillo’s two-volume work on the “fateful years” of 1941–45 published in 1965, there are the usual condemnations of Japanese imperialism and war atrocities and Filipino collaboration. However, the Japanese administration’s support for the revival of Filipino literature and the arts, the events leading to and including the attainment of independence in October 1943, and the “assertive nationalism” of wartime President Jose Laurel, are among the topics treated in an entirely different, positive, manner [Agoncillo 1965].[6]

That Agoncillo would be inspired to gather materials for a new history of the Revolution can be partly explained by the unprecedented return of revolutionary fervor culminating in Independence Day, 1943. This event was hooked on directly to the events of the Philippine Revolution and to early Japanese support for it. Rizal was the dominant symbol of this event. As the newspapers of the period repeated again and again, Rizal had died without seeing his country’s independence, and now it was finally arriving, thanks to Japanese help. On Rizal’s birth anniversary in 1943, Ricarte even traveled to Calamba to “report to the spirit of Rizal” that the hope of independence would soon be fulfilled.

More significantly, in view of Agoncillo’s later work, Independence in 1943 was also portrayed as a culmination of Bonifacio’s armed struggle. On the anniversary of Bonifacio’s birth on November 30, 1942, the founder of the Katipunan secret society was proclaimed as the “militant exponent of Oriental liberation from the West.” “In the spirit of the New Order, Bonifacio lives again and shall live forever,” the Tribune editorialized.[7] In August 1943, on the anniversary of the outbreak of the Revolution in Balintawak and always an occasion for honoring Bonifacio, Director Eulogio Rodriguez of the National Library wrote of the Katipunan founder as a “man of action... one of the first East Asians who faced the reality, dared lead his countrymen in driving away the Westerners from Philippine shores in order to conserve this part of the Orient for the Orientals”[Rodriguez 1943; Martin 1952: 185]. Japanese and Filipino officials preparing the stage for independence took time out to pay a visit to Rizal’s death cell in Fort Santiago as well as to the Bonifacio Monument in Balintawak [Martin 1952: 178].[8]

Half a million people attended the independence ceremony on October 14, 1943. Here is Agoncillo’s account of this momentous event:

As General Emilio Aguinaldo, assisted by General Artemio Ricarte, hoisted the Filipino flag in front of the inaugural stand, to the tune of the Philippine National Anthem, many in the crowd shed tears of joy. It was the first time since the Japanese occupation that the Filipino flag was displayed in public and the Anthem played. Loud and prolonged cheers rent the air as the old flag fluttered in the breeze, alone. [Agoncillo 1965: Vol. 1, 394]

Note the dominant role played in this event by veterans of the Revolution and Philippine-American War. Furthermore, the detail about the crowd shedding tears of joy indicates the return of the past—the unfinished revolution—in this flag-raising event. Columnist “E. M.” of the Tribune described how “not a few were moved to tears” when the flag was hoisted by Aguinaldo and Ricarte. The people present at the ceremony, he further explained, “while having no illusions about the farce that was Philippine independence, were sincerely touched by the sight for the first time in the life of most of them of the Philippine national flag being hoisted alone in the breeze.”[9] Laurel added to this process of reconnecting with the past when he spoke of independence as a fulfillment of the dreams of the heroes of 1896 and of the new Republic as a successor to Aguinaldo’s Republic of 1898.

Although the Second Republic enjoyed a short life-span—October 14, 1943 to August 17, 1945—it pursued many initiatives that would bear fruit after 1946. The Laurel government took advantage of the opportunities offered by the Japanese policy of de-Americanization and the search for Oriental roots. It pursued its own nationalist agendas in the areas of foreign policy, language, national history, and character building, even though the return of the Americans prevented much from actually being implemented. This would have been the setting for Agoncillo’s painstaking research on Andres Bonifacio and the Katipunan secret society—topics that had been neglected during the American colonial period.

Liberation, Independence, and the Huk Rebellion

The liberation of the country from Japanese control in 1945 immediately followed by the granting of independence by the United States in 1946 gave rise to a discourse of nationhood that forms the backdrop of Agoncillo’s attempt to intervene in 1948 through his Revolt of the Masses. This official discourse can be gleaned from the numerous speeches delivered by Filipino leaders from President Osmeña in 1945 to President Roxas in 1946 and 1947, and President Quirino in 1948.

In his inaugural address as Commonwealth President on May 28, 1946, Roxas pictured the pre-war U. S. occupation as a Golden Age [Fonacier 1973: 41–55]. The Philippines was then “a land of comparative plenty” and the U. S. colonial government was trying to implement a policy of social justice for the farm tenants and the poor. But the Japanese invaded in 1941 and their occupation is likened by Roxas to a Dark Age. The Filipino people endured this age of darkness because “there was never a moment in which our hearts or convictions faltered. The Filipinos discharged their debt of allegiance to the United States with a payment of loyalty which has never been surpassed.” Filipinos, declared President Roxas, owe utang na loob (lifelong debt) to America for her forty years of tutelage in democracy and freedom.

Roxas’ task in this speech was to reassert the narrative of Philippine progress, which had been disrupted by the war and the divisive forces it unleashed. This narrative had to culminate in Mother America’s granting of independence to her “daughter republic” in the Orient. Thus Roxas reminded his audience of how America’s teachings “took deep root in a soil made fertile by our great heroes of pre-American days—Rizal, Mabini, and Bonifacio. Our hearts were prepared when the Americans came in 1898.” He argued that the Revolution of 1896 had prepared the ground for America’s completion of that event through tutelage and the granting of independence on the coming Fourth of July.

Roxas insisted on the eternal presence of the American spirit in Philippine national life: “A nation is something more than the people who inhabit a geographic area. It is a spirit, a tradition and a way of life.” But because of our lasting faith in the benevolent teacher America, “[w]e have clasped to our bosom her system of government, her language, her institutions, her historical traditions. We are to be a free nation largely because we were aided in that direction by the love of liberty and the goodwill of the American people. If we succeed as a nation, if we are able to survive as a nation—and of course we will—we will have America to thank.”

Roxas’ lavish praise of America reflected popular sentiments towards the liberators. But his reassertion of the official narrative of Philippine progress under U. S. tutelage was not universally accepted. The opposition was pushing the line that the Revolution had been disrupted by the U. S. intervention and remained unfinished to this day. The Japanese had certainly encouraged the disavowal of the notion of U.S. tutelage. But in this postwar period, there were those “articulate few,” as Roxas called them, who regarded the American benefactor as an imperial power in disguise. The U.S. Congress may make mistakes, Roxas says, “but I have faith that justice will be done us by a country which has been our mother, our protector, our liberator and now our benefactor.... Our feeling toward America is not represented by the loud complaints of an articulate few in our midst.” Roxas then aligns his detractors with the new enemy called Communism: “Shall we give comfort to the enemies of liberty in the crisis which now grips the earth? The forces of evil may be defeated, but they are not dead. And there are new forces of evil growing even in nations which were our allies.”

On July 4, 1946, the American flag was lowered at the Luneta and Commonwealth President Roxas was inaugurated as the first President of the Third Republic. His speech at this historic occasion is an important document in that it attempts to provide a seamless interpretation of Philippine history from the first stirrings of nationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century to its embodiment in the nation-state that has become independent on July Fourth.[10] It encapsulates the official discourse on history and heroes that young historians like Agoncillo would challenge through revisionist works like The Revolt of the Masses.

Roxas speaks of the nation as a child that was nurtured by U. S. tutelage until it became mature enough to play a role as an independent nation on the world stage. Even the nation’s revolutionary heroes are tacked on to a universal series of “soldiers of liberty”: Yes, Roxas declares, we Filipinos “owe to our own heroes ... to Rizal, to Bonifacio, to Mabini, to Quezon, and to Del Pilar and to many others a gratitude of memory, both deep and abiding. But in this supreme moment we must likewise pay tribute to the great apostles of freedom of many lands who contributed to our independence and nationhood, just as surely as if they had lived and died on our soil. Kosciusko, Lafayette and Simon Bolivar were all soldiers of liberty, equally with Washington, Jefferson and Franklin D. Roosevelt.” Rizal and Bonifacio would be venerated in the shadow of Jefferson and Washington.

In the government’s reading of history the American colonial period enables the gradual Filipino entrance into the world community of nation-states. The discourse on heroes follows the same pattern. Rizal’s importance for nation building hinges upon his recognition as both a world-historical figure and a national hero. Thus the Filipino people have a head start in entering the world stage. As Vice-President Quirino puts it in his 1947 Rizal Day speech, “Rizal was the outstanding man of his epoch not only in his own country but outside the Philippines as well.”[11]

The centrality of Rizal in the building of the nation is evidenced in the annual commemoration since 1898 of his execution on December 30, 1896. Alavish monument was erected at his execution site, and lesser but no less imposing ones on practically every town plaza. Even Filipino settlements in Hawai‘i and California could boast of their Rizal statues. The promotion of this central, unifying figure was especially crucial during the tumultuous postwar period. Says Quirino, “Rizal’s monument stands in every public square, his name appears in practically every main street, his bust adorns the front of every school, his portrait graces every hall, office or gallery, Rizal in countless names of barrios, municipalities, cities and provinces, Rizal in text-books, Rizal in great speeches and famous poems.”

The memorializing of Rizal in images and writings was expected to shape his people’s consciousness and actions. Quirino points out how Rizal was expected to be present “in the elevated thoughts and writings of his countrymen, Rizal in the heart and soul of every liberty-loving people, Rizal in the supreme moments of civic and patriotic ecstasy, Rizal pervasive in the entire atmosphere of the land he redeemed.” Only in the sense of Rizal’s ghostly presence within each citizen could the nation be recognized by itself as well as by others. But latched on to Rizal’s presence is that of America—which brings us to the crux of this postwar appropriation of Rizal. Towards the end of his speech Quirino makes reference to Rizal’s essay, “The Philippines a Century Hence”:

Rizal could clearly visualize the coming of America. But did it have his blessing? Who knows? Subsequent events, however, proved that American occupation of the Philippines was the highest blessing that ever befell the Filipinos similar in a way to the advent of Spain. He did not know that America would give us our independence and more than independence her laws and philosophy of democracy on which to build our own charter of freedom.

The Philippines would become victims of a “terrible war” as Rizal predicted, but he did not expect that we would emerge “fully vindicated in our aspiration for freedom and independence, with a new character, new life, new soul, new name, finally accepted as a sovereign nation with all the good will .... What Rizal thus left out in his prophecy it was the task of the great Republic of the United States to fill in and to fulfill” [Collas 1955: 78–80, italics mine].

At about the time Roxas and Quirino were delivering their speeches about historical epochs, unfinished revolution, and the spirit of Rizal, Agoncillo was beginning to publish parts of his Revolt of the Masses manuscript. In the November 1947 issue of The Newspaperman, the magazine of the Newspapermen’s Guild of which Agoncillo was a member, appears an essay by him titled “The Katipunan Newspaper.”[12] Ablurb about the author states that he is “one of the most promising among the younger Filipino historians ... a prominent member of Institute of National Language ... [and] an authority on the Revolutionary Period of Philippine History.” Agoncillo’s essay is short but to the point. The second paragraph states:

The more than three hundred years of Castilian overlordship did not yield for the Filipinos any degree of progress in the political, economic, social and agrarian fields. The country’s economy was dismally feudalistic and its society was ruled by a clique of rapacious and indolent aristocrats, with the Filipino peasants as their chattel, to be bartered away any time at the mere wave of the Spanish grandee’s hand.

A characteristic of Agoncillo’s writings, at least at this stage of his career, is the conflation of past and present when speaking of the Revolution. Add another fifty to those three hundred years of Castilian overlordship and have the Filipinos dismantled their feudalistic economy? Agoncillo highlights the fact that in the Katipunan’s newspaper Kalayaan that carried a Yokohama dateline, one of the articles “urged the Filipinos to take up arms to secure their liberty. So fiery and subversive were the contents of the paper that in less than six months, the membership of the Katipunan rose to more than thirty thousand. People flocked to the leaders of the Katipunan and demanded immediate revolt against Spain.” Kalayaan “was responsible for the growth of the Katipunan and therefore prepared the people for a clash of arms.” The history of “militant Philippine journalism,” concludes Agoncillo, must begin with the founding of this newspaper.

Agoncillo’s essay, an extract from The Revolt of the Masses, was clearly intended to provide historical legitimacy to the magazine The Newspaperman, by incorporating it in the lineage of Kalayaan. What kinds of essays did this publication contain that would qualify it as an example of “militant Philippine journalism”? In the same issue with Agoncillo’s essay is a longer piece by Jose Llanes titled “The Peasants’ War.”[13] The first paragraph states: “The peasant war in the Philippines springs from causes rooted deep in history. While we may deal with these causes in their present forms in this series of articles, we will here discuss them from a purely historical standpoint.”

The blurb about the author states that Mr. Llanes is a staff member of the Manila Times. He was once a guerrilla leader in northern Luzon during the Japanese occupation, and that “resistance experience” resulted in his “profound interest in labor problems and social reform.” Llanes’ treatment of the Spanish colonial period, geared toward uncovering the historical roots of feudalism that continues to exist until the present, is basically the same as found in Agoncillo’s Revolt. Clearly, Llanes and Agoncillo shared the same viewpoint about the past.

Llanes’ article is instructive for what it reveals about an alternative discourse to that propounded by his contemporaries Roxas and Quirino, as discussed earlier. There is, in fact, an oblique reference to official discourse in Llanes’ contention that “What we glorify in our schools and textbooks and in speeches during our holidays as the ‘heroism and patriotism of the Filipino people’ is, in the last analysis, the struggle of the aparceros [sharecroppers] and the dispossessed freemen of earlier times.” Not that Roxas and Quirino ever spoke in these terms, but that these officially-unheralded figures from below are, to Llanes, the ultimate makers of history.

In contrast to the official downplaying of Bonifacio’s role in history (and the concurrent adulation of Rizal), Llanes states: “One of the principal causes of the Philippine Revolution was agrarian. The Katipunan was founded by a plebeian, Andres Bonifacio, and its membership was mostly of the masses, the aparceros, the agricultural laborers and the landless tenants.” There were other important contributors to the revolutionary cause such as Rizal, Del Pilar, Lopez Jaena and so forth, but to Llanes they only played second fiddle because they initially just wanted reform. It was the “plebeian” Bonifacio who actually took action by raising the cry of revolt in August 1896. In the end the Revolution failed because the upper-class nationalists betrayed the masses through the Pact of Biak-na-bato in 1897. Agoncillo in Revolt of the Masses similarly hails Bonifacio as “the great plebeian” and develops these same ideas.

In stark contrast to the position of America in official postwar discourse, Llanes flatly states that “American occupation of the Philippines did two things: 1) America replaced Spain as the ruling power and 2) it retained the Filipino ilustrado class.” The American regime allowed the landowning and moneyed class to expand its power and to “dominate and monopolize our national and political life. The 1896 Revolution failed as a social revolution.” Llanes ends with the warning that “today, there is reason to believe in the claim that ‘the bolo poised at Balintawak is still poised.’” In other words, contrary to President Roxas’ claims, the unfinished revolution remains unfinished. The feudal system born from Spanish times persists today, with “American monopoly capital super-imposed upon a feudal basis.”

Three issues later of The Newspaperman, dated April–May 1948, there appears a similar-sounding essay titled “Our Peasant Problem” authored by militant labor organizer Guillermo Capadocia. There is very little disagreement, he says, over the fact that “the main cause of the turmoil in Central Luzon and other agrarian sectors of our country is the desperate economic plight of the workers on the land in these areas. The peasant is discontented because it cannot make a decent living out of the land, under the present semi-feudal system of tenancy.” Capadocia frankly states his position: “I am a Huk myself so I know how the peasants of Central Luzon feel.”

The Huks and the PKM (Pambansang Kaisahan ng Magbubukid—National Peasant Union), states Capadocia, “fought the late President Roxas so bitterly not so much because they believed that, personally, he was their sworn enemy, but because they were convinced that he was, to use their own words, ‘a fascist who was willing to serve as a tool of American interests.’” The Huks are willing, however, to come to terms with President Quirino because “they believe he has no secret commitments with American imperialists and that he is an honest political leader as far as Filipino political leaders go.”

The appearance of Capadocia’s article in The Newspaperman alongside the contributions of Agoncillo and others shows how the official discourse on the unfinished revolution’s culmination in 1946, thanks to American tutelage and largesse, was challenged by a group of intellectuals and activists sympathetic to a mounting rebellion against the government in 1947 and 1948. For the epic saga of a joint Filipino-American struggle against Japan culminating in the Liberation of 1945 had one glaring flaw: The Hukbong Bayan Laban sa Hapon (Anti-Japanese People’s Army) or Hukbalahap, under the guidance of the Communist Party, arguably the most consistent and effective guerrilla army, was to be excluded from the Filipino-American narrative through its disarming by the U. S. Army in 1945. For the Huks, independence in 1946 meant betrayal, not fulfillment.

The Huk Supremo, Luis Taruc, would put the events of the Liberation differently in his memoirs. When the Americans came in 1898, he says, they “crushed a people’s movement that had come into being in the struggle against Spain.” And when they returned in 1945 they tried to “crush another people’s movement that had come into being in the struggle against Japan.” America’s role as liberator and tutor, so emotionally articulated in the speeches of Roxas and Quirino, is belittled by Taruc as a sham so that the U. S. could “make huge profits in our country.” Since 1899, “posing as our friends and benefactors, [the Americans] have robbed and plundered our wealth, and they held back the achievement of our democracy and freedom. When they pretended to give us independence, in 1946, it was only as a smokescreen to hide an even greater domination” [Taruc [1949]1953: 265].

For the Huks and the many intellectuals and activists sympathetic to this movement, the events of 1945 to 1948, involving a liberation that turns into a betrayal, and an independence that masks continuing exploitation, were viewed through the prism of history. Taruc hailed Rizal’s accomplishments as a writer and scholar; he acknowledged that Rizal upheld “our national honor.” But Rizal could not possibly be the symbol of “the next and higher stage” of the movement. The middle-class elements that shunned revolution took shelter behind an elevated figure of the “idealist and frustrated” Rizal, while pushing into the background the accomplishments of “the militant Bonifacio” [ibid.: 273]. This had been the case throughout the previous decades; the educational system under the Americans had promoted this thinking. In the late 1940s, the question of Rizal versus Bonifacio was more than an academic exercise. The debate lay at the core of the ideological struggle that manifested itself in an armed rebellion and its suppression by the state and its imperial patron. This is the political backdrop to the appearance of Agoncillo’s book.

The Revolt of the Masses, 1948

In the concluding pages of The Revolt of the Masses [Agoncillo 1956: 311–312], the author Agoncillo alludes to himself as “a young man in search of materials on the Revolution” who not long ago came upon an old man “whose face showed traces of battle scars. There was something fiercely noble in the gait of him on whose shoulders hung the heavy weight of years. His white hair contrasted sharply with his tanned face.” Agoncillo struck up a conversation with this man and the Revolution became the major topic.

In his younger years, this man had fought the Spaniards and he reminisced about those days “when heroism was a rare privilege and patriotism a magnificent duty.” But in recent years, such heroism was manifested again, particularly in the defense of Bataan against the Japanese invaders. The last stand of the Filipino-American forces at Corregidor was, for the old man, “a happy reminder of the glorious and deathless epoch of Philippine history.” In other words, the struggle against the Japanese brought him back to the time of the struggle against Spain, which was to him not just a glorious epoch but “deathless”—meaning that it was ongoing, to be repeated endlessly. Bataan was “a solemn reaffirmation of man’s struggle to be free,” a reaffirmation of the ethos of 1896.

The “deathless” epoch of the revolution was about “the men, crude in their learning yet pure and undaunted in their aims, who left family and home to pursue the illusive ideal of freedom, not for themselves but for the coming generations who were their fear and faith and hope.” The old man recalled Andres Bonifacio while looking back “through the mellowing pathos of distance to the beginnings of the vast underground movement that sustained men in their quest for a fuller life.”

Towards the end of the hour-long interview, as Agoncillo was about to take leave, he asked the old man, “If I were to sum up Andres Bonifacio, what do you think I should say?” “The old man gazed at his feet for a moment and then slowly raised his head. ‘Tell the whole world,’ came his ringing answer—‘tell all the world that he was a noble plebeian.’”

The connection between past and present, between the revolution of 1896 and the defense of Bataan and Corregidor, is thus made not by Agoncillo himself but by an ageing veteran of 1896, who sees in both episodes a continuity that stems from the notion of a “deathless epoch”—the continuing revolution of 1896. Andres Bonifacio, the “noble plebeian” in the veteran’s words, represents the countless revolutionaries, “crude in learning yet pure and undaunted in their aims,” who have since 1896 continued this pursuit for the elusive ideal of freedom.

The reader of the book in the late 1940s—if it had been allowed publication then—would have asked himself if the “deathless epoch” of 1896 was in fact being repeated in the events of the Huk rebellion. Could this crisis be another manifestation of this “vast underground movement” that nurtured the rebellion against Spain and the resistance to Japan? The discourse that suffuses Agoncillo’s book—the repeated references to the mounting agrarian crisis under Spanish rule, the betrayal of the revolution by the well-to-do and educated classes, the hesitance of Rizal to support the armed struggle in contrast to the determination of the “militant” Bonifacio—speaks just as much to the political crisis of 1945–47 as it does to the crisis of 1895–97.

In the 1948 foreword to prizewinning manuscript, Agoncillo emphasizes that the book is more about the Katipunan than its founder, Bonifacio: “In dealing with Andres Bonifacio and the Katipunan, I have laid more emphasis on the latter than on its founder and organizer.” In the first place, he acknowledges the dearth of biographical information on Bonifacio, which he sought to rectify by interviewing surviving relatives, comrades, and friends of Bonifacio. The second reason he gives for the emphasis on the movement rather than its founder is because of his belief that “Bonifacio can best be seen and appreciated against the backdrop of the revolutionary society. He could not have been greater than the Katipunan. Nor could he have risen above it.” Therefore, “to understand him, one must understand the Katipunan. He looms great because of the society.”

Agoncillo’s apologetic tone in justifying the book’s focus on the Katipunan rather than its founder can largely be explained by the expectations of his imagined readership. Philippine history was being conveyed in the schools and in public discourse largely through the lives and words of the “great men” in history, among whom Rizal stood head and shoulders above owing to the multitude of writings by and about him. In contrast, Bonifacio had left behind precious few writings, all in Tagalog, and since his death in 1897 there hadn’t appeared a proper biography of him. But there is another angle to this. Agoncillo’s focus on the society rather than its founder had the effect, very likely intended, of highlighting the importance of an organized movement run by a vanguard of individuals sworn to achieving the party’s goals through violent means, if necessary. What was the use of Rizal’s visionary words if they were not translated into action?—this theme is repeated again and again in the book. The language of Capadocia, Taruc, and the mysterious author of the The Peasant War in the Philippines (1946) reappears, albeit in more scholarly fashion, in The Revolt of the Masses. In framing the story of Bonifacio and the Katipunan in terms of an organized movement drawn from the masses that is betrayed by the educated and propertied class, Agoncillo was providing a historical lineage to the Huk rebellion.

The Revolt of the Masses could have immediately been disseminated, but its publication had to wait eight years, until 1956. Overtly the problem in 1949 was a protest lodged by General Aguinaldo against the prizewinning manuscript. Misinformed by provocateurs about its contents (which, being in English, he had not read), the General had allegedly complained about it to Malacañang and President Quirino took action to bar its publication [Ocampo 1995: 45, 81].[14] But a more serious obstacle stemmed from Agoncillo’s use of the notion of “class” to organize his narrative about the revolt of the masses’ betrayal by the “middle class,” thus aligning his work with proscribed texts such as The Peasant War in the Philippines.[15] The intervention of the shadowy Congressional Committee on Un-Filipino Activities (CUFA) was behind the suppression of the book.

On April 30, 1948 the House of Representatives adopted Resolution 42 authorizing the appointment of a special committee of seven to investigate the peace and order problem and the “extent, character, and objectives of communist propaganda activities.” Congress was concerned that such “subversive and un-Filipino” propaganda, instigated from the outside as well as domestically, attacked the basic principles of government as framed by the Constitution. The appointment of the committee was postponed in deference to the amnesty proclamation of June 25 aimed at attracting officials and members of the Hukbalahap and PKM back to the government fold. The CUFA, chaired by Representative Cornelio Villareal of Capiz, finally went into action on October 8. Included in its roster of seven was the Representative from Zambales and future President, Ramon Magsaysay.[16]

The CUFA recognized that the country was in the midst of an ideological war and claimed that its function would be to enable the Filipino people, through its Representatives, “to enter the ideological struggle and act according to the accepted tenets and procedures of truth and fair play.” Its first report, published in 1949, slams the Communists’ “queer analysis of reality” for its potential to do “irreparable damage to our society.” This is because such ideas “flash on the mind like bright lights” and stay on until one takes a closer look and finds nothing of substance. Their logic assaults us “with a drive so sharp it pierces any ordinary reasoning.” The Communists can “camouflage” their “irrational minds” and pose as discoverers of “the secret of creation.” They have thus succeeded in “enticing a reluctant audience” like the members of the Party, the Hukbalahap, and their front organizations (among which was the Newspaperman’s Guild).

The 1949 report devotes quite a bit of space to a discussion of history and revolution, understandably so, given the new nation-state’s moorings in contested narratives of the Revolution and its aftermath. Taking exception to the Communists’ claim that “the written history of all existing society is the history of economic class struggles,” the Committee tries to debunk the theory of social contradictions that inevitably lead to conflict. Contradictions undeniably exist, but like the two sides of a coin they “do not oppose each other to mutual destruction.” Contradictions constitute the wholeness of Man and of society, and so “to destroy those contradictions, which the Communists are trying to do, is to destroy Man and society itself.” After this preamble, the discussion shifts to Philippine history and the Revolution of 1896.

Apparently, members of the CUFA were able to meet with Mariano Balgos, general secretary of the Communist Party. This may have taken place during the general amnesty from June to mid-August. Balgos is said to have presented to the Committee a statement of the “doctrines” of his party, its constitution, and its by-laws. The Committee treated Balgos as a simple mouthpiece of the Communist Party, and the Party’s doctrines as derivative of the works of Marx and Engels. Balgos is said to have confirmed that the Manifesto of the Communist Party—a little book packed with “mental poison”—was an “authoritative source” of the Filipino Communists’ views.

What the CUFA failed to note, in its desire to highlight the foreignness of Communism, was that Mariano Balgos was a contemporary bearer of the “deathless epoch” of 1896. His father was a veteran of the Katipunan, “an active supporter of Bonifacio against Aguinaldo” according to Taruc, who later became a follower of the pro-Japanese Ricarte in the Asociacion de Veteranos. Mariano himself worked as a typesetter and was active in the Union of Printers. Most telling is his 1920s posts as Secretary of a local chapel of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente (IFI) and Minister in the Iglesia Rizalina church. In 1927 he joined the Kapatiran ng mga Anak Pawis (Brotherhood of Toilers) and when the war broke out gravitated to the Huk army where he became Taruc’s Chief of Staff [Taruc [1949] 1953: 90–92].

When Balgos faced the CUFA in late 1948, then, he was a spokesman, not just of a modern Communist Party, but also of a domestic tradition of revolt in which he could trace his own lineage to Bonifacio’s Katipunan. One senses that the CUFA knew this, for they were at great pains to demonstrate that they—Villareal, Magsaysay, and the rest—and not Balgos and his fellow travelers, were the authentic bearers of the Filipino revolutionary tradition.

“Certainly the history of the Philippines is not the history of class struggles,” the CUFA report thunders. Although the CUFA makes no mention of Agoncillo’s book manuscript, it would certainly have been one of the “subtle attempts to insinuate the class struggle angle” into books about Philippine social and political development, and particularly the Philippine Revolution. Rizal is considered a “bourgeois” intellectual and Bonifacio a “proletarian” revolutionary—“No crueler insult had been heaped upon the memory of these men!” Particularly galling to the CUFA is the suggestion that Rizal was not quite the universal hero after all, since he “thought and acted only at the behest of a social class.” Furthermore, to say that the “compelling motive” of Bonifacio was to liberate the proletariat is to “distort his revolutionary legacy” to the country [Congressional Committee on Un-Filipino Activities 1949: 28–29].

“Marx and Mr. Balgos speak of revolution and use of force, which mean one and the same thing—armed force.” Here the CUFA pushes Balgos onto the side of the foreign—Marx. But it does not condemn armed revolution per se. The Committee “believes in the validity of revolution as an instrument in the preservation of the people’s freedoms.” It is compelled to take a seemingly radical stance because of Philippine history, because “we would be desecrating the glorious revolutionary tradition of this country if we did not.” The Revolution of 1896 is foundational to the CUFA’s vision of the nation as well as Balgos’. It then becomes a question of whose revolution is legitimate.

The CUFA ultimately falls back on the “Free World” argument that revolution is waged “for the purpose of upholding and protecting the principles and the eternal truths over which freedom rests.” If the representatives of the people who are in Congress were to consider “present realities,” then the “right to revolt” is on our side and not the Communists’. The latter threaten our freedoms, so we are entitled to defend them. The “spontaneous reaction” of volunteer guerrillas and the “natural heroism” of the Army’s troopers in their armed campaigns against the “dissidents,” are manifestations of “our revolutionary heritage” and constitute a “legitimate Filipino revolution.”

In the light of the CUFA’s condemnation of what it considered to be illegitimate readings of the Revolution’s history, we can readily imagine how it would have reacted to this statement on page 115 of The Revolt of the Masses: “For the Katipunan, together with its offspring, the Revolution, was fundamentally a mass-idea based on utopian socialism. The rich element, which had everything to lose and practically nothing to gain personally, generally was not unaware of the hostility of the society towards the wealthy, the landlords in general, including the friar-suzerain.” In fact an early review of the book bluntly states that “it fits the ideological and tactical orientation of the Communist Party, and is calculated to create the misleading belief in the public mind that the present subversive struggle is merely a continuation of the historical revolutionary struggle of Andres Bonifacio and the Katipunan [Hernandez and Del Rosario 1956].[17] Critics Jose Hernandez and Simeon del Rosario demonstrate that the original (1948) manuscript was closely aligned with the Huk cause. For example, it utilized more pronouncedly Marxist language such as “proletariat” instead of the term “masses” that appears in the toned-down 1956 version. Interestingly, they also draw sinister parallels between Agoncillo’s unpublished manuscript and the writings of Huk leaders Taruc and Balgos.[18] The prize-winning manuscript must have been considered dangerous, its publication proscribed because the reader would not have failed to connect the Katipunan to the HMB (Hukbong Mapagpalaya ng Bayan—People’s Liberation Army), the wealthy landlords of the past to the exact same ones today, and the (Spanish) friar suzerains to the American suzerains in a supposedly independent nation.

When HMB organizers William and Celia Pomeroy were captured in 1952 they revealed some associates who were Communist sympathizers “in that they believe in the objectives and program of the Communist Party but do not subscribe to the methods used.” Among those mentioned were Leopoldo Yabes and Teodoro Agoncillo.[19] It was also discovered that Agoncillo had sheltered the Communist Party leader Jesus Lava during the arrests of 1950 that eventually led to the defeat of the Huk rebels [Dalisay 1999: 98]. In the light of Agoncillo’s pronounced intervention in the “history wars” of the 1940s, the following sidelight from 1950 arrests now makes sense. Jose Dalisay, in his book on the Lava family, recounts how Huk leaders up in the mountains were listening over the radio to a judge pronouncing sentence on their arrested comrades in Manila:

The judge’s voice comes faintly over the distance, reading a prepared statement. He has not prepared it himself, we know. His voice is strained and he stumbles a bit, as if he were unfamiliar with the text. He is saying that the Huk revolution is not a true Filipino revolution; that it is not like the revolution of 1896 or like all of the hundred revolts of Filipinos against colonial domination. He says that the Huk leaders are not nationalists, that they are agents of a foreign power who are taking advantage of the people and are betraying them into alien hands. So says the judge, reading the statement that has been coursed through (or prepared by) the American JUSMAG.... [ibid.: 120][20]

The Revolt of the Masses, 1956

By 1955, Agoncillo’s book manuscript had received General Aguinaldo’s blessing and its launch as a special issue of the Philippine Social Sciences and Humanities Review, a faculty journal of the University of the Philippines’ College of Liberal Arts, was scheduled for Bonifacio Day in November of that year. Agoncillo rightly claims that it was President Magsaysay who attempted to block the book’s publication. Magsaysay halted its printing in 1955 for being “controversial.” When printing went ahead, anyway, Magsaysay stepped in to suspend publication on February 4, 1956. Apparently the powerful Catholic Education Association of the Philippines had intervened. Furthermore, the Catholic newspaper The Sentinel had raised an outcry over government money being used to finance “an outspokenly anti-Catholic book.” The matter was brought before the Supreme Court, which in the end upheld publication of the book. Magsaysay then formed a palace committee that decided to allow 20,000 copies to be printed in 1956.[21]

What historians and biographers have overlooked thus far in trying to explain Magsaysay’s hostility towards Agoncillo’s manuscript long after its suppression by the CUFA in 1949 is the fact that Magsaysay himself had aspired to Bonifacio status in his successful bid for the presidency. As Defense Secretary, Magsaysay had spearheaded the crushing of the Huk rebellion by 1952. This triumph, accompanied as it was by civic action programs designed to wean peasant support from the rebels, was bound to attract the attention of many. Newspapers and radio commentators began to proclaim him as the “man of the masses,” the “only redeeming feature of the Quirino administration”[Coquia 1955: 32]. Somewhere along the line a connection between Magsaysay and Bonifacio was imagined. Instead of denigrating Bonifacio, why not appropriate him instead? This aspiration towards identification with the national hero second only to Rizal would have been undermined by Agoncillo’s radical take on the historical Bonifacio that, as we saw earlier, aligned him and his secret society with Magsaysay’s archenemies, the Huks.

As early as August 1952, Leon Maria Guerrero, a legal counsel in the Senate and a close confidante of now-Senator Laurel, was reported to have visited Magsaysay at his office with an invitation to meet with the Senator. Guerrero’s friendship with Laurel stemmed from the Japanese occupation, when he agreed to serve in Laurel’s government and was posted to Tokyo as First Secretary of the Philippine Embassy. Guerrero was also a part-time historian whose prize-winning biography of Rizal and translation of the hero’s novels would appear in print a decade later.

The mysterious invitation suggests that Guerrero and his friends had identified Magsaysay as the ideal candidate—short of Laurel himself who refused to run this time—to pit against the faltering Quirino in the 1953 elections [ibid.: 31, 226]. Magsaysay politely declined the invitation. Laurel was, after all, the most vigorous critic of his “boss,” Quirino. To top it all, the names of Laurel and his associate, Recto, had been discovered in captured documents of the Huks. Rumors were rife that these two politicians together with Judge Jesus Barrera would be arrested as Communist sympathizers on Magsaysay’s orders. But Guerrero’s failed visit was just the beginning of a patient courtship. Others would come along, such as Senator Lorenzo Tañada of the Citizens Party (allies of the Nacionalistas since the 1951 elections) and Laurel himself, to woo the Defense Secretary—a Liberal Party stalwart—to the Nacionalista camp. Laurel argued that Magsaysay’s candidacy would make for a more peaceful change of leadership and that only a Magsaysay could unite the fractured nation.

Magsaysay’s public defection to the Nacionalistas was staged on March 9, 1953, Laurel’s 62nd birthday. The annual birthday party at the Laurel residence became a huge political rally when the celebrant announced Magsaysay’s affiliation with the Nacionalista Party before some 2,000 party leaders in attendance and thousands more listening to the radio broadcasts of the event. Laurel explained to the crowd that the times in which they lived could be compared to the crisis that led to the Revolution of 1896. He urged the crowd to lend a hand in bringing about change; to lead them “What we need is a Bonifacio with a soul that is truly sincere and patriotic... [and] that new Bonifacio we find in Magsaysay” [Manila Times, March 10, 1953; Coquia 1955: 45]. Laurel admitted that Magsaysay was of limited educational background (at one point Magsaysay worked as a foreman in a bus company) but, Laurel emphasized, at least Magsaysay was dedicated and honest, unlike Quirino. The comparison with Bonifacio, the warehouseman of limited education, was apt—or so it would have seemed to the enthusiastic audience.

Laurel ended his speech with the assurance that he himself would answer for Magsaysay’s failings as President, and that “Magsaysay will serve our best interests fruitfully and well” [Abueva 1971: 236]. Whose best interests? The U. S., to be sure, after pumping in funds and image-building expertise, expected a Magsaysay victory to further their “Free World” interests. The Church, still smarting from the religious instruction controversy, cast its lot with Magsaysay, contributing millions of Catholic votes. The famous song hit of the time, Mambo Magsaysay, was composed by Catholic Action stalwart, Raul Manglapus. Laurel and Recto, for their part, expected to work through Magsaysay in order to further their anticolonial nationalist aims. Recto, keynote speaker in the Nacionalista Party’s March convention, declared that the 1953 election would witness “the victory of national dignity and self-reliance, and of an enlightened patriotism, over the weaklings, the sycophants, and the mendicants, who, to extricate the nation from misery they have brought about, have surrendered [the] political sovereignty and economic independence ... of the Filipino nation to exploiters and oppressors” [Coquia 1955: 62].

In this climate of popular acclamation for the new “man of the masses,” Quirino was placed on the defensive. Rather than attack the man’s honesty and past performance as Defense Secretary, he attacked the “unholy alliances” that had catapulted him to prominence. Quirino insisted that the inexperienced and immature Magsaysay was nothing but a puppet of both the Americans and the old politicians suspected of links with Communists. To top it all, Quirino added, these politicians were once puppets of the Japanese. In contrast to the opportunistic and directionless Magsaysay, Quirino pictured himself as a model of consistency, who had worked against great odds to rebuild the nation from the ashes of World War II. Magsaysay, on the other hand, threatened renewed destruction. Quirino repeated the allegations of the CUFA, now chaired by Liberal Congressman Tito Tizon, that Magsaysay not only had allied himself with the pro-communists Laurel and Recto, but was also in effect fomenting violent revolution. Secretary of Justice Oscar Castelo even declared in a rally, “I will stake my life and do my utmost to stop the victory of Jose P. Laurel and Claro M. Recto, both of them black souls and communists, dangerous to this country. If Ramon Magsaysay wins in this election, Laurel and Recto will rule the country and communism will rise” [ibid.: 177–178].

Castelo actually had a point. One effect of hooking the present onto a revered past, as Laurel had done in comparing the 1953 crisis to 1896 and introducing the new Bonifacio, is that a powerful narrative line begins to reorient the present, making possible what previously could not even be imagined. Magsaysay’s potential for becoming another Bonifacio was welcomed by numerous nationalist intellectuals and labor leaders. They seemed to forget that this new Bonifacio was the same American-made Magsaysay who had crushed the Huk rebellion. They were mesmerized by the return of the hero of 1896, just as the spectators at the 1943 Independence Day ceremony, performed in the shadow of the Japanese military administration, were overpowered by the symbols of the Revolution and wept.

With a view to consolidating student support for Magsaysay, the leaders of the major student organizations—Student Catholic Action of the Philippines (SCAP), College Editors’ Guild (CEG) and Conference Delegates Association (CONDA)—decided to form a confederation called National Student Movement for Democracy (NASTUM). The NASTUM was envisioned as a mass organization at the student level. It was a movement, moreover, that attempted to forge its roots in the 1880s. As one organizer put it, “the different student organizations, given a leadership of vision and responsibility, can be forged into the Propaganda Movement of the present. The CEG, composed as it is of youthful writers from some 70 learning centers all over the country, can provide the new Propaganda Movement the necessary theoretical force” [Republic of the Philippines, National Coordinating Agency 1964: 265].

The Andres Bonifacio in Ramon Magsaysay was never more evident, if at all, than during the lead-up to the November 10 elections. Organized labor groups certainly recognized that this presidential candidate, unlike any other, had worked with his hands as a garage mechanic and foreman. He was one of them and would understand their problems. Vicente Arniego and Vicente Rafael, president and general counsel, respectively, of the Philippine Association of Free Labor Unions (PAFLU), “expressed a hopeful outlook in a new administration that would henceforth bring progressive measures to laborers” [Manila Times, Nov. 12, 1953; Coquia 1955: 214].

As for the nation’s rural majority, Magsaysay’s campaign style of direct, face-to-face interaction with the masses, largely bypassing traditional local politicians, or liders, brought them into contact with a future head of state with whom they could relate personally. Touring the countryside, he appeared to the masses to be like one of them. He listened patiently to their everyday problems, promising solutions if he were elected.[22] Magsaysay was perhaps not so much a new Bonifacio as he was the new Redeemer. Much has been told and written about the magic he wrought among ordinary Filipinos. In time a multitude of little stories would become a mythology, creating a larger than life President—a hero of the present, in effect. As long as this effect was sustained, much of the nation held together.

On December 30, 1953, the anniversary of Rizal’s death, President-elect Magsaysay delivered his inaugural address before a crowd of half a million, roughly similar in size to Laurel’s inauguration a decade ago and at the same spot where Rizal was executed—the Luneta. The brief, 25-minute, speech had been drafted by Senator-elect Emmanuel Pelaez and Leon Maria Guerrero, now a partner in Recto’s law firm. Magsaysay did not pursue Laurel’s vigorous parallels with the time of 1896 or the new Bonifacio—indicative, perhaps, of the Bonifacio image’s volatility, or the Rizalian proclivities of his speechwriters, both outstanding alumni of the Ateneo de Manila:

We have a glorious past. Now we must build a future worthy of that past.

It is significant that we begin on this day and on this ground hallowed by the supreme sacrifice of Jose Rizal. We can find no finer example of dedication to country to light our way.

All too often, however, we speak of Rizal—and of Del Pilar, Bonifacio, Mabini, and our host of heroes—as if their work were done, as if today their spirit had ceased to have any meaning or value to our people. The fact is that we need their spirit now more than ever. We need it to complete the work which they began.

We need men of integrity and faith like Rizal and Del Pilar; men of action like Bonifacio; men of inflexible patriotism like Mabini. We need their zeal, their self-reliance, their capacity for work, their devotion to service, their ability to lose themselves in the common cause of building a nation. [http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ramon_Magsaysay’s_Inaugural_Address (accessed on September 13, 2011); Abueva 1971: 280]

Basically, Magsaysay pledged to fulfill the promises he had made to the people while campaigning among them. The social provisions of the Constitution would become more than just empty promises. “Democracy” would function not just at the polls but also more importantly in the concrete sense of bringing food, shelter, jobs, happiness and security to the people. The latter’s “happiness and security are the only foundations on which a strong republic can be built.” The multiple references in the speech to “the people” and “the common man” indicate that Magsaysay was about to “reap the whirlwind,” to echo Father de la Costa. Cynics might read this as having the rug pulled out from under the long-time admirers of the historical Bonifacio—the proscribed groups labeled “Communist.” The other side to this, however, is that Magsaysay would henceforth be held to his promises. Hopes would be raised that, if frustrated, might lead to the real Bonifacio’s return.

The Bonifacio figured by Magsaysay in his candidacy was soon exorcised in his incumbency. After all, Magsaysay’s “masses” were meant to be pacified through benevolent leadership, not encouraged to revolt through reintroducing parallels with the real Bonifacio and the Katipunan. Agoncillo’s The Revolt of the Masses was controversial just by its title alone. When it was finally published in 1956 in defiance of Magsaysay and the Church hierarchy, critics panned it for being Marxist and obsessed with the so-called masses while ignoring the contributions of the middle class to the revolution. It was also attacked for irreverently portraying Rizal as typically middle class in repudiating the Katipunan and refusing to join it. The many criticisms of the book, however, tend to overlook its crucial function in providing an alternative to the official narrative of Philippine history that was shaped and implanted during the formative years of 1943 to 1948, as the nation successively experienced Japanese colonialism, political independence, assertive nationalism, Allied liberation, still another political independence, and, finally, agrarian-socialist rebellion.

Given the accepted view that, owing to historical circumstances since 1896, “revolution” was intrinsic to the national self-definition, Agoncillo’s book had the effect of disseminating among the educated public a spirited reading of the Revolution of 1896 that exceeded what the state was heretofore prepared to accept. This new account of Bonifacio and the Katipunan would nicely complement the stipulation of Senate Bill 438, penned and sponsored by leading nationalists (and Japanese “collaborators”) Senators Claro Recto and Jose Laurel, and passed in late 1956, that Rizal’s novels would be required reading in all the schools. Rizal, too was being reconfigured for the times [Ileto 2010]. The conditions were being set in place for a new emplotment of Philippine history that would supplant, or at least provide a viable alternative to, the original template that was introduced in the wake of the Filipino-American triumph over Japan.

Postscript

When my Cornell mentor, Professor Wolters, warned me in 1967 against writing like Agoncillo and, together with Professor Hall, encouraged me to emulate the Jesuit historian and arch-Rizalist De la Costa, they were, in effect, drawing an innocent neophyte into the earlier controversies over Rizal and Bonifacio. But why would Wolters, in particular, have cared about the writings of Agoncillo? Having looked more closely into the circumstances behind the writing and publication of The Revolt of the Masses, it seems to me that the Cold War proclivities of both Agoncillo and Wolters were behind much of this.

I have long been intrigued by the late-blooming history careers of both Agoncillo and Wolters. Agoncillo was born in 1912 in Lemery, Batangas province, which was the center of a vast guerrilla movement against the U. S. Army in 1901 and 1902. Wolters was born just three years later (1915) in Reading, England, when England was still lording over a vast empire. Agoncillo was ambivalent toward the Japanese in the Philippines, denouncing its army’s atrocities but lauding its support of the vernacular arts and literature as well as the nationalist goals of Laurel’s government of 1943. Wolters, on the other hand, was employed as a colonial civil servant whose career took a blow with the Japanese defeat of England’s army in Malaya and Singapore. He was detained at Changi prison during the war, while Agoncillo was free to observe the workings of Japanese rule and conduct oral history research on Bonifacio and the Katipunan.

Agoncillo, as we have seen, sympathized with the communist-led Huk rebellion of the late 1940s and 1950s. He was under surveillance for pro-CPP activities in 1950s. Wolters, in contrast, after liberation became District Officer in the anti-communist campaign in Malaya. He rose to the position of Director of Psychological Warfare in 1955.

Although both Agoncillo and Wolters had had a longstanding interest in historical studies since their formative years at the University of the Philippines and Oxford, both came late to the history profession. Agoncillo joined the History Department of the UP in 1958 at age 45 and retired in 1978. Wolters quit the Malayan Civil Service and returned to England to join the PhD program at the School of Oriental and African Studies, the University of London, in 1957. He joined the Cornell History Department in 1964 at the age of 49 and retired in 1979.

Agoncillo and Wolters were, therefore, contemporaries. When I first encountered them both, at the same time, in late 1967 I can now see in hindsight that they represented two sides of the Cold War that were pulling me in separate directions. It is clear from my reflections in this essay that Agoncillo spoke directly to the issues of colonialism, empire, nationalism, decolonization, and revolution. Wolters, in contrast, not only refrained from talking about such political issues but also devoted himself to writing about early Southeast Asia, reaching as far back as the times of Srivijaya and Angkor.

Wolters rarely, if ever, spoke to his students about his previous career; I never really understood his involvement in the Malayan Emergency until the obituaries that appeared upon his death in 2000. It has since become clear that Wolters’ stint as District Officer during the Malayan Emergency taught him much about the “cult of the outlaw” embodied by Communist leaders such as Chin Peng, which appealed to the young Chinese masses. It was his job to seek ways to undermine this appeal. Agoncillo, on the other hand, was caught up in the movement for full independence after the liberation from Japanese rule. He strove to provide historical legitimacy to the Communist-led Huk rebellion that ensued after the “betrayal” of the masses by the propertied class and their American patrons.

Wolters keenly observed the influence of the penghulu (village chief) among the rural Malays and the elaborate court rituals of the Sultan of Perak. With these new insights, he was able to establish a “concept of service” that explained the relationship between the “man of prowess” and his clients. Agoncillo, meanwhile, sought to understand and document the relationship of figures like Rizal and Bonifacio to the ordinary people who joined the Revolution. He wrote with passion about the rejection and eventual execution of the “plebeian” Bonifacio by the local aristocracy of Cavite province, while Wolters was figuring out the need for the Malay ruler to gather political intelligence in order to anticipate or pre-empt any potential threats. Wolters’ concern with the political survival of the Malay ruling class, and his interest in their use of subterfuge and intelligence, could very well reflect his previous counter-insurgency experience in Malaya.[23]

At the end of the day, the question remains: What is the point of contrasting the careers of Agoncillo and Wolters? So what if they represent opposing perspectives in the Cold War? Since my own career as a scholar has been profoundly shaped by both, the question is not a moot one to me. Wolters’ warning that I should not write like Agoncillo was quite likely just a psychological ploy to make me a more careful historian, for he never actually prevented me from emulating Agoncillo in the end. His “warning,” nevertheless, reflects the state of the field of Southeast Asian Studies not just in the 1960s but even up to today. Agoncillo’s The Revolt of the Masses was never considered an important reading in the field. Reviews of the book in Western journals were largely negative; as I recall, Agoncillo was grouped together with the likes of Maung Htin Aung and Syed Hussein Alatas—nationalists, activists, polemicists, but certainly not “real” historians as the guardians of the discipline would have it. If we in this post-imperial age can begin to understand, say, Agoncillo and Wolters as two sides of the same coin, perhaps the history of the field of studies can be rewritten and a book like The Revolt of the Masses: The Story of Bonifacio and the Katipunan can take its rightful place as a classic in Southeast Asian history.

References

Abueva, Jose V. 1971. Magsaysay: A Political Biography. Manila: Solidaridad.

Acosta, Carmencita H. 1973. The Life of Rufino Cardinal Santos. Quezon City: Kayumanggi Press.

Agoncillo, Teodoro A. 1947. The Katipunan Newspaper. The Newspaperman, November 1947.

—. 1956. The Revolt of the Masses: The Story of Bonifacio and the Katipunan. Quezon City: University of the Philippines.

—. 1960. Malolos: The Crisis of the Republic. Quezon City: University of the Philippines.

—. 1963. The Writings and Trial of Andres Bonifacio. Manila: Bonifacio Centennial Commission and the University of the Philippines.

—. 1965. The Fateful Years: Japan’s Adventure in the Philippines, 1941–45. 2 vols. Quezon City: R. P. Garcia.

Agoncillo, Teodoro A.; and Alfonso, Oscar. 1960. A Short History of the Filipino People. Quezon City: University of the Philippines.

Agoncillo, Teodoro A.; and Zaide, Gregorio. 1941. Ang Kasaysayan ng Pilipinas. Maynila, Pilipinas: M. Colcol & Co.

Capadocia, Guillermo. 1948. Our Peasant Problem. The Newspaperman, April-May 1948.

Collas, Juan. 1955. The Quirino Way: Collection of Speeches and Addresses of Elpidio Quirino. n. p.

Congressional Committee on Un-Filipino Activities (CUFA). 1949. General Report on Communism and the Communist Party. Manila: Bureau of Printing.

Coquia, Jorge R. 1955. The Philippine Presidential Election of 1953. Manila: University Publishing.

Dalisay, Jr, Jose Y. 1999. The Lavas: A Filipino Family. Manila: Anvil Publishing.

De la Costa, Horacio S. J. 1965. The Background of Nationalism and Other Essays. Manila: Solidaridad Publishing.

Fonacier, Consuelo V. 1973. At the Helm of the Nation: Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of the Philippine Republic and the Commonwealth. Manila: National Media Production Center.

Fujiwara, Kiichi; and Nagano, Yoshiko. 2011. The Philippines and Japan in America’s Shadow. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press.

Goh, Beng-Lan, ed. 2011. Decentring & Diversifying Southeast Asian Studies: Perspectives from the Region. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

Hernandez, Jose M.; and Del Rosario, Simeon G. 1956. The Revolt of the Masses: The Story behind Agoncillo’s Story of Andres Bonifacio. Manila: s.n.

Hooker, Virginia. 2001. O. W. Wolters (8 June 1915–5 December 2000): An Obituary and Appreciation. Journal of the Malaysian Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 74(1): 1–18.

Ileto, Reynaldo. 2010. Nation-building in the Shadow of Imperial Pasts: The Rizal Bill Controversy of 1956. Paper presented at the Conference on Filipinas, un País entre Dos Imperios, Pompeu Fabra University, Barcelona, February 22, 2010, publication forthcoming.

—. 2011a. Scholarship, Society and Politics in Three Worlds: Reflections of a Filipino Sojourner, 1965–95. In Decentring & Diversifying Southeast Asian Studies: Perspectives from the Region, edited by Beng-Lan Goh, pp. 105–128. Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies.

—. 2011b. Wars with the US and Japan, and the Politics of History in the Philippines. In The Philippines and Japan in America’s Shadow, edited by Kiichi Fujiwara and Yoshiko Nagano, pp. 33–56. Singapore: National University of Singapore Press.

Llanes, Jose. 1947. The Peasants’ War. The Newspaperman, November 1947.

Martin, Dalmacio. 1952. Education and Propaganda in the Philippines during the Japanese Occupation. Manila: s. n. (Typescript in the Garcia Collection, Sophia University)

Medina, Isagani R.; and Bauzon, Leslie E. 1993. Philippine Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. Vol. II. Quezon City: Philippine Social Science Council.

Milner, Anthony C. 2000. Obituary. The Australian, December 19, 2000.

n. a. 1946. The Peasant War in the Philippines. Reprinted in The Philippine Humanities and Social Sciences Review 23(2–4) 1958: 373–436.

Ocampo, Ambeth. 1993. Aguinaldo’s Breakfast. Pasig: Anvil Publishing.

—. 1995. Talking History: Conversations with Teodoro Andal Agoncillo. Manila: De La Salle University Press.

Republic of the Philippines, National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA). 1964. The Communist Education and Propaganda Effort in the Philippines. Typescript. n. p.

Reynolds, Craig. 2008. Early Southeast Asia: Selected Essays. Ithaca: Cornell Southeast Asia Program.

Rodriguez, E. B. 1943. Bonifacio, Man of Action. Sunday Times Magazine, August 22, 1943

Taruc, Luis. [1949]1953. Born of the People. New York: International Publishers.

Wikisource.2011. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Ramon_Magsaysay’s_Inaugural_Address

Newspapers

Manila Chronicle

Jan. 28, 1956. “Stop Publication of Agoncillo book on A. Bonifacio.”

Feb. 9, 1956. “Agoncillo case.”

Manila Times

March 10, 1953.

Nov. 12, 1953.

1) See Medina and Bauzon [1993: Vol. II, 131–135].

2) Agoncillo published Bonifacio’s Tagalog papers, with English translations, in 1963; The Writings and Trial of Andres Bonifacio. In looking over the bibliography of The Revolt of the Masses, one is also struck by the predominance of oral and written documentation in Tagalog. This use of vernacular sources is one of the cues I took from reading Agoncillo in 1969, which I applied to my own work.

3) The bound, mimeographed textbook in my possession states in the preface that this short history was put together “to meet the needs of the freshmen students of the University of the Philippines who will, beginning June 1960, come under the General Education Program.” Anticipating criticism, Agoncillo explains that “those who have been reared in the traditional textbooks on Philippine history will be surprised, if not shocked, to find that the Spanish colonial period has been limited to three chapters excluding the one on ‘The Beginnings of Nationalism’. The senior author assumes full responsibility for this limitation. It has been his belief, expressed on many occasions both in and outside the University, that with few exceptions, the documents of the pre-1872 Philippines deal almost exclusively with the history of Spain in the Philippines.”

4) In reference to Agoncillo, De la Costa states in his 1961 essay “History and Philippine Culture”: “It seems to me that this view does more honor to the sturdy nationalism of its proponents than it does to their understanding of the nature of the historical process. Even if we were to concede that the history of the Philippines begins, or ought to begin, when the Philippines began to be a nation, it should be obvious that we cannot even begin to understand the Philippines as a nation unless we first understand it as a colony” [De la Costa 1965: 28]. For the ongoing debate over Agoncillo’s assertion about 1872, see Ocampo [1993: 110–116].

5) Reynaldo Ileto, “Scholarship, Society and Politics in Three Worlds: Reflections of a Filipino Sojourner, 1965–95” [2011a: 105–128]. The Cornell years are treated in [ibid.: 109–116].

6) See, in particular, Chapters 9 (“The Captive Republic”) and 12 (“Stage Shows and Blue Pencils”).

7) Sunday Tribune Magazine, November 29, 1942; Editorial, “Hero’s Day,” Tribune, November 30, 1942, in Martin [1952: 184.]

8) See also Reynaldo Ileto, “Wars with the US and Japan, and the Politics of History in the Philippines” [2011b: 46–49].

9) “Our Today,” Tribune, October 15, 1943, in Martin [1952: 179].

10) For the full text of the Independence Day address, see Fonacier [1973: 57–72].

11) Elpidio Quirino, “Rizal,” Luneta, December 30, 1947, in Collas [1955: 78–80].

12) The Newspaperman was the organ of the Philippine Newspapermen’s Guild, which was organized as a trade union in April 1945. In its second issue (Aug.–Sept. 1947), union President Cipriano Cid states: “In the field of political action, the Guild should rally its members to the defense of these rights which they should make use of but have to date not exercised. They should fight with all their might against the present tendency to recede into prewar reaction and status quo.” Issues of the magazine from 1947 to 1948 are lodged in the Mauro Garcia Collection, Sophia University library.

13) The title harks back to The Peasant War in the Philippines, a monograph that first saw print in 1946 and was said to have served as a “manual” of the postwar peasant movement and Huk army. The language and historical perspective utilized by Llanes are almost identical to the 1946 work, which states, for example, that “the Katipunan was founded by a plebeian, Andres Bonifacio, and its membership consisted mostly of the masses....” The Peasant War in the Philippines was reprinted in The Philippine Humanities and Social Sciences Review [n. a. 1958: 373–436]. The copy I have is a mimeographed version dating from the student movement in 1970.

14) Aguinaldo also complained that Agoncillo’s entry won first place because of a partisan board of judges, and that some of the sources used for the book were flawed; Milagros C. Guerrero, “Re-reading Agoncillo,” lecture delivered in March 2003. Apparently still unpublished, this 2003 piece by Guerrero, a former co-author of Agoncillo, contains interesting and useful details about her mentor’s career and writings, including the sharp criticisms attracted by Revolt of the Masses.

15) Agoncillo mentioned to interviewer Ambeth Ocampo that the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) had some involvement in the suppression of the book manuscript, but that a certain Captain Jarlego pronounced it as “not communistic” and gave it his approval [Ocampo 1995: 81]. There is more to this than meets the eye, however.

16) CUFA, General Report on Communism and the Communist Party [1949] (approved for publication on Feb. 28, 1949).

17) Guerrero also draws out some implications of this review in her 2003 essay that is broadly critical of Agoncillo’s ideological biases.

18) Comparisons were made with Taruc’s Born of the People [1953] and a 1948 piece by Mariano Balgos titled Ano ang Komunismo? (What is Communism?)

19) Republic of the Philippines, National Intelligence Coordinating Agency (NICA), “The Communist Education and Propaganda Effort in the Philippines,” [1964: 281]. NICAwas the predecessor of the National Intelligence and Security Agency (NISA), formed by President Marcos during Martial Law.

20) JUSMAG is the acronym for “Joint U. S. Military Advisory Group,” established by treaty on March 21, 1947 to provide for a contingent of U. S. military advisers to aid the Philippine military in counter-insurgency operations. The word “advisory” has recently been changed to “assistance.”

21) “Stop Publication of Agoncillo book on A. Bonifacio,” Manila Chronicle, Jan. 28, 1956; “Agoncillo case,” Manila Chronicle, Feb. 9, 1956; Carmencita H. Acosta, The Life of Rufino Cardinal Santos [1973: 78]; Ocampo [1995: 8]. In Ocampo’s 1995 book there is a reprint of an interview of Agoncillo conducted at the Solidaridad Publishing House in March 1976, where further details on the controversy over the book’s publication can be found on pp. 182–183.

22) Magsaysay’s populist campaign style is described well in Abueva [1971: 253–255]. Clearly this election presages Joseph Estrada’s 1997 campaign for the presidency in which he was likewise portrayed as a Bonifacio figure, a man of the masses.

23) Apart from my personal acquaintance with Wolters from 1967 up to his death in 2000, my information about him comes from Hooker [2001: 1–18]. Additional information can be gleaned from Milner [2000]. The most thorough and insightful biographical account to date is Craig Reynolds’ Early Southeast Asia: Selected Essays [2008: 1–38].

Table of Contents

Cover

V. L. RAFAEL: Introduction

J. D. BLANCO: Race as Praxis in the Philippines at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

G. CANO: Filipino Press between Two Empires

F. V. AGUILAR: Between the Letter and Spirit of the Law

N. TADIAR: Remaindered Life of Citizen-Man, Medium of Democracy

R. C. ILETO: Reflections on Agoncillo’s The Revolt of the Masses and the Politics of History