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Abstract:
This paper traces the conceptual resources of Philippine
ilustrado nationalism in the specific concept of Filipino
identity given by Father Jose Burgos in his acclaimed
Manifiesto. It argues that the racial and social exclusivism
essential to ilustrado nationalist ideology can be traced to
the essentially religious character of Burgos’ anti-friar
polemic. By tracing this essential connection between
Filipino identity and Catholicity, we are reminded of the
dangers connected with the emancipatory promises
ushered by nativist and ethnocentric thinking.
Keywords: Jose Burgos, ilustrado nationalism, Catholic
religion, secularization controversy, Filipino identity
I
t is a generally accepted conclusion in studies in Philippine history that
the emergence of Philippine Ilustrado nationalism owes much of its
spirit to the 1872 execution of the priests Mariano Gomez, Jose Burgos,
1
Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism” in Basic Writings, ed. David
Farrell Krell (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 221.
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What does Faith Exclude? Catholic Hegemony and Ilustrado Nationalism 35
and Jacinto Zamora.2 Following the secular clergy’s lead in the fight for
reforms within Spanish colonial ecclesiastical politics, the ilustrado class,
under the leadership of Jose Rizal and Marcelo del Pilar, transformed what
was merely an intra-clerical dispute for the administration of the parishes
into the national struggle for liberation from Spanish colonial hegemony.
This transformation was made possible by the ilustrado appropriation and
elevation of what was essentially a political (and not religious) discourse by
the local secular clergy into the status of an over-arching essentialist
nationalist propaganda. Such intellectual maneuver amounts to the
effective constitution of the whole nationalist agenda as borne from the
heart of the Christian religious paradigm itself and makes clear to us how
the Ilustrado appropriation of the concept of the “Filipino” betrays a
religious and specifically Christian bias that has subtly and unwittingly
translated the Ilustrado nationalist movement into an exclusivist and
totalizing discourse. In this vein, it is possible to understand why Ilustrado
nationalism, as it has been perceived by Rizal, del Pilar, and other members
of the Ilustrado class, is itself involved within the circular problem of
violence that lies at the root of any socio-political institution. By aligning
itself with a specific political ideal of “what the Filipino should be” as basis
for its reformist and later, separatist ambitions, the conduct of ilustrado
nationalism is itself captured within that framework of epistemic violence3
that is in essence repetitive of, if not entirely complicit with, the
perpetuation of the hegemonic structures of Spanish colonial society. By
2
Jose Rizal himself opines that without the “event of 1872,” there would
have been no Propaganda movement and he would have been a Jesuit. The injustice
and cruelty of this event deeply affected Rizal even as a child and this would
eventually define Rizal’s drive for vengeance against the colonial masters. (See Jose
Rizal, Epistolario Rizalino Volume 2 [Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1930-8], 166). Being
proximate, we do not claim that the event of 1872 serves to be as the only singular
starting point; rather, it is what served, in the words of Fr. John Schumacher, as the
turning point, the “catalyst which brought together the liberal reformist elements in
Philippine society with the growing self-awareness of a people into a movement
that before long would be directed at independent nationhood.” (John Schumacher,
Father Jose Burgos: A Documentary History [Quezon City: Ateneo University Press,
1999], 1).
3
I have taken this idea from Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s description of
epistemic violence in her “Can the Subaltern Speak?” in Marxism and the Interpretation
of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg (Champaign: University
of Illinois Press, 1988), 271-313.
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36 Michael Roland F. Hernandez
4
Ibid., 280-1.
5
Given the limits of space allowed for the presentation of this paper, I
cannot anymore proceed to the intricate details that this development has
undergone within the differing conceptions of “what the Filipino is” by the
Ilustrados themselves. For example, Jose Rizal himself attempts to conceptualize
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What does Faith Exclude? Catholic Hegemony and Ilustrado Nationalism 37
7
See José Apolonio Burgos, “To the Nation,” trans. by John Schumacher in
Philippine Studies 54, no. 2 [2006], 168-209. This article was a translation of the
original 1864 document that appeared in La America, VIII, 17 (12 Sept. 1864):11-3. Fr.
Schumacher has previously published the 1888 version of this article under the title
“Manifesto which the Loyal Filipinos address to the Noble Spanish Nation in
Defense of their Honor and Loyalty gravely wounded by the Newspaper La Verdad of
Madrid” in his Father Jose Burgos, 56-105.
8
Schumacher, Fr. Jose Burgos, 44. Schumacher explains that Burgos was
considered a mestizo (with one-eighth Filipino blood) on account of his father
being a Spaniard and his mother being a mestiza. This characterization of Burgos as
having one-eighth Filipino blood is of course confusing since the word “Filipino”
clearly refers to the social class of Spaniards born in the Philippines. What
Schumacher refers to actually is Burgos having one-eighth “Indio” blood.
9
Anderson, Under Three Flags, 15.
10
It must be noted at this point that the Catholic Church in the
Philippines is specifically under the jurisdiction of the Patronato Real, a decree by the
Holy See which granted exclusive and absolute power to the Spanish government
over ecclesiastical matters in her territories both in Spain and her colonies.
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not only Spaniards born in the Philippines but also indios and mestizos—
must undertake a collective imagining of their struggle in order to
articulate an effective political demand for justice. In this context however,
the appropriation of the term “Filipino” in the Manifiesto was devoid of the
nationalist sense in the way Rizal, del Pilar, and the other Ilustrados would
assign to it. In fact, the Manifiesto’s use of the word “Filipino” not only
eschews any reference to liberal political ideas of revolution from Spain but
clearly rules out any thought of nationalist separation. Defending the
Filipinos against the religious friars, Burgos writes:
The loss of these Islands, the ideas of emancipation . . . are
nothing more than a trick with which they [the friars]
aim to frighten the government. . . . There is nothing
further from our [Filipino] imagination than those ideas
of theirs. . . .11
On the contrary, here, what is clearly revealed is Burgos’ rabid
insistence on the element of deep gratitude and unwavering loyalty to
Spain, considered as patria grande or Madre Patria, that defines the
“Filipino.”12 He continues:
For we know and understand very well that, away from
the Spanish name and from the flag that waves over us,
we will be nothing, and perhaps worse than nothing. (…)
It is to our own interest, then, to uphold that flag,
sheltering ourselves under its great shadow, a source of
protection and of the highest culture. 13
This loyalty of the Filipino to Spain, on the basis of which the
strength of the Manifiesto’s whole reformist discourse rests, has already been
proven with “the enthusiasm with which we [i.e., the Filipinos] resisted the
English invasion.” It is this loyalty that shows “what we [Filipinos] can be
and are.”14
11
Burgos, “To the Nation,” 195.
12
See Fr. Schumacher’s explanation of the distinction between patria
grande and patria chica in footnote no. 44 (see ibid., 196).
13
Ibid., 195.
14
Ibid.
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40 Michael Roland F. Hernandez
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid., 174.
17
Ibid., 197.
18
Ibid., 209.
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What does Faith Exclude? Catholic Hegemony and Ilustrado Nationalism 41
19
One of the purposes of the Manifiesto was to exalt the quality of the
native secular clergy in terms of their high intelligence, zeal, integrity and many
other virtues necessary for the execution of their Church duties (see for instance
ibid., 187). This capacity for learning in turn was supplemented by the effort of the
Spanish colonial government to educate the local population. This implies, at the
least, that the education of the natives should not be attributed to the religious
orders as the friars would claim it. No instance in the document, however, was
given to justify the extent to which the Spanish government had carried out the
task of education (see ibid., 193, 195).
20
The ability to speak the Castilian language was one defining feature of
the educated class. Education during the Spanish colonial period was largely carried
out in Castilian Spanish and only those who can speak the language can really be
called educated. The native clergy, especially those mentioned for their excellence in
virtue and knowledge in the document, has shown exceptional ability to learn (and
thus speak Castilian) and for this reason can only rightly claim the status of being a
Filipino.
For an extended discussion of the issue of the Spanish language in
colonial Philippines see Albina Peczon Fernandez, “The politics of language and the
language of politics: a preliminary study of the Spanish Language in Colonial
Philippines” in Imperios y Naciones en el Pacifico Volume II, eds. Ma. Dolores Elizalde,
et. al. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 2001), 219-234.
21
Ibid., 197.
22
See Horacio dela Costa, “The Development of the Native Clergy” in
Studies in Philippine Church History, ed. Gerald Anderson (Ithaca: Cornell University,
1969).
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42 Michael Roland F. Hernandez
feels, speaks, and acts like the Spaniard. Indeed he is the one whose
Hispanization and Christianization was complete, the one hispanized and
Christianized to the highest degree.23
The Filipino as a Christian Concept
From the above, it becomes easy to see why the emergent Filipino
identity, considered historically, is essentially a Christian, specifically,
Catholic identity. Nascent within the context of secular clergy’s reaction to
their specific experience of marginalization, the Filipino, as an identity,
contains in itself an irresolvable ambivalence: it must set itself against
Spanish friar nationalism while, at the same time, utilizing its conceptual
resources from within so as to clearly constitute itself as a Spanish and
Catholic identity. Such parasitism infects the supposedly moral aim of
Filipino identity construction with the same ethnocentric bias that has so
deeply characterized friar nationalism. For if one considers oneself as a
Filipino, loyal to Spain and to the Holy Catholic Church, then one must set
oneself against the non-Christian groups in the colonial society. In this
separation, the circular and inescapable fact of ethnocentric racism is
betrayed by the subjectivism inherent in any nationalist discourse. As
subsequent Philippine history would show, the Ilustrado continuation of
the reformist struggle and their transformation of the secular clergy’s
conception of the Filipino into a “class concept” into which the idea of an
entire modern nation can be embraced 24 or “imagined,” as Benedict
Anderson puts it, 25 would concretely instantiate this exclusivist or
marginalizing tendency.
It would be up to Rizal and the other ilustrados to construct the
center upon which this fictive unity of idealized characteristics called
Filipino identity could ground itself. In this task, however, the Christian
origin of Ilustrado nationalism becomes increasingly clear: only those
indios “who have underwent religious conversion” 26 are possible to become
23
Hispanization, of course, was the highpoint of the Spanish experience
of imperialism. For a relevant example see John Phelan, The Hispanization of the
Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565-1700 (Madison: University of
Wisconsin, 1959).
24
See Aguilar, “Tracing Origins,” 610.
25
See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities (Pasig: Anvil, 2003), 5-7.
26
Aguilar, “Tracing Origins,” 620.
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What does Faith Exclude? Catholic Hegemony and Ilustrado Nationalism 43
Filipinos. But indios here do not mean all the inhabitants living in the
country. Rather, the term “indios” is restricted only to what the Spaniards
describe as “the already-colonized lowland inhabitants.” 27 If the indios are
those that have already labeled as Christians, then, this means that
“Filipinization” is possible only as an exclusive privilege of those who
already possess the Catholic Christian religious episteme.
The possession of this privileged episteme is what led the
ilustrados into an all-exclusive path in the determination of those who
should be included in their conception of the nation. Rizal, for instance,
claimed that only those “Catholicized Malays” can be “filipinized.”28 Those
who resisted Christianization—the Muslims and those who fled into the
mountains—were not to be considered as indios and therefore cannot
become Filipinos. For this reason, ilustrado nationalism reveals itself as a
bounded and restricted view of what the modern Filipino nation-state
should be all about. The ilustrados were conscious of the fact that they have
limited the “imagined community” by excluding those who did not fit into
their Catholic worldview: the Igorots, Tinguians, Zambals, Chinese, Negros
[Aetas], and countless others which the Spaniards collectively call as tribus
independientes. 29 Such ethnocentrism revealed itself obstinate when, on
several instances, the ilustrados were enraged at being called “chinos,
chinitos, negros, igorrotes” to the point that they asked: “Why do these
Spaniards not comprehend that “Chinese, Chinks, blacks, and Igorots” are
not Filipinos?”30
Here, it is easy to see how the privileged possession of a Christian
worldview, as the source of exclusion, becomes in itself an occasion for the
emergence of epistemic violence. On account of this heritage, the ilustrado
search for a clearer definition of what or who the Filipino is becomes not
only a reformist struggle for equal rights but also, by an unavoidable
necessity, a violent act of exclusion, of other-ing, or of marginalization by
establishing one’s own identity as “superior” over other non-Christian
tribes. Further influenced by social evolution, the ilustrados also thought
27
Ibid., 621.
28
See ibid.
29
William Henry Scott, The Discovery of the Igorots: Spanish Contacts with the
Pagans of Northern Luzon (Quezon City: New Day Publishers, 1974), 3.
30
Graciano Lopez Jaena, Diskursos y Articulos Varios (Selected Speeches and
Articles) [Manila: Bureau of Printing, 1951], 171.
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44 Michael Roland F. Hernandez
that there exists innate intellectual and moral differences between the
“indio-filipino” and the non-indio groups that any cultural exchanges
between them would be impossible—in manifest contradiction with the
theory of human nature espoused in the Manifiesto.31
This paradoxical situation in which the conduct of ilustrado
nationalism finds itself leads us into the question of that inescapable
violence that lies at the root of the struggle for freedom from Spanish
colonial hegemony. If the construction of Filipino identity was the
necessary avenue by which the anti-colonial project can be commenced,
and such construction is shown, in itself, to repeat the language of
discriminatory violence and oppression, what guarantee is there that the
language of ilustrado nationalism will not recede back into the problematic
of power relation and violence? Such a double-bind clarifies to us the
impossibility of ever-escaping the relations of power and violence present
in all our relations—be they social, economic, or political. Vicente Rafael, in
a commentary on Schumacher’s Burgos Manifiesto, illustrates this paradox
succinctly:
Here then lies the other side of nationalism’s Christian-
colonial origins; it is infused as much by an originary
cosmopolitanism—the sense of a certain foreignness at its
foundation—as it is contaminated by an intractable
racism.32
What does Faith exclude?
Any attempt to conduct a critique of imperialism from the
perspective of the West is always bound to misrepresent the varied
movements for emancipation by the oppressed colonial subject. Western
intellectual production, it may be argued, has almost always nourished
itself in complicity with western economic interests and for this reason, is
incapable of fully articulating a theory of desires and interest that
empathically represents the marginalized “other.” In the conduct of
Ilustrado nationalism, the struggle for nationhood and self-determination
have always been cast in the language of the elite, i.e., a language which is
itself alien to the life and interests of the oppressed native [indio]. Even if
31
See Aguilar, “Tracing Origins,” 621.
32
Vicente Rafael, “The Gift of Nationalism: Comments on John
Schumacher’s “The Burgos Manifiesto” in Philippine Studies 64, 305-11; 310.
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What does Faith Exclude? Catholic Hegemony and Ilustrado Nationalism 45
one traces its roots to the Secularization Controversy, one can still
recognize with ease that the attempt to appropriate a Filipino identity
itself reveals the problem of exclusionary violence. Having its roots in the
language of religious struggle, the construction of a “Filipino” national
identity has ingeniously mapped out the space for the possibility of neo-
colonial exploitation and subtly solidified Filipino nationalism’s complicity
with the orientalism of Western emancipatory discourse.
In this context, what faith excludes, by its own internal (non)
logic, is the infidel, the non-believer. It should not surprise us that a
nationalist ideology that is itself grounded on the premises of the Catholic
religion should partake of the same exclusivism essential to all faiths
understood as institutions. Faith, as an experience, reminds us that
salvation from God is open to all—Spaniards, creoles, mestizos, and indios
alike. Yet, when institutionalized into a religion, faith divides the inside
from what is the outside; thus revealing that the outside—the nation’s
external and internal others—can only “join” the inside through the
experience of social and epistemic violence. It is an irony reminding us that
Filipino ilustrado nationalism and the nationalist discourse that
subsequently fed on it must always acknowledge this fateful Catholic
heritage and forever be haunted by it.
References
Aguilar, Filomeno. “Tracing Origins: Ilustrado Nationalism and The Racial
Science of Migration Waves.” Journal of Asian Studies 64, no. 3
(August 2005): 605-37.
Anderson, Benedict. Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial
Imagination. Pasig City`: Anvil, 2006.
Heidegger, Martin. “Letter on Humanism.” In Martin Heidegger: Basic Writings,
189-242. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.
Ileto, Reynaldo. Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840-
1910. Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979.
Lopez-Jaena, Graciano. Diskursos y Articulos Varios (Selected Speeches and
Articles). Manila : Bureau of Printing, 1951.
Rafael, Vicente. “The Gift of Nationalism: Comments on Fr. John
Schumacher's "The Burgos Manifiesto".” Philippine Studies 54, no. 2
(2006): 305-311.
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46 Michael Roland F. Hernandez
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