Filipinos

and their
Reyoltttion
EVENT, DISCOURSE, and HISTORIOGRAPHY

by

Reynaldo C. Ileto

[_XJ
ATENEO DE MANILA UNIVERSITY PRESS
A T E N E O D E M A N I L A U N I V E R S I T Y PRESS
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Loyola Heights, Q u e z o n City
P.O. Box 154,1099 Manila, Philippines
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Copyright 1998 by Ateneo de M a n i l a

and Reynaldo C. Ileto
First printing, 1998
Second printing, 1999

Book design by Joel C. Lozare

Cover design by J. B. de la Peña

A l l rights reserved. N o part of this publication may be reproduced,

stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
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without the written permission of the Publisher

The National Library of the Philippines CIP Data

Recommended entry:

Ileto, Reynaldo C.
Filipinos and their revolution
: event, discourse, and historiography
/ Reynaldo C. Ileto. - Quezon City :
A D M U Press, 1998
1V

1. Philippines - History - Revolution,

1896. 2. Philippines - Historiography.
I. Title.

DS688.62 959.9026 1998 P983000151

ISBN 971-550-294-6 (pbk.)
ISBN 971-550-297-0 (pbd.)
 CONTENTS

Preface ix

1 Bernardo Carpió: Awit and Revolution 1

2 Rizal and the Underside of Philippine History 29

3 Rural Life i n a Time of Revolution 79

4 Hunger in Southern Tagalog, 1897-1898 99

5 The Revolution and the Diaspora in Austral-Asia 117

6 Orators and the C r o w d : Independence Politics,

1910-1914 135

7 The Past i n the Present: M o u r n i n g the Martyr N i n o y 165

8 The "Unfinished Revolution" i n Political Discourse 177

9 History and Criticism: The Invention of Heroes 203

10 Epilogue: Filipinos and Their Centennial 239

Endnotes 252

References 284

Index 296
 HISTORY AND CRITICISM:
T H E INVENTION OF HEROES

r • ihe nationalist "invention" of A n d r e s Bonifacio, though

I brought to the UmeUght by Glenn M a y i n 1997, is an issue
JL that begins for me i n the early 1980s. Soon after the publica­
tion of my book, Pasyón and Revolution, I found myself engaged i n
a polemic w i t h a University of the Philippines colleague concern­
ing a relatively minor episode i n Philippine history: an excursion
that Bonifacio and eight fellow Katipuneros made to the moun­
tains of Montalban and San Mateo i n A p r i l 1895.^

1984: READING ANDRES BONIFACIO

In our history books, the motive for this activity is derived

from a statement by one of the Katipuneros that they were looking
for a safe haven to retreat to i n case of difficulties i n the lowlands.^
I argued that there was more than a pragmatic side to the
Katipuneros' excursion. For one thing, they are said to have
climbed M o u n t Tapusi and entered the cave of the legendary Taga-
log folk hero, Bernardo Carpió. A s I show in the first essay i n this
volume, the Historia Famosa ni Bernardo Carpió is one we know to
have been Bonifacio's favorite. In fact, i n his copy of the awit he
penciled i n what he imagined to be the local equivalents of the
names and places i n the text. The mountains of Montalban was the
general area where Bernardo Carpió was believed trapped and
 from where he w o u l d some day descend w i t h an army of libera­
tion. C o u l d Bonifacio have suddenly forgotten this as he and his
group arrived in the area? Or, to ask an even more pertinent ques­
tion, how d i d the inhabitants of the area who, we are told, came in
to be initiated into the society interpret the event?
Other details complicate a singular, "common sense" explana­
tion. Bonifacio is said to have written on the walls of the cave:
"Long live Phihppine independence." If the Tagalog original of
this slogan is reconstructed, it turns out to be something like Mabu-
hay ang kalayaan ng bayang Pilipinasl which can also be translated as
" M a y the [condition of] freedom of [Mother] Filipinas come alive."
K a t i p u n a n manifestos and rituals, and even later anticolonial
plays like the w e l l - k n o w n Kahapon, Ngayon at Bukas, freely ma­
nipulated the idea and imagery of the mother country {Inang
Bayan) rising from her grave or at least her incarceration. I believe
the Katipunan expedition was itself a symbolic event, a scattering
of signs of the approaching time of liberation. The possibility of
such an interpretation already existed i n the popular expectation
of their s l u m b e r i n g k i n g finally a w a k e n i n g i n his cavernous
prison. The analysis might even be extended to the image of the
risen Christ emerging from his tomb, an image all Christianized
F i l i p i n o s were familiar w i t h . The K a t i p u n a n entry, then, into
Bernardo Carpio's cave has various levels of meaning, one of
which points to the assimilation of the Katipunan enterprise into
the larger body of myths floating about the region.
Milagros Guerrero dismisses the above arguments to the ex­
tent of calling it the work of a creative fictionist rather than a histo­
rian. This opens up the question of what the proper activity of a
historian is. It concerns methodological limits and therefore justi­
fies a more detailed examination. What do the objections consist
of? Paramount among them is my alleged use of "doubtful evi­
dence" to deduce the political motivations of Bonifacio. This par­
ticular objection can be broken d o w n into two aspects. One is my
use of awit literature, as well as other unfamiliar texts like songs,
dreams, legends, and even pictorial seals, as evidence. I am told
that i n using literature as w e l l as, by implication, those other
"doubtful" sources we "need to have incontrovertible proof that
 the sUce of Hfe they portray actually happened." The other aspect
concerns the need for evidence of Bonifacio's political motivations,
his "internal psychological state," his "truth," to come to light be­
fore c o n c l u s i o n s can be made about the significance of the
mountain-climbing event.'
Evidence is the bread and butter of historians, and some have
even claimed recognition on the basis of nothing more than the
ownership or control of such. Written documents are considered a
privileged means of access to some past reality, sometimes naively
equated with that reality itself which the collectors thereby get to
"own." Fine, if only they knew how to utilize these documents
fully. What is often missing in this obsession with the documen­
tary is an awareness of the relationship between language and the
world, the nature of document as text.
To take a concrete example, the objection to m y use of the
Bernardo Carpió awit is that it refers to a world that is fictive, un­
real, and therefore "literary." The events therein d i d not happen in
the Philippines; the awit therefore is not history. There appears to
be a conceptual confusion here. It originates from viewing the awit
merely as a fanciful representation of some past reality. Its
"literariness" is regarded as a hindrance to the faithful reproduc­
tion of this past. Enter the historian who, armed with a more "sci­
entific" language of representation, sorts out fact from fiction: yes,
those kings and princes d i d exist, but Bernardo Carpió himself is a
Spanish legendary figure; those events could not have happened
in the Philippines; the FiUpino belief in King Bernardo is a manifesta­
tion of a false consciousness, itself an effect of colonial rule. A l l these
points appear to be valid. If awit are viewed in this way, then there is
certainly no point in treating them seriously as historical texts.
There w o u l d be no cause for dispute if historical documents
were mirrors of our society. C a n documents, being linguistic pro­
ductions, be identified with fixed referents, the "facts" i n contrast
to fiction? There are problems with this "common sense" view, as
we w i l l explain later. Let us discuss first what seems on second
thought to be obvious: that certain social classes and sectors have
been favored by the written word. Colonial officials, friars, explor­
ers and travelers, ilustrados, the native clergy, revolutionary offic-
ers, mestizos, principales and as a whole, men, are the principal
subjects of our archival records. Histories centered around them
have been and w i l l continue to be important i n providing some
kind of framework for our national past, and a justifiable pride in
the achievements of a Burgos, a Luna, a Rizal, and so forth. But
where are the ordinary people, the pobres y ignorantes, the so-called
masses, and the women, about w h o m the archives are largely si­
lent? A dependence on proper documentary sources amounts to a
capitulation to the "tyranny" of the Philippine archives.
Guerrero certainly does not dispute the need for a history from
below. In her work on the revolution she demonstrates how peas­
ants throughout L u z o n rose against the republic i n response t«.
abuses by government officials and the local elite which made it
seem Uke "Spanish times" all over again.** What her documenta­
tion cannot reveal, however, is h o w the masses perceived and
thought through their condition. Colonial and elite records can be
read with the aim of reversing the process by which the activities of
rebels or subalterns were distorted by those who observed and
wrote about them. For every interpretation of "terrorism" or "ban­
ditry" there is a body of suppressed data that can be recovered by a
creative rereading of the colonial source.^ This, of course, is noth­
ing new to many of us. Sakay is too obviously a patriot despite the
label ladrón, or bandit, plastered all over him. Too often, however, a
colonial discourse is simply transformed into a "nationalist" or
"progressive" one, w i t h little being revealed about the masses
themselves. What d i d Sakay really mean to those w h o sympa­
thized with him? What meanings were generated by his appeals
for a continued struggle and his mode of death?
The emphasis since the late sixties—at least in student circles—
on "learning from the people" has heightened our awareness of
the relative autonomy of the masses' thoughts and perceptions.
The belief that unity of action can be obtained by enHghtenment
imposed from above, has given way to an acceptance of differen­
ces. A s those who go to the countryside to conduct "mass work"
usually discover, the masses' comprehension of their condition is
just as real as the "brute facts" of their material existence. Even
today, so-called superstitions, feudal customs, fanaticism, and
other survivals of a premodern past are discovered in the most
unlikely places and, as a glance at our weekend magazines w i l l
show, are the object of great interest. If these phenomena exist today,
we can imagine what it must have been like at the turn of the century.
Those who want to pursue this matter w i l l want to consult the
classics of Philippine history for their antecedents. Sadly, however,
they won't get very far, for these books basically provide an ac­
count of the Filipino people's emergence from a dark age of colo­
nial rule. Superstition, ignorance, fanaticism, timidity, and the like
are the ideological features of this dark past. Instead of an articula­
tion of the categories of meaning implicit in them, subjects of this
sort are simply given a negative sign and generally dismissed. The
archives, again, are partly at fault for not providing direct access to
popular mentalities. Sharing the blame, however, must be the view
that only educated, middle-class F i l i p i n o s thought, w h i l e the
masses were kept mesmerized by the fanfare and spectacle of pop
culture with its irrational, sentimental, and escapist attributes. This
view, applied to popular rehgion, originates from ilustrado propa­
ganda against the friars, w h i c h was transformed into a general
statement about society.'^ The problem is analogous to that of the
historiography of Indian nationalism which, according to Ranajit
Guha, "has been dominated by elitism—colonial elitism and bour­
geois nationalist elitism."'' This denial to the masses of any sub­
stantive role beyond that of implementing the thoughts of those
above them, rears its head in the very way Philippine history has
been conceived within an uncritical, linear, and developmentalist
framework, an ilustrado legacy that underpins even the most
anti-ilustrado of texts.**
The current problematic of the masses' role i n Phihppine his­
tory thus forces us to turn to unconventional sources. Symbols,
rituals, epics, and other aspects of culture can tell us h o w people
who otherwise could not write diaries and reports, publicly mani­
fested their thinking. The shape of a house, dance movements,
poetic conventions—these are all clues to how people organize
their experience of reality. Works previously assigned to the realm
of "literature" gain a wider range of use, particularly i n sociocul-
tural analysis.'' Yet these sources hardly provide us with facts. If we
 are to use literature, Guerrero argues, we "need to have incontro­
vertible proof that the slice of life they portrayed actually hap­
pened." After all, it is the documentary aspect of the text that the
historian is trained to latch onto. In this mode of analysis, the text
is situated i n terms of its factual or literal dimension, how it refers
to empirical reahty and conveys information about it. Working i n
this mode, we w o u l d ask how the Bernardo Carpió awit corre­
sponds to its Spanish model or to actual events and personalities i n
m e d i e v a l E u r o p e . ' " The h i s t o r i c a l r e c o n s t r u c t i o n of the
Katipuneros' ascent of M o u n t Tapusi, on the other hand, w o u l d
not stray beyoiid repeating what the documents said.
Or what the authors said. Corollary to the above is the view that
a text can only tell us about the m i n d of its author. The truths and
meanings of a text, produced at the time of its creation, are simply
waiting to be discovered by literary critics and philologists. Thus
any attempt to connect the text to its "outside"—such as the think­
ing and gestures of Bonifacio or the behavior of the Katipuneros—
is regarded as frivolous. This is merely a symptom of one of the
canons of Philippine scholarship today, the notion that text and
society can be separated, that the former belongs to the realm of
the imaginary, the individual creation, while the latter is real, even
capable of statistical verification. The latter is deemed, i n the final
analysis, to "produce" the former. Perhaps this is the reason why,
in the growing number of studies of folk literature or literary his­
tory that are appearing, "history" plays the role of introductory
background to, or causal explanation for, "literature." The latter is
subjected to classification procedures, thematic analyses, and
author-centered readings that more or less assure the status of a
text as nonevent, a static receptacle of truths and facts rather than a
moving force. This approach now appears "self-evident," "univer­
sal," and "common sense" to many. But looking back at the history
of historical thought, how obvious it is that "rules," "canons," cri­
teria of true and false, cause-and-effect, etc., reflect not timeless
truths but the epistemic character of particular ages."
R o l a n d Barthes has a s i m p l e e x p l a n a t i o n for the t y p i c a l
historian's anxiety about "the facts." It's all part of the prestige of
"this happened," another consequence of a certain historical con-
 ditioning of western man. When history was trying to estabUsh
itself as a genre i n its o w n right in the nineteenth century, it took as
a guarantee of "truth" the abundance of concrete details in a care­
fully constructed narrative that was deemed to express "reality"
out there. It was this attraction to the "reality effect" that also led to
the popularity of the realist novel, the diary, the documentary, and
photography. Today, this nineteenth-century aspiration towards
an objective and realistic historiography is seen as part of that com­
plex of myths peculiar to western culture "at a time when it was
trying to deal with the social pressures caused by the impact of
industrialization on institutions and beliefs peculiar to feudal so­
cial systems and agricultural economies."'^ The enUghtenment drive
to approximate reality through reason coincided with establishing the
"facts of history," which meant that literature, which seemed to un­
dermine the ideal of factuality, had to be kept at arms length.
Authorcentrism, too, can be traced to a certain historical condi­
tioning. It could stem from our o w n bourgeois conceptions of per­
sonal property, i n d i v i d u a l w o r k s , and the private control of
meaning. Michel Foucault traces back to the seventeenth and eigh­
teenth centuries i n Europe the beginnings of a preoccupation with
writing as an expression or even extension of an author's indivi­
duality. The value attributed to a text began to depend on informa­
tion such as author, date, place, circumstance of writing, and so
forth. Without an author to shoulder the responsibility for truth,
evidence was not "reliable."'^
It is authorcentrism that seems to lie behind the insistence that
my first duty should have been to probe into the origins (i.e., the
authorial circumstances) of the pasyón, religious rituals, folk be­
liefs, awit, and the like. We can raise at least two objections to this
approach. First, can meaning be controlled at the moment of writ­
ing? H o w could "personal authorship" thrive i n a situation where
works, stories, poems, and other writings freely borrowed ele­
ments from each other, were transmitted orally, and were therefore
subject to creative alterations; in short, where works were seen as
part of a collective enterprise, expressing not an individual point of
view but a general outlook? Second, how far back should one go i n
the search for origins, when any "origin" is already the outcome of
 a prior event? Doesn't this preoccupation w^ith ultimate origins,
absolute ground, in fact reveal a metaphysical rather than some
disinterested "scientific" outlook? Barthes goes as far as to link the
notion of the unitary or author-determined meaning of a text to
two forces: Protestantism and capitalism. H e sees in a certain atti­
tude towards the text (including the "properly" historical) the
same impulse that brought forth notions of the individual's per­
sonal relationship to G o d and the personal commitment to acquire
and accumulate money.'*
Unfortunately, the "documentary" approach to sources has
come to be identified with the historian's "proper" activity For any
text, whether this be awit, personal memoir, or proceedings of a
trial, has also its "performative" or "work-like" (to borrow a term
from Heidegger) aspects. The "performative" aspect of a text refers
to how it does things with words that brings about a change i n the
situational context; how it engages the reader—the past audience
as well as the historian or critic—in a recreative dialogue with the
t e x t . T h e Bernardo Carpió awit was written within the limits of a
prevailing system of conventions. Already, at the moment it was
composed, the author (whose identity remains problematic) was i n
a relational situation to an imagined audience. Furthermore, the
publication of the work meant that it took on a life of its o w n , mov­
ing through its nineteenth century readership and engaging it in
thinking about self-identity, control of loób, relationship w i t h k i n -
folk and patrons, stages of the life-arc, love, utang na loób, revenge,
and even, as we saw i n the earlier essays in this volume, freedom
from domination by a foreign power. Textual analysis makes available
the units of meaning which the historian, working equally with con­
ventional sources, can use to restore the play of meanings between
text, and ever-present context. We can say that meanings were gener­
ated outside the awit, with the participation of its mass audience, and
in relation to nineteenth-century social and material conditions.
Reading texts i n the above manner, the historian gains some
idea of how human actions are defined and limited, or the range of
possible meanings i n an event. N o t that we should cease scouring
texts for facts and ordering the data in cause-and-effect chains, but
when we are recovering a Phihppine history "from below" and
 faced with an apparent scarcity of records by and pertaining to the
masses, do we have any choice? In undertaking a new reading of
Bonifacio's favorite awit i n relation to events of the war against
Spain, we are i n effect identifying possible structures of meaning
that informed both popular mentalities and that of the Katipunan's
founder. We can state w i t h virtual certainty that the ascent of
M o u n t Tapusi was more than a search for a safe haven, for the
event was thoroughly imbedded in "culture."
This stress on social significance is related to another criticism
of my reading of the Mount Tapusi affair: the absence of direct evi­
dence that Bonifacio had the intentions and motivations I seem to
have ascribed to h i m . History, Guerrero reminds us, should deal
with the "articulation of conscious experience"; it is dangerous to
draw inferences about Bonifacio's psychological state."^ But is it
Bonifacio's psychological or internal state that we are after? M u s t
we limit our investigation to the consciousness of individuals, of
the "great men" w h o changed the course of history?
Philippine historical writing has traditionally put a premium
on the utterances and personalities of national heroes. This may be
the fault of the archives as well as the hagiographic tradition that
serves certain needs. But there are other traditions: " M e n make
their o w n history," Marx once said, "but they do not know that
they are making it." Social science today bears the imprint not only
of M a r x but also of Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic revolution.
Saussure proceeded from a simple insight: the distinction between
parole and langue, the everyday speech of individuals and the
underlying grammar, or linguistic system w h i c h unconsciously
structures utterances and which is by nature "social." Must we
forever attempt to l i n k the "speech" of B o n i f a c i o a n d the
Katipunan to conscious motives? The present dispute began when
I broke out of the preoccupation with "Bonifacio's truth" to probe
into the social meanings generated by the events of 1896, whether
Bonifacio intended them to happen or not.
In fact, Philippine historiography in the last decade (i.e., the
1970s) has largely removed the i n d i v i d u a l from center stage.
Renato Constantino's A Past Revisited (1975), with its insistence on
economic and class explanations, has eroded much of the cult of
 personality-centered history.'** There is now a "new wave" of struc­
tural explanations of the economic, sociological and demographic
sort, recently summarized exhaustively by John Larkin (1982) and
which can be sampled i n the collection, Philippine Social History
(1982)." K e y events i n our past, so these works maintain, were
made possible by changes occurring beyond the pale of individual
intentions, or "conscious experience." These historians have made
more efficient use of the archives, exploiting the abundance of land
transfer records, economic transactions involving local compres­
sors and foreign capitalists, colonial reports, census-type data, and
the like. The relative lack of personal correspondence, diaries, and
autobiographies is no longer regarded as a handicap.
This particular enrichment of Philippine historiography is not,
however, without its limits. We recall how Larkin, in his book on
the Pampangans, explained the appearance of the charismatic
leader Felipe Salvador i n terms of the rise of export agriculture and
deteriorating landlord-tenant relations i n Pampanga.^" We do not
know, however, from his work how Salvador managed to mobilize
peasants from varied linguistic groups i n central Luzon to join the
Santa Iglesia. W r i t i n g i n the Philippine Social History volume,
Guerrero merely reiterates L a r k i n ' s explanation of the Santa
Iglesia while emphasizing the local ehte's abuses that triggered
such phenomena.^' One senses the limit of their "methodology"
when the consciousness of the Santa Iglesia cannot be articulated
in a specific cultural milieu; when the rationale for their acts is pre­
conceived rather than demonstrated—the assumption being that
Salvador (or Bonifacio, for that matter) was really "just like us."
The peasants were oppressed and so they quite naturally rose up
in arms? Salvador's "interests" were no different from those of
budding capitahsts, except that cultural factors made h i m a bit
more "fanatical" or "religious" or "emotional" as "men of the
masses" are deemed to be? This outlook takes an extreme form i n
the writings of D a v i d Sturtevant. A pioneer i n the study of popular
traditions of Phihppine protest, Sturtevant nevertheless paints his
rebels as pathological failures reacting rather "irrationally" to
stresses and strains in rural society and the economy until more
rational and properly political leaders appear. M o v i n g to more fa-
 miliar ground, we can cite Constantino's reference to "mystic
mumbo-jumbo" in otherwise comprehensible peasant revolts as a
sign of the limits of his analysis/^
What characterizes the above works is the absence of any
real attempt to understand the masses on their o w n terms, and
the consequent reliance on colonial and elite-nationalist repre­
sentations of the masses' behavior. The boom i n "objective" so­
cioeconomic analyses of the Philippine past may be taking for
granted the deeply ingrained, behaviorist assumptions of social
science models such as "patron-client ties" and archaic notions
of language, textual analysis, human motivations, and the role
of the unconscious.^'
Predictably, anyone w h o engages i n an alternative history
based on "fragments" w i l l incur the wrath of the empiricists. For a
history that prides itself i n being "objective" displays its character
by the amount of unambiguous, documented statements of fact it
contains. N o t surprisingly, Guerrero says that I am treading
"dangerous g r o u n d " w h e n I "evaluate the collective mentality
during the revolution largely by indirection." Is there any choice
for us? To combat the "tyranny of the archives," to avoid that lapse
into silence about the masses while waiting in vain for conventio­
nal documents to surface, "indirect" methods must be resorted to.
This is nothing new. Claude Levi-Strauss once cited the Anuales
historian Lucien Febvre's work on sixteenth-century thought for
its constant reference to "psychological attitudes and logical struc­
tures" which "can be grasped only indirectly because they have
always eluded the consciousness of those who spoke and wrote."^*
N o matter how "dangerous," looking into the "collective men­
tality" rather than "Bonifacio's truth" is another way of removing
the individual from center stage. Its basic premise is that, just as
Copernicus decentered man and his planet from a privileged place
in the universe, man is decentered from his o w n meanings. The
conscious subject is displaced from the center of social activity. Just
like a "text," Bonifacio cannot be pinned d o w n to a particular
meaning and truth. H e could only operate within the prevailing
social structure and mode of discourse of his time. There were lim­
its to what could be thought. Within such limits, however, there
 was also play: Bonifacio's writings, speeches, and gestures were
texts which generated meanings which he may not have intended.
Ultimately it is the notion of text that leads us to justifiably cir­
cumscribe Horacio de la Costa's advice, reiterated by Ed de Jesus,
that students skirt the subject of Rizal and the revolution i n order
to do socioeconomic history.^^ The present dispute about the
Mount Tapusi affair is a good example of what I mean. Half a cen­
tury or more of scholarship on the revolution has actually domesti­
cated a subject matter which, i n itself, ought to be strange and full
of surprises, a product of a different time and sociocultural milieu.
We have all come to identify Bonifacio and the Katipunan with a
stock repertoire of meanings, and 1 suspect that the sense of indig­
nation provoked by my reading of the subject comes from the simple
fact that it is unfamiliar. It fails to reiterate the contours of the "thing
itself" that Agoncillo and others have "objectively" laid down.
The difficulty, to once more address the question of "metho­
dology," originates from a simple faith i n the transparency of all
historical phenomena. It is supposed that in the course of a histo­
rical narrative—the story of Bonifacio and the Katipunan i n this
case—what appears to be "strange" and opaque to reason can be
rendered susceptible to understanding by ordinary, informed com­
mon sense: the standards of universality imposed by present con­
sensus. N i e t s z c h e ' s a d m o n i t i o n of n i n e t e e n t h - c e n t u r y
historiography still rings true for our times: What the much touted
"objectivity" of the academic establishment amounted to, he said,
was simply "the measurement of the opinions and deeds of the
past by the universal opinions of the present . . . . They call all
historical writing 'subjective' that does not regard these popular
opinions as canonical. "^^
When Bonifacio is somehow linked to "primitive" and "super­
stitious" beliefs in a slumbering king who w o u l d one day descend
from M o u n t Tapusi at the head of a liberating force armed only
with anting-anting, the effect can be disconcerting. For the estab­
lished "truth" is that Bonifacio was a radical nationalist who led a
movement that was far advanced i n a developmental sequence
from "primitive" to "modern." But what is elided by this con­
struct? 1 have suggested that the Katipunan, whatever ancestry it
 had in the Propaganda movement and masonry, of necessity ab­
sorbed the characteristics of earlier cofradías and samahan, and the
potency of existing religious symbols and linguistic usage.
A w e l l - m e a n i n g friend once c o m p l a i n e d to me that her
grandfather was a Katipunero who believed i n liberal principles,
so how dare I suggest that the "fanatic" Valentin de los Santos (of
Lapiang Malaya fame) carried on the Katipunan tradition! In reply
I w o u l d ask, do we really know K a Valentin or, for that matter, the
Katipunan? Every scholar is convinced that he or she has pinned
d o w n the Katipunan's true nature. Jim Richardson writes: H o w
could Bonifacio "who read Victor H u g o and spoke of Reason . . . be
allied with a rustic prophet (Ruperto Rios) who professedly spoke
with European emperors, climbed to heaven up a rope and kept
independence i n a magic box?"^'' The problem with Richardson
and coauthor Jonathan Fast is that they think they have pinned
d o w n the ideology of the Katipunan because of their careful re­
search into the rise of the capitalist economy that preceded it.^**
The Katipunan leadership's middle-class origins, urban or pro­
vincial, are all too obvious. This leadership, however, also sought
to mobihze lower-class Filipinos i n an armed struggle. W h y was it,
to a great extent, successful? If we can accept the view that the
Katipunan subalterns were not simply blind followers, we can go
on to ask what it was about the gestures of some of their "lower-
middle class" or "plebeian" leaders (notably Bonifacio) and the
language of their manifestos, that proved so efficacious. Without a
sensitivity to the range of meanings that could be generated by
words or ideas like kalayaan, kasaganaan, kaginhaivaan, damayan,
katuwiran and kaliwanagan—and images like independence jump­
i n g out of a box (mother c o u n t r y r i s i n g from the grave, of
course!)—it is no wonder Richardson and Fast were able to con­
vince themselves of the essentially bourgeois ideology of the
Katipunan as a whole.
H o w e v e r , let us not blame foreign scholars w h e n expert
"Tagalists" are guilty of the same thing. In our universities, as we
aH know, schools of thought and factional groupings have played a
great part i n determining w h i c h kinds of history are " i n " and
which ought to be purged. Instead of constructing and defending
 the "correct" (or, more ominously, "official") version, should we
not perhaps reflect upon the function of historical studies i n the
first place? W h e n first p u b l i s h e d , the w e l l - k n o w n w o r k s of
Agoncillo and Constantino simultaneously reflected current think­
ing about the revolution and added new, "unfamiliar" dimensions
to it. The problem is that these have become classics, reduced to
certain stock anticolonial a n d / o r antifeudal meanings, self-evident
"truths" which, unless brought alive by those who practice new
modes of reading, no longer have the revolutionizing effect they
once had. The aim of historiography, Michelet once said, was "res­
urrection," to restore to "forgotten voices" the power to speak to
the living. Once these voices are drained of their strangeness and
mystery as once-vital forces, they cease to move the present to ac­
tion. W h e n once-vital events in our past become reduced to un­
questionable truths and facts, they have been "domesticated."
Historians can no longer bask i n the confidence that all they
need in order "to do research" is a lot of documents (living infor­
mants included) and rare books plus some rudimentary training i n
historical detective w o r k such as s u b m i t t i n g the evidence to
cross-verification, being fair to all sides, getting at the facts. The
culturally specific sources of their o w n analytic or sorting catego­
ries must be recognized and evaluated. H o w , for example, do the
dichotomies primitive versus modern, superstitious versus ratio­
nal, religious versus secular, backward versus forward, or even re­
gional versus national, draw their aura of factualness from their
place i n the culture of westernized, educated Filipinos? H o w do
they draw their legitimacy from the social prestige of the groups
w h o m a y have e m p l o y e d these categories as an i d e o l o g i c a l
weapon i n the past? What are the configurations of power i n our
society that conspire to institutionalize certain favored construc­
tions of our history? Historians today, rather than clinging to the
security of past practices, should be asking themselves such ques­
tions. They should be recovering what has been ignored or swept
under the rug i n past works, letting this "excess" challenge the
dominant "truths" and thus preventing history from becoming, in
Nietzsche's words, the "harem of a race of eunuchs." For Foucault,
the task is one of disordering, destructuring, unnaming—an ex-
 treme view, yet so relevant to our present situation.^**
In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, to climb the
mountains of San Mateo—the so-called Montes de la Libertad—
was a demonstration of one's exceptional valor. It was in achieving
this singular feat that many tulisanes—a term which literally trans­
lates as "bandits" but, according to Teodoro Kalaw, carries past
connotations of instigador revolucionario—became enshrined as he­
roes i n the folk memory.'" A s we saw in the second essay, Jose
Rizal, whose extraordinary powers and eventual martyrdom en­
deared h i m to many an unlettered villager, was rumored to have
climbed the mountain, entered Bernardo Carpio's cave and proven
his intelligence and inner control to the trapped king. With the out­
break of hostilities against Spain, the gentes ordinarias of the region
joined the fray expecting their K i n g Bernardo, with only one foot
left chained, to finally break free and descend from M o u n t Tapusi
to aid his people. Even today, I have heard peasants and artisans i n
Batangas and Quezon provinces (which are quite a distance from
San Mateo) speculate about the meaning of nag-uumpugang hato
(lit., "two rocks colliding"), the mountain where Bernardo, now in
the company of the patriots of the revolution, still lives until the
next war when they all w i l l return.
There is behind all these "folkloric" details a coherent view of
the world, not consciously articulated and, at least until their dis­
covery of Gramsci, ignored by the intellectual class. In fact, there
has hardly been any place i n our histories for such mental catego­
ries. To illustrate this point, we need only go back to when the dis­
pute regarding Andres Bonifacio actually began. In 1897 Carlos
Ronquillo, the personal secretary of Emilio Aguinaldo, in his "his­
tory" of the Katipunan uprising castigated Bonifacio for raising
false hopes that an army w o u l d descend from Mount Tapusi "to
lead his whole army." "This plain falsehood," writes Ronquillo,
"was a deception or morale booster (pangpalakas loób) perpe­
trated by Bonifacio; because at the appointed hour neither men
nor arms a r r i v e d from Tapusi. U p to n o w we do not k n o w
where this mountain is."'^
When I posited a connection between the Katipunan ascent of
Mount Tapusi and the Bernardo Carpió myth, I lacked the assur-
ance of such a direct statement as Ronquillo's. Yet, other signs,
made intelligible by the use of literature as a historical source,
pointed to the same thing. A n d there is something else, even more
important, that Ronquillo's account reveals: A s early as 1897, this
nationalist, revolutionist and historian, a believer in enhghtened
l i b e r a l i s m , was a l r e a d y d e c r y i n g the " d a r k u n d e r s i d e " of
Bonifacio's mentality, adding it to the litany of faults (the assump-
tion of " k i n g s h i p " b e i n g one of these) that he felt justified
Bonifacio's execution at the hands of Aguinaldo and the Caviteño
ehte. Things are different now, you say. Bonifacio's unswerving
patriotism has been given just recognition since the appearance of
Agoncillo's book. But is the angry bolo-waving Bonifacio and his
followers, contrasted w i t h the effete likes of Rizal, all there is to it?
Have we, perhaps, constructed this Bonifacio to suit our o w n
needs and desires? Despite the nationalist and revolutionary
badges conspicuously displayed by some of our vociferous intel-
lectuals, I suspect that it is Ronquillo, not Bonifacio, that lurks
within them.

1997: HEROES AND MYTHMAKERS

Thirteen years later, I find myself dissecting a book that raises

some of the older issues regarding the construction of Bonifacio as
a revolutionary nationalist. I w o u l d not be surprised if Inventing a
Hero: The Posthumous Re-creation of Andres Bonifacio was published
deliberately during the centennial of the Philippine revolution. A t
the very moment that the nation remembers and celebrates the i n -
dividual who initiated the event, Glenn M a y asserts that this hero
was, i n fact, "posthumously recreated and the six individuals w h o
d i d the recreating [were]: M a n u e l A r t i g a s , E p i f a n i o de los
Santos, Jose P. Santos, A r t e m i o Ricarte, Teodoro A g o n c i l l o , and
Reynaldo Ileto."(4)'2
Professor M a y teaches history at the University of Oregon and
is the author of other books on the Philippine-American war and
A m e r i c a n colonial administration. A s a professional historian.
M a y employs a familiar strategy i n his critique: the questioning of
evidence and sources, a rather old-fashioned but very persuasive
w^eapon. A m o n g his sensational discoveries is that Bonifacio can­
not have authored the texts attributed to him, that most of his per­
sonal correspondence was "probably forged."
M a y relentlessly assails the questionable methods of Filipino
historians and memoirists. A t least one is accused of having "con­
sciously dissembled" (i.e., "camouflaged, disguised, masked, con­
cealed") w h i l e "more than one altered e v i d e n c e . " Teodoro
Agoncillo, late professor of history at the University of the Philip­
pines, is said to have dealt with historical evidence " i n demonstra­
bly peculiar w a y s " (peculiar: strange, w e i r d , not according to
accepted rules). A r t e m i o Ricarte, a participant i n those events
whose memoirs offer some of the most detailed accounts is dubbed
another "re-creator" whose "influential narrative bears little re­
semblance to reality." Ricarte, in short, was a liar.
There is, to May, an obvious explanation for this posthumous
recreation of Bonifacio: politics, or more precisely, the politics of na­
tion-building engaged in by historians all of w h o m were, i n their
respective days, "prominent, outspoken nationalists, deeply com­
mitted to the ideal of Philippine nationhood." A reconstructed and
sanitized Bonifacio "served a vital political function as a symbol of
Philippine nationalism and a model for Filipino youth." This "ex­
plains the liberties they took w i t h historical evidence and other
deficiencies of their scholarship." The following passage clearly
evidences M a y ' s conviction that "politics" is inevitably linked to
" i n v e n t i o n . " It also reveals, i n its proliferation of " i f s " a n d
"mights," that May's conclusions are foregone—"if" these Filipi­
nos were nationalists, they must have written bad history:

For if, as I suspect, the historical Bonifacio may have mat­

tered less to them than their nationalism—if, that is to say,
they cared less about the 'documentable' particularities of
Bonifacio's life than the contemporary uses to which their
reconfigured hero might be put i n the present—they might
have seen nothing wrong w i t h embellishing a bit. If the
ultimate goal was re-creation, the inclusion of footnotes
was very much beside the point. (34) [itahcs mine]
 Some commentators have responded favorably to the book,
but there has been more condemnation than approval. Passionate
negative reviews have appeared with titles like "The U g l y A m e r i ­
can Returns" and "The Repeated M u r d e r of Andres Bonifacio."
M a n y Filipinos have reacted with anger and deep hurt.'' A n d w h y
not? The book strikes without mercy not necessarily at Bonifacio
but at the way Filipinos—particularly those of the "nationalist,"
"patriotic," and "anticolonialist" varieties—have remembered, re­
constructed, and disseminated the past. It suggests that the cen­
tennial is a big sham because Filipinos have spent the last hundred
years manipulating or inventing historical evidence in order to
have a revolution worth celebrating.
In the introductory pages. M a y tries to allay suspicion that he
is gunning for Filipinos by stating that the problem is a universal
one: "History invariably serves a political function; nationalist his­
torians around the w o r l d wave the flag . . . . Hence, the general
historiographical matters I touch on i n m y examination of the
Bonifacio myth are hardly unique." M a y points out other cases
where "supposedly priceless historical documents have turned
out to be certain or probable forgeries." Of direct relevance to the
Bonifacio controversy is the universal genre of "heroic biography,.
. . invariably hagiographic i n nature," produced by Americans,
Latin Americans, Africans, and all. A n extreme case is the invented
hero Stalin, alluded to by M a y as the Bonifacio of the Soviets. "In­
deed, it can be argued, and sometimes is, that all historical writing,
including the most esoteric, has a political dimension, even if the
writers do not acknowledge (or may not be aware of) it." This is a
most telling point, but apparently there are exceptions.
May, i n fact, seems to already know who the guilty ones are.
Aside from the nationahsts, he mentions other types of historians
who use their work to promote political objectives, among them
being certain Marxists, conservatives, liberals, environmentalists,
feminists, and postmodernists. (6) N o w this w o u l d include among
the "bad guys" practically anyone who writes within the frame­
work of an "ism," a theoretical standpoint, an ideological perspec­
tive. May, however, claims to be beyond such "isms," describing
himself as one who deliberately avoids fancy theories and sophis-
 ticated readings because lie merely wants to expose a scandal and
get the facts about Bonifacio straight. A s he puts it, "my discussion
of these writings w i l l strike some readers as pedestrian and theo­
retically innocent. I intend it to be exactly that."(44) Most thought­
ful readers who encounter statements of this sort w o u l d already
suspect that it rests on still another "ism," however ill defined or
obfuscated i n the text.
I w i l l not deny that the Bonifacio we k n o w today has mytho­
logical dimensions, and that there are problems with how the cen­
tennial has been celebrated. 1 do not dismiss outright the claim that
the six Filipino writers M a y targets are implicated i n various ways
in the creation of a mythic Bonifacio. What I object to, mainly, is
M a y ' s o w n act of dissembling and concealment i n the book, his
naive claim to be standing outside the controversy, describing
the w o r l d as it really is. H e wants the book to be seen as an
attempt to clear the path of mythological obstacles so that he
can access the "real" and human Bonifacio. Yet, the very nature
of historical inquiry, as anyone attuned to contemporary de­
bates i n the field should know, cannot but limit M a y himself to
p r o d u c i n g still another representation of Bonifacio—perhaps
drab and unheroic, perhaps more authentic, but a construction
nonetheless. One positive effect of the book is that it reminds us
of the relational, dialogical—even combative—aspects of any
historical reconstruction.
The Filipino nationalist "mythmakers" are the villains i n the
book because they "introduce and circulate inventions." However,
the very act of identifying and criticizing the "bad guys" is depen­
dent o n a n o t i o n of the " g o o d guys."^* The "other" of the
mythmakers are the supposed truth-seekers, the professional his­
torians. O f necessity, then, the first chapter of the book has a long
section i n which M a y projects himself as the "other" of the devious,
dissembling nationalists. O n page three he says: "For the next
three years, I spun m y wheels. I continued to do research, spend­
ing many hours alone w i t h my refractory Tagalog texts . . . " In
describing his attempt "to find a path through the documentary/
scholarly forest," M a y portrays himself as taking up the profes­
sional historian's lonely quest for truth, which lies i n the docu-
 merits themselves rather than the perspectives brought to bear
upon them. The hero of the book is the historian himself.
N o w this image of the dedicated investigator who uncovers a
scam is, I suspect, what makes M a y ' s book attractive to some. In a
society whose citizens routinely suspect and accuse politicians, bu­
reaucrats, and even departmental colleagues of corruption, pork-
barrelling, and the manipulation of facts, it is easy to get behind a
crusader from the outside who w i l l set things straight—someone
from the United States, no less, which is still perceived by many
Filipinos as the place where the standards of the professions are
set. O n the other side of the equation one can explain the book's
attractiveness in terms of the American public's thirst for sensa­
tional exposes, feeding orientalist fantasies about crime, such as
Asian gangs dealing in illicit merchandise. Here we have the au­
thor blowing the whistle on what amounts to a Filipino nationalist
clique of pseudoscholars telling lies, if not forging and hawking
documents behind the hallowed walls of the academe.
A n alternative and more productive w a y of reading M a y ' s
book is to forget about M a y the savior and source of light, and
instead see h i m as letting off a salvo, an artillery barrage, i n a long-
d r a w n battle over the terrain of P h i l i p p i n e national history.
"Andres Bonifacio" is an effect of the ongoing battle w h i c h i n ­
volves the nationalists, the colonialists, and all their successors. By
thereby shifting our perspective we can ask such questions as:
What kind of history of the revolution does Glenn M a y and his
cohorts uphold? What is the color of their flag?
When M a y starts to give the reader a background to the revolu­
tion (12), it is obvious that he regards the socioeconomic approach
as the w a y to go. This has been the approach favored by most U.S.-
trained Philippine historians like Alfred McCoy, N o r m a n Owen,
Michael CuUinane, and Ed. de Jesus. They do not necessarily agree
with M a y ' s critique of the Bonifacio biographers, but they defi­
nitely signify the "good guys" in the conflict. In their kind of his­
tory, the colonial archives are privileged. In fact, if M a y had his
way, nearly every historical source that is not written d o w n and
stored in a proper archive w o u l d be made suspect. The privileging
of colonial archives is an essential stratagem in the present war.
 May, for example, questions practically everything we claim to
know about the details of Bonifacio's youth. Zaide is faulted for
citing newspaper articles: these are not proper archival sources,
such articles are "clearly not works of o r i g i n a l scholarship."
Agoncillo is assailed for relying on only a small number of written
sources a b o u t B o n i f a c i o ' s y o u t h . We k n o w , h o w e v e r , that
Agoncillo interviewed many people who knew Bonifacio. To M a y
these are next to useless! Bonifacio's sister Esperidiona was inter­
viewed several times by Esteban de Ocampo. But where is the tran­
script? asks May. H o w do we know the interviews were not made up?
M a y argues that the relative absence of proper a r c h i v a l
records—records, by the way, that can be freely accessed by the
socioeconomic historians—facilitated the mythmaking:

This sparse d o c u m e n t a r y record—something that ap­

peared to have posed formidable obstacles to the recovery
of the past—actually made it easier for nationalist histori­
ans to invent the man. Unhampered by existing docu­
ments, they were freer to attribute certain ideas a n d
personal characteristics to Bonifacio, to explain away the
apparent human flaws, and, in the process, to create a suit­
able national symbol.(17)

It is entirely legitimate for M a y to push for the kind of history

he favors, namely socioeconomic and demographic history based
on parish records and colonial reports. It is also reasonable for h i m
to criticize Agoncillo for not using certain archival collections (such
as the P h i l i p p i n e Revolutionary Papers and the archives of the
Spanish religious orders), and for relying on oral interviews for
much of his reconstruction of Katipunan history. The problem is
that M a y attempts to establish a binary opposition between archi­
val sources (which he privileges) and oral sources whose prov­
enance is difficult to trace. H e posits a d i c h o t o m y between
authentic records (i.e., official, reliable, written, archived) and i n -
authentic records (i.e., i n private hands, oral, biased, probably tam­
pered with). It just so happens that for M a y the authentic records
lie mostly i n colonial archives, easily accessible to him.
 Agoncillo knew that Filipinos were disadvantaged i n histories
that privileged archives. H e often spoke of the tyranny of the colo­
nial archives, how they only spoke of the indios i n relation to Spain
and Spanish official surveillance. That is one reason w h y Philip­
pine history to Agoncillo begins i n 1872, when native voices start
to proliferate i n the written records. H e believed that, aside from
captured records i n their custody, the official archives w o u l d not
have revealed as much as interviews of survivors of the revolu­
tionary period. Revolt of the Masses relied heavily on oral informa­
tion, which to M a y is "Agoncillo's most distinctive methodological
quirk—his seemingly unqualified faith i n interviews" and the
main source of the book's "striking weaknesses."(131)
Those who attempt to write women's history w i l l sympathize
with Agoncillo's criticisms of the colonial archives. H o w effectively
can we retrieve women's past when men largely penned the so-
called reliable archival sources? Women's history relies much on
the use of "unofficial" records, oral interviews, creative readings of
men's writings, and is currently informed by feminist or, worse,
"postmodernist" theory. By May's reckoning, then, feminist histo­
rians should turn out to be just as bad as the nationalists.
The oral sources or interviews pertaining to Bonifacio are
criticized by M a y because they were conducted half a century after
the events. People w o u l d by then have forgotten or distorted—
deliberately, he insinuates—certain details of the past. Most histo­
rians have i n fact used the sorts of records Agoncillo used, but M a y
belittles Agoncillo's ability to properly use the data i n his sources.
Agoncillo is pictured as a "home-grown" scholar, largely uniniti­
ated to western scientific methods of history. Moreover, he is ac­
c u s e d of b e i n g e s s e n t i a l l y b i a s e d , not just because of his
nationalism, but by virtue of his kinship ties to the second wife of
Aguinaldo, a major informant. In all sorts of ways M a y assumes
the position of the modern, liberal, scholar (rational, objective, freed
from particularistic ties) vis á vis the preprofessional, and coinci-
dentally brown-skinned, Agoncillo.
U n d e r l y i n g G l e n n M a y ' s doubts and anxieties about oral
sources is, I think, the question of access to the historical or native
"other." One thing we all knew about the Philippine social histori-
 ans back i n the late 1960s and the 1970s v^as that they considered it
unimportant to be fluent i n a Philippine language; after all, their
targets w^ere the Spanish and American archival holdings. A n d so
because of language barriers. M a y could not i n fact have con­
ducted oral history extensively or effectively. In his one attempt,
an extensive interview of a P h i l i p p i n e - A m e r i c a n war veteran
named Benito Vergara, M a y relied on an interpreter and assumed
that the translation into English was entirely transparent.^^ In con­
trast, Agoncillo was himself a Tagalog writer and poet. He could
communicate at a deep level with his informants. From them he
could, and d i d , wean out details, even deep sentiments, about the
events of 1896-97. In contrast, I doubt if even with all the docu­
ments at his d i s p o s a l M a y c o u l d have w r i t t e n a book l i k e
Agoncillo's The Revolt of the Masses, which required extensive inter­
action between the historian and informants. So M a y ' s valoriza­
tion of the [colonial] archives has also something to do with the
problem of an outsider's access to the indigenous world. The ar­
chives can be regarded as privileged memory machines of elites,
both colonizer and native.
Let me now turn to one of the highlights of the book: M a y ' s
discovery of a sensational trade i n forged documents. M u c h of the
book has to do with examining the authenticity, validity, or legiti­
macy of the sources used to construct Bonifacio's biography and
the history of the 1896 revolution. While oral history is regarded as
suspect, certain written documents are alleged to be fakes.
M a y notes first of all that the writings of Bonifacio are in pri­
vate hands, not locked up i n some state or church archive. So i m ­
mediately his suspicions are raised. For example, take the letters of
Bonifacio which used to be owned by Epifanio de los Santos and
his son Jose P. Santos. W h y are there differences i n penmanship.
M a y asks, even though the signatures are the same? "Santos may
have known, or strongly suspected, that the documents in his pos­
session were bogus and wanted to cover up that fact." M a y then
embarks upon a hypothetical scenario of what I call "the grand
coverup." I stress the w o r d "hypothetical" because despite all his
demands for hard proof i n making historical statements, he him­
self is unable to say for sure that what he alleges is true. Readers, i n
 fact, s h o u l d note the extraordinary number of times i n w h i c h
M a y uses variations of the w o r d "probably" i n his analyses of
texts and scenarios.'*'
It all starts with the observation that not all of Bonifacio's let­
ters were penned by the same person. M a y himself hints at a
simple explanation for this: that different scribes (escribiente, secre­
tary) penned Bonifacio's letters, which he himself signed. But this
explanation is glossed over; M a y instead asserts that the docu­
ments had "major defects" which Santos may have tried to rectify
through forgery. It is interesting to trace the drift i n May's argu­
ments and style of presentation. What starts out as a hypothetical
scenario—he admits that his conclusions are circumstantial and
speculative—ends up reading hke a reconstruction of real events.
The reader gets seduced into thinking that a major trade i n forged
documents has actually been exposed. In subsequent chapters
M a y boldly refers back to this hypothetical scenario as a real event.
Anyone who skips the middle chapters w i l l not realize that the
whole issue is shot through with doubt.
M a y speculates that Santos knew the documents he had were
forgeries and so transcribed them so that they looked more au­
thentic. M a y ' s argument, however, when examined closely, is not
all that convincing. For example, he says that the "originals" used
goal-focused verbs which were not characteristic of older Tagalog,
or the Tagalog of Bonifacio's time. So Santos is supposed to have
transcribed the sentences to make the verbs actor-focused (e.g.,
"Tinanggap ko ang sulat" becomes "tumanggap ako ng sulat"). H o w ­
ever, M a y himself undermines his argument by admitting that
Marcelo del Pilar used goal-focused verbs as well. So, i n fact, the
allegedly forged original letters also conform to a nineteenth-cen­
tury stylistic practice, albeit less common. Maybe Santos wanted to
transcribe them in a way that he felt modern readers w o u l d feel
more comfortable with. I myself have transcribed nineteenth-cen­
tury texts and subtly altered sentence constructions to make them
more readable.
"In the end," says May, "the accumulated weight of the evi­
dence—the unbelievable stories about the provenance of the docu­
ments, the inconsistencies i n penmanship, and the defects in the
 prose—seems to indicate that the Bonifacio letters are probably fab­
rications." (79) Unbelievable? . . . to whom? Penmanship? . . . there
could have been different escribientes writing. Defects in prose? . . .
Marcelo del Pilar wrote in the same style. A n d despite all his argu­
ments. M a y can only conclude that the letters were probably fabri­
cations. The most he achieves in this chapter is to undermine the
credibility of De los Santos and Santos, to plant the seeds of doubt
in the reader. I w o u l d argue that this is i n fact his aim—to show
that these Filipino nationalists cannot be trusted.
The theoretical positions that undergird May's work become a
bit clearer in his discussion of Bonifacio's personality. W h y this i n ­
terest in personality? H e says: "Agoncillo's picture of the early
Bonifacio is almost certainly too flattering."(p. 126) The Bonifacio
of the M a n i l a phase was depicted by Agoncillo (based on his inter­
views with survivors) as a calm and charismatic leader who i n ­
spired his followers to rise i n revolt. It was only when he became
embroiled in Cavite local politics that he became impulsive and
rather irrational. M a y disputes the view of Agoncillo and others
that Bonifacio's personality was affected by the changing circum­
stances and environment.
Despite his c l a i m s o t h e r w i s e . M a y is not n e u t r a l about
Bonifacio. H e embraces Santiago Alvarez's suggestion that even
before Bonifacio went to Cavite he "manifested many of the same
traits of personality that later led to his downfall: hypersensitivity,
extreme i r r i t a b i l i t y , a n d v o l a t i l i t y . " M a y also disputes P i o
Valenzuela's claim that his depiction of Bonifacio as being tem­
peramental was due to testimony taken under duress. What is the
pattern i n May's o w n "critical judgement" of the differing testimo­
nies? What makes h i m so sure that Bonifacio was ruled by his emo­
tions—easily offended, a hothead, volatile? The stakes are high on
this issue: If Bonifacio can be proven essentially temperamental, he
is therefore unfit for national hero status.
M a y is unable to offer "hard proof" of Bonifacio's temperamen­
tal nature; I don't think anyone can, for that matter. H i s argument
feeds, however, into another narrative upheld by critics of the
revolution—certain upper-class F i l i p i n o s , c o l o n i a l rulers i n ­
cluded—that the Katipunan was not a rational movement, that it
 was led by a fanatic Bonifacio, and that it needed the leadership of
a more calculating individual such as Aguinaldo. M a y ' s view also
feeds into the orientalist representation of Fihpinos (especially the
indios) as ruled by emotions and therefore needing guidance from
more advanced tutors. Just look at any description of indios i n
Spanish and early American writings, and chances are you w i l l be
told that the indios or the tad are still ruled by emotions, and there­
fore need western disciplining and tutelage.
But another problem here is that M a y has an either/or, static,
essentialist, view of personality types. Individuals have to be lo­
cated w i t h i n a rigid personality category. In this case, Bonifacio
should fit into the category "emotional" rather than "rational."
Therefore the heroic, charismatic Bonifacio who only became emo­
tional when things got bad for him, is an invention of the national­
ists. To May, Bonifacio was never calm and heroic. H e d i d not
change, as Agoncillo alleges; he was always an irrational leader and
thus his downfall was deserved.
May's views about the behavior of nationalist writers and the
personality of Bonifacio are fortified by his views about Filipino
politicians. In connection w i t h his critique of Artemo Ricarte's
memoirs (another useless nationalist document, he concludes)
M a y takes a close look at the famous "Tejeros Assembly" of history
schoolbooks. This, he says, was really a gathering of políticos with
revolutionary pretensions at Tejeros i n early 1897 to resolve the
problem of leadership through elections.
His first conclusion about that historic event is that the elec­
tions were rigged, marred by irregularities. So what's new, he
asks? "Such was the norm i n Philippine local elections during the
final decades of the Spanish regime and such is often the case i n
Philippine elections today."'^ Ricarte is accused of concealing the
intrigues that took place; he wanted it k n o w n that he was given the
position of captain general due to high regard by others, not be­
cause of political shenanigans. "One thing we know for sure about
Ricarte is that his public image was very important for h i m , " M a y
states i n all innocence. But Ricarte's whitewashing of the truth
makes his account flawed and unreliable; "Ricarte the defiant was,
in reality, Ricarte the deceitful. "(99) Quite a devastating conclu-
sion, considering that I have used the memoirs myself and find
much of it accurate. H o w does M a y k n o w the real Ricarte? H e
doesn't, but he makes the reader doubt Ricarte's nationalist cre­
dentials; baka politico lang siya, maybe he was just playing politics,
one can hear the murmurings. The "real" Ricarte also happens to
conform to colonial representations of the native. Check out May's
first book. Social Engineering in the Philippines, and you w i l l find an
earlier statement of his view that Filipinos were not prepared to
run the country by themselves because even their best leaders
were inept, ambitious, and patron-client oriented. A n d so A m e r i ­
can tutelage was needed.
To May, the Tejeros Assembly must have been a typical dirty
election i n the Philippines. But lacking reliable sources (because
the a v a i l a b l e o n e s — f i r s t h a n d native accounts—are m o s t l y
"tainted" as far as he's concerned) M a y draws on his earher work
on elections under Spanish rule to paint a scenario of what must
have happened i n Tejeros. The electoral participants

w o u l d have been expected to conduct themselves as they

normally d i d i n electoral contests. That is to say, they prob­
ably consulted w i t h each other, lobbied, cajoled, threat­
ened, conspired, drew up slates of candidates, and made
deals. Some may have engaged i n ballot tampering. In the
aftermath of the voting, as might have been expected, too,
the defeated or dissatisfied cried foul, charging their oppo­
nents with all sorts of nasty behavior.(lOl)

Behind May's treatment of Filipino elections is the discourse of

democratic development, which has tied Filipino political devel­
opment to American tutelage. A male, liberal enlightenment fan­
tasy of rational politics is posited as the n o r m w h i c h Filipinos
failed to reach, therefore their politics—as in factional and then na­
tionalist politics—is shabby, pretentious, forever lacking. What is
missing is a discussion of Filipino political behavior on its o w n
terms. Instead, M a y encodes the Philippine data i n terms of rather
dated social science paradigms about "underdeveloped societies."
In fact, the problem goes back much farther, to an orientalism that
 presumes that the Philippine case must be the binary, negative,
opposite of the developed west.'"^
Typically, May's imagined scenario subsequently operates as a
real event: "The elections at Tejeros were, after all, only elections."
The people at Tejeros w o u l d have acted like "astute Filipino politi­
cal operatives" engaging i n "electoral pohticking, arm twisting,
and dirty tricks."(110) M a y gives these leaders the essential at­
tributes of the prepohtical and corrupt Oriental; they are trans­
formed into one-dimensional beings. They are typically corrupt,
authoritarian-leaning, nonideological F i l i p i n o politicians. The
ghost of Marcos helps to promote this view.
So those leaders at Tejeros were just ordinary Filipino power-
grabbers but nationalist historians. M a y laments, always like to
portray heroes as conducting themselves "with the sort of dignity
that, i n their view, such a moment deserved," i n order to build na­
tional pride in accomplishments of past leaders. M a y has a point,
but we can go the other extreme of forgetting that, despite their
principalia origins, the participants at the Tejeros Assembly also
called themselves revolutionaries. In M a y ' s account we lose sight
of the fact that a war was raging all around those leaders. It wasn't
"only elections." Those leaders had lost brothers and cousins to
Spanish bullets. It was an election i n a time of revolution.
M a y tries to show that Bonifacio got what he deserved, Philip­
pine elections being what they are: "Bonifacio was unhappy, but
that was to be expected: electoral contests i n the Philippines invari­
ably led to bad feelings." Since the archetypal premodern Fihpinos
are supposed to be driven by emotion, not reason, we are told not
to take seriously Ricarte's allegations that Bonifacio had been
wronged. Instead M a y suggests that Bonifacio (being basically
emotional) was a bad loser in a typically rigged election. A g a i n , the
idea is to demolish by innuendo another account sympathetic to
Bonifacio. Instead of presenting v a r i o u s possible scenarios.
M a y is i n c l i n e d to d i s m i s s or at least u n d e r m i n e any pro-
Bonifacio position.
So who are the Bonifacio sympathizers? Let me return to the
theme of Glenn May's "bad guys." To h i m the nationalist histori­
ans can be characterized as "pro-lower class, anticolonial, and anti-
upper class" and so they posthumously recreated Bonifacio i n or­
der to obtain all these attributes in a hero. M a y recoils from the
nationalist position because it appears to be the antithesis of his
o w n views about Filipinos. H e has always viewed Philippine soci­
ety in patron-client terms.*" The lower class cannot be anti-upper
class because they are beholden by all sorts of traditional ties to
their superiors. A n d most Filipinos were quite happy with what
colonial rule offered, especially American tutelage. So it pains M a y
that a character Uke Bonifacio might actually have existed, and that
a lot of Filipinos have come to believe so.
What readers of the book may not realize, because it is dis­
sembled by May, is that the current controversy is a replay of much
older ones dating from the time of the American occupation but
reaching the height of intensity during the 1950s and 1960s. Let us
take a close look at the following statement by M a y :

For at least four decades, the nationaUst school has domi­

nated the Philippine historical establishment. It is not sur­
prising, therefore, that the only challenges to the existing
orthodoxy have come from outside the establishment.
Joaquin does not hold an academic post in the Philippines
Fast and Richardson are foreigners. N o r is it surprising
that such challenges have been studiously ignored by the
establishment.(51)

First, we notice that the "other" is collapsed into the same. M a y

stereotypes "the nationalist school," so that it can be "othered." In
fact, N i c k Joaquin has a following among nationalist scholars,
while Fast and Richardson were aligned with Constantino, who is
also embraced by nationahsts. Internal debates and bitter contro­
versies are hallmarks of Filipino nationalist scholarship. Ever fond
of essentializing Filipinos, M a y wants Filipino scholars portrayed
as a more or less homogenous, reified, group (bound by an
"ism"—in this case, nationalism). By reifying them as the irrespon­
sible "other," M a y makes it appear that by his intervention as a
responsible historian (who, by coincidence, happens to be a white
American male), he is opening up the field for the first time. There
 is i n fact no "school." Even the external critics of the nationalists
hailed by M a y also positioned themselves within those debates.
Returning to the quote, M a y says that the nationalist historians
have dominated for at least four decades, therefore since at least
the mid-fifties. What was the other kind of history against which
the "nationalist school" was established; what used to dominate
before the so-called nationalists mounted the challenges of the late
1950s? Do I hear names like Gregorio Zaide, Conrado Benitez, the
good followers of the David Barrows and Dean Worcester schools,
Horacio De la Costa? There was obviously a contest over history,
and what is hidden i n May's book is his position in this struggle.
We cannot understand the vehemence of M a y ' s attack until we
appreciate the extent to which American colonial discourse domi­
nated historical writing until the 1950s when it was assailed by a
new generation of postcolonial writers and scholars. We cannot
fully u n d e r s t a n d this book w i t h o u t g l a n c i n g at, say, L e w i s
Gleeck's earher salvos i n the pages of the Bulletin of the American
Historical Collection, formerly housed i n the U.S. Embassy.
In the present hero-mythmaking controversy, the flip side of
the coin is the Rizal debate, i n which Americans and Filipinos alike
clearly figured. M a n u e l A r t i g a s , Epifanio de los Santos, Jose
Santos, and others were keeping one tradition alive at a time when
Rizal, approved by the Americans, was the national hero. A s we
saw i n the previous essay, Bonifacio was not a dominant figure i n
history books until the 1960s. Overshadowed by Rizal, he was a
hero of some Katipunan veterans associations and troublesome
anticolonial movements from the time of Macario Sakay (himself
an ex-follower of Bonifacio who was labelled a bandit). Rizal on the
other hand was the sort of hero that could more easily be recruited
into the A m e r i c a n colonial project. M a y himself states that the
Bonifacio of the nationalists is an i n v e n t i o n to counter the
Bonifacio "excoriated by foreign writers and home-grown en­
emies. . . . Here was a worthy national hero, an attractive revolu­
tionary alternative to the reform-oriented Rizal."(47)
Where does M a y fit i n all this? Only way into the book does he
allude to the tradition from where he comes: American colonial
historiography. "Agoncillo was also controversial. A n outspoken
 nationalist, he was critical of both colonial rule and colonial histori­
ography." This is a muted reference to Agoncillo's "other"—colo­
nial h i s t o r i o g r a p h y — w h i c h is practically ignored throughout
May's book. By raising the question of [American] colonial histori­
ography earlier. M a y w o u l d have had to state his subject position
in relation to it. This w o u l d have been a more productive stance
instead of posing as a disinterested "fixer," a hero amongst the
mythmakers. For what we can easily overlook is that, i n relent­
lessly undermining Bonifacio's authorship of every piece of writ­
i n g a t t r i b u t e d to h i m , i n r u t h l e s s l y c u t t i n g d o w n e v e r y
pro-Bonifacio work around. M a y is himself engaged in that 1900s-
vintage conflict over heroes.
M a y asserts that his "aim here is not to discredit Agoncillo . . .
but, if we are ever to understand Andres Bonifacio and the revolu­
tion he led, we must first jettison prevailing views of the man's
personality . . . ."(114) In fact, as 1 have suggested, the k i n d of
Bonifacio M a y w o u l d produce after clearing the ground w o u l d
hardly be a neutral figure, if there ever was one. H i s aim is precisely
to discredit Agoncillo and the University of the Philippines (U.P.)
History Department (Diliman campus), a breeding ground of na­
tionalist and anticolonial scholars. M a y reveals in his earlier po­
lemic against Renato Constantino (which I refer to in the previous
essay) h o w his students at the U.P.-Manila campus, where he
taught as a visiting FuUbright professor in 1980, remained diehard
adherents of the Agoncillo-Constantino construction of history de­
spite his efforts at reeducation. This was a time of student activism
and martial law, when the revolution and its heroes were being
read, interpreted, appropriated, and even manipulated by the
present. The American professor's intervention was no less a part
of that pohtically charged scene.
Glenn M a y ' s politics is clearly revealed in his overall treatment
of Phihppine historiography. A s pointed out earher i n relation to
the Tejeros election, a male, liberal enlightenment fantasy of ratio­
nal politics is posited by M a y as the norm which Filipinos have
failed to reach. Therefore, their pohtics, as in "nationalist" politics,
is shabby, pretentious, dishonest, and lacking. It is a prerational
and rather infantilized politics where the participants are ruled by
 their passions and kinship relations. We can detect a homologous
relationship betv\^een this evolutionary and developmentalist nar­
rative of poUtics and M a y ' s linear construction of the writers of
Philippine history.
A t the lower end of M a y ' s schema is M a n u e l Artigas y Cuerva,
easily the least developed because he was an ordinary, Spanish-
educated clerk without any formal training i n the discipline of his­
tory. Proof of this is that Artigas d i d not use proper citations, and
saw nothing wrong with relying on hearsay rather than authentic
documents for his Bonifacio biography. A t the other end of the
spectrum is G l e n n M a y himself—the professional, nonpolitical
a n d u n b i a s e d scholar. S o m e w h e r e i n - b e t w e e n is Teodoro
Agoncillo, who wrote i n English (as well as Tagalog) and held a
chair i n history, but was a literary person supposedly untrained i n
the canons of historiography (although I remember h i m discours­
i n g o n his favorite historian, Benedetto Croce); i n any case,
Agoncillo's "nationalism" let h i m down.
Occupying a somewhat ambiguous position in M a y ' s schema
is the sixth and last of his Filipino subjects, Reynaldo Ileto. U.S.-
educated and now Australia-based, Ileto appears to be the most
"developed," described as "to some degree a product of a foreign
intellectual environment, and i n that regard . . . a very different
historian from [the others], none of w h o m had such an intense ex­
posure to outside intellectual influences." Early in the book. M a y
remarks that the "problem" of Bonifacio's invention can be blamed
on the slowness with which Euro-American traditions of history
established themselves i n the Philippines. Ileto represents for h i m
one end-result of the American colonial project to educate the Filipi­
nos. That Ileto nevertheless produced a "flawed work" is due to his
having written in the service of "independence and national unity" as
"a participant in this nationalist discourse." Ileto is also pictured as
having been, "to some extent, a victim of the mythmakers." (165)
The elements of M a y ' s book are organized around or between
two poles: one negative, undeveloped, backward, unhistorical,
and Filipino, and the other pole being positive, developed, mod­
ern, historical, and Euro-American. Even the sources of history are
organized along these lines. Most of the Filipino writers he criti-
cizes seem to have depended on sources which are oral, unauthen-
ticated, mostly unauthored and therefore unreliable. O n the other
hand, "scientific," modern historians like M a y are associated with
the use of written, archived, catalogued, authenticated, authored,
and implicitly objective source materials.
What happens, though, if we move beyond such binary oppo­
sitions and hierarchies, which after all reflect a certain manner of
thinking which we call "postenlightenment"? The most positive
and productive moments i n M a y ' s book are precisely when he
identifies the dark features of Filipino nationalist writings. Jose P.
Santos, for example, describes how documents of the Katipunan
pertaining to Bonifacio survived several fires, floods, termites, and
even the H u k rebellion; "Ang mga kasulatan ukol kay Bonifacio ay
parang himalang muling nakaligtas." The documents are hkened to
religious relics or anting-anting, having the power to survive d i ­
sasters.*' M a y uses this as further proof that such writings, having
a fantastic, even laughable, quality about them, cannot possibly be
authentic documents.
This to me raises the much more interesting question of what
Katipunan texts meant i n relation to the social field i n which they
circulated. What was the status of writing at the turn of the cen­
tury? The production, circulation, and conservation of historical
memories through oral means is another exciting theme that M a y
draws our attention to, even if he regards orality as a less effec­
tive—in fact, a rather primitive—mode of conserving and trans­
mitting memories. There is also the whole question of who really
authored the letters and other documents attributed to Bonifacio,
w h i c h raises the broader issue of h o w the idea of authorship,
which is another effect of the rise of capitalism and private owner­
ship in the late eighteenth century, was handled by Fihpino writers
in the early twentieth century.
A final example of the productive aspects of M a y ' s book can be
found i n his discussion oiPasyon and Revolution. According to May,
Ileto adopted a textbuilding strategy that might be best described
as" "discursive blurring—by which I mean that [Ileto] constructed
his text i n such a way as to blur important distinctions and link
things that should not necessarily be linked."(146) One conse-
 quence of this is that Ileto mistakenly blurred the distinction be­
tween the Katipunan and the Colorum. M a y expresses dismay at
this collapsing or blurring of the clear lines demarcating a reh-
gious, backward, premodern and nonrevolutionary movement
(the Colorum) from a supposedly secular, forward, modern, and
revolutionary movement (the Katipunan).
What, i n fact, Pasyón and Revolution sets out to do is to shift the
study of the revolution away from the enlightenment/modernist
foundations on which it had developed at the hands of the nation­
alists. The irony i n M a y ' s critique of Filipino nationalist historiog­
raphy is that its o w n foundations lie squarely i n the discourse that
underpins nationalist historiography itself. Contrary to its claims
of being above politics and beyond discourse. May's book merely
adopts a different subject position i n relation to the same dis­
course. It reconfigures for the twenty-first century the same lines
of conflict over the meanings of the revolution that first appeared
during the early American colonial period.
Let me recapitulate those early events. W h e n Aguinaldo de­
clared independence and organized a government i n 1898, it was
w i t h the intention of establishing a nation-state and joining the
ranks of the progressive Euro-American nations. Republican lead­
ers like Aguinaldo, Mabini, Ricarte, and Malvar believed that there
was a genuine impulse for liberty among the general population,
and that they, as the better-off and educated, were articulating
such sentiments into a nation-state. The United States, however, in
collaboration with some Filipino ilustrados, upheld the view that
the revolution was a purely cacique phenomenon, and that the
"poor and ignorant" rank and file were blind followers of their
bosses. American "tutelage" was deemed by them necessary i n
order to defeudalize society and turn the masses into modern citi­
zens. The Philippine-American war was therefore anchored i n a
fundamental question: whether the revolution was a "revolt of the
masses" or a "revolt of the ehtes." If it was the latter, then the U.S.
A r m y was not suppressing a genuine revolution; the Filipinos
were but an oriental version of the American Indian tribes which
needed to be subjugated. The whole program of "benevolent as­
similation" in fact rested on this presumption.*^
 While Glenn May's book has appeared just i n time for the cen­
tennial of the revolution of 1896,1 think it really is more suitable for
another centennial: February 1899, the outbreak of fighting be­
tween the U.S. and Filipino forces. For what M a y is criticizing is
not so much that Bonifacio is an invented hero, but that he was
invented as a popular hero. H i s dispute with Agoncillo concerns
not so much Bonifacio as it does the U.P. professor's theme of a
"revolt of the masses." The problem he sees i n Ileto's w o r k is that it
moved "the locus of nationalism from the dominant elites to the
common people."(165) M a y ' s "take" on the revolution and the
Philippine-American war is that it was a "revolt of the elites."*^ H i s
book, then, is not so much about Bonifacio and the sources for his
biography, as about the effects of the Philippine-American war and
the subsequent American impact on— and nationalist responses
to—how Filipinos w o u l d remember and transmit their memories
of the revolution.
 10. Ibid., 245.
11. Teodoro A . Agoncillo, " A n g Kaangkupan n i Andres Bonifacio sa
Kasalukuyang Panahon" (1971).
12. Jaime Veneración, "Fagbabalik-aral sa Tradisyong H i s t o r i k a l "
(1971), 24-39. See also N o e l Teodoro, " M g a Pag-aaral H i n g g i l sa Pag-
unlad" (1979), 123-38.
13. Nicolas Zafra et al., "'The Revolt of the Masses: Critique of a
Book," (1956).
14. "History and National Progress" (1967).
15. Ferdinand E. Marcos, "Towards a N e w Social Order" (1973).
16. Renato Constantino, Neocolonial Identity, 269. For the controver­
sial lecture, see "Veneration Without Understanding" (1969).
17. Renato Constantino, "Roots of Subservience" (1969); Dissent and
Counter-Consciousness (Manila, 1969), 95.
18. Benjamin Pimentel, Rebolusyon! (1991), 85.
19. Zeus Salazar, " A n g Sigaw sa Pugad L a w i n " (1970).
20. Petronilo Bn Daroy " O n the Eve of Dictatorship and Revolution" (1988).
21. Pimentel, Rebolusyon, 85.
22. De la Torre, Touching Ground, 51.
23. Ibid., 113.
24. Epifanio San Juan, Jr., The Radical Tradition (1971), 133.
25. Ferdinand E. Marcos, Today's Revolution (1971).
26. Ibid., x v i .
27. Ibid., 64.
28. Ibid.
29. Ibid., 70.
30. Ibid., 68.
31. M a y ' s critique was originally published i n the University of the
Philippines student publication. The Diliman Review 31 ( M a r c h - A p r i l
1983): 69-79. It is also found i n M a y ' s collection of essays, A Past Recov­
ered (1987), 3-24.
32. May, A Past Recovered, 23.
33. Ibid.
34. Francisco M a g n o , "The Political D y n a m i c s of People P o w e r "
(1986), 13-18.
35. Far Eastern Economic Review, 21 December 1989.

Notes to Essay 9
"History and Criticism: The Invention of Heroes"

The first part of this essay was originally published as "Bonifacio, the
Text, and the Social Scientist," Philippine Sociological Review 32 (Decem-
ber 1984): 19-29. The second part originated as lectures at the University
of H a w a i ' i (Center for Southeast Asian Studies, September 1997) and at
the Ateneo de M a n i l a University (February 1998).

1. M y book, Pasyón and Revolution, was published i n 1979 b y the

Ateneo de M a n i l a University Press, Q . C .
2. Teodoro Agoncillo, Revolt (1956), 70; Gregorio F. Zaide, The Philip­
pine Revolution (1968), 98.
3. Milagros C . Guerrero, "Understanding Philippine Revolutionary
Mentality" (1981).
4. Guerrero, " L u z o n at War" (1977), chapters 3-4.
5. See Ranajit G u h a , "The Prose of Counter-insurgency" (1983), 1-42.
6. See Agoncillo, Revolt, 49; Agoncillo and Guerrero, History of the
Filipino People (1977), 106-7.
7. Ranajit G u h a , " O n Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial
India" (1982), 1.
8. I develop this argument i n "Outlines of a Nonlinear Emplotment
of Philippine H i s t o r y " (1997).
9. In this regard historians owe a great deal to the pioneering studies
of anthropologist Clifford Geertz (see R o n a l d Walters, "Signs of the
Times" [1980]).
10. See Damiana Eugenio's approach i n "Awit and Corrido" (1965).
11. For example, such a common-sense distinction as the "literary"
versus the "historical" derives from changing notions about language
and the anxious efforts of nineteenth-century historians to align their
w o r k w i t h science and factuality (see H a y d e n White, "Historicism" 14
[1975] and "The Discourse of H i s t o r y " [1979]).
12. Roland Barthes, "Historical Discourse" (1970), 153-55.
13. M i c h e l Foucault, "What is an A u t h o r ? " (1977), 125-27.
14. R o l a n d Barthes, "The Death of the A u t h o r " (1977), 142-43;
Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (1977), 119-20.
15. D o m i n i c k L a C a p r a , " R e t h i n k i n g Intellectual H i s t o r y " (1980),
250ff.
16. Guerrero, "Philippine Revolutionary Mentality," 249.
17. See N a n c y Streuver, "The Study of Language" (1974).
18. Renato Constantino, A Past Revisited (1975).
19. J o h n A . L a r k i n , " P h i l i p p i n e H i s t o r y R e c o n s i d e r e d " (1982);
M c C o y and De Jesus (1982).
20. John A . Larkin, The Pampangans (1972), 235-39.
21. Milagros Guerrero, "The Provincial and M u n i c i p a l Elites of the
Philippines d u r i n g the Revolution," i n M c C o y and De Jesus, Philippine
Social History (1982), 156, 179. Brian Fegan's contribution to that volume
("The Social History") is one of the few that grapple with the actual cat-
egories through w h i c h people experienced the changes around them (see
pp. 107-8, 115).
22. A Past Revisited, 267 and passim.
23. The problem is certainly not confined to Filipinists. Keith Tho­
mas, author of Religion and the Decline of Magic, replying to a critique by
H i l d r e d Geertz, admits that historians, though equipped to handle un­
derlying social structures, are m u c h less accustomed to searching for " i n ­
visible mental structures, particularly the mental structures underlying
inchoate and ill-recorded systems of thought, w h i c h are only articulated
i n a fragmentary w a y " (see " A n Anthropology of Religion" [1975], 106).
24. Claude Levi-Strauss, "Introduction: History and A n t h r o p o l o g y "
(1967), 24.
25. Ed. C. de Jesus, The Tobacco Monopoly (1980), x.
26. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History (1874), 37.
27. Jim Richardson, "Revolution or Religious Experience?" (1980).
28. J i m Richardson and Jonathan Fast, Roots of Dependency (1979),
70-84.
29. See H a y d e n White, "Foucault Decoded" (1973), 50.
30. Teodoro Kalaw, Cinco Reglas de Nuestra Moral Antigua (1947), 20.
31. Ronquillo, Ilang Talata, 6, 21.
32. The numbers i n parentheses correspond to page numbers i n In­
venting a Hero. The book, published i n 1997 by the Center for Southeast
A s i a n Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, has a Philippine edi­
tion put out by N e w Day Publishers.
33. For a p u b l i s h e d c o m p i l a t i o n of critiques of M a y ' s book, see
Bernardita Reyes-Churchill, ed.. Determining the Truth (1997).
34. I am indebted to Betty Holt for helping me think through this
crucial point. She particularly drew m y attention to parallel issues i n
feminist historiography. A u s t r a l i a n N a t i o n a l U n i v e r s i t y doctoral stu­
dents Theresa M i l l a r d and M i k e Poole also contributed their thoughts on
Glenn M a y ' s peculiar style.
35. Glenn May, "Private Fresher and Sergeant Vergara" (1984), 57.
36. A good example is M a y ' s treatment of Epifanio de los Santos
who, he admits, may have been right about his details concerning the
titles i n Bonifacio's library:

But the opposite is possible, too. De los Santos's discussion of

Bonifacio's reading habits and preferences is less than convinc­
ing, and his entire treatment of Bonifacio's early years should be
viewed skeptically. If it is true, as I have intimated, that de los
Santos's account of Bonifacio's life may have been embellished,
what possible motive could he have had for doing so?"(33, m y
emphasis).
 The whole argument is based on a possibility that he asserts. Later on
in the chapter, this possibility magically gives way to certitude. Later
chapters build on such rhetorical slides.

37. This paraphrases his conclusions in "Civic Ritual and Political

Reality" (1989).
38. Glenn May, Social Engineering (1980).
39. Surprisingly, American writings on their Philippine colony have
not been subjected to the same sort of critical reading that has been ap­
plied to French and British writings since the appearance of Edward W.
Said, Orientalism (1978). For an overview of the philosophical issues sur­
rounding the critique of orientalism, see Robert Young, White Mythologies
(1990). It might be well worth exploring how "America" constituted it­
self in relation to its Philippine colonial "other," and how this is repro­
duced in some scholarship.
40. For example, note his description of Benito Vergara: "Here was a
man who was not interested in fighting, who was not especially inter­
ested in Philippine independence, but who fought all the same. Why?
The answer lies in the nature of his society. He fought because he was a
client and his patrons asked him to fight" ("Sergeant Fresher and Private
Vergara," p. 57).
41. For stories of the appearance, disappearance, and survival in
fires of the writings of Bonifacio and Jacinto, see Nepe (pseud.), "The
Thirteen Miraculous Escapes of the Bonifacio Document" (1927).
42. These views are developed in Reynaldo Ileto, "Knowing the Phil­
ippines" (1988).
43. See the introduction to May's Battle for Batangas (1993). The "re­
volt of the elites" subtext explains why May is sympathetic to any ac­
count that does not portray Bonifacio as a man of the masses. It is
otherwise puzzling why May upholds Nick Joaquin's essay on Bonifacio
as a model when it displays even less scholarly attributes (such as foot­
notes and proper documentation) than Agoncillo's book.

Notes to Essay 10
"Epilogue: Filipinos and Their Centennial"
Much of this essay was written in July 1998 for the "History of Na­
tion-Building in Southeast Asia" project directed by Wang Gungwu, In­
stitute of Southeast Asian Studies, Singapore.

1. Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing Historyfromthe Nation (1995), 27-28.

2. Rocky Nazareno and Stella Gonzales in Philippine Daily Inquirer, 13
June 1998.