stony.

I probably have some 16 hectares bought from different owners who

Rizal to Blumentritt had abandoned them. They are situated along the seashore, inside the bay of
Dapitan, so that you can mark on the map the part between the town and a
little more toward the south of the cove of Taguilong or Talaguilong. C‘est la
In his ostracism he has little correspondence - ― They treat me more than
ou sont mes possessions! ( It;s there where my properties are!) I am
humanly‖ - Road to civilized forest - ―I lack nothing except my freedom, my
becoming a farmer, because here hardly, very hardly, do I practice medicine.
family, and my books‖ - About the Tagalog language - Photo of a Subano -
I have already cleared a part of the forest. Although it is stony, it has however
Blumentritt and the Ilongot language - Philological disquisitions - How is
good views, beautiful steep rocks. I am opening roads to make a civilized
Loleng?
forest with well traced paths, with steps, benches, etc.
When I receive a camera I shall take different views and send them to
Dapitan, 15 February 1893
you. In short, in order to be happy, I lack nothing except my freedom, my
Mr. Fernando Blumentritt
family, and my books. Of these three things, the easiest to obtain is the last -
Leitmeritz, Bohemia, Austria
the books; but mine are far away and I have read all that i have been able to
My very dear Friend,
get here. I have the Von Fels zum Meer (some loose sheet). Universum
By the mails of the 8th February I received your letter from the hands
(some pamphlets also), Chamber‘s Edinburgh Journal (2 vols.) and other
of the Politico-Military Commander of the District. I did not answer you by the
works. For the scientific life here is my former professor, the cultured Jesuit,
same mail for lack of time. I thank all of you for having remembered me from
Father Francisco P. Sanchez, who you already know. Nevertheless, I am
that peaceful city whose remembrance is not erased from my memory. Do
very far from incessant and indefatigable scientific life of civilized Europe
not be surprised at my silence, for since the loss of my liberty, for my reasons
where everything is discussed, where everything is placed in doubt, and
of delicacy that you can easily understand, I have suspended my
nothing is accepted without previous examination, previous analysis - the life
correspondence with persons who do not write me. I should have liked to
of the societies of linguistics, ethnography, geography, medicine, and
write you in German so that I may not forget altogether the language, but as
archaeology. But on the other hand, I am nearer nature, I hear constantly the
you have written me in Spanish, I believe I ought to answer you in the same
song of the sea, the murmur of the leaves, and I see the continuous fluttering
language so that the letter may follow the same route.
of the palms stirred by the breeze.
You are anxious to know how I am and frankly I do not know what to
I am working for some days now on a grammar of the Tagalog
tell you. If I should tell you that I am very well and they treat me a little more
language, but an original grammar, sui generis. However, as I have not books
than humanly, perhaps you would not believe it, because you would imagine
here on linguistics, many times I find myself hard up. My grammar of
that there being prior censorship, my manifestation could be forced. However
comparative languages by Bournouf is in Hong Kong - I do not know
that is the truth. I could cut off my hand first rather than write an untrue thing.
anymore what shelf - so that my work goes on slowly. Moreover, the clearing
This is one of the minor inconveniences of prior censorship: Even the truth
of my lands distract me at present. Make yourself easy for when my camera
appears suspicious. I am well indeed, anima corporeque (body and soul).
arrives, I am going to take photos of Subano types. I have known them here
Dapitan‘s climate suits me better than that of my hometown and much better
and really they are peaceful people, very honest, industrious, and faithful in
than that of Manila. This climate is most temperate. I live with the Governor.
their transactions, according to what they say. Here there is a young man by
However, I spend the greatest part of the day on my lands where I have
the name of Agyag who returns to his settlement tomorrow. He is of gentle
ordered built a little house amidst fruit trees (artocarpeas, theobromas,
character, humble, and reserved,
sansonias, etc.). I am engaged in clearing my lands in order to plant coffee
I commend your work on the Ilongot language and I am wishing to
and cacao which thrive well, despite the fact that the lands are hilly and
read it. I too am learning Bisayo and I am beginning to speak it a little with the
inhabitants here. Could you give me the linguistic or ethnological reason for
the change of the Tagalog i into o in Bisayo? The passing for the palatal
sound to the labial viceversa, to what is it due? Is it the result of a mistake in
the reading of the punctuation of the characters of writing? In the Bisayan
language I see traces of names of more primitive forms than in the Tagalog,
notwithstanding that the Tagalog conjugation contains in itself not only that
forms of the Bisayan but also others. Which if the two was older? Are both
branches of a trunk that has disappeared? That is what I am going to inquire
into, because I distrust greatly the Malay.
Loleng must be a little young lady now. I try to visualize as a junges
Madchen (young lady)the little girl that I saw running behind the coach to bid
us goodbye; however, it is hard for me to do so. It is natural she will find
Spanish more beautiful and more useful than Tagalog. The continuous
reduplications in certain tenses render our language ugly; but the Tagalog,
when well spoken, can be as valuable as any other language. It has a great
wealth of words to express affection and the activities of everyday life.
With greetings to Frau Rosa Blumentritt, Loleng, Fritz, and Kurt.
Your friend who embraces you,
Jose Rizal
Creation of a cultural minority
During an open forum of the Baguio Religious Acculturation
Conference in December of 1973, an Igorot student in the audience
addressed a question to the chair which began with the words, ―Sir, before
we were cultural minorities…‖ The expression surprised many people
present, and, indeed, seemed meaningless to some. Anthropologists and
tourists have made us so aware of the difference between the so-called
minorities and the rest of the Filipino people that we regard them almost as a
separate species - and it never occurs to us there may have been a day
when they were not cultural minorities.
The new society, of course, call these people cultural communities,
and they have come into prominence since the promulgation of the goals of
nation-building and national consciousness which are expressed in slogan as
“Isang lahi, isang bansa, isang tadhana - one race, one nation, one destiny.‖
These Filipinos used to be called ethnic minorities because their ancestors
resisted assimilation into the Spanish and American empire and therefore
retained more of a culture and customs of their ethnos, or ―tribe‖, than their
colonized brother to eventually came to outnumber them. They scarcely
appear in the pageant of history presented in the Philippine school system
because they lived outside Spanish control and therefore show up and the
Spanish records which form the basis of the Philippine history simply as
outcasts, brigands, or savages. And from this same circumstances stems the
fact that our main knowledge of them is derived from 20th century tourist
descriptions or anthropological studies.
Such studies and descriptions have the result, if not the aim, of
making us aware of the differences between these minority cultures and the
majority culture. They do not, of course, either ask or answer the question of
how these differences arose, and therefore do not contribute, or intend to
contribute, to understanding why some Filipinos still dance the dances their
ancestors danced but others do not. Quite the opposite, they obscure the
very question by reinforcing a natural tendency to consider present conditions
normative and static rather than as the end product of an ongoing process of
human history. Worse yet, they have fastened these differences on the civic
consciousness of the Filipino people by projecting 20th-century observations
into a prehistoric past complete with dates and details for which there is no
archaeological evidence whatever.
To the historian, however, limited as he is to records compiled by
foreign chronicles, no such Filipino minority-majority division appears. The
earliest accounts are more interested in the difference between Spaniards
and Filipinos than between one Filipino and another, and beyond the facts
that some Filipinos were Muslims and others were not, and that those in the
hinterlands lacked the cultural advantages of those in the trading ports they
have little to say about the characteristics or variations of Filipino life styles.
Later accounts, on the other hand, distinguish Filipinos from one another
mainly by whether they had submitted to Spanish rule or not, and so limit
their cultural observations to such comments as references to the one as
dociles and the other as feroces. Nonetheless, it is possible by a careful
survey of the accounts to recognize the rise of a cultural concept in the mind
of the Spanish observers which did not exist at the beginning of their regime,
a concept akin to that which we today would call a cultural minority. It is a
concept which arose in response to an historic process which was nothing
less than the creation of cultural minorities. What I propose to do here is to
illustrate this process by telling the story of one of these cultural communities
as an historian, not as an anthropologist or a tourist - that is, by restricting
myself to the written accounts of what earlier observers found worthy of
record.
The cultural community I have chosen is the Isneg people of the Sub-
Province of Apayao of the Province of Kalinga-Apayao in the mountains of far
northern Luzon. The sub-provinces takes its name from the Apayao River
which rises on the eastern slope of the largest mountain range in the
Philippines, the Gran Cordillera Central, which forms the watershed between
the Ilocos coastal plain on the west and the Cagayan Valley on the east, and
flows into the Pacific Ocean at Abulug about 25 kilometers west of the mouth
of the Cagayan River at Aparri. Both Spanish and contemporary sources
consider mountains impenetrable barriers to communication, and modern
Filipino laymen have accepted this impenetrability as the explanation for the
cultural community‘s existence in this area. This geographic situation is one
of two reasons I chose the Isnegs as my subject - to see whether Spanish
records do in fact indicate that these Filipinos lived in geographic isolation
from other Filipinos.
The second reason is that at the time of the American occupation, the
Isnegs might well have served as the stereotype for what other Filipino
consider an ethnic minority - they were illiterate, wore G-strings, cut off
human heads, and sacrificed pigs to pagan deities. Blas Villamor, first Filipino
lieutenant-governor of the sub-province and brother of the first Filipino
president of the University of the Philippines, was quoted as saying that the
natives of Apayao were so savage they could never be pacified but would
have to be exterminated. The question we will ask is, Do the Spanish records
portray these Filipinos as being so different from their Filipino neighbors, and
hostile to them?
Of course, there was no such province or sub-province in the Spanish
period, nor does the word ―Isneg‖ itself appear in print until the 20th century.
The area appears in historic records for the first time soon after the Spaniards
settled in the Cagayan Valley in 1518 to prevent the Japanese from doing the
same thing. When the Spaniards learned that a Japanese settlement had
actually been established there by a certain Tayfusa, a freebooter who lacked
only a monarch‘s backing to qualify as a second Legazpi, they dispatched a
fleet from Manila. After defeating the Japanese, they remained there to
discourage any such competition in the future. Dominican Bishop Diego
Aduarte, who arrived in the Philippines only 14 years after the event,
described the Spanish position in the following candid terms:
Thus the Spaniards remained in this province, but against the
will of its inhabitants, who wished to see there as little as they wished
to see the Japanese, and they promptly made clear by withdrawing
farther into the interior, leaving them all alone with no food, so that
they quickly consumed all their provisions.
Bishop Aduarte may not have realized it but he had put his finger on
one of the techniques by which those mountaineer Filipinos called Igorots
were later to resist Spanish occupation for centuries. That is, Spanish
conquistadores never grew their own food and the Igorots were willing to
abandon or burn their houses and fields rather than feed them. But he did
correctly diagnose another sort of Filipino behavior which worked in Spanish
favor:
They were much aided in their plan to remain there by the many
factions and wars among the Filipinos, who could not live in peace but
were constantly slaying one another.
One such faction was headed by a pocket-sized Napoleon called
Guiab, who apparently stood a good chance of conquering the whole lower
Cagayan Valley. He operated with a task force of 300 men, attacked anybody
who resisted him, punished any disrespect or disobedience, and rewarded
his followers from the spoils of victory. As soon as he heard about the
presence of the Spaniards, he started sending them rice and chickens and
even hogs - presumably because he recognized them as men after his own
heart and thus as potentially valuable allies. But the local people begged the
Spaniards not to join forces with this local conquistador, so, misreading the
message and overplaying their hand, the Spaniards captured Guiab and
hanged him. But this only set off a real resistance movement, complete with
personal challenges to lay down their firearms and come out and fight fairly,
man to man - the same challenge, as a matter of fact, Igorots were to shout
down from the mountaintops when their turn came in the next century.
Another faction, however, the Spaniards were able to exploit more
successfully. Along the seacoast just west of the Cagayan River mouth, a
Filipino by the name of Tuliao had been feuding with his own brother for
many years. Seeking to take advantage of the new political situation, Tuliao
asked for Spanish intervention on his behalf. So the Spaniards, as Bishop
Aduarte put it, ―ended their quarrel for them by taking away the lands over
which they had been quarreling.‖ Such heavy-handed tactics, however, soon
led to the outright killing of Filipinos and made missionary work impossible for
the friars who had accompanied the expedition, so they withdraw in disgust
and frustration.
For 14 years this military occupation was unable to extend its control
much farther along the coast than the mouth of the Apayao River. Then new
missionary friars arrived to make use of the personal relations, both positive
and negative, that had developed between Filipinos and Spaniards in the
interim. In Pata they found Chief Yringan who had been won over by the
example of a Spaniard who had been cured of an illness by praying before a
large cross, and in Masi they were able to reconcile Chief Siriban who had
taken to the hills after his two wives had been flogged on the charge of
bigamy. Both were among the first converts baptized on Easter Day 1596,
and Siriban volunteered allegiance for himself and his subjects in the
Plebiscite of 1597. (This Plebiscite was a kind of referendum in which Filipino
chieftains under Spanish control were asked if they wanted the Spaniards to
remain or withdraw.) One town that voted ―yes‖ explained the choice by
saying that the greatest advantage of obedience to His Majesty was in having
Spaniards to liberate them from the tyranny of their chieftains, and friars to
liberate them from some of the Spaniards.
The following years a priest was stationed in Abulug and began the
construction of a church. But the forced labor conscripted to build the church
gave the people of Abulug second thoughts about the advantages of a
resident priest, so they sent a delegation of chiefs to Manila to request the
withdrawal of the friars As the delegation was sailing down the Ilocos coast,
however heavy weather drove them to put in at Vigan. Vigan was a
community which had accepted foreign occupation back in the days of
Conquistador Juan de Salcedo himself 25 years before, and their leaders
now persuaded the Cagayan delegation that the Spaniards were here to stay
and that the best thing for them to do would be to return to Cagayan and
make friends with the missionaries there so they would have some allies
against the abuses of the military. So that is what they did. And so, too, the
people of Fotol, a day's journey up the Apayao River, asked for a missionary
priest when tribute-collectors appeared among them for the first time ten
years later. Thus the Mission of Santa Cecilia de Babulayan was founded in
Fotol in 1610.
Now Fotol is the modern Pudtol, Apayao, and it was until recently
inhabited by people who speak the Isneg language-that is, by Filipinos who
have come to be called a cultural minority- while the Ibanag-speaking natives
of Cagayan who are descended from Yringan, Siriban, and Tuliao are simply
called Filipinos. This is a discrimination which does not appear in the Spanish
records,
For 15 years, mission work proceeded smoothly at Fotol, although its
people remained so independent-minded that the annual tribute-collector had
to come in well-armed and quickly depart. Then, on the first Sunday after.
Trinity in 1625, two of those mountaineer chiefs approached Father Alonso
García and Brother Onofre Palao as they were eating lunch after mass, and
for the third time requested permission to return to the hills. this was refused,
they draw their bolos, hacked the two clergy tổ death, and led all the converts
and catechumens back to the mountains. The following spring a Spanish
punitive expedition destroyed the coconut plantation in the deserted village,
and When the Isnegs moved back again. Six years later, friar mission- aries
returned, restored the work, opened two new missions, and in less than a
year baptized more than 500 new Christians. A shrine was erected on the site
of Father García's death, and the missions continued to flourish until a
garrison of Filipino troops was sta- tioned at Fotol under the command of one
Don Francisco Tuliao. Then, for what a Spanish chronicler considered no
reason at all- a traición y sin motivo alguno-the troops killed some 80 Isnegs,
and the next year their avengers proceeded to burn the fort, kill 25 soldiers,
and put their priest in a boat with the church orna- ments and send him.
safely downstream. Just six years later, two new missionaries were assigned
to Fotol, and by 1657 the mission was so flourishing it was given charge of
work in the Babuyanes.
 The records which provide these details give us little in- sight into the
culture of the Isnegs, minority or otherwise, ex- cept that they were masters
enough of their own destiny to be able to accept or reject foreign missionaries
as they chose. True, Bishop Aduarte does say that Father García's flesh was
thrown to the pigs after he was murdered-but this is no more noteworthy a
fate than that of a Spanish tribute-collector in Isabela a genera- tion earlier
whose shin-bones wound up as rungs in some inde- pendent Filipino's
house-ladder. Aduarte calls the Isnegs living farther upstream or higher in the
mountains Mandayas, a term which literally means "those up above."
(Daya/raya/laya "upstream" or "up above"-is a root common to many
Philippine languages, and inland Filipino groups have been called Mandayas,
Irrayas or Ilayas all over the archipelago.) Moreover, he says that Father
García's murderers were Mandayas "whose native abode was in
mountainous places about the Bay of Bigan in Ilocos." This reference to
Vigan is a curious one, for Vigan and its bay lie on the west coast of Luzon,
while Fotol is in the eastern foot- hills on the opposite side of the Gran
Cordillera. It probably refers to Isnegs living so high on the crest of the
watershed that they were identified with the Ilocos rather than the Cagayan
side, and thus reflects the fact that the great watèrshed of northern Luzon did
not prove a barrier to such Filipinos as wanted to cross it. And the events
following the Andres Malong uprising a few years later make the implication
clearer still.
When Andres Malong raised the standard of revolt in Pangasinan in
1660, he shrewdly çirculated rumors that Manila had fallen into the hands of
the Pampanguefño rebels and that the Spaniards had been driven out of the
archipelago. The parish priest of Bacarra, Ilocos Norte, foolishly accepted this
propaganda at face value, and sent off a report to the Governor of Cagayan
by means of a parishioner named Magsanop. This Magsanop is referred to in
Spanish accounts as an Igorot, meaning a moun- taineer, and was probably
an Isneg from Calanasan, judging from the following events. He was also an
encomendero, and Maestro de Campo of Bangui, an outstation of Bacarra,
northernmost Spanish mission on the Ilocos, coast at the time. It is rare find
native Filipinos, Igorot or non-Igorot, appointed to such sensitive positions in
the colonial government, but this area was the coastal frontier between Ilocos
and Cagayan, and since neither Spaniards nor their vassals ventured to
cross the Cordillera itself to reach their outposts in Cagayan, it made good
sense to appoint a native mountaineer commander of this strategic area.
titles, however, proved insufficient to retain Magsanop's loyalty and instead of
delivering the letter, he read it-and then roused up 300 of his own followers in
revolt. They were promptly joined by allies from the Cagayan coast and
Isnegs from Calanasan, the uppermost settlement in the headwaters of the
Apayao River. Part of Magsanop's strategy was a direct attack upon the new
religion, and before he was captured by a combined force of Spaniards and
Filipino mercenaries, he had ransacked churches, destroyed religious
ornaments, persecuted faithful converts, and killed three friars. The Fotol
mission disappeared in the process.
Whatever Magsanop's personal faith may have been, he had correctly
analyzed the missionary's role in the foreign control that had been
established along the coastal fringes of northern Luzon and was now
pressing up the waterways into the interior. As soon as the revolt was put
down, a military outpost was established at Bangui, and from there the friars
began working their proselytizing way up the Bulu River to reach some
Isnegs called Payaos who had not joined the rebellion. Some of these were
resettled on the coast just east of Cape Bojeador (where their descendants
today have forgotten their ancestors were mountaineers), but the
headquarters of the mission remained in a mountain barrio on the Cordillera
itself. Forty years later, an Agustinian chronicler said that these converts were
"very useful as allies against the Calanasanas, a cruel and pagan tribe, and
for this reason the Governors in Manila have exempted them from paying
tribute."
Back in Fotol and Capinatan, mission work began again as usual after
Magsanop's death, and ten years later one of Spain's greatest missionaries,
Dominican Fray Pedro Jimenez, arrived to build two stone churches in the
Apayao jungle with such speed local troops swore the walls grew up
miraculously every night. Whatever these troops' credulity, their presence
was another symbol of the changes that were taking place in the Apayao
Valley. Isnegs in the garrison town were now subjected to different pressures,
and began to have different interests, from their independent neighbors. Thus
in 1684, a daring chieftain from upstream entered the fort in broad daylight
and killed one Spaniard and one Filipino, and two years later the missions
were suffering hunger because their inhabitants didn't dare go out to work
their fields in the face of the feud which developed. Father Jimenez, by the
shrewd use of local peacepacts and appeals to former converts, was able to
patch up the quarrels. But still the upstream Mandayas would not come
down: a generation before, some of their leaders had been treacherously
killed in Capinatan and their heads taken. Therefore, after considerable soul-
searching and argument with the military commander, Father Jimenez
decided to go up the river himself, unescorted and unarmed and undeterred
by a well circulated threat against his life."
The threat, as it turned out, came not from the people of the Apayao
Valley, but from the Kalafugs just across the hills to the south in the Ripang-
Conner area of the present Apayao-Kalinga border. A glance at the map will
make their interest in Father Jimenez's movements understandable. Kalafug
was on a headwater tributary of the Matalag River which flows directly into
the Chico below Piat, but this route to Cagayan had been interrupted 70
years before by a Spanish mission only ten kilometers downstream at
Malaueg-now Rizal, Cagayan. There the Spaniards began collecting tribute
only five years after they began collecting it in Fotol, a fact which evidently did
not escape Kalafug notice-at least, they participated in the revolt which cost
Father Garcia's life in 1625. Now Father Jimenez was planning to open a new
mission in what is today the Apayao sub-provincial capital of Kabugao. This
would not only place the Kalafugs in between two outposts of colonial
advance but threaten a trade-route to Dingras, Ilocos Norte, which supplied
them with the means of maintaining their independence. Moreover, two years
later another friar moved still farther up the Chico and started to write a
grammar of the Itawis language on their southern flank. Thus the Kalafug
threat to kill anybody who participated in the founding of Father Jimenez's
new mission is not all that surprising.
When Father Jimenez finally met the Kalafugs in face-to-face parley
under the protection of his Mandaya hosts, he told them it made no sense for
them to be at war here in Cagayan and at peace over there in Ilocos just for
the little trade they got out of it. It made no sense, that is, to anybody planning
to divide all of northern Luzon into two Spanish provinces and reduce all the
independent Filipinos in between the mere appendages of one or the other.
But it probably made perfectly .good sense to those Independent Filipinos
themselves to come and go, buy and sell, and make military alliances as they
pleased. Those in Kalafug accordingly crossed the mountains in 1690 and
wiped out Father Jimenez‘s new Missions of Nuestra Senora de Pena
Francia in Kabugao.
Father Jimenez‘s personal account of his mission to the Mandayas
has survived in Dominican archives, and it contains another clue to the
contradictions developing in the lower Apayao Valley. He calls everybody
indios - or, as we say, Filipinos - but among them he distinguishes some as
Enemigos. That he does not mean this word literally is indicated not only by
his spelling it with a capital letter like a proper noun, but by the fact that he
applies it to his hosts, companions and protectors as well as to the Kalafugs.
But he only applies it to those who have not surrendered to Christ and King.
The term itself is evidently the literal translation of an Ibanag word which
vassal Filipinos in Cagayan were now applying to all their neighbors who did
not join the new society. And since the terminology of the new majority
ultimately became normative in the colony, by the end of the Spanish regime
unsubjugated mountaineer neighbors farther south began to use it
themselves. Thus American colonialists in their turn were able to apply this
inappropriate Ibanag word to a whole sub-province and teach three
generation of Filipinos born there to accept it with pride and confidence. The
word is Kallinga.
This pagan-Christian, or independent-vassal, dichotomy continued
after Father Jimenez‘s departure and death in 1690, and the Fotol-Capinatan
misisons did not spring back to their old vigorous life again. Missionary friars
continued to come up from the coast for visitations, but could not overcome
the effects of such incidents as the murder of 30 upstream Mandayas in
Capinatan in 1732. Conditions in the frontier missions of Malueg on the
southeastern Isneg flank can also be cited to further illustrate the tensions. In
1740 two converts were killed by neighboring pagans, and their people
accordingly went out, killed ten and captured five, and in 1741 made three
forays. Then the whole town was burned to the ground except the church,
and everybody had to depend on the parish priest for emergency rations. At
the same times, others migrated back to the hills to escape the tribute after
they had fallen into hopeless debt to the mayor when they had been
prevented from working their fields for two seasons by an epidemic of
smallpox - a scourge unhappily introduced with tribute and the Gospel in the
first place.
A letter from the priest-in-charge of Malaueg dated June 24, 1741,
also gives insight into cultural changes accompanying these politico-religious
conflicts. The letter includes two requests of his superiors - one for tools to
proceed with the gliding of the church altar, and the other for clothing for
those who had been unable to save enough to attend mass. That is, at a time
when a modern theologian might think the raggedy fire victims had special
need of the Sacraments, the hierarchy of value judgments in the colonial
society gave precedence to sartorial propriety over spiritual need. So, too, a
contemporary decree in Ilocos made it a crime punishable by 50 lashes to
appear in a Christian town dressed in native Filipino attire, and in Cagayan
forbade naked bathing. And when an expedition of Malaueg converts was
sent out 20 years later, armed with headaxes, muskets and their priest‘s
blessings, to punish the people of Fotol for failure to pay tribute, they reverted
to G-strings to do so.
Yet contemporary missionary correspondence from Apayao makes it
clear that Spanish friars there had not yet developed any discord for the
cultural majority. When Fray Jose Tomas Marin spent three years hiking up
and down the Apayao Valley and across the Cordillera, he addressed Isneg
chieftains as ―Don So-and-so‖ and they addressed him as ―Joseph‖ not
―Father.‖ He describes them as gracious hosts - they went out to catch fish
when they learned he wouldn‘t eat dogmeat, or any meat at all on Friday -
and independent. Some said they might consider moving down to the
missions of Cagayan produced as good textiles as Ilocos did ( another
example of doing business on the ―wrong‖ side of the Cordillera), and one
promised to be baptized if Father would send for his relatives in Isabela. They
spoke of an evil spirit around the missions called Tributo which ate people,
but invited the friars to settle among them or to come and go as they pleased
on one condition - that it be put in writing that no tribute collectors would
accompany them. They called Father Marin ―the bravest father in the whole
world‖ for his courage in coming into their territory, yet his own letters give no
hint that his life was in any danger among them. In fact, like his great
predecessor, Pedro Jimenez, he does not even mention the fact that they
were headhunters.
But the fact was mentioned by conferers living in those colonized
parts of the Philippines from which the custom had disappeared. Augustinian
Fray Antonio Mozo, who never set foot in Apayao, reflected the attitude of
both Spaniards and Filipinos in the more acculturated society by describing
the Isnegs as bloodthirsty savages who lay in wait along the highways to cut
the heads off unwary travelers. So, too, a century later, Spanish minister
Sinibaldo de Mas enveighed against the custom of calling such Filipinos
―Don‖ as dangerous to the security of the colony because it failed to keep the
Filipinos properly in their place. And when in 1919 after another three
generations of white man‘s burdens and manifest destinies, dominican
historian Julian Malumbres told the story of one of Father Marin‘s converts
who was baptized with the full name of his Spanish sponsor, he found it
necessary to add a footnote explaining such lack of racial discrimintation as
being due to the missionary zeal of colonial officers in a happier day of
Spanish empire.
The transcordilleran trade routes that Father Marin followed continued
to be used up into the 20th century. During the Diego Silang uprising in 1763,
an Augustinian friar in Banna, Ilocos Norte, tried to get Filiino allies to deny
the use of these communications, and after he was released from a short
captivity, he proceeded up to the Cordillera foothill mission of Solsona to
send messages to Spanish forces in Cagayan by this means himself. A
southern branch of this same route reached the watershed at Anayan on the
Abra border, and from there it was possible to reach Vigan in three days on
horseback. After Father Marin‘s day, Spaniards did not make use of these
Isneg trails themselves but toher Filipino did: an 1805 report from the
Cagayan Valley stated that Ilocano traders reacted Malaueg - that is, Rizal -
by crossing Apayao over such a route. It is significant that the report refers to
these Ilocanos as ―embezzlers‖ or ―shysters‖ - extraviadores - for, in the eyes
of the colonial government‘s views on legality weren‘t very important in
Apayap: the Spanish missions in Fotol and Capinatan were never reopened,
and the Isnegs were left free to pursue happiness as their ancestors had
pursued it, trading or fighting with their neighbors as they chose.
Such fighting and trading of course threatened the security of Spanish
subjects, the collection of internal revenue, and the maintenance of
government monopolies, and therefore a thorn in the side of Spanish
sovereignty which grew more irritating with the passage of time. After the
invention of the Remington repeating rifle, therefore Governor valeriano
Weyler decided to end all this independence, once and for all. In 1891 he
accordingly announced the occupation of Apayao by the creation of the
Comendancias Politico-Militares of Cabugaoan and Apayaos. The latter of
these was garrisoned at Malunog on the River only 20 kilometers from the
coast and never extended its authority as far upstream as Fotol, and the
former had its headquarters in Piddig, Ilocos Norte, and never entered the
mountains at all. Clues to this failure to carry out the occupation are probably
to be found in two incidents which happened at the time.
In 1888, some mountaineers attacked Dingras and the Governor of
Ilocos Norte sent a punitive expedition into the mountains to retaliate. On the
Cordillera, the soldiers and their commander were hospitably received by a
local chief named Onsi. This Onsi had been cooperative with the colonial
government in the past and as a matter of fact, had been decorated with the
Cross of Civil Merit for his services. All day, therefore, he fasted and
entertained his visitors in good FIlipino fashion. Then, suddenly, the troop
commander had about 40 of his host‘s people surrounded, and accused them
of having made the attack on Dingras. When Chief Onsi protested their
innocence, the commander drew his revolver, emptied all six chambers into
the Isneg leader, and gave his men the order to open fire. Sixteen Isnegs
were shot to trial for his unmilitary behavior, but the next trading party of
Ilocanos who went into the area on business never came out again.
An almost identical case happened in the Apayaos commandancy in
Malunog just four years later. The Commandant there gave a part in the
garrison headquarters on the occasion of his birthday and invited all the
prominent Isnegs from Pamplons to Tawit to attend. In the midst of the
feasting and drinking, he suddenly had his guests surrounded and ordered
some of them seized and bound as suspects of the murder of seven Negritos.
Some of the Apayaos managed to snatch up their weapons, however, so the
soldiers opened fire, killing one outright and wounding many others. The
suspects were then seized and imprisoned, but the government took no
action against the commandant. Father Julian Malumbres happened to be in
Capinatan at the time, cleaning two centuries of jungle worth off Father
Jimenez‘s old church, and when he heard of the treacherous deed, he asked
for custody of the prisoners and took them back up to Capinatan with him.
But there they made an attack upon his life, and he always afterwards
believed that the local military authorities had deliberately misinformed them
that he had been responsible for the treachery. Needless to say, the mission
of Capinatan was not reopened.
Before Governor General Weyler attempted to establish the two
Apayao commandancies, he asked the Augustinians for information about the
area. Fray Ricardo Deza of Dingras responded with a sketch map and the
statement that the Isnegs were unapproachable because of their living by the
law of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, and always lying in wait for a
chance to take some Christian traveller. In drawing this conclusion, Father
Deza evidently did not find the recent example of Spanish behavior
noteworthy, or the fact that a German pharmacist by the name of
Schadenberg had just visited the remote barrios of Calanasan the year
before. He also seems to have forgotten that all his data had been supplied
by a half-dozen Ilocano businessmen and petty officials who had been hiking
safely in and out of Apayao for decades. In other words, if Apayao was
unsafe for Spanish commanders and their friar compatriots, it wasn‘t unsafe
for other people. The reason Father Deza missed this message is probably
because, like those treacherous commanders themselves and Blas Villamor
20 years later, he lived at the end of a colonial process which had steadily
divided the Filipino people into two categories - the submissive and the
unsubmissive, the faithful and the faithless, the good and the bad. The Isnegs
of Apayao clearly belonged to the latter group. No longer simple indios like
everybody else as they had been in the days of Bishop Aduarte and Fathers
Jimenes and Marin, they were, in short, a cultural minority.
This, then, is a brief summary of the recorded contacts between the
Spaniards and the people of Apayao, but it is enough to illustrate the colonial
experience of the Filipino people in far northern Luzon. So far as we can tell,
this people was divided into three language groups at the time of the Spanish
advent. Those in the lower Cagayan Valley spoke Ibanag, those on the
coastal plain along the South China Sea, Ilocano, and those in the mountains
in between, Isneg. None of these groups was united; none had kings or
common governments, and none was either a minority or a majority. They
were all composed of independent baranganic communities whose relations
with each other, whether of the same language or different, varied from
isolation to cooperation or conflict according to circumstances. Then, under
colonial pressure, Filipinos in two of these groups submitted to foreign
domination while those in the third did not. So, as the years of occupation
passed, the Ilocanos and Ibanags gave up more and more of their own
culture to assimilate more and more of their conquerors‘ culture. In the
process, they became more and more like each other and less and less their
ancestors. The Isnegs, on the other hand, preserved more of the culture of
their ancestors and so came to look less and less like their acculturating
neighbors. By the end of the Spanish regime, this divergence had created a
real Filipino majority for the first time in history - those Filipinos who had the
same king - the Spanish King. And those did not were just cultural
communities. Thus by the magic of colonial alchemy, those who changed
most became today‘s Filipinos while those who changed least were actually
denied this designation by a former president of the state university. In this
way a cultural minority was created where none had existed.
Tracing origins
Inquisition led Rizal to remark in his edition of Morga: ―A wise
foresight, for otherwise the Indios might have fled away from Christianization‖
(1962, 313; 1961c, 334). Thusu indios designated those who underwent
religious conversion, with the Tagalog as the exemplary indio. By implication,
those who ―fled‖ - mountain tribes and Muslims, for example - were not
indios. In an article in the September 15, 1889, issue of La Solidaridad
(Fores-Ganzon 1996, 1:352), Rizal used the phrase igorrotes e indios (Igorot
and indio) which confirmed the link at the same time that it demarcated the
discursive boundary between these two categories.. In critiquing hte 1887
exposition, lopez Jaena was adamant that ―genuine Filipinos, those of the
autochrothonous race‖ (los genuinamente filipinos, los de la raza antoctona),
were not given a ―place of honor‖ (1951, 155, 164); indeed, ―genuine
Filipinos‖ were excluded from its organizing committee. But in the same
breath he used the phrase igorrotes y filipinos (Igorot and Filipino) (Lopez
Jaena 1951, 166). One could not help but suspect that Lopez Jaena
considered ilustrados such as himself as the ―genuine Filipinos‖ who should
have been involved in planning the exposition. Apparently, for Rizal and
Lopez Jaena, ―Igorot‖ and indio represented dichotomous entities. In the
aftermath of the exposition, Antonio Luna was even more forthright in chiding
Madrilenos for ignorantly failing to make all-important distinctions: ―To these
people, Chinese, Igorots and Filipinos are one and the same‖ (Fores-Ganzon
1996, 1:444-45). Luna‘s point was unmistakable: FIlipinos should not be
confused with Chinese - neither should Filipinos be confused with Igorots, for
the Igorot was not an indio and not a Filipino. Lopez Jane cited Luna‘s
statement, making the further claim that Filipino all over Spain were being
―shamelessly mortified‖ by even educated persons with epithets such as
―chinos, chinitas, negros, igorrotes‖ (1951, 171). The ilustrados were
enraged: Why do these Spaniards not comprehend that ―Chinese, Chinks,
blacks, and Igorots‖ are not Filipinos?
The Campaign for Assimilation and Its Exclusionary Politics of
Numbers
Despite the furor surrounding the 1887 exposition, the ilustrados essentially
excluded Negritos, highland peoples, and Muslims from the national
community that they had begun to imagine. This exclusion can be seen in
Jose Rizal‗s blueprint for a Philippine studies conference to be hosted in
Paris by the fledgling Asociación Internacional de Filipinistas (International
Association of Philippinists). Drafted in early 1889, the program (which did not
materialize) included panels on the ―origin‖, ―classification,‖ and ―civilization‖
of the islands‗ inhabitants ―before the Spanish arrival‖ and panels on ―the
influence of Spanish civilization on the social life of the Philippines‖. On
Ferdinand Blumentritt‗s suggestion, a new section was added to discuss
―[r]azas y regions independientes in which we shall include the sultanates
and independent tribes (Moros, Negritos, and so on)‖. If not for Blumentritt‗s
intervention, Rizal‗s cognitive map would not have included the ―independent
races and regions‖ within the same territorial area supposedly designated by
Las Islas Filipinas, or ―the Philippines.‖ Moreover, the added section‗s title
contained the insidious suggestion that Moros, Negritos, and others
represented ―races‖ distinct from the inferior to indios. While the indios lived
under Spanish hegemony, non-indio tribes existed in regions unsubjugated
by Spain. Implied were two divergent historical experiences and two
unrelated political projects that fell along a well-demarcated racial divide and
civilizational ranking. Evidently, Rizal‗s ilustrado thought had been influenced
by European racial evolutionism, backed by ―purportedly scientific evidence
that innate intellectual and moral differences made cultural exchanges
between ‗superior‘ and ‗inferior‘ races impossible‖. Blumentritt‗s intervention
might not have alerted in Rizal the necessity to overcome such a dichotomy
actively, merely the need to ―fill in the gaps‖ that would be created by
excluding non-indios who lived in spaces encompassed by the name ―the
Philippines.‖
Sensitive that other Europeans were scoffing at them as ―owners only
of the littoral,‖ Spanish authorities in Manila from the 1880s onward sought to
conquer the archipelago‗s mountainous interior and subjugate the peoples
there in a second reduccion, the forcible creation of settlements that was
attempted at the start of the conquest. The ilustrados did not value this late
imperial goal, however, and readily detached themselves from the social and
physical spaces occupied by ―independent tribes‖ and ―wild races.‖ The
ilustrados imagined community was restricted to the early-colonized lowland
inhabitants of third-wave ancestry, those whom Spain has designated as
indios. It excluded, as Scott notes, the ―mountain peoples of northern
Luzon,... whether called Igorots, Tinguians, or Zambals,‖ whom Spaniards
―collectively referred to as tribus independientes (independent tribes) rather
than indios.‖ Molded by the nomenclature and reach of the Spanish colonial
state, the ilustrados found it difficult to think otherwise. Thus, the early
nationalists laid claim to the same sphere over which the colonial state
exercised its authority, and excluded the zones that had eluded the state‗s
incorporative advances. The embryonic nation was conceived, perhaps
delimited space was reared the consciousness of being native ot indigenous
– the indio identity – despite a supposedly ancestral immigrant past.
Corollarily, descendants of ―older‖ immigrant groups beyond the state‗s reach
were denied the status of rootedness and ultimately of being ―genuine
Filipinos.‖
In addition to the mold of the colonial state, the genesis of the Filipino
nationalism was also entangled with the appropriation and internalization of a
high-minded imperialist agenda. The ilustrados‗ campaign for ―assimilation‖
was influenced by the French colonial dictum of assimilation, a logical
outcome of France‗s mission civilisatrice. France;s seeming imperial liberality
impressed the ilustrados. Rizal appreciated that ―the French spirit does not
shine in zeal for colonization,‖ while Antonio Luna honored French colonies
with the superlative description as places where ―the road to genuine policy of
assimilation of the most beautiful of civilizations‖ had been paved. Ilustrados
became enthusiastic admirers of the French idea of a ―civilizing mission‖ –
unaware of the injuries that were being inflicted upon the Khmer and
Vietnamese. Imperial France marked a standard which, in their view, Spain
failed miserably. In France itself, questions were raised in Parliament
concerning the cultural assimilation of ―natives,‖ but assimilation in French
imperial thought indisputably meant representation of the colony in the
legislature of the imperial country (Lewis 1961). Legitimized by the French
model and inspired by the collection that Spain‘s Cadiz Constitution of 1812
(revoked in 1815) once made for such provision, Philippine representation in
the Cortes became a central plank of the Propaganda Movement‘s campaign
for assimilation.
This campaign was meant to convince Spain that it ought to be a
―proper‖ imperial power - lest ―Spain perjure herself‖ by reneging on pledges
made in the ―blood compact‖ (Fores-Ganzon 1996, 1:380-81). In their view,
Filipinos deserved fair treatment because they were Spaniards. On legal
grounds and by patent cultural affinities but not on biological terms, ilustrados
deemed themselves Spaniards. When the Pangasinan provincial governor
ordered that indios take their hats to show respect when meeting peninsular
Spaniards, Graciano Lopez Jaena countered that it was preposterous
because ―the indio is as much a Spaniard as a peninsular‖ and stressed that
indios need not concern themselves with ―greetings nor kissing hands
(besamanos), but in fulfilling their duties as good Spanish citizens (ciudadano
español)‖ (Fores-Ganzon 1996, 3:502-3). Having internalized the ideology of
empire, the Propagandists found nothing odd in claiming equal entitlement to
citizenship rights like ―other‖ Spaniards. They were also at ease in talking
about ―our African possessions‖ (Fores-Ganzon 1996, 1:322-23), as if
Filipinos were co-rulers in ―savage‖ Africa.
In the campaign for assimilation, however, the ―primitive races‖ were
reckoned as a hindrance because they seemingly overshadowed the indios
and conveyed the message that the Philippines had not reached ―the stage of
enlightenment that would merit the concession of political rights‖ (Lopez
Jaena 1951, 151). This perception, the ilustrados believed, had to be rectified
by placing primitivity in quantitative perspective. Blumentritts‘s prologue to
Rizal‘s edition of Morga contains a most telling statement of the boundaries of
the ilustrados‘ imagined community. In response to Spanish objections,
Blumentritt wrote:
{The magnitude of the savage races does not matter because they
 constitute only a small number of souls, and the Filipinos do not
demand the extension of the liberties of constitutional life over the
savage tribes.}
(Rizal 1961c, xvii; trans.
author)
Too few in number, the ―savage races‖ were so insignificant as to form a
stumbling block to assimilation. Implied was the opinion of racial science that
―savage races‖ had no future: with their supposed incapacity for ―moral
progress,‖ they would remain forever primitive - except for Negritos, who
were destined for extinction, as Blumentritt believed (1900, 15). With such
tacit admission, ―primitive tribes‖ should not mark out the Philippines as
unworthy of Europe‘s civilizing mission, for they were, for all intents and
purposes, not ―Filipinos.‖
Blumentritt‘s statement was not merely his own invention. Rizal had
requested his friend to write an honest and candid prologue to show his
compatriots the fruits of intellectual debate. Rizal perused Blumentritt‘s draft
and with the latter‘s permission expunged portions that he found
objectionable (Rizal 1961a, 579; 1961b, 305). Obviously, the decisive
statement gained Rizal‘s approval as neither it nor the whole segment of
which it was a part was deleted. Blumentritt‘s introduction received high
praise from ilustrados such as Mariano Ponce, who described it as ―truly
excellent‖ (NHC 1963, 2:415). Appearing in 1889, the new Morga edition
showed few hints of the fraternal connection with the ―rare individuals‖ whose
display a couple of years earlier had rankled ilustrado nerves. The budding of
a possible comradeship in 1887 was smothered by the politics of assimilation.
This was not the first time Blumentritt made the assertion. On the
editorial page of La Solidaridad of October 15,1889, he wrote:
Yes, the Philippine archipelago is a land with an ―immensity of savage
races,‖ but I do not believe that the Filipinos wish to extend suffrage to the
infidels but advocate representation only of Christian Filipinos. Moreover, I
have to add that the ―great number of wild races‖ in reality consists of only a
few individuals and forms but a tiny fraction of the population, accounting for
at most 15 percent of the total, if the official and friars‘ statistics we are
referred to are accurate.
(Fores-Ganzon 1996, 1:400-403; trans.
author)
This statement passed the editorial scrutiny of Lopez Jaena, despite his
exceptional assertions made in 1887 that ―savage races‖ were civilizable.
During the exposition, Lopez Jaena expressed pleasant surprise that the
Igorots, Muslimsm and those from the Carolines and Marianas who went to
Madrid spoke perfect Spanish. He declared that ―Igorots are neither savage
nor irrational‖ and that ―they are susceptible to modern civilization‖ (1951,
156). He admired ―Tek, the Negrito, whose race has long been considered
incapable of receiving the gifts of civilization, [but who] is the living protest
against such erroneous asseveration‖ (1951, 153). By late 1889, however,
other graver concerns had superceded the exposition. With the campaign for
assimilation in high gear, Lopez Jaena gave editorial nod to Blumentritt‘s
statement, paving the way for its repetition in the Morga prologue.
Blumentritt‘s recurring assertion on the exclusion of ―wild tribes‖ from political
representation and from the imagined community of ―Filipinos‖ thus
articulated not only his personal view but also the sentiment of Rizal, Lopez
Jaena, and other ilustrados.
The ―savage races‖ were clearly outside the framework of justice and
liberty sought by the early nationalists because their concept of nation was
one that was modern, cultured, civilized, Catholic, industrial, and progressive
- all conformable with European notions. In addition, none of the ilustrados
(except possibly Isabelo de los Reyes) had lived outside the pueblos in a way
that would have allowed direct and sustained relations with those whom they
had excluded from the nation. Although members of ―wild tribes‖ would
occasionally visit Manila and some provincial centers, most ilustrados had no
personal contact with them, save for the 1887 exhibition. Only during his exile
in Dapitan, Zamboanga, did Rizal finally come into close and repeated
exchanges with one such group, the Subanon. Only then did he appreciate
their humanity and character: ―I have known them here, and really they are a
peaceful people, very honest, industrious, and faithful in their transactions,
not reneging on their word‖ (1961a, 817; 1961b, 461; emphasis added; trans.
author). But, martyrdom prevented him from expounding what might possibly
have been an alternative vision of nationhood based on firsthand
understanding, a patria adorada that went beyond a mere inversion of
colonial racism.
The ilustrados‘ majoritarian view made population numbers - all rough
estimates in any case - a crucial ingredient in the politics of assimilation. To
conjure the insignificance of ―primitive races,‖ they tended to underestimate
the population count of these groups. Responding to the charges made by a
Franciscan friar, an ilustrado countered in the October 15, 1889, issue of La
Solidaridad that there were not ―seven or eight million inhabitants who still, he
says, live in the impenetrable forests‖ (Fores-Ganzon 1996, 1:415). The
ilustrado proceeded to list ―the entire population of the Philippine archipelago‖
which he placed at 5,065,952 Christians and 1,144,117 non-Christians, for a
total figure of 6,210,069. These figures indicated ―non-Christians‖ as
accounting for 18.4 percent of the total. Interestingly, these numbers
appeared in the same issue of La Solidaridad in which Blumentritt calculated
the ―few individuals‖ as constituting ―at most‖ 15 percent of the population.
In the segment of his famous essay ―Filipinas Dentro de Cien Años‖
(The Philippines a Century Hence) that appeared in the December 15, 1889,
issue of La Solidaridad, however, Rizal wrote, ―Spain cannot claim even in
the name of God himself that six million men should be brutalized, exploited,
and oppressed…‖ (Fores-Ganzon 1996, 1:510-11; trans. author). Rizal‘s
demographics disingenuously included over one million non-indios - the
―independent races‖ that he had elsewhere marginalized. Spain‘s inhumanity
seemed all the graver if six, rather than five, million were involved. A year
later, Marcelo H. del Pilar quoted the figure seven million in relation to failed
attempts to obtain Philippine representation in the Cortes (Fores-Ganzon
1996, 2:112-13). The seriality that made the nation imaginable as a delimited
community was also the same seriality that counted those excluded from
within. Thus, when it served ilustrado purposes, the excluded were added to
pad the statistics.
Since its original enunciation by Blumetritt, the assertion that ―primitive
races‖ constituted a numerical minority would remain a sticky issue when the
United States began to impose its own imperialist designs. The
proannexation side in the U.S. debate used the diversity of Philippin cultures
and ethnolinguistic groups to make the case that the Philippines was not ―a
nation‖ and therefore needed American tutelage. Anti-imperialists, in tandem
with Filipino nationalists, stressed the numerical smallness of tribal peoples.
Always the Filipinos‘ loyal supporter, Blumentritt endorsed the translation to
English of his monograph to aid the anti-imperialist drive. Not surprisingly, it
contained the statement that ―the Negritos, the mountain pagans and the
Moros have no part in the Philippine question‖ (Blumentritt 1900, 21). Sixto
Lopez, secretary of the Philippine mission to the United States, wrote a
political tract reiterating that ―so-called tribes‖ were a small minority and were
analogous to the ―Indian tribes still inhabiting certain parts of the United
States‖ (Kramer 1998, 119-21). The figure advanced by Lopez was a mere 5
percent. From the time of Blumentritt and Rizal into the colonial period
(Salman 2001), variants of the same nationalist discourse that embedded
racial science wished away ―tribes‖ and the ―uncivilized‖ by reducing them to
numerical insignificance.
Prevarications on Race and Nation
After publishing his edition of Morga and reading further scholarly
works, Jose Rizal began to doubt the idea that indio forebears had emigrated
from Sumatra. In his letter to Ferdinand Blumentritt dated April 17, 1890, he
argued that the cultural similarities of Sumatra and the Philippines did not
warrant the conclusion that one derived from the other, and he doubted
whether it would ever be possible to know the origin of the Malay race. His
reexamination of this issue echoed the thoughts of Isabelo de los Reyes, who
had raised similar questions regarding the origin of Malays in the Philippines,
be it Borneo, Sumatra, or some other land (de los Reyes 1889, 9-12). De los
Reyes also asserted that ―the Malay race in the Philippines is not pure,‖ there
being ―three subraces‖ based on admixture with Negritos, Chinese, and
―Indonesians and Arabs‖ (1889, 4). Although de los Reyes resorted to the
concept of a ―subrace,‖ RIzal pushed the issue further. Hinting at the inherent
instability of racial categories, Rizal questioned the very notion of a ―Malay
race‖ : ―It appears to me that Malayans should not be considered the original
race or the type of race (die Typen von der Rasse); the Malayans have been
exposed to many foreign and powerful factors that have influenced their
customs as well as their nature‖ (1961a, 652; 1961b, 350; trans. author).
Overtly, Rizal was questioning the validity of Malay as a racial type, perhaps
following the theory that ―types‖ were permanent and that deviations from
which were believed to be kept by nature within bounds (Banton 1983, 43-
44). Deviations among Malays, however, seemed out of control, making the
category meaningless. Based on his own ―customs‖ and ―nature,‖ RIzal might
well have been expressing a deep-seated anxiety about his own hybrid
ancestry, which did not fit neatly into the migration-waves framework. Was
Rizal in search of purity? Blumentritt
admitted in Versuch einer Ethnologie der Philippinen that the Malay Tagalog
―have plenty of foreign blood flowing in their veins, not only Chinese and
Spanish but also Japanese (16th and 17th centuries) which mixtures have
bettered the race as a whole (1980, 57). Presumably the foreign bloods were
of superior quality such that metissage led to racial improvement, but
Blumentritt classification implied that Malay‗s with ―foreign blood‖ remained
Malay. At what point would intergroup unions produce offspring beyond the
boundary of Malayness? This was Rizal‘s question. The potential answer in
Versuch was no more than a residual category of ―Chinese, Chinese
Mestizos, Japanese‖ and a last category of ―Whites and Other Population
Groups'' (Blumentritt 1980, 141-50). Although Blumentritt mentioned that the
―next group after the Malays that are worth our attention are the Chinese'' and
the Chinese Mestizos dubbed as ―new arrivals‖ on the Philippine scene,
these were not viewed as representing a distinct migration wave. In
Blumentritt‗s Las Razas Indigenas de Filipinas (1890), Chinese mestizos did
not merit any mention at all. In effect, Chinese and Chinese Mestizos
designated alien entities. The temporal cutoff point for determining indigency
was drawn teleologically at the arrival of the third wave. Blumentritt had been
influenced inexorably by his close association with Ilustrados, such that by
1890 his framework did not account for the realities of colonial society.
Suffering erasure from his work were Chinese Mestizos, who by the 1740‗s
had formed a classifiable and legally distinct group from whom Ilustrados
could trace their Ancestry.
Rizal might well have classified himself as a ―Malay Tagalog,‖ but he
could also have placed himself with Chinese Mestizos. To which category did
he belong? As Edgar WickBerg has shown, a mechanism existed for
changing one‗s legal status. Depending on the circumstances, one might
prefer to be listed in the roster or mestizos or in that of naturales, although
both categories were considered by the state as indigenous. Rizal was a fifth
generation Chinese Mestizo, but his paternal grandfather had been able to
use wealth to transfer from the mestizo tax register to that of the naturales.
From his maternal side, Rizal allegedly inherited Japanese and Spanish
―blood‖. His family and connections with the Chinese and Chinese mestizos
appeared strong, as both of Rizal‗s parents spent their last year and died in
Binondo, where these two ethnic groups predominated. In the 1880‗s,
however, the abolition of tribute also erased the legal distinction between
mestizos and naturales. By then, wealthier Chinese mestizos had been
hispanized and ―ostentatiously rejected Chinese culture.‖ In their anti-
Sinicism, Rizal, who placed ―Chinese and Savages'' on the same level, was
the exact match of de los Reyes, who denigrated for their ―consummate
avarice‖ and condemned their presence as ―anticivilization.‖ Tutored by
Spanish Prejudices, the ilustrado‗s denial of their Chinese Heritage was a
racial strategy that ensured the exclusion of Chinese as aliens and the
hegemony of a Malay Template.
Although Rizal designated himself as an indio, his mixed background
might not have escaped him. Antagonists extant between mestizos and
nonmestizos did not easily conceal the former‗s liminality. But regardless of
what Rizal knew and felt about his Chinese mestizo heritage, he was
emphatically keen to efface differences in the spirit of forging national
solidarity. When the Spanish governor-general passed a decree in 1888
giving preferences to mestizos over naturales, he fumed ―it is sheer folly to
make this distinction between mestizos and naturales; it is offensive to the
majority and fosters stupid antagonisms.‖ Rizal raised the concept of a
―majority,‖ which in this context referred as nationales who were the ―pure‖
indio. Indeed, indio was often used in lieu of natural. Who then, were in the
minority? Not Negritos, Muslims, and mountain peoples, for Rizal‘s implied
―minority‖ referred to the ―impure‖ indio, that is the mestizo. Rizal and his
fellow ilustrados might well have confronted their minority status.
Rizal was unquestionably conscious of the multiracial composition of
his imagined community, particularly the activists of the Propaganda
Movement. As he told Blumentritt in April 1887: ―They are creole youth of
Spanish descent, Chinese mestizos, and Malayans; but we call ourselves
solely Filipinos.‖ Race was not to take precedence over an emerging
collective identity - especially in an overseas context where social marginality
accentuates such identities. Rizal was emphatic especially because, about a
month or two before he wrote Blumentrit, acrimonious debates concerning
strategies of political journalism divide the youthful ―colony‖ in Madrid along
racial lines. Skin color threatened to become the basis for identifying ―genuine
Filipinos‖ - ―the genuine of pure Indios‖ in contrast to Mestizos and Kastila
who acted like ―aristocrats‖ and were not ―pure and genuine Filipinos.‖ Rizal
was said to have deplored ―not having in his veins all the blood that could
serve as a common bond.‖ A common race was seen as a basis of unity.
Rizal had even dreamed of mingling ―all the blood‖ of his compatriots in his
body, perhaps to incarnate the national corpus founded upon total hybridity.
The fantasy of racial fusion, however, faced the reality of a grand political
project shared among a group of divisible into indios, mestizos, and Kastila.
All were to be deemed ―genuine Filipinos,‖ as Rizal enjoined fellow ilustrados,
thus the import, in the wake of the going ons in Madrid, of Rizal‗s
reassurance to Blumentritt, an outsider who was almost an insider. ―We call
ourselves solely Filipinos‖
The precise relationship between Rizal‗s multiracial ―Filipinos‖ and the
third wave ―Malays,‖ whom he regarded as ―ancient Filipinos‖ or ―Malayan
Filipinos,‖ however, was not confronted. What did Filipinoness consist of for
the ancient ―Malays‖ and for the modern, multiracial Filipinos? Or did the
concept of Filipino float freely through history? Blumentritt‗s racial schema,
while useful in the search for origins to enable the imagining of the national
biography and putative line of descent, appeared concomitantly to undermine
the nation of systemizing, if unevenly, the vocabulary of its internal
differences. But, forming a national consciousness required going beyond
racial science through the negation of social differences. There would be no
majority or minority. In this case there would be no myth of descent, for the
binding element would be territory: las islas Filipinas. Race, in this instance,
would not be constitutive of the nation.
Territory had its internal borders, for the ―interiors‖ and ―fringes‖
occupied by the ―primitives‖ were excluded from the nation-space. The
physical inside, the hinterland was outside the nation‗s moral community. The
spatial frontiers occupied by pure types stood out of their unambiguous
identity as the land of ―wild men‖ who were beyond recuperation and national
honor. In contrast, the settled lowlands were a frontier area of sorts; when
their children congregated overseas, their hazy entities could be submerged
into one nation: "(W)e call ourselves solely Filipinos." The oppositional
relations between indio lowlands and "savage" interiors denoted an uncertain
cartography, but it was left unresolved. Despite the imagining of a world of
plurals and the abstraction of society in Rizal's Noli Me Tangere- emblematic
of the nation's spatial coordinates,as Benedict Anderson has argued
(1991,22-30)-in the end the territory of Filipinas was indeterminate and
beyond mapping. With the disjuncture between the expanse of an imagined
homeland and the excluded zones occupied by internal Others,the nation's
geo-body had no solidity.
The internal exclusion was related to the ilustrados' idea of the nation
as a temporal project. They envisaged an educated future in which liberty and
justice could be enjoyed,but only those of the third migratory wave were
included in this vision. And even they,with their "lost civilization", needed to
be (re)civilized. To reconnect with "civilization" (a seemingly eternal concept
with no historical moorings, as "ancient Filipinos‖ possessed a "civilization but
their descendents needed to be "civilized"), indios had to get out of the friar-
constrained present. They had to go to"free Europe'' and remigrate to the
motherland as agents of change and modern education. As Rizal observed
on his first trip to Europe in 1882, "(w)hat a revolution takes place in the ideas
of the man who for the first time leaves his native land and travels around
through different countries!" (Craig 1993,253-54). Armed with knowledge
gained from the outside, ―a wise traveler carries to his own country the good
usages he has seen and tries to apply them there with the necessary
modifications. "Rizal's laudatory view of travel was strikingly similar to the
established practice of rantau among the Minangkabu of Sumatra ,which
entailed leaving one's home area and returning someday to enrich it.
However, Rizal's cosmopolitanism, as he referred to it, was applied only to
himself and to others who could lay claim to being indio and therefore of the
third wave. Evidently he did not see the rare individuals'' who traveled to
Spain for the 1887 exposition as learning something that they could use on
their eventual return. Unlike L pez Jaena, who deplored that the persons in
the exposition could not tour Madrid (including a seamstress who eagerly
wanted singer sewing machines in actual use) Rizal was silent about the
possibility that travel to Europe for the ―uncivilized‖ sojourners have brought
them some benefit.
Travel, education and civilization would appear to be the exclusive
domain of indios. In this respect, national solidarity was strengthened
overseas and even cut across class lines, but only for an exclusive circle of
compatriots. In ―Filipinas dentro de cien Años Rizal noted: ―the journey to
Europe also contributes much to strengthen the bonds, for abroad the
inhabitants of most widely separated provinces are drawn together in
patriotism, from sailors even to the wealthiest merchants. . . They embrace
and call each other brothers. Victims of colonial misrule, migrant seafarers
had left the homeland unlettered, but overseas they embraced ―the wonders
of civilization as Lopez Jaena noted with pride as those beneath their social
class but safely within their racial ambit. Thus, Nationhood as exemplified
overseas excluded ―mountain tribes' ' but included lower class third wave
indios, who were civilized and civilizable. Because civilization encompassed a
racial boundary, the Ilustrado concept of nation depended on a mythology of
descent.
FILIPINO AS A RACE/NATION
At one level race would appear to be not fundamental to the nation
because of the ilustrados‗ self awareness of their own racial diversity. In this
respect, the board structure of racism would not provide the basis for the
fictive unity of the nation. But at another level, race was an elemental
dimension of nationhood. For ostensibly cultural and civilizational reasons,
the Malayness of the third migration wave was imputed upon the emerging
nation, in which case a racist structure formed the basis of a fictive
commonality. Thus, nation flirted dangerously with race. Rizal had glimpsed
the inherent contradictions of a racialist template in questioning ―Malay race‖
as a Category. Adding to the muddle was Marcelo H. del Pilar‗s insistence
that Japanese are Malays and the inhabitants of the Philippines are Malay.
Products of European thought, Rizal and other ilustrados were too deeply
immersed in racial thinking - colonial oppression was voiced and experienced
as the indio‗s racial degradation- for them to transcend a race based
discourse. Notwith-standing some questions, they had no alternative to the
racial paradigm. Perhaps nationalism was the answer. But from the vantage
point of their class, their concept of the emerging nation was inseparable from
race. In addition to repressing the issue of internal ilustrado creole-mestizo
racial ancestry, national consciousness was marshaled to resolve the
problems of Spanish Racisms, the Chinese, and the ―primitive races.‖ To gain
respectability to the civilized world, the nation had to be delineated from a
multitude of besieging and contaminating internal and external Others.
Paradoxically, all these ―excesses,‖ as Caroline Hau (2000) calls them, and
their seemingly distant geographies have been internal to and constitutive of
the nation.
In a semantic slippage that dreamed away these excesses, ilustrados
began to talk of the ―Filipino race‖ (la raza filipina). Jose Rizal did so in his
1889-90 essay ―Filipinas Dentro de Cien Anos‖ arguing that without
assimilation ―The Philippines would have to declare itself,some fatal and
inevitable day, independent‖ and any retaliation by Spain would not
―exterminate the Filipino race‖ [Fores-Ganzon1996,2:32-33]. Attacking the
opponents of assimilation, del Pilar declared erroneous the view that ―the
Filipino race is anthropologically in a state of inferiority‖ [Fores-Ganzon,2:32-
33]. Rizal, del Pilar, and other Ilustrados might well have been using ―race‖ as
a substitute for ―nationality.‖ Race, in this instance, might have anticipated full
nationhood. In 1836 Rizal explained to Ferdinand Blumentritt that, apart from
the five main racial types, he used race to refer ―to pueblos of more than half
a million souls, those whom you call nations, but we do not call nations
pueblos that are not independent, for example, the Tagalog race, the Visayan
race, and so on.‖ The term Filipino race was a collective designation for
Filipinos who otherwise would have been referred to separately as the
Tagalog race, the Visayan race and so on. The term circumvented the
nascent regionalism that distanced the Ilocano from the Tagalog. The
prefiguring of nationhood would have been consistent with the practice in the
English speaking world, where, before the mid-nineteenth century, ―race‖ and
―nationality‖ were interchangeable. In that period, both ―race‖ and ―nationality‖
referred to a group of people sharing a common ancestry, despite perhaps
some differences in physical appearance and culture.
By 1880‗s, however, ―scientific‖ theory had pegged the idea of race to
inherent differences in appearance, culture, and mental capacities. In this
sense, many Spaniards vituperated the Indios. Although he used race as an
ordering principle in ethnology and despite a hint of eugenics, Blumentritt
resolutely objected to racism. In the context of the assimilation campaign,
however, the use of phrases such as ―savage races‖ and ―primitive races‖
implied a hierarchy of intrinsic biological-cultural differences, for which reason
Non indios were excluded from the ilustrados demand for political and civil
liberties, in the context of assimilation discourse, the term ―Filipino race‖ was
racist: it applied only to indios who were deemed assimilable and civilizable.
The third wave- compromising the ―races‖ Tagalog, Visayan, Ilocano and so
on- was transmogrified into the ―Filipino race.‖ Disregarded were the
―uncivilized races‖ of Mindanao, Luzon, and the Visayas as well as the
―civilized‖ multiracial community of those who claimed to ―call ourselves solely
Filipinos.‖
The ilustrados self-definition of ―Filipino‖ was ontologically
compromised from the start. A slippery concept, Filipinoness often demanded
the certification of ―genuineness.‖ The fear of counterfeits was emblematic of
the racist fear of contamination that could blur cultural-cum- class boundaries.
At the same time, as exemplified by Rizal's martyrdom,many ilustrados
overflowed with political love for the nation, their self-sacrifice inseparable
from their heroism. Facing death, Rizal made one last assertion of his "pure"
identity: "When the document {of his impending execution} was shown him,
he drew attention to the fact that he was incorrectly described as a Chinese
mestizo,..... saying that he was and indio puro {pure indio}"(Coates
1968,312).In their search for a narrative of identity,their politics of imperial
assimilation,and their ultimate dream of national dignity,the ilustrados left a
legacy of nationhood full of ambiguities, gaps, silences and excesses.The
Malayness'‖ of Filipinos has been reified-Rizal is "the pride of the Malay
race,‖ as Roman Ozaeta made popular in titling Rafael Palma‗s biography of
the man - and a myth of origins based on race has endured. Today every
child in the Philippines school system recites, after singing the national
anthem, the ―Panatang Makabayan‖ (Oath to the Nation) in which the
promise is made to ―love the Philippines,‖ the homeland of ―my race‖ (aking
lahi). The existence of a ―Filipino race‖ (ang lahing Pilipino) is taken as a
certainty. Still, Somatic and ethnic differences cannot be denied. The hope is
in the continuous intermingling of racial waves- akin to Rizal‗s fantasized
body- to create a ―Filipino Blend‖ that ―will ultimately come to include the
majority of the population,‖ as popularizers of the migration waves theory
have expressed. But despite frequent references to moreno or kayumanggi
(brown) as its own color, the ―Filipino race‖ is an ambiguous, unstable, and
even empty signifier. The nationalist rhetoric simply asserts that Filipinos are
a ―nation‖ (bayan) and a ―race‖ (lahi), conflating race and nation in
Filipino/Pilipino. The mestizoness - Asian and European- of the very same
intellectuals who articulated the national idea has been suppressed in the
interest of national homogeneity. As Palma‗s biography in its opening
paragraph, Rizal‗s father was a ―Pure filipino.‖ The claim to purify flags an
invented history of Malayness that shroud the dominant‗s elite‗s ethnicities. At
the same time, ethnic groups such as Negritos, Chinese, and Indian,
although accorded formal citizenship, are pressurized by notions of a Filipino
nation-race. The citizenship rights and national ties of Filipinos born to
Filipina mothers and American fathers, especially those of African heritage- a
legacy of the US military base- are diminished because they do not ―look
Filipino‖ (Eric Jimenez, ―Amerasians Hit DFA for Discrimination,‖ Philippine
Daily Inquirer, May 17,1999; Tonette Orejas, ―Gapo‘s Amerasians Bear
Discrimination,‖ Philippine Daily Inquirer, April 11, 2000). Challenged by class
and ethnicity, the fictive unity of the nation has remained problematic. The
nation‗s ontological narrative has not come to terms with the givenness of a
hybrid, plural, and stratified Philippines. With the burdens laid on the national
ideas at its inception, it is understandable why no closure has yet been found
to the perennial question, ―Who is the Filipino?‖
Paramount in the nation‗s founding myth were civilizational
hierarchies, invidious comparisons, and confounded assertions of status. In
effect, ―Filipino‖ stood for the internally superior and dominant ―race‖ led by
an ―enlightened class,‖ whose members, although charged as inferior by
racist outsiders, were equal to Europeans in there being civilized and
civilizable, deserving liberty and indeed their own independent nation. They
were not pagans who lived close to nature and by brute force, without law
and legal institutions, and were superior to the spatially distant ―savages of
Africa‖ and the temporally and socially distant ―savage races‖ epitomized by
Igorots. Rather, they were educated and educable; they believed in religion or
reason; they were peace loving, with mild morals and the art of law and
governance; and they could debate in the Cortes or better yet in their own
legislature. They were industrializing and growing in mastery over nature,
although they were acutely aware of the need to catch up, let they be left
behind by progress. A child of modernity and the capitalist world system,
ilustrado national consciousness impelled them to demand equality with the
colonizer but concomitantly eschew ―savages‖ from their imagined
community. Seeing themselves at the helm of ―native‖ society, the ilustrados
were sworn to uplift the lower classes with their political and educational
leadership. Ultimately, as Norbert Elias (2000) has shown, the preoccupation
with civilization expressed the aspiration of a social class.
The ilustrados promperial-cum-anticolonial politics would be
transported into the politics of the Philippines ruling class. The benevolent
assimilation of the United States built upon the pragmatics of ilustrado
nationalism. As Michael Salman (2001) has elucidated, the American colonial
state deployed racial science and deepened the divide between ―civilized‖
Filipinos and ―Nonchristian‖ wild tribes, the former as collaborators, the latter
as ideal wards; American authorities overstudied Negritos until the state
rendered them nonexistent and inconsequential. Initially, ―non-Christian‖ were
administered separately, but ilustrados and successor leaders sought to
integrate them under ―Filipino rule.‖ Elites, especially among Muslim Fipinos,
entered into mutual accommodations with central state actors. The class
based hierarchy of civilization and race/ethnicity persisted, and feelings of
superiority hardened. When, in the 1940‗s, Carlos P. Romulo declared in
Mother America that ―igorots are not Filipinos,‖ he was speaking as the
legitimate heir of ilustrado nationalism.
Nationhood does not stand still, however, and is ever being
reconstituted. In the 1960‗s, amid the resurgence of Filipino nationalism, the
cry was raised in relation to ―cultural minorities.‖ The Marcos regime added its
share of primordialist rhetoric. In the 1980‗s, national and international
movements for the rights of indigenous people gained momentum,
eventuating in the embrace of ―cultural communities‖ in the national fold or at
least by intellectual‗s and officialdom. Despite implementation problems, a
law recognizing the rights of ―indigenous people‖ was enacted in 1997.
Although the place of Muslims is still being contested on the battlefield and
Negritos are no better than second- class citizens, the Philippines today has
moved beyond the ilustrado concept of the nation. The role of the Igorot has
been reversed, with many freezing them in their ―unmodernity‖ as the static
bearers of cultural authenticity. Since the 1980‗s, even the formerly
disparaging term ―Igorots‖ has gained popularity on the Cordillera highlands
as a badge of resistance against dominant groups in the Philippines, yet
everyday social practices on the basis of civilizational hierarchies persist. The
town-based Mindoro man who calls out to a Mangtan as sandugo (of one
blood) is convinced of his superiority over the mountain dweller, who may
have set aside his G-string for a pair of trousers. On the Cordillera, as the
Ibaloi to the Bontok, one ethnic group feels ―more civilized‖ than the other.
We all are heirs to the dreams, achievements, and prejudices of the
Enlightenment.
By the 1880s, however, ―scientific‖ theory had pegged the idea of race
to inherent differences in appearance, culture, and mental capacities. In this
sense, many Spaniards vituperated the indios. Although he used race as an
ordering principle in ethnology and despite a hint of eugenics, Blumentritt
resolutely objected to racism. In the context of the assimilation campaign,
however, the use of phrases such as ―savage races‖ and ―primitive races‖
implied a hierarchy of intrinsic biological-cultural differences, for which reason
non-indios were excluded from the ilustrados‘ demand for political and civil
liberties. In the context of assimilation discourse, the term ―Filipino race‖ was
racist: it applied only to indios who were deemed assimilable and civilizable.
The third wave—comprising the ―races‖ Tagalog, Visayan, Ilocano, and so
on—was transmogrified into ―the Filipino race.‖ Disregarded were the
―uncivilized races‖ of Mindanao, Luzon, and the Visayas as well as the
―civilized‖ multiracial community of those who claimed to ―call ourselves solely
Filipinos.‖
The ilustrados‘ self-definition of ―Filipino‖ was ontologically
compromised from the start. A slippery concept, Filipinoness often demanded
the certification of ―genuineness.‖ The fear of counterfeits was emblematic of
the racist fear of contamination that could blur cultural-cum-class boundaries.
At the same time, as exemplified by Rizal‘s martyrdom, many ilustrados
overflowed with political love for the nation, their self-sacrifice inseparable
from their heroism. Facing death, Rizal made one last assertion of his ―pure‖
identity: ―When the document [of his impending execution] was shown him,
he drew attention to the fact that he was incorrectly described as a Chinese
mestizo, . . . saying that he was an indio puro [pure indio]‖ (Coates 1968,
312). In their search for a narrative of identity, their politics of imperial
assimilation, and their ultimate dream of national dignity, the ilustrados left a
legacy of nationhood full of ambiguities, gaps, silences, and excesses. The
―Malayness‖ of Filipinos has been reified—Rizal is ―the pride of the Malay
race,‖ as Roman Ozaeta made popular in titling Rafael Palma‘s (1949)
biography of the man—and a myth of origins based on race has endured.
Today every child in the Philippine school system recites, after singing the
national anthem, the ―Panatang Makabayan‖ (Oath to the Nation) in which the
promise is made to ―love the Philippines,‖ the homeland of ―my race‖ (aking
lahi). The existence of a ―Filipino race‖ (ang lahing Pilipino) is taken as a
certainty. Still, somatic and ethnic differences cannot be denied. The hope is
in the continuous intermingling of racial waves—akin to Rizal‘s fantasized
body—to create a ―Filipino Blend‖ that ―will ultimately come to include the
majority of the population,‖ as popularizers of the migration-waves theory
have expressed (Reyes et al. 1953, 12– 13). But despite frequent references
to moreno or kayumanggi (brown) as its own color, the ―Filipino race‖ is an
ambiguous, unstable, and even empty signifier. The nationalist rhetoric
simply asserts that Filipinos are a ―nation‖ (bayan) and a ―race‖ (lahi),
conflating race and nation in Filipino/Pilipino. The mestizoness—Asian and
European—of the very same intellectuals who articulated the national idea
has been suppressed in the interest of national homogeneity. As Palma‘s
biography declares in its opening paragraph, Rizal‘s father was a ―pure
Filipino‖ (1949, 1). The claim to purity flags an invented history of Malayness
that shrouds the dominant elite‘s ethnicities. At the same time, ethnic groups
such as Negritos, Chinese, and Indian, although accorded formal citizenship
(Aguilar 1999), are pressurized by notions of a Filipino nation-race. The
citizenship rights and national ties of Filipinos born to Filipina mothers and
American fathers, especially those of African heritage—a legacy of the U.S.
military bases—are diminished because they do not ―look Filipino‖ (Eric
Jimenez, ―Amerasians Hit DFA for Discrimination,‖ Philippine Daily Inquirer,
May 17, 1999; Tonette Orejas, ―‗Gapo‘s Amerasians Bear Discrimination,‖
Philippine Daily Inquirer, April 11, 2000). Challenged by class and ethnicity,
the fictive unity of the nation has remained problematic. The nation‘s
ontological narrative has not come to terms with the givenness of a hybrid,
plural, and stratified Philippines. With the burdens laid on the national idea at
its inception, it is understandable why no closure has yet been found to the
perennial question ―Who is the Filipino?‖
Paramount in the nation‘s founding myth were civilizational
hierarchies, invidious comparisons, and confounded assertions of status. In
effect, ―Filipino‖ stood for the internally superior and dominant ―race‖ led by
an ―enlightened class,‖ whose members, although charged as inferior by
racist outsiders, were equal to Europeans in their being civilized and
civilizable, deserving liberty and indeed their own independent nation. They
were not pagans who lived close to nature and by brute force, without law
and legal institutions, and were superior to the spatially distant ―savages of
Africa‖ and the temporally and socially distant ―savage races‖ epitomized by
Igorots. Rather, they were educated and educable; they believed in religion or
reason; they were peace loving, with ―mild morals‖ and the art of law and
governance; and they could debate in the Cortes or better yet in their own
legislature. They were industrializing and growing in mastery over nature,
although they were acutely aware of the need to ―catch up,‖ lest they be left
behind by progress. A child of modernity and the capitalist world system,
ilustrado national consciousness impelled them to demand equality with the
colonizer but concomitantly eschew ―savages‖ from their imagined
community. Seeing themselves at the helm of ―native‖ society, the ilustrados
were sworn to uplift the lower classes with their political and educational
leadership. Ultimately, as Norbert Elias (2000) has shown, the preoccupation
with civilization expressed the aspirations of a social class.
The ilustrados‘ proimperial-cum-anticolonial politics would be
transposed into the politics of the Philippine ruling class. The ―benevolent
assimilation‖ of the United States built upon the pragmatics of ilustrado
nationalism. As Michael Salman (2001) has elucidated, the American colonial
state deployed racial science and deepened the divide between ―civilized‖
Filipinos and ―non-Christian‖ ―wild tribes,‖ the former as collaborators, the
latter as ideal wards. American authorities overstudied Negritos until the state
rendered them nonexistent and inconsequential (Rosaldo 1982). Initially,
―non-Christians‖ were administered separately, but ilustrados and successor
leaders sought to integrate them under ―Filipino rule.‖ Elites, especially
among Muslim Filipinos, entered into mutual accommodation with central
state actors (Abinales 2000). The class-based hierarchy of civilization and
race/ethnicity persisted, and feelings of superiority hardened. When, in the
1940s, Carlos P. Romulo declared in Mother America that ―Igorots are not
Filipinos (1943, 59),‖ he was speaking as the legitimate heir of ilustrado
nationalism.
Nationhood does not stand still, however, and is ever being
reconstituted. In the 1960s, amid the resurgence of Filipino nationalism, the
cry was raised in relation to ―cultural minorities‖: They Are Also Filipinos
(Clavel 1969). The Marcos regime added its share of primordialist rhetoric. In
the 1980s, national and international movements for the rights of indigenous
peoples gained momentum, eventuating in the embrace of ―cultural
communities‖ in the national fold or at least by intellectuals and officialdom.
Despite implementation problems, a law recognizing the rights of ―indigenous
peoples‖ was enacted in 1997 (Castro 2000). Although the place of Muslims
is still being contested on the battlefield and Negritos are no better than
second-class citizens, the Philippines today has moved beyond the ilustrado
concept of the nation. The role of the Igorot has been reversed, with many
freezing them in their ―unmodernity‖ as the static bearers of cultural
authenticity. Since the 1980s, even the formerly disparaging term ―Igorot‖ has
gained popularity on the Cordillera highlands as a badge of resistance
against dominant groups in the Philippines (Labrador 1998, 243), yet
everyday social practices on the basis of civilizational hierarchies persist. The
town based Mindoro man who calls out to a Mangyan as sandugo (of one
blood) is convinced of his superiority over the mountain dweller, who may
have set aside his G-string for a pair of trousers. On the Cordillera, as the
Ibaloi to the Bontok, one ethnic group feels ―more civilized‖ than the other
(Labrador 1998, 207–9). We all are heirs to the dreams, achievements, and
prejudices of the Enlightenment.