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Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial
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Counter-Hispanization in
the Colonial Philippines
Connected Histories in
the Early Modern World
Connected Histories in the Early Modern World contributes to our growing

understanding of the connectedness of the world during a period in history
when an unprecedented number of people—Africans, Asians, Americans,
and Europeans—made transoceanic or other long distance journeys. Inspired
by Sanjay Subrahmanyam’s innovative approach to early modern historical
scholarship, it explores topics that highlight the cultural impact of the
movement of people, animals, and objects at a global scale. The series editors
welcome proposals for monographs and collections of essays in English from
literary critics, art historians, and cultural historians that address the changes
and cross-fertilizations of cultural practices of specific societies. General topics
may concern, among other possibilities: cultural confluences, objects in motion,
appropriations of material cultures, cross-cultural exoticization, transcultural
identities, religious practices, translations and mistranslations, cultural impacts
of trade, discourses of dislocation, globalism in literary/visual arts, and cultural
histories of lesser studied regions (such as the Philippines, Macau, African
societies).
Series editors
Christina Lee, Princeton University
Julia Schleck, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Advisory Board
Serge Gruzinski, CNRS, Paris
Michael Laffan, Princeton University
Ricardo Padron, University of Virginia
Elizabeth Rodini, American Academy in Rome
Kaya Sahin, Indiana University, Bloomington
Counter-Hispanization in
the Colonial Philippines
Literature, Law, Religion, and Native Custom
John D. Blanco
Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: “Map of the San Isidro Biñán Hacienda, along with the separate settle-
ments [sitios] that comprise it and the new demarcation made this past 27 February, 1745.”
The new demarcations resulted from the agreements following the 1745 Tagalog Rebellion.
Source: ES.41091.AGI//MP-FILIPINAS,154BIS, Archivo General de Indias, Seville.
Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden

Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout
isbn 9789463725880
e-isbn 9789048556656 (pdf)
doi 10.5117/9789463725880
nur 685
© J.D. Blanco / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of
this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted,
in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise)
without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book.
Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations
reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is
advised to contact the publisher.
Per me reges regnant et legum conditores iusta decernun
[Through me kings reign and princes decree justice].
— Proverbs 8:15
Hay en el colonialismo una función muy peculiar para las palabras: las palabras
no designan, sino encubren… De este modo, las palabras se convirtieron en
un registro ficcional, plagado de eufemismos que velan la realidad en lugar de
designarla.
— Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “La universalidad de lo ch’ixi”1
1 “Words have a very peculiar function in colonialism: words do not expose, but veil… In this
way, words transform into a fictional record, plagued with euphemisms that mask reality instead
of exposing it.” Cited in Sociología de la imagen. Miradas ch’ixi desde la historia andina, 175.
This book is dedicated to my parents,
Rene (1936–2016) and Nita.
Table of Contents
List of Illustrations 11
Acknowledgments 14
Introduction: Towards a Counter-History of the Mission Pueblo 17

The Great Unsettlement 17
Beyond the “Hispanization” thesis 24
Spiritual Conquest as (a) Staging [Escenificación] 30
Baroque Ethos and Native Custom 39
Counter-Histories of the Colonial Illusion 42
1 The War of Peace and Legacy of Social Anomie 49

The Fact of Conquest 51
Pacification as Discourse and Performative Utterance 57
The Peace that Wasn’t 65
Protracting Colonialism 75
2 Monastic Rule and the Mission As Frontier(ization) Institution 79

“Era público y notorio” [It was well known and infamous] 80
Patronato Regio [Royal Patronage of the Church] vs. Omnímoda
[Complete Powers of the Religious Orders] 85
The Regular Orders Against Crown and Church 90
Immunity and / as Impunity in the Mission as Frontier Institution 97
Counter-Hispanization and / as Frontierization 102
3 Stagings of Spiritual Conquest 107

Reducción or Forced Resettlement in Theory and Practice 110
A God Is Weeping 120
Desengaño as Theopolitics 128
Disciplining the Shamans 136
Conjurations of Law 141
4 Miracles and Monsters in the Consolidation of Mission-Towns 149

Routinizing the Sacred 152
Disease, Derealization, and the Hostile [Racial] Other in the
Tigbalang Complex 160
Antipolo, 1596: a Tale of Two (or Three, or a Multitude of) Crosses 169
Taal, c. 1600: from Manifest to Latent Grace 172
Miracles and Phantasms in the Gestation of a Colonial Unconscious183
5 Our Lady of Contingency 189

Dispensaries of Grace 194
Errantry and Unsettlement in the Legend of the Virgin of Caysasay198
Towards a Genealogy of “Split-Level Christianity” 209
6 Reversions to Native Customin Fr. Antonio de Borja’s Barlaan

at Josaphat and Gaspar Aquino de Belen’s Mahal na Pasion 217
From the End of the Encomienda to the New “Efficiency of Empire” 224
Jesuit Spirituality and the Ambiguity of Emancipation in the
Tagalog Barlaan at Josaphat 230
Pasyon and Indictment in the Court of Public Opinion 239
The Last Maginoo and the “Philippinization of Christianity” 248
7 Colonial Racism and the Moro-Moro As Dueling Proxies of Law 259

Towards a New Hierarchy: Race 262
Custom [Ugalí], Christian Tradition, and Spanish Law 269
Fiestas and cockfights 275
Upstaging the Scene of Spiritual Conquest in Native Theater and
Romance [Moro-Moro and Awit] 282
Native Custom and the Undeceived Indian 299
Conclusion: The Promise of Law 309

Commonwealth vs. Cult in the Conjuration of Law 309
Confabulations of Philippine “Split-Level Christianity” 314
ReOrient or ReOccident? 316
Bibliography 319
Index 349
List of Illustrations
Figure 1 The mission fields of the several religious Orders and

the secular clergy c. 1650, with designation of mission-
towns and placenames in the book. 13
Figure 2 Banaue Rice Terraces, Ifugao Province. 19
Figure 3 Frontispiece to Fr. Gaspar de San Agustín (OSA),
Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas, etching. 34
Figure 4 “Per me Reges regnant,” detail, from Fr. Gaspar de
San Agustín (OSA), Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas
(frontispiece). 34
Figure 5 Drawing 227 from Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala,
Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (1615 / 1616),
manuscript. 82
Figure 6 Drawing 234, from Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala,
manuscript. 83
Figure 7 Drawing 233, from Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala,
manuscript. 84
Figure 8 “Village Tagal de Bacor, sur la route de Cavite á
Manille” [1828]. 113
Figure 9 The fortress-like construction of the Augustinian
church in Miagao (Iloilo) (completed in 1797). 113
Figure 10 The Ati-Atihan festival in Kalibo, Aklan (on the island
of Panay), where Aetas or highland natives mingle with
residents in blackface. 165
Figure 11 Poster or estampa of the image of Nuestra Señora de
Guía (Our Lady of Guidance). 193
Figure 12 Virgin of Antipolo. 195
Figure 13 Virgin of Antipolo (detail). 195
Figure 14 First page of “Catalogus Christianorum quos colit Soci-
etas in Philippinius Anno 1675” [Catalog of Christians
the Society (of Jesus) Worships (?) in the Philippines]. 222
Figure 15 “Cafres”: detail from Fr. Pedro Murillo Velarde (SJ),
Carta Hydrographica y Chorographica de las Islas
Filipinas (1734). 279
12 Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines
Figure 16 “Indios bailando el comintang” [Indians dancing the

kumintang]: detail from Fr. Pedro Murillo Velarde
(SJ), Carta Hydrographica y Chorographica de las Islas
Filipinas (1734). 279
Figure 17 “Indios peleando gallos” [Indians fighting (with)
gamecocks], detail (right) from Fr. Pedro Murillo
Velarde (SJ), Carta Hydrographica y Chorographica de
las Islas Filipinas (1734). 281
Figure 18 Performance of a moro-moro in Iloilo, Panay (Central
Visayas), c. 1895. 283
Figure 19 Makeshift shrine atop outcropping boulders at the foot
of the puwesto Sta. Lucia Falls. 311
Table 1 A comparison of Frs. San Agustín and Bencuchillo’s

accounts of the Virgin of Caysasay. 205
Figure 1: The mission fields of the several religious Orders and the secular clergy c. 1650,with designation of mission
towns and placenames mentioned in the book. Copyright © Mathilde Grimaldi, 2022. Map by Daniel Doeppers, in
“The Evolution of the Geography or Religious Adherence in the Philippines before 1898,” 100. Copyright permission
granted by author.
Acknowledgments
This book represents one of several associated projects, which emerged over
the course of many years. I want to thank the many friends, collaborators,
and interlocutors who made these moments possible, and who continue to
feed the hive mind of Philippine and Filipinx diaspora studies throughout
the world. Without your insights I would not have written this book.
I would like to thank first the mentors in my life, both academic and
personal, who passed away in the course of my completing this work: Philip-
pine National Artist Bien Lumbera, Rosemary George, Marcel Henaff, Edel
Garcellano, Dr. Luciano Santiago, and my father Dr. Renato Blanco, called
Rene by his friends and family. Your words and example continue in the life
and work of those you nurtured, among whom I count myself.
This book would not have been possible without the insights, enthusiasm,
and encouragement of the book series editor Christina Lee. I would also
like to thank Erika Gaffney and Randy Lemaire for steering me through the
editorial process of the book’s publication. A grant from the UC Humanities
Research Initiative allowed me to invite several senior scholars to review the
book manuscript in 2020. Thank you to the participants whose observations,
interpretations, and encouragement significantly contributed to the final
shape of the book: in addition to Christina, Vicente Rafael, Ignacio López-
Calvo, Damon Woods, and Sally Ann Ness. Needless to say, I acknowledge
any errors, oversights, or opinions in these pages as my own.
Different stages of the research and writing were sustained by different
audiences, with many friends among them: Nicanor Tiongson, Julio Ramos,
Philippine National Artist Virgilio Almario, Caroline Hau, Brian Goldfarb
and Parastou Feizzaringhalam, Cynthia Sowers, Anna More, Karen Graubart,
Ivonne del Valle, Phil. Congressman Kiko Benitez, Philippine National Artist
Resil Mojares, Neferti Tadiar, Ricardo Padrón, Rey Ileto, Josep Fradera,
Lola Elizalde, Oscar Campomanes, Eric Van Young, Sara Johnson, Nancy
Postero, Christine Hunefelt-Frode, Yen Espiritu, Joi Barrios, Lulut Doromal,
Ruby Alcantara, Yoshiko Nagano, Joyce Liu, Lulu Reyes, Paula Park, Jorge
Mojarro, Santa Arias, Ana Rodriguez, Luis Castellví-Laukamp, Tatiana
Seijas, Eberhard Crailsheim, Ruth Pison, Roberto Blanco Andrés, Fr. Blas
Sierra de la Calle (OSA), Ricky Jose, Ino Manalo, Ernest Hartwell, Matthew
Nicdao, Sony Bolton, Johaina Cristostomo, Ruth de Llobet, Nikki Briones
Carson-Cruz, Daniel Nemser, Orlando Bentacor, Rachel O’Toole, Claire
Gilbert, Marlon James Sales, Jánea and Juan Estrada, Mariam Lam, Leo
Garofolo, Fr. Ericsson Borre (OSA), Isaac Donoso, Xavier Huetz de Lemps,
Acknowledgments 15
Julius Bautista, Tina Clemente, Kuan-Hsing Chen, Shu-fen Lin, Diego Luis,
Juliana Chang, Ryusuke Ishikawa, Sarah Schneewind, Lisa Surwillo, María
del Rocío Ortuño, Irene Villaescusa, Dana Murillo and Mark Hanna, Veronica
Junyoung Kim, Koichi Hagimoto, Parimal Patil, Deirdre de la Cruz, Ana
Ruíz Gutiérrez, Takamichi Serizawa, Susan Gilman, Adam Lifshey, and
Jun Matibag.
My intellectual community during the period of writing this book came to
largely revolve around my regular involvement in the intellectual community
forged by the Tepoztlán Institute. My intellectual debt extends to the people
I have come to know there and their immensely helpful feedback on chapter
drafts: Josie Saldaña, Yolanda Martínez-López, María Elena Martínez (who
passed away in 2014), Pamela Voekel, Kelly McDonough, Caroline Egan,
David Kazanjian, and Gabriela Soto Laveaga. Thanks also to the leadership
of the Tepoz Colectivo, including Elliott Young, Jorge Giovanetti, David
Sartorius, Dillon Vrana, Marisa Belausteguigoitia Rius, Shane Dillingham,
Adam Warren, Christen Smith, Osmundo Pinho, Itza Amanda Varela Huerta,
Alaina Morgan, Araceli Masterson, Nattie Golubov, entre otres.
Many colleagues have played an essential role in my life of the mind as
well as the university. Thanks to the staff and community of Latin American
Studies. Thank you Claire Edington, who leads the Southeast Asia and
Transpacific collective. Thanks also to Cindy Nguyen, Nancy Kwak, Simeon
Man, Wendy Matsumura, Mohammad Khamsya Bin Khidzer, Christen
Sasaki, Diu Huong Nguyen, Sarah Grant, Phung Su, Christina Scwenkel,
Evyn Lê Espiritu Gandhi, Thûy Vo, and David Biggs for their enthusiasm
and engagement in this shared project. With my fellow members of the
editorial advisory board of the Journal of Early Modern Cultural Studies, I
share a continuing multifaceted conversation of the early modern moment.
Thanks to Daniel Vitkus for steering us through the vicissitudes of the field;
and to Babak Rahimi, Sal Nicolazzo, Jacques Lezra, Susan Maslan, John
Smolenski, Martin Huang, and Ulrike Strasser as well as Ivonne.
Thank you friends of the mind and heart, for your continued presence
and encouragement: Max Parra, Consuelo Soto, Luis Martín Cabrera and
Carol Arcos Herrera, Cristina Rivera-Garza and Saúl Hernández, Joseph
Ramírez, You Xiu Min, Maribel and Manny Gaite, María D. Sánchez Vega,
Aurelia Campbell, Daniel Widener, Dennis and Saranella Childs, Jacobo
Myerston and Danielle Raudenbush, Elana Zilberg, Gloria Chacón, Martin
Manalansan, Enrique Bonus, Lisa Lowe, Cristina Pantoja Hidalgo, Preachy
Legasto, Fr. Jimmy Achacoso (JCD), Fr. Luis Soliven, Theo Gonzalves, Luz
Mena, Ipat Luna, Howie Severino, Mars Estrada, Thelma Estrada, Wendell
Capilli, Neil Garcia, Nerissa Balce, Fidelito Cortes, Butch and Beng Dalisay,
Frances Makil, Bliss Lim, Trina Pineda, Leo Nery, Antonio Tinio, Bomen
Guillermo, Dylan Rodriguez, Robyn Rodriguez, Edward Nadurata, Maria
Bates and Patrick Colmenar, Gary Colmenar, Happy Araneta, Abe Ignacio
and Christine Araneta, Atilio Alicio, Augusto Espiritu, Richard Chu, Verna-
dette Gonzalez, Marilou and Malou Babilonia, Vina Lanzona, Judy Patacsil,
Sal Flor, Felix Tuyay, Thelma and Audie de Castro, Jay Perez, Josen Díaz,
Jimiliz Valiente, Heidi Tuason, Giselle Cunanan, Denise Cruz, Michael Gil
Magnaye and Roy Ferreira, Kazim Ali and Marco Wilkinson, Erin Suzuki,
Nina Zhiri, Lisa Lampert-Weissig, Amelia Glaser and Eran Mukamel, Tara
Knight, Ross Frank, José Fusté, Michael Davidson, Zeinabu Davis and Marc
Cherry, Cristina della Coletta, Brian Byun, Badri Swaminathan, Nayan Shah
and Ken Foster, Jeffrey Minson and Lesley Stern (who passed away in 2021),
Mica and Joe Pollock, Erin and Josh Graff Zivin, Sarah Gualtieri, David
and Julianne Pedersen, Shelley Streeby and Curtis Marez, Lisa Yoneyama
and Takashi Fujitani, Tom LaPere, Erin Dwyer, and Keith McNeal, Eugene
Pak, John Barron, Lauren Wood, Scott Frederick, Wendy Stulberg, Anna
Parkinson, Will and Dana Tiao, Colleen Chien and Dirk Calcoen, Amit
Nigam and Scott Linder, Holly and Bill Gastil and the SD Ashtanga com-
munity, Heather Fenwick, Jorge and Mariana Bustamante, Bill and Lorena
López-Powers, Rich Schulz and Marisol Marín, Larry and Sarah Carr, and
Aimee Santos.
I would be remiss not to express my gratitude to students past and
present, many of whom have helped me think through the most complex
takeaways from my f ield of study. They include: Mayra Cortes, Jessica
Aguilar, Marisol Cuong, Maya Richards, Steven Beardsley, Noelle Sepina,
Vyxz Vasquez, Satoko Kakihara, Shi-szu Hsu, Ma Vang, Malathi Iyengar,
June Ting, Theofanis Verinakis, Niall Twohig, Lyra Cavada, Claudia Vizcarra,
Cindy Pinhal, Jodi Eisenberg, Yelena Bailey, Scott Boehm, Leonora Paula,
Andrew Escudero, Carla Rodriguez, Adam Crayne, Kate Thompson, Ivy
Dulay, Rocío Giraldez-Betrón, Deanne Enriquez, Melissa Wang, Frida Pineda,
Kat Gutierrez, Corrine Ishio, Chris Datiles, Amanda Solomon, Jonathan
Valdez, Graeme Mack, and Ren Heintz.
Special thanks go to my mother Benita, with whom I have often consulted
on matters pertaining to Tagalog language as well as Philippine culture
more broadly. Among my extended family I would like to thank the Blanco,
Hermogenes, Soliven-Vega, and Doromal families, Tita Yoly Ganchorre,
Menchie and Jim LaSerre, and Monika and Olaf Jaeger, for providing me
with every manner of assistance in the Philippines, the US, and abroad.
I save my final and most affectionate gratitude for last: to Marivi and
Aspen, without whom nothing is possible.
Introduction: Towards a Counter-
History of the Mission Pueblo
Another stereotype that needs reexamination for a better understanding of the

Filipino people during the Spanish occupation is the supposed ease, speed, and
thoroughness of the Conquest.
— William Henry Scott, Cracks in the Parchment Curtain, 22
The Great Unsettlement
In 2009, UCLA archaeologist Stephen Acabado published a surprising and

controversial discovery from his research on the dating of the Ifugao rice
terraces in the Cordillera Mountain region in northern Luzon (Philippines)
(see Figure 2). As the author mentions in the introduction to his study, the
rice terraces are included in UNESCO’s World Heritage List, which describes
the terraces as a “living cultural landscape of unparalleled beauty… Built
2000 years ago and passed on from generation to generation, the Ifugao Rice
Terraces represent an enduring illustration of an ancient civilization that
surpassed various challenges and setbacks posed by modernization.”1 UN-
ESCO’s description, however, relied on early scholarship of the rice terraces,
which went largely unquestioned for decades. This earlier estimation was
based largely on speculation of how long it would have taken for the existing
Ifugao highland population to build such a vast network.2 Acabado’s research,
however, based on chronometric data from carbon samples along a section
of the network close to the lowland regions of Luzon, determined that, far
from being 2000 years old, their creation and period of greatest expansion
took place after 1585 – in other words, after the arrival of the Spaniards.
His research confirms a hypothesis first developed by Felix Keesing: “the
1 “Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras,” web.

2 Stephen Acabado, “A Bayesian Approach to Dating Agricultural Terraces,” 802; see also
Acabado, “Colonial Resistance through Political and Economic Consolidation,” 287–301.
Blanco, J.D., Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University

Press 2023
doi: 10.5117/9789463725880_intro
terraced landscapes of the Ifugao are the end-result of population expansion

into the Cordillera highlands in response to Spanish colonization.”3 Stitching
together Keesing’s history with this data led Acabado to the conclusion that
the evidence of “indigenous population migration away from the Spanish
and into this highland refugium [was] significant enough to expand terrace
systems” (811).
While Acabado’s findings may come as a great disappointment to both
UNESCO and cultural nationalists touting the antiquity of this seemingly
superhuman feat of environmental engineering, his research exposes us
to a different kind of amazement. It allows us a panoramic view of a secret
history unfolding just outside the gaze of the Spanish colonizers – for two
and a half centuries. If we view the terraces as an invention of the early
modern Spanish period rather than antiquity, they attest to a massive,
collective refusal of colonial rule: a refusal and flight of coastal and lowland
populations into the Luzon northern hinterlands, which led to the great
counter-settlement of these highlands between the sixteenth and (at least)
seventeenth centuries; and, carried on undiscovered by Spaniards until
around the 1750s. 4
Acabado’s research has several implications. The first and most important
is that the overweening focus on “Hispanization” in Philippine historiography
has obscured a twin and counter-history of Spanish depredation, native
deracination and derealization, terror, and (in the case of these highland
refugee populations) retreat from the coastal and lowland populations. Works
like Robert Reed’s classic study on “the rapid and complete Hispanization of
the Philippines” through Christianity and urban settlement, for example,
confidently estimated the procurement of Spanish suzerainty as early as
the third decade of the occupation: an estimation that the work of recent
scholars like Acabado has debunked.5 In contrast, the history of the back-
lands phenomenon in Luzon and other parts of the Philippines reinforces the
larger thesis made by Southeast Asian historian and anthropologist James
Scott on the unwritten and suppressed histories of unsettlement among
upland peoples throughout Southeast Asia. As Scott writes, “The history of
3 Cited in Acabado, “A Bayesian Approach,” 803. Acabado compared his results with other
historical data: most signif icantly, the disappearance of sixty villages in the lowland areas
exposed to the Spanish presence between 1739 and 1789, compared to the preservation of over
fifty villages in the highlands from around 1660 to the present day. See ibid., 813; and Acabado,
“Taro Before Rice Terraces,” 296.
4 Acabado, ibid. 286.
5 See Robert Reed, Hispanic Urbanism in the Philippines: A Study of the Impact of Church and
State, 11.
INTRODUC TION: TOWARDS A COUNTER-HISTORY OF THE MISSION PUEBLO 19
Figure 2: Banaue Rice Terraces, Ifugao Province. Copyright © John Crux / Alamy Stock Photo, 2022.
hill peoples is best understood as a history not of archaic remnants but of

‘runaways’ from state-making processes in the lowlands… The effect of all
state-making projects… was to create a shatter zone or flight zone to which
those wishing to evade or to escape bondage fled.”6
The case of the highland Ifugao – also called Igorots or Igorotes, although
this term has grown to encompass the Kalinga, Benguets, Bontocs, and
Apayos – as well as untold other indigenous identities, is particularly
instructive. This culture, routinely derided or condemned by Spaniards
as primitive, turns out to be a rather modern (or early modern) invention:
an amalgamation of different indigenous groups living between the coast
and the highlands, who became “Igorot” in the layered movements of
flight, desertion, and apostasy from the Spanish conquest and mission
pueblos.7 Cultural anthropologist Alicia Magos, who researches the upland
6 See Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 24. Scott’s argument draws in part from another
(Philippine) anthropologist, William Henry Scott, who argued that the Philippine highland group
identified as “Igorots” were actually the amalgamation of generations of lowland assimilation
into the highlands, propelled by flight from Spanish dominion. See The Discovery of the Igorots;
as well as “The Unconquered Cordilleras” in Rediscovery, 31–41; and Of Igorots and Independence,
11, 29–36.
7 See William Henry Scott, “The Unconquered Cordilleras,” 35. For a comparative instance
of “mistaken primitivism, see the case of Allen Holmberg’s study of the Sirono of Bolivia, in
Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, 3–34.
dwellers of Central Panay – a large island south of Luzon, in the Visayas

region – arrived at a similar conclusion, based on her study of Bukidnon
epics. Magos was initially struck by the boat-building tradition that these
mountain people had retained for centuries through this oral tradition,
after they had ceased to build boats or live in the coastal areas of the
island. In fact, one of the chanted epics she succeeded in recording (the
Humadapnon), which belonged to a severely endangered oral tradition,
describes frequent episodes of sea travel. Her conclusion was that, while
pre-Hispanic settlers on the island probably moved farther into the interior
before the Spanish arrival, “[they] were later joined by other people who
wanted to escape military recruitment during the Spanish regime… as
some Spanish records of the early Spanish period mention the movement
of lowlanders to the interior to escape tribute, forced labor and military
conscription.”8
The work of scholars like these leads to a second implication that this
book will explore in greater detail. The point of contact, contiguity, and
re-encounter between these histories of settlement and unsettlement was
captured in the voluminous chronicles, correspondence, and literature
of the mission frontier, which constituted most of the archipelago until
at least the end of the eighteenth century. Yet the latter history remains
stubbornly invisible. Why? While classic works of Philippine historiography
would confidently pronounce that urban resettlement constituted a great
success of Spanish colonial rule, and particularly the accomplishment of
the monastic Orders and the Jesuits, one need only stare at the rice terraces
in Banaue and other highland areas to acknowledge the equal success of
native flight and escape from resettlement. This success unfolds before the
beholder like words across the pages of a living book.
This living book, which substantiates the work of many recent scholars
in history, anthropology, literature, and the arts, calls for a rethinking of
Philippine history in the early modern period with greater attention to
the colonial subjects who experienced it rather than the architects who
imagined it. It is not just that the architects were writing at a far remove
from their subjects; as I will argue, it is that their interpreters, detractors,
translators, and even the architects themselves, engaged in acts of the
imagination and fiction to obscure the lasting legacy of social anomie in
the attempted projection of colonial society. The body of work that resulted
from this imaginary is the literature of “spiritual conquest.”
8 See Magos, “The Sugidanon of Central Panay,” in Edukasyon: Harnessing Indigenous Knowledge
for Education, 129. See also F. Landa Jocano, Sulod Society.
By reading this literature of the early modern period against that other
living “book” of native flight and deracination etched into the Ifugao rice ter-
races, I argue, a different history comes to light. For one thing, the divergent
character of this (counter-)history suggests that the genesis of Philippine
colonial society, which emerged around the consolidation of mission-towns
or doctrinas administered by Religious Orders, did not and does not reflect
the consequence of the nebulous ethno-historical process of “Hispanization”
as it is often portrayed; but rather its opposite – counter-Hispanization.9
That is, mission-towns, far from initiating the process by which Spanish
laws would be implemented in the frontier provinces, and in which Indian
subjects would culturally assimilate Spanish customs, instead perpetuated
a state of social anomie or lawlessness that the conquest had unleashed in
these regions.10
Moreover, the religious imaginary order, even fantasy, that was expressed
in the literature of Spain’s “spiritual conquest,” had a political function: it
supplanted the (absence of) law in the name of supplementing or promising
it. Examining these religious and historical texts as examples of literature
and even fiction will enable us to fill in the gaps of the overarching frame(s)
of colonial history, up to the point of calling these very frames into question.
The outsized role of the religious imaginary in the writing of colonial history,
in inverse proportion to the administration of law and political economy
in the frontier provinces under the pastoral care of religious ministers,
thus not only calls for a drastic revision of that history, but also a broader
reconsideration of the role played by frontier provinces in the Americas as
well as the Philippines, in the paradoxes of Spanish rule overseas and in
the role of popular Christianity in colonial society.
Contrary to the general consensus in Philippine historiography, which
credits the mendicant Orders and the Jesuits for curbing the impunity and
violent excesses of the conquest, and facilitating a long, peaceful, and gradual
conversion of the population to Christianity, I have focused instead on how
the literature and politics of spiritual conquest reflect the contribution of
these ministers to a protracted period of social anomie throughout the
mission provinces for most of the colonial period (sixteenth-eighteenth
9 The locus classicus of this theory is John L. Phelan’s Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish
Aims and Filipino Responses 1565–1700.
10 My understanding of social anomie draws from anthropologist Victor Turner’s studies of
liminality, social drama, and communitas, although I apply it specif ically here to the literal
suspension or malleability of laws under the immunity and impunity of religious privilege
throughout the Philippines. See Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors, 23–59 and 231–271. See
also Marvin Olsen, “Durkheim’s Two Concepts of Anomie,” 37.
centuries). Instead of the mission serving as a “frontier institution,” as

Herbert Bolton famously characterized the mission in Latin America, the
historical research and literary analyses in this book show that the mission
served instead as an agent of frontierization – a term coined by Mexican
historian Cecilia Sheridan Prieto to describe the social consequences of
the mission complex in northern Mexico.11 The evidence of social anomie,
terror, and native maladjustment to Christianity and resettlement, in
any case, finds abundant documentation in the religious chronicles and
correspondence of the Orders themselves. Our difficulty in seeing and
recognizing it as such stems from the narrative pretension and imaginary
reach of “spiritual conquest” as the organizing metaphor of Philippine
history in all areas outside of Manila (and perhaps Cebu) throughout the
colonial period.
In tracing the historical arc of this narrative and the imaginary ma-
trix it sustained, I will advance several interrelated arguments, some
more explicitly than others. The f irst is that the events of Philippine
history recorded in the chronicles of the religious Orders, along with the
reports and correspondence with the Crown and colonial government,
are anchored in an imaginative frame that arises out of Christian theol-
ogy and, as such, deserve to be studied as works of creative literature as
well as for their historical content. The second is that this imaginative
frame had a political and a pastoral function. In addition to representing
Philippine history in ways instructive, entertaining, and exemplary to
the religious Order in question and also fellow (and oftentimes rival)
religious Orders, these chronicles engineered the disappearance of the
conquest as a historical fact, while reinforcing the protracted period
of social anomie that ensued. They did so through their defense of the
continued legal and ecclesiastical autonomy of the religious Orders and
the mission lands from any effective oversight or unmediated exercise of
civil or official Church authority. The literature of spiritual conquest, in
other words, doubled as a manifesto for a de facto monastic sovereignty,
as nineteenth-century propagandist for colonial reforms Marcelo H. del
Pilar identified it; or “monachocracy,” as scholars like Jean-Paul Potet call
11 “The Mission as Frontier Institution in the Spanish-American Colonies” was the title of a
well-known essay by Herbert Bolton in 1917. Together with the fort or garrison, Bolton argued,
the religious mission served as a “pioneering agency” that was tasked to fulfill both a material
and spiritual end through the forced concentration of native populations [Sp. congregación or
reducción] and their conversion to Christianity. See Bolton, “The Mission,” 42–61. On “frontieriza-
tion” [Sp. fronterización], see Cecilia Sheridan Prieto, Fronterización del espacio hacia el norte
de la Nueva España, 63–64.
it today.12 Religious writings like the historical chronicles of the religious

Orders represented Christianity to both colonial officials and natives alike
as the continuation of an unfinished conquest of the provinces outside
Manila; and as an effective proxy for law in the law’s absence or more
specifically abeyance in these areas.
Third, the very same weakness of the Crown and colonial government
upon which the authority of the religious Orders was based, also forced friars
and Jesuits to rely on the very same peoples they were trying to resettle and
convert. The literature of spiritual conquest, while overtly celebrating the
willingness and enthusiasm of many natives to freely convert to Christianity
under colonial conditions, thus also inadvertently reveals the co-invention
of Philippine Christianity by friars and natives alike: a protracted sur-
render to Spanish rule under the religious ministers; the acceptance and
refunctionalization of the Devil as a cipher for the native spirit world; the
phantasmagorias of miracles and apparitions, as well as their routinization;
and the necessary persistence of a frontier that made any form of effective
colonial governance impossible.
Fourth and f inally, the literature and imaginary matrix of spiritual
conquest provide the model for the earliest signif icant examples of
literature and theater in vernacular Tagalog. The signif icance of these
early examples, however, lies not in the conformity of these works to their
European models but rather their discrepancy and their preoccupation
with the emergence of an ersatz colonial society under the mission town
or doctrina and the stubborn perseverance of older pre-Hispanic forms
of political authority, debt slavery, and poetic expression. 13 With the
increased contact between the mission regions and the colonial metropolis
of Manila as the seat of colonial government in the eighteenth century,
came the proliferation of new practices, ambiguously referred to as native
custom(s) [Tag. ugalí], which ultimately gave the lie to Christianization
and colonial rule.
Taken together, these arguments aim to provide the sketch of a
counter-history of mission settlement: demystifying the mission as the
magical apparatus that sublates the collective trauma of a subjected people,
brutalized by massacre, deracination, and cultural genocide, under the
providential narrative of Christianity and civilization. The coherence of
12 See Pilar, La soberanía monacal en Filipinas: apuntes sobre la funesta preponderancia del
fraile en las islas, así en lo politico como en lo económico y religioso; and Potet, Seventeenth-Century
Events at Liliw.
13 See Virgilio Almario, Muling Pagkatha sa Ating Bansa, 116-117.
this counter-history derives from the ideas of counter-Hispanization, the

staging or mise-en-scène of Christian phantasmagorias, and the evolution
of a baroque ethos, which I describe briefly below.
Beyond the “Hispanization” thesis
Counter-histories inevitably pit themselves against established certitudes

that connect historiography with the perceived injustice of the status quo.
In this case, my characterization of Philippine colonial society under the
mission doctrinas as a space of social anomie, as well as its influence on
the dual genesis of native custom, popular or “folk” Christianity, confronts
perhaps the best-known account of the missionary endeavor in the Philip-
pines in English, John Leddy Phelan’s Hispanization of the Philippines (first
published in 1959). In Phelan’s study, the author describes this culture and
society as the result of two drives, “Spanish aims” and “Filipino responses.”
The former was expressed as Hispanization, which the Crown sought to
achieve with the assistance of the Church and the religious Orders, i.e.
through “Christianization.” The result of this effort, however, amounted
to what Phelan identified as partial, or incomplete Hispanization.14 His
explanation for why the Philippines was not “fully” Hispanized pointed to
the main agents charged with concentrating the native populations into
towns and converting them to Christianity: the religious Orders, both
monastic and Jesuit. Instead of Hispanization-through-Christianization,
Phelan argued, the transplantation of Christianity to the Philippines brought
about its “Philippinization.” While Phelan doesn’t clearly articulate what
such a term entailed, readers were left to presume he meant the preservation
of pre-Hispanic customs and traditions, along with the selective appropria-
tion of Christianity towards the production of cultural syncretism. The
relationship between these two ostensible responses, however, remained
ambiguous.
One must credit Phelan for the elegance with which his exhaustive
research on the progress and setbacks of the colonial government dur-
ing the first century and a half of Spanish rule was presented.15 Yet many
14 John Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines, 158–159.

15 As Damon Woods has astutely pointed out, Phelan’s “partial Hispanization” thesis was in
part a response and modification of the earlier, uncritical appraisal of the religious Orders in
New Spain by Robert Ricard (private communication). See The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico.
A more systematic critique of Ricard’s views appears in James Lockhart, The Nahuas After the
Conquest, 2–5. Lockhart presents a compelling alternative to the evolutionism found in Phelan,
succeeding scholars have pointed out how his rather Hegelian system of
abstractions (a fact to which he himself confesses: see 153) also ended up
obscuring the historical events and cultural artifacts through which an
identification of what is “Spanish” versus what is “Filipino” even comes
about.16 The nebulous character of the ethnohistorical processes laid out
by Phelan – Hispanization, Christianization, and Philippinization – have
nevertheless become quasi-permanent placeholders for a diverse and of-
tentimes divergent set of historical occurrences. In fact, this self-referential
structure of Hispanization-Christianization-Filipinization has allowed
for fuzzy sociological theory to substitute for historical knowledge. This
substitution finds a clear example in Phelan’s articulation of “partial” or
“uneven” Hispanization:
The paradox is that Spanish success issued from Spanish failure. The
Spaniards did not accomplish as much as they set out to do, and this
result enabled Filipinos to absorb a modest amount of Hispanic influence
without breaking too abruptly or too completely with their preconquest
way of life. The Filipinos were partially Hispanized with a minimum of
psychological and physical damage. The same result did not occur in
either Mexico or Peru (158–159: italics added).
One cannot argue, of course, with the assertion that “Spanish failure” ap-
pears as a recurring theme in both missionary and secular literature and
historiography produced throughout much of the colonial period. But the
certitude of Phelan’s summation begins to fall apart when we begin to
question who exactly these Spaniards were; and what they presumably
set out to accomplish. Even a cursory analysis at the enduring conflicts
between the colonial government, royal grantees or encomenderos, the
official Church hierarchy or bishopric, and the regular or monastic Orders
(including the Jesuits) reveals that their goals were more often than not
incompatible.17 So conflictive, in fact, that it leads us to wonder what one
based on three stages of encounter and interaction between Spanish and Nahua culture in central
Mexico which advanced the nature and character of “double-mistaken identity” (442–446).
16 See, for example, Vicente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, 5–6; Reynaldo Ileto, Filipinos
and Their Revolution, 29–31; Carolyn Brewer, Shamanism, Catholicism and Gender Relations in
Colonial Philippines 1521–1685, xxii; and Damon Woods, The Myth of the Barangay, 246–247.
17 For a brief history of the encomienda institution in the Philippines, see Eric Anderson, “The
Encomienda in Early Philippine Colonial History,” 25–36. Encomienda entailed the rewarding of
royal grantees (encomenderos) with the right to collect tribute and extract labor from the subject
native population within a given area, provided that they also helped to finance the concentration
can or can’t presume to be the meaning and goal of “Hispanization.” If

we understand this term, broadly, to entail the acculturation of colonial
subjects to Hispanic institutions of government and society, whether this
meant the introduction of colonial laws and policies into concentrated
settlements, the abolition of pre-Hispanic institutions like debt slavery, the
secularization of mission churches into parishes under the official Church,
and the teaching of Spanish to native peoples, one would have to conclude
that neither encomenderos nor the religious Orders shared this goal: in fact,
for most of the colonial period they were adamantly opposed to it. What
then, constituted the measure of Spanish “success” or “failure?”
Another set of problems emerges when we consider the other side of
Phelan’s conclusion, which was that the colonization of the Philippines
exercised a “minimum of psychological and physical damage… [which] did
not occur in either Mexico or Peru.” Let us grant at the outset that, since
the publication of Phelan’s thesis, historians have drastically revised their
estimation of depopulation in the Philippines during the first two centuries
of Spanish rule.18 Linda Newson’s research, for example, estimates the decline
of the native population by around one third, depending on the region.
While such a figure clearly doesn’t approach the scale of depopulation in
the Americas in the wake of the Spanish invasion, it nevertheless compels
one to at least question the easy, almost flippant character of Phelan’s
remarks regarding “minimum psychological and physical damage.” In
fact, nineteenth-century expatriate propagandist for colonial reform and
national martyr, Dr. José Rizal had earlier arrived at the complete opposite
conclusion to that of Phelan after researching the colonial history of the
Philippines in the British Library:
Scarcely had [the indigenous peoples of the islands] been brought under
the Spanish crown, when they were forced to sustain with their blood
and the tribulations of their children the conquistador wars and ambi-
tions of the Spanish people, and in these struggles, in that terrible crisis
[reducción] of the population in towns and villages as well as support the missionaries in the
task of religious conversion. Anderson characterizes it as an “irregular system for extracting
labor, alluvial gold and some local native production from contacted Indian peoples” (26), which
persevered in the Philippines despite its demise in the Americas because of “the frontier nature
of the colony” (27). He clarifies this to mean that, outside the immediate vicinity of the Spanish
cities Manila, Cebu, and Arevalo (Iloilo City), “Private encomiendas were purposely concentrated
on the frontiers where their continuing military role was deemed necessary” (33).
18 See, for example, Donald Hall, A History of South-East Asia, 252; and Eric Anderson, “The
Encomienda in Early Philippine Colonial History, 32.
when a people changes its form of government, its laws, usages, customs,
religion and beliefs, the Philippines became depopulated, impoverished
and retarded – caught by surprise in their metamorphosis, having lost
conf idence in their past, without any faith in their present and with
no hope of fortune in the years to come… [Filipinos] forgot their writ-
ings, their songs, their poetry, their laws in order to learn by heart other
doctrines, which they did not understand, other morals, other tastes…
They were made abject, degraded in their own eyes, ashamed of what was
distinctively their own, in order to admire and praise what was foreign
and incomprehensible; their spirit was broken and they bowed down…
And in this way the years and centuries passed.19
The two assessments cannot both be right. Neither can one square away the
implication of Rizal’s argument with the one following from Phelan’s: the
implication that the cultural transformations and conflicts brought about
by Spanish rule in the Philippines, mutatis mutandis, very much resemble
those examples that come from New Spain or the viceroyalty of Perú.20 Yet
one might say that the historiography of Philippine Christianization as
“spiritual conquest” boils down to just such an attempt to do so.
The best-known response from among Philippine Studies scholars to
Phelan’s Hispanization thesis in recent years has been Vicente Rafael’s
Contracting Colonialism. In this work, the author drew upon his interpretation
of translation in early modern religious writings, to reevaluate the “success”
of Christian conversion and native resettlement by considering the insertion
of native understandings and values into the alien religion. He concluded
that it was through the politics of translating religious concepts and terms
19 “Incorporadas apenas á la Corona Española, [los indígenas pueblos isleños] tuvieron que
sostener con su sangre y con los esfuerzos de sus hijos las guerras y las ambiciones conquistadoras
del pueblo español, y en estas luchas, en esa crisis terrible de los pueblos cuando cambian
de gobierno, de leyes, de usos, costumbres, religión y creencias, las Filipinas se despoblaron,
empobrecieron y atrasaron, sorprendidas en su metamorfosis, sin confianza ya en su pasado, sin
fe aun en su presente y sin ninguna lisonjera esperanza en los venideros días…. [los Filipinos]
olvidaron su escritura, sus cantos, sus poesías, sus leyes, para aprenderse de memoria otras
doctrinas, que no comprendían, otra moral, otra estética, diferentes de las inspiradas á su
raza por el clima y por su manera de sentir. Entonces rebajóse, degradándose ante sus mismos
ojos, avergonzóse de lo que era suyo y nacional, para admirar y alabar cuanto era extraño é
incomprensible; abatióse su espíritu y se doblegó.”
“Y así pasaron años y pasaron siglos.” Rizal, “Filipinas dentro de cien años,” in Poesía completa
/ Ensayos escogidos, 353–354. Originally published in 1889.
20 This thesis is more carefully explored in the work of Rafael Bernal: see Paula Park, Intercolonial
Intimacies, 93–119.
that native writers found themselves able to defer or evade the meaning of
colonial rule through Christianity, instead of engaging with it – or rather,
engaging with it by subterfuge.21 To “contract colonialism,” as the title of his
work suggested, thus meant two opposite and simultaneous dispositions of
colonial subjects to Spanish rule: one of capitulation, and one of anticipating,
warding off or “bargaining” with the terms of conversion and resettlement.
Ultimately, this doubled understanding of conversion and translation –
conversion through a creative practice of mistranslation – allowed the author
to “map the conditions that made possible both the emergence of a colonial
regime and resistance to it” (xx). In short, Rafael’s answer to the question of
why or how natives came to embrace Christianity was to suggest quite simply
that in many ways they didn’t; or rather, through acts of (mis)translation,
they approximated or “matched” Christian notions of sin, repentance, and
salvation with native concepts of debt, reciprocity, and shame.22
In contrast to Rafael, Filomeno Aguilar’s Clash of Spirits works backward
from the focus of his study on the emergence of Visayan planter society at
the end of the nineteenth century, to anchor the idea of spiritual conquest
in the concept of “Friar Power,” which emerged in the early colonial period.
The nineteenth century, in Aguilar’s study, was dominated by mestizo
landowners whose skillful manipulation of workers and institutions alike
endowed them with a certain charismatic power. He traces this charismatic
power to the Ilonggo and Kinaray-an term Dungan, which constitutes a kind
of alter ego that “resides in the human body and provides the essence of
life” and which contributes to the characteristics of “willpower, knowledge
intelligence, and even the ability to dominate and persuade others.”23 The
transference of this concept to the friars, Aguilar speculates, allowed
natives to explain to themselves how native society was Christianized:
without, however, destroying native epistemologies regarding the nature
of power and authority: particularly its relationship with the spirit world.
He employs the concept “Friar Power” to explain native regard for religious
missionaries, who (in his account) expressed their forceful dungan through
their presentation of Christianity as spiritual conquest. Aguilar interprets
spiritual conquest to mean two different things for the colonizing religion
and the colonial subject. For the latter, the arrival of Spanish Christianity
21 Vicente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, 83.

22 “Translation,” Rafael writes, “enabled [native writers] to negotiate with Spanish authority
and hence to contain its demands, including the demands implicit in the Christian notion of
death” (Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, 208: see also 83, 127, and 212).
23 Aguilar, Clash of Spirits, 28; see also Herminia Meñez, “The Viscera-Sucker and the Politics
of Gender,” 96–100.
represented “[a] massive intrusion of Hispanic spirit-beings” (Aguilar 33).

These phantasmagorias (metaphysically) overwhelmed and supplanted
the native spirit world, with friars appearing as “alien shamans” whose
legitimacy was based on their “potency and superior cosmic strength” (38).
While both Rafael and Aguilar’s contributions attempt to explain the
dichotomy between the apparent success of Christian conversion and the
seemingly purposeful misrecognition of certain basic tenets of the Christian
faith, both still remain attached to Phelan’s assumption regarding the identity
of interests between the religious Orders and the Spanish Crown; which,
in turn, reinforces the dichotomy and confrontation between Spanish and
indigenous worlds that both the Orders and Christian neophytes had refused
from the very beginning. In Contracting Colonialism, one consequence of this
misidentification is the corollary tendency to equate native accommodation
(to Christianity, or Spanish rule, or both) with resistance and vice-versa,
to the point that the difference between the two falls out of historical
consideration. In Clash of Spirits, the transposition of spiritual conquest
to the metaphysical realm tends to reify the very same complex that the
author sets out to critically examine. Spirit becomes Superior Spirit; power
becomes Power; and spiritual conquest becomes likened to a cosmic struggle
featuring superhero-like leaders who pit or exercise “Power” against one
another.24 Both Rafael and Aguilar’s analyses, in different ways, reconfirm
the unfinished nature of the conquest and the character of social anomie that
forced natives to live in at least two simultaneous yet incompatible realities.
The question that remains, however, concerns the role of the religious Orders
in reinforcing that condition through the labor of counter-Hispanization.
If we choose to abandon Phelan’s prison-house of developmentalist
thinking, what approach to reading colonial history emerges in its place?
Breaking down the reifications of “Hispanism-through-Hispanization,”
“Christianity-through-Christianization,” and “Filipino identity through
Philippinization,” begins with two tasks. The first entails dissecting the
actors, institutions, and interests that were sometimes allied, sometimes
pitted against one another, but which became conflated in the invention of
Hispanization as a quasi-historical category. The second involves retracing
the dynamic among these forces, with particular attention to the relationship
of the religious Orders to the Crown and to their native flocks, as the chief
moments of this dynamic: crystallized around concepts like “pacification,”
24 Aguilar adopts the concept of Dungan from the work of anthropologist Alicia Magos, in order
to account for the cult adoration of certain mestizo capitalist landowners in the nineteenth and
twentieth century.
“spiritual conquest,” undeception (Sp.: desengaño), the Devil, and the threat
of religious relapse or “backsliding,” as well as cultural artifacts and parali-
turgical traditions.25
One of the immediate consequences of this approach is to recognize that
the Christian conversion of souls, or “Christianization” more broadly, had a
much more complex and contested relationship to the Crown, Spanish rule,
and “Hispanization” (however one defines it) than Phelan had acknowledged.
The dismantling of the Hispanization thesis will also allow us to analyze
fully the active role that the religious Orders themselves played in the
anticipation and articulation of native custom as quasi-legal realm, set
apart from the administration of Crown or civil law in the provinces. A
third consequence of reading critically Phelan’s account is to rephrase his
conclusion that “Filipinos absorb[ed] a modest amount of Hispanic influence
without breaking too abruptly or too completely with their preconquest way
of life.” The question, it seems, has less to do with some presumed quantity
of “Hispanic influence” that colonial subjects did or didn’t absorb; and more
to do with the trajectory of individual and collective self-reinvention that
followed from the history of Spanish depredation, epidemic disease, and
displacement; and that remains encoded in the missionary chronicles as
well as early works of Tagalog literature. Fourth and finally, an analysis
and evaluation of the counter-Hispanizing role played by the religious
Orders in the maintenance of a permanent colonial frontier – the colony
as frontier – locates the study of the early modern Philippines within the
larger field of Latin American Studies – paradoxically, the same field from
which Phelan distinguished the uniqueness of Philippine Hispanization.
Here, the comparison of the mission frontier in the Philippines with the
peripheries of viceroyalties of New Spain and Perú yields insights about
the continuities being forged by the Spanish Hapsburgs and their overseas
subjects across the Pacific and the Atlantic Ocean.
Spiritual Conquest as (a) Staging [Escenificación]
Much of this work concerns the analysis of religious rhetoric as an artifice,

whose intentions were political in their substitution of history by exemplum
and eschatology. Heading the chain of significations that made this religious
25 Michel Foucault characterized these approaches as the double-writing of a critical history

and genealogy. For an exploration of these two terms and their methodological implications,
see Michel Foucault, Archaeology of Knowledge and Discourse on the Sciences, 231–234.
conception of history so persistent is the phrase “spiritual conquest,” which

the religious historian Robert Ricard used in the title of his early work on
the sixteenth-century friar or Mendicant Orders in New Spain (Mexico).
Called La conquête spirituelle du Mexique [The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico],
published in 1933, the book describes spiritual conquest as: “the work of
the Mendicant Orders… as Orders. It is a singular and most remarkable
fact that the churches of Spanish America were founded by the Mendicant
Orders independently of the episcopacy, whose authority broke against the
pontifical privileges granted to the regular clergy” (4). Curiously, the phrase
did not enjoy any wide circulation before the seventeenth century – at least
several decades after the historical period Ricard ostensibly covered.26 Of
course, the intermingling of military and religious rhetoric dates back to the
time of the Crusades, or (at least in Spain), the “Reconquest” of the Iberian
peninsula under the Catholic monarchs. Yet, as I will show, the identification
of Spain’s conquest as a primarily religious one under the leadership of
the religious Orders only happens in and through the process by which
the Crown self-legalizes its universal claim to dominion over its overseas
possessions; even as it cedes any effective authority over that dominion to
the Orders themselves. In any case, the point is not to fault Ricard for his
anachronistic use of a seventeenth-century phrase to describe the work of
the friars in the sixteenth. Rather, our attention to the late appearance of
this phrase suggests the articulation of an ideology and iconography that
one can distinguish from (and that one should not confuse with) both the
“Spanish aims” of the Crown as well as Christian eschatology per se.
Ricard’s observation regarding the inefficacy of the official Church before
the “pontifical privileges” of the religious Orders specifies the key feature
of mission settlements throughout the Americas and the Philippines: their
successful resistance to both Crown and ecclesiastical (that is, episcopal)
authority. What did this spiritual conquest entail? Following the arrival,
pillage, and establishment of peace treaties with various native local chiefs
throughout the archipelago, Spanish Admiral Miguel López de Legazpi
26 The anonymous Jesuit play (presented in the form of a colloquy) written around 1622,
Coloquio de la conquista espiritual del Japón hecha por San Francisco Javier [Colloquy of the
Spiritual Conquest of Japan accomplished by St. Francis Xavier], seems to be an early example
of the phrase “spiritual conquest” in circulation. Franciscan friar Fr. Paolo da Trinidade wrote
Conquista Espiritual do Oriente in Goa between 1630–1636; and in 1639 Jesuit priest Fr. Antonio
Ruiz de Montoya wrote La conquista espiritual: hecha por los religiosos de la Compañía de Jesús,
en las provincias del Paraguay, Paraná, Uruguay y Tape [The Spiritual Conquest: Accomplished
by the Religious of the Company of Jesus (the Jesuit Order), in the Provinces of Paraguay, Paraná,
Uruguay and Tape]. See Celsa García Valdés, Coloquio de la Conquista espiritual, 35–57.
established Manila as the seat of Spanish authority over the declared posses-
sion of the islands in 1571 under Spanish king Philip II (hence, Philippines).
Barely three years later, Philip II’s 1574 Ordinances on the Discovery, Popula-
tion, and Pacification of the Indies entrusted the Church, and specifically
the religious Orders, with the dual task of preaching to unbaptized Indians;
and encouraging peaceful native settlement in concentrated populations.27
The first involved preparing natives to their conversion to Christianity; and,
in cases where no ordained priest was available to baptize and administer
the sacraments to the population, to provisionally fulfill that office. The
mission as a “frontier institution” (Bolton) would represent the first step
or phase in the establishment of the Church overseas; the second phase
would entail the creation of parishes administered by ordained secular
priests (vs. friars or Jesuits) under the ecclesiastical hierarchy of bishops,
which serves as the official authority of the Church.28 Yet that first step
would also involve the missionaries in the work of “pacification,” through
the process of resettlement that was called reduction [reducción]. Tied to
this task of resettlement, given the extensive disruption that followed in
the wake of the Spanish arrival, friars and (later) Jesuits were expected to
model, indoctrinate, and discipline the natives according to the principles
of European civic behavior, referred to as policía [polity, as well as political
or civil life in general]. The purpose of policía was to dispose the subject
population to the exaction of tribute, the conscription of (forced) labor
(called polos y servicios), domestic service [tanores], and the forced sale of
native goods at values fixed by the colonial government (called vandala).29
One can see in this brief sketch how the term “spiritual conquest” conflates
these two roles of the religious ministers, to the degree that they become
indistinguishable. Forced resettlement as “pacification” acquires a moral and
spiritual dimension, even as the religious Orders identify their interests with
those of the Spanish Crown. In Fr. San Agustín’s classic account of the early
Augustinian mission, the “spiritual conquest” simultaneously designates
27 See Zelia Nuttall, “Royal Ordinances Concerning the Laying out of New Towns,” 743–753.
These ordinances find earlier expression in the New Laws advanced by Charles V in 1542.
28 See Bolton, “The Mission,” 42–61.
29 On the concept of policía [police in French], see Michel Foucault, Security, Territory,
Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–78, 311–361; and “The Political Technology of
Individuals,” 145–162. For the emergence of this concept overseas, see J. Lechner, “El concepto de
‘policía’ y su presencia en la obra de los primeros historiadores de Indias,” 395–409; and Daniel
Nemser, Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico, 25–64. Latin
American historian Inga Clendinnen highlights the coercive and often traumatic experience of
reduction in Yucatan: see Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570, 59.
the absorption of the frontier into the sphere of Spanish dominion; as well
as the defeat of the universal enemy, Satan. Thus do the opening lines of
Fr. San Agustín’s history read:
Thus there came the fullness of time as decreed in the inscrutable mind of
the Most High to shower His pity on all those nations as in the extensive
Islands… and primarily in these Philippines, [the people] lived in the
darkness of death, blind beneath the tyrannical empire of Satan, to whom
they rendered vassalage in their cowardice and ignorance, and gave him
adoration, without participating in the abundant fruits of the universal
and copious redemption of the human race [género humano] through
the immense judgments of God, as other regions of Europe and America
now enjoy, where, through the preaching of the Gospel, the torch of truth
was lit…30
Fr. San Agustín’s rhetoric here concatenates a chain of signifiers that sutures
the political and eschatological dimensions of the evangelizing mission:
high / low, center / periphery, Spain / Philippines, light / darkness, freedom /
tyranny, redemption / enslavement. By identifying the “tyrannical empire
of Satan, to whom [the natives] rendered vassalage… without participating
in the abundant fruits… of the human race,” the author presents in con-
densed form the theological reason through which a political decision – in
this case, the condition by which a just war [guerra justa] may be waged
against indigenous populations in non-Spanish territories – takes place. The
liberation of the natives here would coincide with their inclusion into “the
human race,” which for Fr. San Agustín meant the Christian community
or respublica Christiana.
The fulfillment of God’s Plan, the instrument of a Universal Monarchy
[monarchia universalis], the liberation of non-Christian peoples from the
Devil, and their inclusion in the worldwide Christian community, constituted
the main elements of Fr. San Agustín’s vision of early modern globalization.31
30 Llegó la plenitud del tiempo decretado en la inescrutable mente del Altísimo para apiadarse
de tantas naciones como en las dilatadas Islas… y principalmente en estas Filipinas, habitaban en
las tinieblas de la muerte, viviendo ciegos debajo del tiránico imperio de Satanás, a quien cobardes
e ignorantes rendían vasallaje y daban adoración, sin participar… de los abundantes frutos de
la universal y copiosa redención del género humano, como los gozaban las otras regiones de la
Europa y América, donde, mediante la predicación del Evangelio, lucía la antorcha de la verdad…”
Fr. Gaspar de San Agustin (OSA) and Manuel Merino, Conquistas de Las Islas Filipinas, 31.
31 On the ideology of Universal Monarchy in the early modern period, see Anthony Pagden,
Lords of All the World, 29–62.
Figures 3 and 4: Frontispiece to Fr. Gaspar

de San Agustín (OSA), Conquistas de las
Islas Filipinas, etching; and “Per me Reges
regnant” detail. Copyright © Museo Oriental,
Valladolid (Spain). Permission granted by
museum.
Yet San Agustín also took care to include a bold reminder of the limits
and necessity of Crown authority in the attainment of ultimately spiritual
ends. In the image, the citation represented as a ray of divine sunlight
directed towards king Philip II and Admiral Miguel López de Legazpi, is
taken from the book of Proverbs 8:15, and reads: “Per me reges regnant (et
legum conditores justa decerunt)” [By me kings reign, and princes decree
justice] (see Figures 3 and 4).
San Agustín’s reminder of the Crown’s dependence on the spiritual mis-
sion as guarantor of its authority allows us to track the coalescence of the
idea of “spiritual conquest” as it developed in the writings of the religious
over the course of the seventeenth century. On the one hand, the prose of pax
hispanica, Spanish-sponsored peace, underlined the specifically political task
the Crown would assign to the missionary orders: to complete a truncated
conquest by not only preaching and teaching the Christian religion but
also ensuring the continuity of peace as the basis of asserting the Spanish
title.32 On the other hand, however, religious missionary chroniclers stage
this political task in idealized, religious, or in any case politico-theological
terms: as a constant battle with the Devil or devils’ reign of tyranny for the
32 See Marta Milagros del Vas Mingo, Las Ordenanzas de 1573, sus antecedentes y consecuencias,
83–101.
“conquest” of souls; and as the undeception [desengaño] of those hearts and

minds from the Devil’s snares. The representation of this campaign rests
on the enduring ambiguity between a symbolic “war” and an actual one
taking place at any given moment on the colonial frontier.
This ambiguity of spiritual conquest paralleled the ever-shifting
boundaries between the so-called “pacified” and “unpacified” territories
and populations in the Philippines as well as New Spain; and contributed
decisively to the independence of friar authority in all areas outside
Manila.33 In 1665, for example Philippine Dominican Fr. Hector Polanco
(OP) employed the rhetoric of “ongoing spiritual conquest” [viva conquista
espiritual] in the Philippines as the main reason that missionaries could and
should not subject themselves to the authority of the official Church; nor
should the Church try to exercise its authority over the mission territories.
He writes:
One cannot follow [the model of replacing missions with secular par-
ishes administered by ordained priests] that obtains in Peru or Mexico,
where for many years the Indians have been reduced to the Faith and in
obedience to Your Majesty and the ministers in the tranquil and pacific
possession of these Christian lands. In the Philippines the religious remain
in a state of an ongoing spiritual conquest [viva Conquista espiritual],
hoisting high the banners of the Faith and Christian religion… and unless
one attempts the reduction of these Indians with humility, patience, good
temperament, example, and orthodoxy, the ferocity of their nature and
customs will not be held in check, and they will destroy the Christian
kingdoms already fashioned.34
As if to emphasize his meaning, Polanco catalogs the many revolts and

uprisings that, in his opinion, have left the islands in a state of total ruin.
“These Christian kingdoms,” he concludes, “need spiritual soldiers who
33 See Sheridan Prieto, Fronterización del espacio, 63–64; and Ivonne del Valle, Escribiendo desde
los márgenes. On the violence of “spiritual conquest” in northern Mexico, see Bernd Hausberger,
“La violencia en la conquista espiritual,” 27–54; and Guy Rozat Dupeyron, “Reflexiones personales
sobre la Conquista espiritual,” 76–108.
34 Cited in Francisco Colin [SJ] and Pablo Pastells [SJ], Labor evangélica, v.3, 734–735: italics
added [No se siguen en el Perú y México en donde los Yndios ha muchos años que están reducidos
a la Fe y obediencia de Vuestra Magestad y los ministros en quieta y pacífica posesión de las
Christianidades. En Filipinas están los ministros en viva conquista espiritual, enarboladas las
banderas de la Fe y Religión Christiana… [y] si no se tratara de reducir estos con humildad,
paciencia, buen tratamiento, ejemplo y doctrina no se contuviera la ferocidad de su natural, y
costumbres, y destruyeran a las Christianidades que ya están formadas].
will work without rest to assure their fealty to God and Your Majesty”
(737).35
The imagination of a spiritual conquest extended beyond the Americas
and the Philippines, to encompass all the lands where members of the
religious Orders were tasked to settle native subject populations in and
through the preaching of the Christian gospel. This imagination facilitated
the migration of the language of “conquest” from a political to spiritual
realm. Religious chroniclers often returned to the rhetoric of spiritual
conquest as a reminder to the Crown that it had conferred the task of
completing the conquest on the Orders. Of equal importance, however,
the imaginary feats of spiritual conquest reported in these chronicles
also served as an ongoing defense against the direct interference of
royal authority and the official church on the missionary frontier, which
constituted most of the archipelago outside Manila and the eight Spanish
villas where Spaniards were allowed to reside.36 To repeat Fr. Polanco’s
words, “let no novelty nor alteration be made of the old way that the
missions of the aforesaid Philippine Islands have been administered” (739
passim.).37 This had the effect of maintaining a “viva conquista espiritual,”
ongoing spiritual conquest, indef initely: paradoxically protracting the
conquest under the pretense of completing it; and leaving the mission as
frontier institution fruitlessly trying to corral ostensibly “Christianized”
populations into settlements, while also defending the Church’s autonomy
to administer its mission parishes [doctrinas] outside the sphere of both
civil and canon law.
The constantly precarious state of mission territories rendered the dif-
ference between conquest, pacification, and “spiritual conquest” ever more
indistinct. As Chapter 2 will show, the persistent and undeniable anomaly
of friar autonomy from law(s) contributed to the nebulous character of
colonial society. For the religious authors of the missionary chronicles
and histories, however, the suspension of law in these territories was
the sole condition upon which the future of Spanish rule over a resistant
population relied. In the eighteenth century, Franciscan chronicler Fr.
Juan Francisco de San Antonio (OFM) captures this sentiment in these
rambling words:
35 Aquellas Christiandades … necesitan de soldados espirituales que trabajen sin descanso

en ellas para assegurarlas para Dios y Vuestra Magestad.
36 For a history of these Spanish settlements, see Luciano Santiago, “Pomp, Pageantry and
Gold: The Eight Spanish Villas in the Philippines (1565–1887),” 57–75.
37 que no se haga novedad ni altere el antiguo estilo que se ha tenido en la administración de
las doctrinas de dichas Islas Filipinas.
Religious missionaries have by now acquired in their campaigns enough

experiences with the volatile, and fungible character [genio] of the natives,
to know that while many convert [to Christianity] easily, they are even
quicker to pervert it, if the attendance of the Ministers is not permanent
… [A]nd so unchanging is the genius of these natives, that violence is
necessary, so that their roots gain strength to take hold … [E]ach Minister
[must] remain a permanent resident in the Fight [Partido] … [and] until
these Ministers grow in number, some should remain firmly established
in the conquered territory, and others could go ahead with the conquest
through their Missions because these Peoples cannot be left to themselves
and their own opinions …38
Given that San Antonio’s work was published in 1738, over a century and a
half after the so-called “pacification” of the Philippines, any recognition and
admiration for the author’s missionary zeal should give way to the reader’s
perplexity. What “conquest” is Fr. San Antonio referring to here – over 150
years after the conquest supposedly ended? And who is the enemy: the Devil?
The natives? As elsewhere throughout the text, the author underlines the
precariousness of both Christianity and Spanish rule among the baptized
natives, which reinforces the need for missionaries to remain “in the Fight”
[Partido] permanently, while also being authorized to exercise violence
when necessary, as befit agents of law enforcement under a civil order or
regime. As I will explore later, the “natural perversity” of Christian proselytes
mirrored the legal perversion of a permanent frontier institution defined
by its peculiar relationship to civil and canon laws alike.
Spiritual conquest signifies the chief euphemism and phantasmagoria
around which the unfinished conquest of the Philippines was simultaneously
denied, written out of existence; and endlessly reconceived as the production
and staging of Spanish arrival and rule in missionary literature. It serves as a
38 Fr. Juan de San Antonio (OFM), Chronicas de la Apostólica Provincia de S. Gregorio de

Religiosos Descalzos de N.S.P. S. Francisco en las Islas Philipinas, china, Japón, &c. Parte primera,
371. [Tenían ya los religiosos en sus partidos adquiridas bastantes experiencias del genio de los
naturales tan voltario, y flexible, que si con facilidad se convierten, están mas prontas siempre
a pervertirse, si la asistencia de los Ministros no es permanente … [Y] tan perenne es el genio
de estos Naturales, que es necesaria violencia, para que tomen alguna robustez sus raíces …
Por esta experimentada beleydad propusieron los Religiosos … que se estuviese cada Ministro
perpetuamente residente en el Partido, que le tocase, sin vagar de lugar en lugar, para conquistar
mas Tierras, y mas Gentes; hasta que con la mayor copia de Ministros, unos se quedasen en lo
conquistado a pie firme, y otros pudiesen ir adelante conquistando con sus Misiones pues no
era esta Gente para dejada en manos, de sus propios dictámenes …
cipher for the actual events that take place therein.39 What is interesting about
the widespread condition of social anomie that resulted from this indefinitely
postponed transfer of power is the unlikely and incommensurate dependence
of colonial authority and law – its interpretation, exercise, and limits – on both
the religious and native imagination and their constitutive roles in the process
of conversion and settlement. Borrowing a concept from the field of Lacanian
psychoanalysis (and reinterpreted by cultural historian Serge Gruzinski as
well as Philippine historian Reynaldo Ileto), I employ the term “imaginary”
[Fr. imaginaire] to suggest a phantom apparatus, or working blueprint of a
colonial fantasy – in this instance, the fantasy of the law’s existence – which
supplanted the actual implementation of colonial law and authority under
the pretext of supplementing or substituting for the law’s absence.40
At the heart of this apparatus lies the confabulation of history arising
from the creative confusion between the theological and political premises
of the Spanish monarchy. This conflation underwrites the many chronicles
penned by the religious Orders, as well as a great deal of correspondence
and official reports among them. While many of these chronicles serve as
primary references for the writing of Philippine history, very seldomly do we
follow literary scholars Jorge Mojarro and Isaac Donoso’s suggestion that we
treat religious writings as not only works of history but also that of literature,
even fiction. 41 It should be obvious, in any case, that the entanglement of
39 In his Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, Latin American historian Matthew Restall
highlights the stakes of explorers, conquistadors, missionaries, and colonial bureaucrats alike
in promoting a “myth of completion [of conquest],” which endlessly reiterates and revises a
narrative demonstrating that the colonization of the Americas is an accomplished fact (Seven
Myths, 65–76). In contrast to both, Restall argues: “[T]he Conquest of the core areas of the Andes
and Mesoamerica was more protracted than Spaniards initially claimed and later believed,
and when warfare did end in these areas it was simply displaced out to the ever-widening and
never-peaceful frontiers of Spanish America … to the point of rendering the very concept of
completion irrelevant” (75).
40 Serge Gruzinski used the term to describe at once a Christian repertoire of images, tropes,
styles, and gestures that formed “sequences and the succession of situations” that “unveiled
a sense of causality and human liberty proper to Christianity that was clearly far from the
complex mechanics that tended to make the native submit to games of divine forces and to
the absolute control of the community” (Images At War, 80). He also used the word, however
to describe the ensemble of Indian responses to Spanish rule: see The Conquest of Mexico: The
Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, 16th-18th Centuries, 2–3). In the case of
the Philippines, Reynaldo Ileto characterizes Philippine spirituality (as reflected in the popular
nineteenth-century rendition of the Passion of Christ [Pasyon]), as a “Pasyon interface”: see
“Rizal and the Underside of Philippine History,” in Filipinos and Their Revolution, 48–61.
41 See Jorge Mojarro, “Colonial Spanish Philippine Literature between 1604 and 1808: A First
Survey,” 423–464; and Isaac Donoso, “El Barroco f ilipino,” 85–146. On the literary value and
verifiable historical events with numerous accounts of apparitions, miracles,

prodigies and wonders, not to mention the phantasmagorical appearance
of the devil through natural phenomena as well as speaking images or
“idols” has required a corresponding disentanglement of such accounts in
the service of a more sober assessment of Spanish rule. Yet the task of the
literary scholar, as I see it, would have to go a step further. This task would
involve an exploration of the sense or logic that allowed religious chroniclers
to alloy historical claims with a larger set of theological and economical or
providential premises: premises that endow such (historical) claims with
an imaginary aura. 42
Baroque Ethos and Native Custom
Acknowledging and restoring the imaginary aspect of “spiritual conquest”

to the study of missionary writings, which amounts to exploring the full
implications of their status as literary texts, allows the reader to piece
together an untold counter-history of mission pueblos and mission society in
the Philippines: the counter-history of counter-Hispanization efforts under
the religious Orders and native leaders alike. This story would center on the
common experience of living in a state of social anomie throughout most
areas of the archipelago between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries:
a condition not unlike the mission territories in the Americas described
by Latin American historians. 43 But it would also highlight the creative,
perhaps baroque, ways in which missions and their resettled populations
both accommodated to and reinforced the perpetually deferred arrival of
function of colonial texts in the Americas, see Walter Mignolo, “Cartas, crónicas y relaciones
del descubrimiento y la conquista,” 57–116.
42 For the distinction between theological and providential claims, which revolve around the
Christian concept of oikonomia [“economy”], see Marie-Jose Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy;
and Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory.
43 The characterization of the colonial world as a world turned “upside down” or “in reverse”
[un mundo al revés] we owe to the indigenous Peruvian writer Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala,
whose voluminous illustrated El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (c. 1615) documented
the abuses and atrocities of colonial officials and the religious missionary Orders, as well as
the tragic effects of impunity upon native society: see Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Sociología de la
imagen, 175–204. Both Phelan and Peter Borschberg have warned against too close a comparison
between Iberian colonization in the Americas and across the Pacific (see Phelan, Hispanization
153–161; and Borschberg, “Foreword,” in Peter Borschberg, ed., Iberians in the Singapore-Melaka
Area and Adjacent Regions, vii-xx). In taking this warning to heart, however, scholars have
neglected or downplayed many of the larger similarities.
the law; to the point of becoming a cultural feature of native custom itself.
A (new) tradition, of reinventing tradition.
To characterize this disposition to the absence of law among priests
and subject peoples alike as “baroque” is to foreground the epistemologi-
cal, ethical, and methodological frames that anchor this study. From an
epistemological standpoint, José Antonio Maravall’s classic study refers
to the baroque as the historical consciousness of an epoch, perceived as
one of crisis and decline. 44 While this consciousness stemmed from very
different historical factors obtained in early modern Spanish society (the
failed transition from feudalism to capitalism, the independence of the
Low Countries, the Protestant heresy, etc.) than the trauma of conquest
overseas, the collective sense of historical rupture, disenchantment, and
impermanence in both Spanish and native societies facilitated the trans-
lation of one perceived crisis in the terms of the other. The literature of
spiritual conquest participated in that translation of crisis, coming as it did
from Spanish religious missionaries who saw their theological mission as
inseparable from the ultimate political extension of the Spanish monarchy.
The rhetoric and theme of desengaño, for example, which I have translated
alternately as undeception, disenchantment, or disabusal, was common
to the neo-Stoic philosophy of courtly drama in early modern Spain, Jesuit
spirituality, and missionary literature overseas, all at the same time, but
for different reasons and with different stakes.
Beyond the general perception of historical crisis shared by Spaniards,
Amerindian civilizations, and native communities exposed to the trauma of
conquest, however, there developed strategies of historical agency – ranging
from armed resistance to accommodation to colonial rule – that oblige
us to consider the baroque not only in terms of an epistemology but also
an ethos. In different ways, the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze and
Argentine sociologist Bolívar Echeverría have described the baroque as a
way of seeing – and, by extension, imagining the world in order to participate
in it. For Deleuze, “The essence of the Baroque entails neither falling into
nor emerging from illusion but rather realizing something in illusion itself,
or of tying it to a spiritual presence that endows its spaces and fragments
with a collective unity” (Deleuze, The Fold, 125). Bolívar Echeverría captures
the same ethos at work in the baroque artist’s determination to make the
“dead past” speak; and, in ventriloquizing the classic or canonical forms
or Western culture, investing them with the present and reorienting their
function to the needs of their contemporary interlocutors:
44 José Antonio Maravall, La cultura del barroco, 47–104.

[Baroque ethos] accepts the inevitable recourse to the past as formal

principle [i.e., established orthodoxy or canon], and attempts to awaken
the vitality from its petrified gestures and express its present character
[Sp. novedad] by animating it with a new substance … and in doing so
[the artist] ends up replacing the lost vitality with his or her own – which
also results in a strategy of affirming use-value(s) in its / their concrete
materiality, leading to their reconstruction on an elevated plane (La
modernidad de lo barroco, 46). 45
To consider the baroque as an ethos in the spread of devotional cults of the

Virgin Mary, for example (Chapter 5), or native Tagalog writer Gaspar Aquino
de Belen’s rewriting of the Passion of Christ (Chapter 6), or in the development
of native custom(s) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (Chapter 7),
would be to demonstrate how Indians accommodated themselves to resettle-
ment and the Christian imaginary in order to inhabit both, which would mean
rendering them serviceable to their present survival and welfare according
to their understanding. In doing so, native Indios could not but refashion
resettlement and Christianity in ways that unsettled, and sometimes sparked
outright opposition, of their religious ministers. On one level, then, the reading
of spiritual conquest as a genre of imaginary literature allows us to study
the ventriloquism of theological arguments serving as legal justifications
for Spanish rule in the Philippines. On another level, the creative character
of the religious imagination also inspired and contributed to the birth and
genesis of “Philippine” Christianity – with the adjective Philippine signifying
a disjuncture, innovation, or maladjustment in the historical transplantation
and localization of Christianity that remains in place to this day.
The character of Philippine Christianity as an “upstaging” of spiritual
conquest constitutes my second object of analysis. We know, of course, that
the projection of a Christian universe upon deracinated peoples and a dena-
tured environment in the wake of the conquest amounted to more than a
superimposition and replacement of “old” experiences, values, observances,
and practices by “new” ones. Yet by analyzing the social and cultural evolution
of Philippine Christianity through literary and cultural artifacts from both
Spanish and vernacular Tagalog sources, I trace a curious innovation in the
45 [El arte y ethos barroco] acepta lo insuperable del principio formal del pasado, que, al
emplearlo sobre la sustancia nueva para expresar su novedad, intenta despertar la vitalidad
del gesto petrificado en él … y que al hacerlo termina por poner en lugar de esa vitalidad la suya
propia – éste también resulta de una estrategia de afirmación de la corporeidad concreta del
valor de uso que termina en una reconstrucción de la misma en un segundo nivel.
process of native conversion. That was the articulation of native custom(s)

as an obstacle to Spanish rule, insofar as it nurtured and disguised acts of
defiance, subversion, and rebellion against colonial rule in counterpoint to
the efflorescence of Christian traditions taking place throughout the mission
provinces.46 Christian tradition and native custom, in other words, emerged as
interrelated but juxtaposed responses to the ambiguity of law in the Philippine
provinces. Both spurred members of the religious Orders, the native elite [called
datus or maginoos in Visayan or Tagalog pre-Hispanic society, respectively],
and the larger native populations undergoing conversion to Christianity, to
ceaselessly restage and upstage the drama of spiritual conquest by imagining
and projecting the terms under which a perpetually deferred and protracted
conquest and concomitant state of social anomie would come to an end.
Counter-Histories of the Colonial Illusion
While the conquest and colonization of the Philippines was organized

around the Christian conversion and forced resettlement of the native
populations throughout the archipelago, Counter-Hispanization in the
Colonial Philippines shows how the practice of native resettlement and
acculturation to the colonial obligations of tribute, forced labor, and the
forced sale of native products, spurred countermovements of flight and
social reorganization far from the institution of Christian missions and
colonial settlements (called reducciones) under colonial rule. To this end,
Chapter 1 presents a critical history of the conquest and its aftermath,
which exposes the disavowal of depredation, deracination, derealization,
and social anomie that characterized the religious provinces. Ultimately,
I connect these countermovements of unsettlement and marronage to the
twin metaphorization of conquest as “pacification” under agents of the
Crown; and religious evangelization as “spiritual conquest.” Together, these
euphemisms masked an underlying struggle over the stakes and direction of
early modern globalization set in motion by the European encounter with
the Americas and Pacific. Chapter 2 focuses on the armature that held these
two euphemisms together and, in this way, generated and reinforced the rule
of expediency in the provinces outside Manila. This armature consisted in
46 The two starting points of this controversy are Jaime Bulatao’s 1966 essay, “Split-Level
Christianity”: see Phenomena and Their Interpretation, 22–31; and F. Landa Jocano’s short work
Folk Christianity: a Preliminary Study of Conversion and Patterning of Christian Experience in
the Philippines, also in 1966.
the juridical exceptions or fueros granted to the religious Orders, which they
extended to a quasi-jurisdiction over the mission frontier itself. Chapters
3–5 examine missionary chronicles and reports as a “literature of spiritual
conquest,” in which missionary activities including pre-baptismal instruc-
tion, baptism, the designation of areas as mission territory, and the founding
of mission towns and settlements, alternately repressed and provoked the
engagement of colonial subjects with the twin goals of Christianity and
forced resettlement. 47
My resulting interpretation of the conquest and its protracted conclusion
in the literature of spiritual conquest prepares us to read the discrepant
emergence of “native custom” as the irreducible and unassimilable object of
colonial society from its emergence in the eighteenth century. Paradoxically,
however, the field of practices developed by natives as a bulwark against
the pastoral authority of the regular clergy (monastic Orders and Jesuits)
involved the collaboration of the religious themselves in their development
(Chapters 6–7). In this respect, Spanish colonialism in the Philippines aligns
with similar readings of religious evangelization in New Spain and Peru. 48
Reading the simultaneous condemnation of native custom and exaltation
of Christian tradition in relation to one another demonstrates an early
modern counterpoint to Eric J. Hobsbawm’s famous characterization of
nationalism as “the invention of tradition”: that is the colonial, contrapun-
tal tradition of perpetual reinvention in Philippine culture. The patina of
Hispanic acculturation and Christian tradition thus masks the incoherence
of the colonial project as well as a growing concern among missionaries
regarding the inscrutability and ungovernability of the colonial Indian
subject. 49 This “tradition of (re)invention,” crystallizes with the growth of
vernacular Tagalog literature and theater at the beginning of the eighteenth
century, where the staging of spiritual conquest gives way to the upstaging
and reimagining of Spanish dominion in vernacular Tagalog theater and
metrical romances all the way up to the end of the nineteenth century.
47 While Carl Schmitt employs the term “political theology” to describe what he sees as
the secularization of Christian ideas of authority and divine law in early modern theories of
sovereignty like Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, I follow Ernst Kantorowicz’s wider use of the term
as an originally Western medieval concept of the interdependent and complementary relations
between religious and temporal expressions of authority and law: see Schmitt, Political Theology;
Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies; Otto Gierke and Frederick William Maitland, Political
Theories of the Middle Age; and John Neville Figgis, “Respublica Christiana,” 63–88.
48 See, for example, Louis Burkhart, The Slippery Earth; Solange Alberro, El águila y la cruz;
William Taylor, Magistrates of the Sacred; and Sabine MacCormack, Religion in the Andes.
49 See Hobsbawm, “Introduction: Inventing Tradition,” in Hobsbawm and Ranger, eds. The
Invention of Tradition, 1–14.
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Ziegler of the ear department of the Hospital of the University of
Pennsylvania showed atrophy of this membrane.
Eulenburg speaks of one case in which the external atrophy had

reached as far as the larynx, and in which the pronunciation of the
letter r was somewhat impeded. Beverly Robinson,17 reports a case
accompanied with slight paralysis of the adductors of the vocal
cords. The laryngeal paralysis in this case improved under
treatment, which led Robinson to believe that the relation between
the two affections might have been only one of coincidence.
17 Am. Journ. Med. Sci., October, 1878, p. 437.
Flascher18 has described a unique case of bilateral facial atrophy

occurring in a woman twenty-three years old. When an infant she fell
and injured her forehead, and soon afterward had an attack of
measles without eruption. Shortly afterward the atrophy appeared.
Tactile sensibility was diminished and the secretion of sweat absent.
The masseter, temporal, and facial muscles and bones were
atrophied. External strabismus of the left eye was present; the pupil
of this eye was dilated, irregular, and non-reactile; sight was
diminished, the optic disc atrophied. This case would appear to differ
somewhat from true facial hemiatrophy. It was probably a peripheral
nerve affection following measles.
18 Berliner klin. Wochenschr., 1880, No. 31.
Mitchell19 has reported a case of absence of adipose matter in the

upper half of the body. I had an opportunity of examining this patient,
who was exhibited at a meeting of the Philadelphia Neurological
Society, and noticed that both sides of the face presented a striking
similarity to the affected side in cases of unilateral atrophy. The
muscles were apparently not affected. Mitchell suggests the
possibility of separate centres capable of restraining deposits of
adipose tissue.
19 Am. Journ. Med. Sci., July, 1885.
DURATION AND TERMINATION.—The disease pursues a slow but
generally progressive course. In a few instances, after having
attained a certain development, it seems to have remained
stationary for many years. Nothing could better illustrate the slow
progress or stationary character of this affection than the study which
Virchow made in 1880 of a patient whose case had been described
by Romberg more than twenty years before. After comparing the
patient's present condition with that described in notes taken twenty-
one years before, Virchow was not able to convince himself that any
material alteration had occurred in the atrophic parts; in fact, he
regarded the disease as having long ago become stationary. Cases
reported by Tanturri, Baerwinkel, and others bear out the same view
as to the stationary character of the affection in some cases.
COMPLICATIONS.—In a case of Virchow's, in addition to the facial

atrophy the patient presented atrophy which, commencing in the
distribution of some of the dorsal cutaneous nerves of the scapular
region, affected the musculo-spiral nerve from its origin downward,
most markedly in the forearm and head. Mendel20 describes a case
of facial hemiatrophy occurring in a monomaniac, the diagnosis
being complicated by the somatic signs of degeneracy—congenital
facial and bodily asymmetry. The patient was twenty-eight years old,
and the disease could be traced back to the seventh year. In several
reported cases the disease has followed or has been associated with
epileptic seizures. Buzzard21 has published a case in which the
affection came on in a girl aged thirteen in the course of a second
attack of chorea. In another it followed typhoid fever. In a case
reported by Parry22 left hemiplegia with temporary disturbance of
intelligence preceded the disease by about two years. In another,
observed by Axman and Hueter, the patient, a man aged thirty-two,
had suffered from irregular contractures of the left masticator
muscle, which commenced in the seventh year. These spasms were
associated with an increased delicacy of sensation in the region of
the left trigeminus. Neuralgia is sometimes a complication. In a case
reported by Holland,23 the patient for several years suffered from
paroxysms of fronto-temporal neuralgia.
20 Neurologisches Centralblatt, June 15, 1883, quoted in Journal of Nervous and
Mental Disease, 1883, x. p. 571.
21 Transactions of the Clinical Society of London, vol. v., 1872, p. 146.
22 Eulenburg.
23 American Practitioner, vol. xxxi. No. 182, Feb., 1885, p. 72.
PATHOLOGY.—Up to the present time, so far as I have been able to

learn, not a single autopsy in a case of typical progressive unilateral
facial atrophy has been made. Conclusions as to pathology can
therefore only be drawn from an analysis and study of symptoms
and from comparisons with other degenerative affections. Most
authorities hold that it is neurotic in origin. Lande, however, regarded
it as having its origin in the connective tissue, affecting the nutrition
of the other tissues by interfering with the circulation.
Different views have been held by those who have believed in its
neurotic origin. Moore regarded it as a form of progressive muscular
atrophy attacking the muscles supplied by the portio dura, but what
has already been shown with reference to the symptomatology is
sufficient to show that this is an erroneous hypothesis. The muscles
supplied by the facial nerve may diminish in volume, but they do not
undergo a true degeneration.
Brunner attributed the affection to continued irritation of the cervical

sympathetic by some continuing lesion. Irritation of such a lesion,
according to him, causes vascular spasms, diminishes blood-supply,
and thus leads to the gradual development of the atrophy. This view,
to say the least, has not been made out.
Virchow holds that the affection is peripheral, and not central. He

believes, however, that a primary process being once set up in the
nerve-trunks, owing to inflammations of the surrounding tissues it
may then extend upward to the spinal and basal ganglia. The
disease, according to this view, has some analogy to herpes zoster.
The manner in which nerve-districts are unequally attacked is similar
to what is observed in the various forms of lepra and in morphœa.
The doctrine of a tropho-neurosis is the one that is best upheld by
clinical facts. In the first place, various arguments can be adduced to
show that the disease is neurotic in origin. It is limited to one side of
the face and to special nerve-distributions. Affections of sensibility in
the domain of the trigeminal nerve are frequently present. In the
case given under Symptomatology, although anæsthesia was
absent, the patient complained of peculiar paræsthesia in the form of
stinging sensation. Either trophic centres or trophic fibres, which
have the same connection and course as the trigeminal, are affected
by a degenerative process. Whether nuclei, ganglia, or peripheral
fibres are primarily affected has not yet been satisfactorily
determined.
The case of Romberg, observed by Virchow twenty years after, was

considered by the latter to entirely overthrow the vaso-motor theory,
owing to the condition of the blood-vessels. While the surrounding
tissues from the skin inward were wasted and shrunken, the veins
and arteries of the parts appeared absolutely unchanged, the larger
even projecting above the surface of the skin. Under stimulation the
vessel dilated as in a normal individual, appearing to take no part in
the atrophy.
DIAGNOSIS.—The chief affections from which progressive unilateral

facial atrophy are to be diagnosticated are congenital asymmetry of
the face and head, facial paralysis, progressive muscular atrophy,
and hypertrophy of the opposite side of the face.
Congenital asymmetry of the face is observed in institutions for the

idiotic and feeble-minded. Such asymmetry, however, is usually
associated with corresponding defects of other parts of the body, as
of the head and limbs. In the nervous wards of the Philadelphia
Hospital is now, for instance, a patient the entire right half of whose
body is very decidedly wasted, the case being one of epileptic idiocy
with paralytic and choreic manifestations which point to atrophy of
the opposite half of the cerebrum. At the Pennsylvania Training-
School for Feeble-minded Children want of development of one-half
of the head is often observed, but in these and in other congenital
cases the special changes in nutrition, in the skin, in the color and
growth of the hair, and in sensation, are absent. In some cases of
congenital asymmetry of the head atrophy of the face or limbs, if
present, will be upon the opposite side of the body; and this is what
might be expected, as arrested development of the cranial vault will
probably correspond with arrested development of the cerebrum of
the same side and bodily defects of the opposite side.
Eulenburg, Maragliano, and others refer to an acquired want of

symmetry of the face sometimes observed in cases of wry neck or
scoliosis with deviation of the spinal column. Eulenburg especially
speaks of the so-called habitual scoliosis, where a curve in the
dorsal region in one direction has a compensatory cervical curve, the
side of the face which corresponds to the dorsal curve being often
smaller than the other. This asymmetry is supposed to result from
compression of the vessels and nerve-roots in the concavity of the
cervical curve. Here, again, the absence of special nutritional
changes will assist in the diagnosis. A study of the spinal curvature
will also be of value. Indeed, only the most careless observation
would allow this mistake in diagnosis to be made.
Facial paralysis—Bell's palsy of the usual type—would not be likely,

except by a careless observer, to be confounded with the disease
under consideration. When the muscles in the facial distribution are
involved, it is only in a very slowly progressive deterioration, which
may be due to mechanical causes, as compression by the
contracting skin. Moore,24 as already stated, was wrong in speaking
of the morbid changes as entirely confined to the portio dura of the
left side. It is the fat, the connective tissue, and the skin which are
first and chiefly affected. In unilateral facial atrophy no true paralysis
of the facial muscles is present; consequently, the forehead can be
wrinkled, the eye closed, the mouth drawn up or down, or sideways,
etc.; in short, all the movements of the face are possible. The
opposite of this, it goes without saying, is present in general facial
paralysis. The drawing of the face to the side opposite the paralysis
in Bell's palsy is not here observed; the mouth is sometimes drawn
upward slightly on the atrophied side. In facial paralysis of any
severity reactions of degeneration are present. In unilateral facial
atrophy, as in progressive muscular atrophy, the muscles respond
both to faradism and galvanism. As minor aids in making the
diagnosis, the absence of loss of taste in one-half of the tip of the
tongue, and of deflection of the tongue and uvula, are in favor of
facial atrophy.
24 Dublin Journal of Medical Science, vol. xiv., August and Nov., 1852, p. 245.
It is possible that a case of progressive muscular atrophy might

begin in almost any muscle or group of muscles in the body. In
progressive muscular atrophy, however, the appearance of the skin
is different; it is not mottled; it is not thin, as can be demonstrated by
manipulation of it; it can be raised by the fingers; it is soft and flaccid.
In progressive muscular atrophy also first one muscle and then
another, just as likely as not at some distance from each other, are
attacked by the wasting process; in unilateral facial atrophy the
affection spreads uniformly and regularly over one-half of the face.
According to Duchenne of Boulogne, when progressive muscular
atrophy first appears in the face the orbicularis oris is the muscle
most likely to be attacked, causing the lips to appear enlarged and
pendent, and giving a stupid look to the patient. In unilateral facial
atrophy this appearance is not present. Progressive muscular
atrophy commonly begins at a later age than unilateral facial atrophy.
Hypertrophy of the opposite side of the face is suggested by

Eulenburg as a possible source of mistake; but a little study,
however, will suffice to exclude this affection.
The following points are given by Eulenburg with reference to vitiligo

and porrigo decalvans: “In vitiligo we find the same white
decoloration of the skin, the cicatricial feel, the turning gray and
falling out of the hair, but not the loss of volume, which is the special
characteristic of this disease. In porrigo decalvans inflammatory
symptoms and œdema of the skin come first; the disease first
appears in regular circular spots; the hairs fall out without previous
loss of color; and finally, the disease is contagious, and fungi can be
demonstrated (microsporon Audouini).”
PROGNOSIS.—The prognosis as to recovery is bad, but, as already

shown, the disease may long remain stationary.
TREATMENT.—No well-authenticated case of cure under any method

of treatment has yet been reported. Electricity, either in the form of
galvanism or faradism, has been resorted to in a majority of cases.
In most of these temporary benefit has been produced by the
employment of these agencies. Baerensprung reports two cases as
having been greatly benefited by faradism. In Moore's case it also
produced temporary improvement. Carefully administered massage
should be tried. With reference to friction or massage, however, it is
well, as advised by Eulenburg, to be cautious, as excoriations are
easily produced. Measures directed to building up the nervous
centres are indicated—such medicinal agents, for instance, as the
salts of silver, gold, zinc, and copper, arsenical preparations,
strychnia, and iron.
DISEASES OF THE MEMBRANES OF THE BRAIN

AND SPINAL CORD.
BY FRANCIS MINOT, M.D.

The membranes or envelopes of the brain and cord were formerly
reckoned as three in number: the dura mater, lying next to the inner
surface of the bones of the cranium and spinal column, forming an
internal periosteum; the pia mater, which is in immediate contact with
the brain and cord; and the arachnoid, which was described as a
distinct membrane loosely attached to the pia mater, but more firmly
united to the dura, and constituting a closed sac or serous cavity
called the cavity of the arachnoid. This view is now abandoned by
most anatomists, who regard the external arachnoid as simply a
pavement epithelium covering the internal surface of the dura, and
the visceral arachnoid as constituting the external layer of the pia.
The term cavity of the arachnoid has, however, been generally
retained for the sake of convenience; and it gives rise to no obscurity
if we remember that by it we simply mean the space between the
dura and the pia.
The diseases of the membranes which I shall consider are—

congestion and inflammation of the dura, including hæmatoma;
congestion and simple and tubercular inflammation of the pia; and
meningeal apoplexy.
The membranes of the brain and those of the cord may be

separately diseased, or both may be affected at the same time.
Simultaneous inflammation of the cerebral and spinal meninges is
apt to occur epidemically, and is supposed to be zymotic in its origin.
This is described in another article. (See EPIDEMIC CEREBRO-SPINAL
MENINGITIS, Vol. I. p. 795.)
Inflammation of the Dura Mater of the Brain.
SYNONYM.—Pachymeningitis. Either surface of the dura may be

inflamed separately, and in many cases the symptoms are
sufficiently definite to render it possible to diagnosticate the situation
of the disease in this respect during life, especially when taken in
connection with the causes. For this reason it is usual to speak of
external and internal pachymeningitis. A peculiar form of the latter is
accompanied by the effusion of blood upon the arachnoidal surface,
which sometimes forms a tumor called hæmatoma. Congestion is
also sometimes included in the diseases of the dura mater, but is
rarely alluded to by writers on pathology or clinical medicine.
Congestion of the Dura Mater.
Except as the first stage of inflammation, congestion of the dura can

hardly exist unless in connection with the same condition of the pia
or of the brain. Its causes are either local, such as thrombosis of the
sinuses, syphilitic or other growths in the membranes; or remote, the
principal being obstructions to the general circulation, including
valvular disease of the heart, emphysema and other affections of the
lungs, renal disease, compression of the superior cava or jugulars by
aneurism and other tumors, delayed or suppressed menstruation,
etc. The symptoms cannot be distinguished from those of congestion
of the pia or of the brain—namely, headache, a sensation of
throbbing, pressure, or weight in the head, somnolence, etc. The
absence of fever would serve to distinguish the affection from an
inflammatory condition of the membranes or brain.
Inflammation of the External Surface of the Dura.
SYNONYM.—External pachymeningitis.
ETIOLOGY.—The most frequent causes of external pachymeningitis

are injuries to the cranial bones from violence, caries and necrosis of
the same, and concussion from blows on the head. Next in order of
frequency, if not even more common, comes the propagation of
inflammation from disease of the inner ear and of the mastoid cells.
It is only of late years that this important subject has been brought
prominently forward and the danger of ear diseases in this respect
fully pointed out. The channels of communication, as indicated by
Von Tröltsch1 in his valuable article on diseases of the ear, are along
the arteries and veins which pass from the skin of the meatus and
the mucous periosteal lining of the middle ear to the contiguous
bone, while the capillaries of the petrous bone are in direct
connection with the dura mater, so that the vessels of the latter are in
communication with the soft parts of the external and middle ear.
The vessels of the ear and the membranes of the brain are also
directly connected through the diploëtic veins of the temporal bone,
which discharge into the sinuses of the dura, as well as through the
venæ emissariæ, which, arising from the sinuses, pass through the
bone and discharge their contents into the external veins of the
head. Von Tröltsch also points out that the extension of an
inflammatory process may occur along the sheath of the facial nerve,
the canal of which (canalis Fallopii) is a branch of the internal
auditory canal and is lined by the dura mater. The latter is separated
from the mucosa of the tympanum only by a thin, transparent, and
often defective plate of bone. Inflammation may also be transmitted
from the scalp by means of the vessels which pass through the
bones of the skull. In this way erysipelas and other diseases of the
integument sometimes give rise to external pachymeningitis.
1 “Die Krankheiten des Gehörorganes,” von Anton von Tröltsch, in Gerhardt's Handb.
der Kinderkrankheiten, Tübingen, 1879, 5 B., ii. Abt., p. 150; also English translation
of the same, by J. O. Green, M.D., New York, 1882, p. 107.
SYMPTOMS.—There are no known symptoms which are characteristic

of inflammation of the external surface of the dura. In cases of death
from other diseases an autopsy may show traces of previous
inflammation, such as thickening of the membrane and its firm
adhesion to the cranial bones, which were not manifested during life
by other symptoms than those which accompany meningeal disease
in general; and in some instances none at all were known to have
occurred. At a variable time after the receipt of an injury to the head
the patient may complain of headache, followed by a chill, with high
fever, vomiting, vertigo, delirium, unconsciousness, convulsions, etc.,
arising from compression by the products of inflammation. The same
phenomena may follow the transmission of inflammation to the dura
from caries or other disease of the bones, or from otitis medea
purulenta. These symptoms usually continue without interruption,
though there is sometimes more or less complete remission of the
pain, and the patient may recover his consciousness for a time, thus
giving rise to fallacious hopes. In a large proportion of cases the
disease extends to the inner surface of the membrane and to the pia,
without any noticeable change in his condition other than coma. In
chronic external pachymeningitis the principal symptom is pain in the
head, which may persist for weeks or months without other
manifestations except drowsiness. Sometimes, on the contrary, there
is obstinate vigilance. Mental symptoms, such as loss of memory,
hallucinations, dementia, or mania, are sometimes noticed, ending,
as in the acute form, in coma.
PATHOLOGICAL ANATOMY.—In chronic cases often nothing is found but

thickening of the membrane, which generally becomes firmly united
to the inner surface of the cranium. Indeed, these appearances are
not unfrequently observed, to a limited extent, when there has been
no history of disease to account for them. In other chronic cases the
connective tissue of the membrane is found to be in part ossified,
and the osteophytes of the cranium sometimes found in pregnant
women and in patients with rheumatic cachexia are supposed to be
due to a chronic inflammatory process of the dura. The first changes
observed in acute external pachymeningitis are increased
vascularization, shown by red lines corresponding to the blood-
vessels, with punctiform extravasations, swelling, and softening of
the tissue. Later, there is thickening of the membrane from new
formation of connective tissue, and exudation of lymph, and
sometimes of pus, which latter may accumulate between the dura
and the cranial bones, or in traumatic cases may escape through
openings in the skull. The dura and the pia become united in most
cases of acute inflammation. The lateral sinuses frequently contain
thrombi, which, when ante-mortem, are firm in structure, reddish-
brown in color, often closely adherent to the walls of the vessel, and
may extend to other veins, sometimes reaching as far as the
jugulars. When purulent inflammation of a sinus occurs, its walls are
thickened, softened, and discolored, and the inner surface is
roughened. The thrombus becomes more or less purulent or
sanious, disintegrates, and the infecting particles are carried into the
circulation, giving rise to embolism and disseminated abscesses of
the lungs, kidneys, liver, or spleen. Other lesions, such as injury or
caries of the cranial bones and purulent inflammation of the middle
ear and of the mastoid cells, are frequently found in conjunction with
pachymeningitis, to which they have given rise. When the disease of
the dura extends to the pia, the adjacent portion of the brain is often
found implicated in the inflammation. In traumatic cases the dura
may be detached from the bone and lacerated to a greater or less
extent.
DIAGNOSIS.—The existence of external pachymeningitis may be

suspected from cerebral symptoms following traumatic injury of the
skull, erysipelas, or suppurative otitis medea, but apart from the
etiology it would not be possible to distinguish it from internal
inflammation of the membrane, or even from leptomeningitis.
PROGNOSIS.—In cases of suspected external pachymeningitis the

prognosis will depend upon the evidence of effusion of pus or blood
between the dura and the skull, and the possibility of their removal. A
large proportion of cases are fatal, especially those arising from
caries of the cranial bones and from the propagation of disease from
the middle ear, the mastoid process, or the external surface of the
skull, the inflammation extending through the membrane to the
arachnoid surface of the dura, and also to the pia mater. This would
be shown by a high temperature, rapid pulse, pain, and delirium,
followed by coma and perhaps convulsions. The frequency with
which external pachymeningitis occurs in connection with diseases
of the ear should put the physician on his guard in cases of otorrhœa
or pain in the ear, that he may warn the patient or his friends of the
possibility of danger, and may employ an appropriate treatment.
TREATMENT.—In all cases of injury to the skull or of severe
concussion the possibility of subsequent external meningitis should
be borne in mind. The patient should be confined to the bed and be
carefully secluded from excitement. Cold applications should be
made to the head, the diet should be simple and somewhat
restricted, and the bowels kept free without active purging. If there
be evidence or suspicion of the presence of pus or of blood between
the dura and the skull, means should be taken to evacuate the
effusion. In case of inflammatory symptoms leeches should be
applied behind the ears, and a stimulating liniment or croton oil
rubbed on the scalp. There is no specific treatment. Pain and
sleeplessness must be relieved by opiates and sedatives, and the
strength must be sustained by nourishing diet and stimulants.
Internal Pachymeningitis.
Internal pachymeningitis is of two kinds: 1st, simple inflammation,

which may be accompanied by purulent exudation and by a
corresponding affection of the pia mater: 2d, hemorrhagic
inflammation or hæmatoma of the dura mater. Simple inflammation
of the internal or lower surface of the dura, without the coexistence
of external pachymeningitis is rarely found in the adult. The morbid
appearances differ but little from that of the external form, and the
causes and the diagnosis are also similar. In children, however, it is
not uncommon, according to Steffen.2 The pus may discharge itself
spontaneously through the fontanels or the sutures, or caries of the
cranial bones may open a passage for its exit. It has also been
evacuated artificially when the symptoms have indicated its
presence. In other cases more or less extensive firm adhesions
between the dura and pia mater have shown the previous existence
of inflammation, but it would be difficult to say in which membrane it
began. In some instances no symptoms are observed during life; in
others the coexistence of inflammation of the pia, effusion into the
ventricles, etc. prevent an exact diagnosis.
2 “Die Krankheiten des Gehirns in Kindesalter,” von Dr. A. Steffen, in Gerhardt's
Handb., 5 B., i. Abt., 2te Hälfte, p. 380.
The TREATMENT does not differ from that of inflammation of the

external layer of the pia.
Hæmatoma of the Dura Mater.
SYNONYM.—Hemorrhagic pachymeningitis.
DEFINITION.—A chronic inflammation of the dura mater, resulting in

the formation upon its inner surface of successive layers of false
membrane, into and between which there is usually an effusion of
blood, the whole sometimes forming a large solid mass between the
dura and the cavity of the arachnoid.
ETIOLOGY.—Hemorrhagic pachymeningitis never occurs in healthy

persons except from traumatic causes. It is most frequently observed
in advanced life, and especially in the male sex. In a large number of
cases the blood is in an unhealthy condition, and hence the disease
is seen in alcoholism, in scurvy, in acute articular rheumatism, and in
the acute febrile affections, as typhoid fever, pleuro-pneumonia, and
pernicious anæmia, of which last, according to Huguenin,3 it
complicates one-third of the cases. It is frequent among the chronic
insane. It is occasionally met with in young children, but with them its
causes are mostly unknown; according to Steffen,4 they may consist
in alterations of the blood resulting from insufficient nourishment or
from the infectious diseases, and from abnormal blood-pressure, as
in whooping cough, asthma, etc., as well as from blows on the head.
3 G. Huguenin, “Acute and Chronic Inflammations of the Brain,” in Ziemssen's
Encylop., Am. translation, New York, 1877, vol. xii. p. 401 et seq.
4 Op. cit., p. 386.

SYMPTOMS.—Many cases of hemorrhagic pachymeningitis
complicating other cerebral diseases can be distinguished by no
special symptom from the original malady. Thus, in cases of chronic
insanity its existence may not be suspected during the lifetime of the
patient. Steffen quotes5 the case, reported by Moses, of a child
seven months old who died of catarrhal pneumonia, and who
exhibited no symptom which could suggest any disease of the brain
or its membranes. The autopsy revealed a pachymeningitic cyst
extending over the anterior half of the right hemisphere. When
symptoms are present they vary in different cases according to the
acuteness of the inflammatory process, the amount and situation of
the effusion, and the participation of the pia mater and brain in the
disease. In the beginning they are usually indefinite, headache being
the most common and often the only complaint. This may continue
for weeks without any other indication of disease, but it is frequently
accompanied by tinnitus aurium, vertigo, muscular weakness, and
contraction of the pupils. Wakefulness and restlessness at night and
slight twitching of the facial muscles or of the limbs sometimes occur.
There may be no change in the condition of the patient for a
considerable length of time (weeks or months), or he may improve to
some extent, owing to the absorption of the serous portion of the
effusion or to the tolerance of the foreign body acquired by the brain.
Sooner or later a fresh hemorrhage is followed by a recurrence, and
usually an aggravation, of all the symptoms. Sometimes the patient
becomes comatose, and dies speedily with apoplectic symptoms,
but this is not common at an early period. The extravasation of blood
generally takes place in small quantities at a time, without giving rise
to unconsciousness or paralysis. After a period of uncertain duration,
when the tumor has attained considerable dimensions a condition of
somnolence may take place, the patient sometimes sleeping twenty-
four hours or longer at a time. Distinct paralysis rarely occurs, though
hemiplegia is sometimes seen, and the paralysis has been observed
on the same side with the lesion. When symptoms of compression
appear the pupils become dilated. Toward the end of life the patient
is usually in a state of profound coma, the pulse is slow and irregular,
and the sphincters are relaxed.
5 Op. cit., p. 394.
The distinctive features of internal pachymeningitis, therefore, so far

as they are at present known, are those which would depend upon a
primary cerebral irritation, followed by those of compression of the
brain—persistent, often severe, headache, with contracted pupils,
and occasionally motor and sensory disturbances; afterward, coma,
dilated pupils, and involuntary discharges from the bowels and
bladder.
The DURATION of the disease is exceedingly variable, extending from

a few days to more than a year. According to a table made from
carefully observed cases by Huguenin, 74 per cent. of patients die
within thirty days; 18 per cent. live from one to six months; 4 per
cent. live from six months to one year; and 4 per cent. live over one
year.
PATHOLOGY.—A difference of opinion has existed among pathologists

concerning the true nature of hemorrhagic effusions of the inner
surface of the dura mater, especially as to whether the membrane in
which they are enclosed is formed by a deposit of fibrin from the
effused blood itself, or whether the disease consists essentially in an
inflammation of the dura, followed by a pseudo-membranous deposit
into which blood is afterward extravasated. The latter explanation,
offered by Virchow, has been generally accepted, but Huguenin,
whose opportunities for observing the disease were unusually good,
believes that the first stage of hæmatoma is not the formation of
connective tissue, but simply an extravasation of blood.
The disease begins with hyperæmia of the dura mater in the area of
distribution of the middle meningeal artery, followed by the formation
upon its inner surface of an extremely delicate membrane in small
patches of a yellowish color and studded with innumerable bloody
points. If the membrane be carefully raised, it is found to be
connected with the dura by very delicate blood-vessels, and to
contain an immense number of very wide and thin-walled vessels,
much larger than ordinary capillaries.6 At a later stage we find the
membranes to be made up of several distinct layers, of which the
innermost exhibits the character of the primary deposit, being thin
and abundantly supplied with blood-vessels, while those of older
formation have become successively thicker and are composed of
tough, lustrous fibres of connective tissue almost as dense as that of
the dura mater itself. The delicate structure of the false membranes
and of the vessels which they contain leads almost inevitably to the
effusion of blood, which increases in quantity with the thickness of
the whole growth, so that in an advanced stage it is not uncommon
to find large pools of blood, partly clotted and partly fluid, constituting
what is called hæmatoma of the dura mater. The small bloody points
are within the substance of the false membrane; the extravasations
are interstitial, the largest being always found between the youngest
membrane and the older layers. In some cases serous transudations
also occur between the false membranes. In still rarer instances no
blood or serum is found between or beneath the layers. Occasionally
small quantities of blood escape by leakage through the delicate
membrane into the cavity of the arachnoid.
6 See Rindfleisch's Manual of Pathological Histology, New Sydenham Soc.'s
translation, 1873, vol. ii. p. 302.
The usual situation of internal pachymeningitis is the vault of the

cranium, near the median line, the upper or external layer of the
tumor being in relation with the dura mater, to which it is adherent,
and the lower or internal with the arachnoid and pia mater. If the
effusion be extensive, it spreads downward over the frontal and
occipital lobes of the brain, and laterally toward the fissure of Sylvius.
In the majority of cases the disease occupies both sides of the
median line symmetrically, but it may be limited to one side only.
According to Huguenin, 56 per cent. of the cases embrace the
surfaces of both hemispheres; 44 per cent., that of one only.
Hæmatoma very rarely occupies the base of the cranium. The
thickness and consistency of the deposit vary in different cases,
depending upon the number of successive exudations, and hence
are most marked in cases of the longest duration.
Hemorrhagic pachymeningitis is occasionally met with in young
children, but much more rarely than in adults. The disease is usually
more acute than in older persons, but the anatomical appearances
are essentially the same.7
7 For an able description of the lesions of hemorrhagic pachymeningitis in children
see the third edition of Rilliet and Barthez's Maladies des Enfants, by Barthez and
Sanné, Paris, 1884, vol. i. p. 152.
PROGNOSIS.—The great majority of cases end fatally. A few instances

of recovery are reported in which the diagnosis seems justified by
the symptoms. Moreover, it is not very rare to find, on post-mortem
examination of those who have died of other diseases, evidence of
the former existence of hemorrhagic pachymeningitis. According to
Steffen, while the prognosis of simple pachymeningitis in children is
frequently good, owing to the favorable conditions for the exit of pus
through the open fontanels and sutures, in hemorrhagic
pachymeningitis recovery is rare.
DIAGNOSIS.—In a disease whose symptoms are so vague the

diagnosis must of necessity be difficult and often impossible. The
chief elements for the formation of the diagnosis are the slow and
interrupted progress of the affection, persistent headache, tendency
to prolonged slumber, and final coma; the absence of paralysis of the
cranial nerves, of vomiting, and of general convulsions; the age of
the patient, the coexistence of alcoholism, chronic insanity, or acute
rheumatism, and traumatism. The diseases for which hæmatoma
would be most likely mistaken are acute inflammation of the
meninges, apoplexy from cerebral hemorrhage, tumor in the
substance of the brain, and necrobiosis from thrombus or embolus.
The absence of symptoms characteristic of these affections might
lead to a probable diagnosis by exclusion, but in many cases the
existence of the disease cannot be determined with certainty. In
children it is most likely to be confounded with tubercular meningitis,
from which it may be distinguished by the fact that it is most common
under the age of two years, the other being rare before that period,
and that the characteristic symptoms of tubercular meningitis
(prodromic period, vomiting, irregularity of pulse, etc.) are wanting.
But the tubercular disease in young infants may closely resemble
hæmatoma, a profound coma replacing all other symptoms. Here the
existence of tuberculous disease in the parents or other near
relatives would point strongly to tubercular meningitis, while the
absence of such antecedents would suggest hæmatoma.
TREATMENT.—If the disease be a complication of alcoholism, anæmia,

scurvy, rheumatism, etc., the treatment appropriate to those
affections should be employed, along with remedies addressed to
the local disease. For the early symptoms of irritation, perfect rest in
bed, cold to the head, bromide of potassium internally, sinapisms to
the back of the neck, together with simple and nutritious diet, are the
most efficient means. The bowels must be regulated, but purging is
not necessary. The abstraction of blood from the head by leeches to
the temples or behind the ears, or by cupping, is recommended by
most authorities, especially if there be much heat of the head.
Mercury may be tried, care being taken not to salivate the patient. It
is obvious that this treatment, in order to be of any avail, must be
instituted at the earliest stage of the disease. After the probable
formation of the hæmatoma an effort should be made to promote its
absorption, which sometimes actually takes place, as is proved by
the autopsies of patients who, having previously suffered from this
affection, have died from other causes. The iodide of potassium or
the iodide of sodium should be employed perseveringly for this
purpose, in the dose of from ten to thirty grains three times daily. The
bromide should also be continued if necessary. The acne which
sometimes accompanies the continued use of these remedies may
be prevented or cured by the use of three to five drops of the liquor
potassæ arsenitis, given once or twice daily after meals. Counter-
irritation to the scalp by means of stimulating liniments or croton oil,
and small blisters to the temples, are likely to do good. In alcoholic
subjects the amount of wine or spirit taken should be regulated by
allowing enough to support the strength, without too suddenly
withdrawing the accustomed stimulant. In the stage of coma the
treatment must be purely expectant. The state of the bladder must
be regularly examined, and the catheter employed when necessary.
Liquid nourishment should be carefully given as long as the patient is
able to swallow.
Cerebral Meningeal Hemorrhage.
SYNONYM.—Meningeal apoplexy of the brain. Hemorrhage of or upon

the membranes of the brain is closely connected with intracerebral
hemorrhage. Both arise from similar causes, and the former may
result directly from the latter. It is for convenience of arrangement
that the two subjects are treated separately in this work.
ETIOLOGY.—The causes of meningeal apoplexy are predisposing and

immediate. The most important predisposing cause consists in
disease of the cerebral vessels, especially the arteries, which favors
the formation of so-called miliary aneurisms, as demonstrated by
Charcot and Bouchard in the case of cerebral apoplexy. Disease of
the vessels in its turn arises from various conditions, among which
alcoholism in adults holds a prominent place from its tendency to
favor a fatty degeneration of the vascular walls. In subjects of
purpura or hæmophilia (the so-called bleeders), in whom, from an
inherent weakness of the capillary vessels or a deficiency of the
fibrin of the blood, or both combined, there is a tendency to
extravasation of the blood in various parts, hemorrhage into the
arachnoid cavity may occur.8 A new-born child under my observation
had bleeding at the navel and ecchymoses in various parts of the
body. Suddenly it became comatose, and it died with signs of
cerebral compression. There was no autopsy, but it seems probable
that hemorrhage into the cavity of the arachnoid had taken place. A
sister of the patient had also had spontaneous hemorrhage from the
navel and from other parts shortly after birth, but recovered. Chronic
general arthritis and gout also probably predispose to the affection,
as well as old age, which is accompanied by atrophy of all the
tissues. The disease is most frequently met with in the two extremes
of life; according to Durand-Fardel,9 in adults the largest number of
cases occurs between the ages of seventy and eighty years.

Counter Hispanization in The Colonial Philippines Literature Law Religion and Native Custom John Blanco Full Chapter

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Counter Hispanization in The Colonial Philippines Literature Law Religion and Native Custom John Blanco Full Chapter

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Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial

Philippines: Literature, Law, Religion,

Connected Histories in the Early Modern World contributes to our growing

Amsterdam University Press

Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden

© J.D. Blanco / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2023

[Through me kings reign and princes decree justice].

— Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, “La universalidad de lo ch’ixi”1

Introduction: Towards a Counter-History of the Mission Pueblo 17

1 The War of Peace and Legacy of Social Anomie 49

2 Monastic Rule and the Mission As Frontier(ization) Institution 79

3 Stagings of Spiritual Conquest 107

4 Miracles and Monsters in the Consolidation of Mission-Towns 149

5 Our Lady of Contingency 189

6 Reversions to Native Customin Fr. Antonio de Borja’s Barlaan

7 Colonial Racism and the Moro-Moro As Dueling Proxies of Law 259

Conclusion: The Promise of Law 309

Figure 1 The mission fields of the several religious Orders and

Figure 16 “Indios bailando el comintang” [Indians dancing the

Table 1 A comparison of Frs. San Agustín and Bencuchillo’s

Another stereotype that needs reexamination for a better understanding of the

The Great Unsettlement

In 2009, UCLA archaeologist Stephen Acabado published a surprising and

1 “Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras,” web.

Blanco, J.D., Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University

terraced landscapes of the Ifugao are the end-result of population expansion

hill peoples is best understood as a history not of archaic remnants but of

dwellers of Central Panay – a large island south of Luzon, in the Visayas

centuries). Instead of the mission serving as a “frontier institution,” as

it today.12 Religious writings like the historical chronicles of the religious

this counter-history derives from the ideas of counter-Hispanization, the

Beyond the “Hispanization” thesis

Counter-histories inevitably pit themselves against established certitudes

14 John Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines, 158–159.

can or can’t presume to be the meaning and goal of “Hispanization.” If

21 Vicente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, 83.

represented “[a] massive intrusion of Hispanic spirit-beings” (Aguilar 33).

Spiritual Conquest as (a) Staging [Escenificación]

Much of this work concerns the analysis of religious rhetoric as an artifice,

25 Michel Foucault characterized these approaches as the double-writing of a critical history

conception of history so persistent is the phrase “spiritual conquest,” which

Figures 3 and 4: Frontispiece to Fr. Gaspar

“conquest” of souls; and as the undeception [desengaño] of those hearts and

As if to emphasize his meaning, Polanco catalogs the many revolts and

35 Aquellas Christiandades … necesitan de soldados espirituales que trabajen sin descanso

Religious missionaries have by now acquired in their campaigns enough

38 Fr. Juan de San Antonio (OFM), Chronicas de la Apostólica Provincia de S. Gregorio de

verifiable historical events with numerous accounts of apparitions, miracles,

Baroque Ethos and Native Custom

Acknowledging and restoring the imaginary aspect of “spiritual conquest”

44 José Antonio Maravall, La cultura del barroco, 47–104.

[Baroque ethos] accepts the inevitable recourse to the past as formal

To consider the baroque as an ethos in the spread of devotional cults of the

process of native conversion. That was the articulation of native custom(s)

Counter-Histories of the Colonial Illusion

While the conquest and colonization of the Philippines was organized

Acabado, Stephen. “A Bayesian Approach to Dating Agricultural Terraces: A Case

Foucault, Michel. “The Political Technology of Individuals,” in Foucault, et al.,

Eulenburg speaks of one case in which the external atrophy had

Flascher18 has described a unique case of bilateral facial atrophy

Mitchell19 has reported a case of absence of adipose matter in the

COMPLICATIONS.—In a case of Virchow's, in addition to the facial

21 Transactions of the Clinical Society of London, vol. v., 1872, p. 146.

Introduction: Towards a Counter-History of the Mission Pueblo 17

1 The War of Peace and Legacy of Social Anomie 49

2 Monastic Rule and the Mission As Frontier(ization) Institution 79

3 Stagings of Spiritual Conquest 107

4 Miracles and Monsters in the Consolidation of Mission-Towns 149

5 Our Lady of Contingency 189

7 Colonial Racism and the Moro-Moro As Dueling Proxies of Law 259

Conclusion: The Promise of Law 309