What is a Filipino? What is a Revolution? What is a Filipino Revolution?
Memories from EL GALEON DE MANILA: Revolt or Revolution or Failed Attempts (Part 3)
This is the third part of a series entitled, Memories from EL GALEON DE MANILA. The title refers to the fact that for over 300 years boats from Manila made there way not to Spain nor the USA but to Mexico, which was the capital of New Spain and where the archipelago was under the control of the New Spain Viceroy from Mexico City.
In this 3rd part of the tale, the Philippines gains a new taskmaster—with spoils from the Philippines heading to the USA.
Part 1
http://www.opednews.com/Diary/To-my-young-daughter-of-th-by-Kevin-Anthony-Stod-110305-548.html
Part 2
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Memories-from-EL-GALEON-DE-by-Kevin-Anthony-Stod-110306-906.html
Memories from EL GALEON DE MANILA: Revolt or Revolution or Failed Attempts (Part 3)
Gemma Cruz Guerrero (1997) has described the “EDSA Revolution” of 1986 “as little more than coup d’état. This was a popular revolt that led to the expulsion of Ferdinand Marcos from the Philippines. She notes that there has been a considerable history in the Philippines of flippancy in using the term “revolution”. We, in the USA, too, have similarly been a bit flippant with the term “revolution”. We call the American War for Independence (1774-1783) the “Revolutionary War”, too. Meanwhile, we recognize that the French Revolution and the Russian Revolutions were much more authentically revolutionary in nature than ours was—or has ever been.
WHAT IS a FILIPINO?
Cruz has also noted that in the Philippines’, there has existed a similar semantic trick i with the term “Filipino” as describing an entire people’s national identity. [p. 182]
In her “La Revolucion Anticolonial y la Primera Republica”, Cruz explains that when the Spaniards first came to colonize the Philippines over 400 years ago, the children of the Spaniards who were born on the archipelago, newly named after a King of Spain, Felipe II, were called “Filipinos”. In Mexico or Latin America the term would have been “criollos” for such children of direct Spanish descent. In contrast, “the Spanish called the natives of the island ‘indios’”. [p.182] Only in the late 19th century did the “indios”, “mestizos” (mix-bloods) and Chinese inhabitants of those same islands appropriate the term, “Filipino”, for their own identities before the Spanish crown and as part of their growing consciousness of who they were as a more modern people or nation.
In Cruz’s opinion, in order to understand how the first Republic was founded in East Asia in 1898, it is important to understand these concepts of revolution and the rise of national Filipino identity as experienced by the various leaders of that century.
Looking back on the arrival of Miguel Lopez de Legazpi (in the 16th Century), who arrived some 50 years after Magellan had been killed in Visayas (the central region of today’s Philippines), it is important to note that this first major conqueror of the Philippines on behalf of the Spanish crown only managed to conquer the regions of Visayas--i.e. where Cebu is located--and Luzon, where Manila is located. Neither Legazpi nor any other Spanish conquistadores ever conquered the entire region of the southern islands of what is considered Mindanao, which makes up the southern third of today’s Philippines.
In fact, the Sulu Kingdom of the Muslims continued to exist separate from the other Filipino islands into the era when the USA first invaded the Philippines at the start of the 20th Century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Sulu
This Sulu Sultinate stretched westward to Borneo, where Malaysia and Indonesia are located. Even today, revolts take place in this region of the Philippines. In short, any strong national identity as Filipinos on certain portions of Mindanao has only developed over the past 100 years—if at all.
THE 19TH CENTURY—FINALLY WINDS OF NATIONALISM
Meanwhile, throughout the 300 years of Spanish dominance in the Philippines, there were at least 300 notable revolts and insurrections in the regions of Visayas and Luzon. According to Cruz, it is reasonable to interpret the lack of the formation of any notable national Filipino movement prior to the late 1800s in the Philippines as being the result of two factors.
The first factor is the geography of the region, which was inhospitable to cross mountain and cross-island communication and social movements or island-to-island protest. The second factor was that, as a whole, the Spanish leadership generally was always much more internationally oriented. The Spaniards and ruling classes made their wealth through trading and commerce with Asia, the America, and Europe.
Therefore, as a merchant oriented class, they did not place appropriate effort in organizing the production of large plantations. They were not-nationalistic in their spending and savings habits. The idea of improving local infrastructure, such as building roads or aqueducts between regions, was not so important to these outward looking leaders. This tunnel-vision, of course, led to a relatively underdeveloped sense of connected Filipino identities as well—along with maintaining for centuries a relatively underdeveloped local economy, i.e. as compared to many other Latin American colonies controlled in the same era, such as Mexico or the Caribbean.
While it is true there was a lot of cultural and poltical-economic exchange between Mexico and the Philippines for 300 years because the Spanish Viceroy of Mexico controlled the Philippines, only with the full independence movement taking hold in Mexico (during the 1810 to 1820 period) were attempts made to unite Filipinos against the crown alongside their Mexican and Latin American bretheran. For example, Cruz notes in her paper, from Queretero, Mexico, the brothers, Emeterio and Epigmenio Gonzalez, arrived to help organize Filipino communities and to call out independence for New Spain in the archipelago.
Emeterio stayed in the country for 30 years. His younger brother returned to Mexico in 1835. Meanwhile, another Mexican military officer, Andres Noveles, arrived in the Philippines with the intention of doing the same sort of organizing but he was captured and executed soon after his arrival.
With the opening of the Suez Canal in the 1850s, trading wealth in Manila and Cebu grew sharply with the increasing activities of exchange with Europe. This increased wealth enabled a new class of creoles and mestizo families to gain some local political and economic power.
At this stage in history, a group of young Filipinos created what the called “La Propaganda” movement. The propagandistas called for a national project and they desired to create through their writings and projects a new identity for others in the land of their birth. Later, Jose Rizal, Marcelo H. Pilar, and Graeceano Lopez Jaena were to become the most famous of these sort of writers and thinkers. However, initially, there attention was mostly on the court of opinion in Madrid—rather than focusing on organizing a full radical or revolutionary movement in the Philippines.
Meanwhile, emotional fires had already been burning in the countryside throughout the island of Luzon due to growing religious campaigns amongst the local populist leadership. For example, there was a strong millennialist movement. Thee was also a movement which eventually led in 1901 to the founding of the Filipino Independent Catholic Church, i.e. a national church movement where the church said its sermons, prayers, & stations of the cross in tagalong—the major language of the Luzon region.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_Independent_Church
Manila was a city run by the Spaniards. Apolinario de la Cruz was just one of many of the local Tagalog preachers who threatened Manila’s hierarchy of church and state. By their radical interpretations of Catholicism and their ability to organize the poor and repressed rural peoples of Luzon, Cruz and others populists were seen as demagogues and threat to the Spanish control of the Philippines. Cruz was eventually executed by the Spanish crown, which had seen its first duties to protecting the Catholic church from indigenous rebellion.
http://www.slideshare.net/corpuz/filipino-early-revolts-by-mr-herbert-saquing-corpuz-presentation
Other church movements took form in the early 1870s. These movements, centered around Cavite, demand that more duties and control at the country’s many local parishes be turned over to laity control—as there were not enough priests in most of the rural regions by then. Again this so-called revolt was put down and the local leaders executed.
Finally, in 1892, Jose Rizal returned back to the Philippines. By the time, he and others had realized that the Propagandista movement had not succeed in convincing the Madrid courts to share more control locally.
It was time for stronger pressure at home. He helped found the La Liga Filipina to push for more rights. Rizal, however, was not interested in an armed revolt, so when the movement became more radical he was usually not out front. In any case, the Spanish crown had Rizal arrested and sent to from Manila to a distant island in Visayas over the next 4 years.
Meanwhile, La Liga Filipino , under the leadership of Andres Bonifacio, became more active. Bonifacio had been one of the main leaders who had organized a secret association known as Katipunan, which used much of the language of Masonic orders. These secret subgroups were formed in small villages and large towns across the Luzon and Visayas regions. On August 23, 1896, Bonifacio openly called for a revolution against the colonial powers.
http://filipino.biz.ph/history/katipunan.html
The first anti-colonial “battle took place on August 25, 1896 and this followed a reign of terror” by the Spaniards. “Due to [internal] conflict, the rebels were split into two groups, Magdiwang and Magdalo in Cavite, Luzon. When Bonifacio tried to mediate, he attempts were rebuffed.”
Later, “Bonifacio’s acts and plans were termed as harmful for the unity and he was arrested and executed for ‘treason and sedition. The execution was ordered by Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo, the elected president of the provisional revolutionary government. Bonifacio was executed on May 10, 1897 in the mountains of Maragondon, Cavite.”
http://www.historyking.com/Biography/Biography-Of-Andres-Bonifacio.html
The Spanish had an easy time at first against the rebels because of their lack of organization, lack of good leadership and good training of its opposition.
On the other hand, Emilio Aguinaldo of Cavite had several victories. Nonetheless, his troops eventually had to flee to the mountains. Next, Aguinaldo “entered into an accord with the Spaniards, agreeing to exile in Hong Kong in exchange for 400,000 pesos. Soon after his arrival there, Aguinaldo purchased the weapons his troops would require to continue the struggle.”
It was only “[a]fter the U.S. declared war on Spain, [that] Aguinaldo saw a possibility that the Philippines might achieve its independence; the U.S. hoped instead that Aguinaldo would lend his troops to its effort against Spain. He returned to Manila on May 19, 1898 and declared Philippine independence on June 12”.
Eventually, “[w]hen it became clear that the United States had no interest in the liberation of the islands, Aguinaldo's forces remained apart from U.S. troops. On January 1, 1899 following the meetings of a constitutional convention, Aguinaldo was proclaimed president of the Philippine Republic. Not surprisingly, the United States refused to recognize Aguinaldo's authority and on February 4, 1899 he declared war on the U.S. forces in the islands.”
http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/aguinaldo.html
After his capture on March 23, 1901, Aguinaldo agreed to swear allegiance to the United States, and then left public life. His dream of Philippine independence came true on July 4, 1946.
REVOLUTION 1890s?
By some stretch of the imagination, one might call what happened in the Philippines in from 1896 onwards “a revolution”. A revolution means that the world or society is turned upside down (on its head) —and eventually goes back into place. This, in fact is what occurred with colonialism in the Philippines in a period of less than 5 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution
First, there were men of ideas, like Bonifacio calling for revolt and battles. Then the first phase of revolution ends with the execution of the leaders of the first phase, like Rizal and then Bonifacio.
In the second phase, the revolutionaries who-are-still-around refuse to cooperate with any powers-that-be. The revolutionaries flee into the mountains.
Next, a military leader, like Aguinaldo makes himself president after having found USA forces escorting him back to Manila from an exile in Hong Kong.
Finally, the revolution is over and the status-quo of colonialism back in place (a full revolution)—this time to be exercised by a more active colonial power, the USA—which soon forces its own culture and language on the newly founded Pan-Pacific colony.
NOTES
Cruz Guerrero, Gemma (1997) “La Revolucion Anticolonial y la Primera Republica” , EL GALEON DE MANILA , Mexico City: Philippine Centennial Commission & National Commission of Culture and Arts, pp 175-180
This is the third part of a series entitled, Memories from EL GALEON DE MANILA. The title refers to the fact that for over 300 years boats from Manila made there way not to Spain nor the USA but to Mexico, which was the capital of New Spain and where the archipelago was under the control of the New Spain Viceroy from Mexico City.
In this 3rd part of the tale, the Philippines gains a new taskmaster—with spoils from the Philippines heading to the USA.
Part 1
http://www.opednews.com/Diary/To-my-young-daughter-of-th-by-Kevin-Anthony-Stod-110305-548.html
Part 2
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Memories-from-EL-GALEON-DE-by-Kevin-Anthony-Stod-110306-906.html
Memories from EL GALEON DE MANILA: Revolt or Revolution or Failed Attempts (Part 3)
Gemma Cruz Guerrero (1997) has described the “EDSA Revolution” of 1986 “as little more than coup d’état. This was a popular revolt that led to the expulsion of Ferdinand Marcos from the Philippines. She notes that there has been a considerable history in the Philippines of flippancy in using the term “revolution”. We, in the USA, too, have similarly been a bit flippant with the term “revolution”. We call the American War for Independence (1774-1783) the “Revolutionary War”, too. Meanwhile, we recognize that the French Revolution and the Russian Revolutions were much more authentically revolutionary in nature than ours was—or has ever been.
WHAT IS a FILIPINO?
Cruz has also noted that in the Philippines’, there has existed a similar semantic trick i with the term “Filipino” as describing an entire people’s national identity. [p. 182]
In her “La Revolucion Anticolonial y la Primera Republica”, Cruz explains that when the Spaniards first came to colonize the Philippines over 400 years ago, the children of the Spaniards who were born on the archipelago, newly named after a King of Spain, Felipe II, were called “Filipinos”. In Mexico or Latin America the term would have been “criollos” for such children of direct Spanish descent. In contrast, “the Spanish called the natives of the island ‘indios’”. [p.182] Only in the late 19th century did the “indios”, “mestizos” (mix-bloods) and Chinese inhabitants of those same islands appropriate the term, “Filipino”, for their own identities before the Spanish crown and as part of their growing consciousness of who they were as a more modern people or nation.
In Cruz’s opinion, in order to understand how the first Republic was founded in East Asia in 1898, it is important to understand these concepts of revolution and the rise of national Filipino identity as experienced by the various leaders of that century.
Looking back on the arrival of Miguel Lopez de Legazpi (in the 16th Century), who arrived some 50 years after Magellan had been killed in Visayas (the central region of today’s Philippines), it is important to note that this first major conqueror of the Philippines on behalf of the Spanish crown only managed to conquer the regions of Visayas--i.e. where Cebu is located--and Luzon, where Manila is located. Neither Legazpi nor any other Spanish conquistadores ever conquered the entire region of the southern islands of what is considered Mindanao, which makes up the southern third of today’s Philippines.
In fact, the Sulu Kingdom of the Muslims continued to exist separate from the other Filipino islands into the era when the USA first invaded the Philippines at the start of the 20th Century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sultanate_of_Sulu
This Sulu Sultinate stretched westward to Borneo, where Malaysia and Indonesia are located. Even today, revolts take place in this region of the Philippines. In short, any strong national identity as Filipinos on certain portions of Mindanao has only developed over the past 100 years—if at all.
THE 19TH CENTURY—FINALLY WINDS OF NATIONALISM
Meanwhile, throughout the 300 years of Spanish dominance in the Philippines, there were at least 300 notable revolts and insurrections in the regions of Visayas and Luzon. According to Cruz, it is reasonable to interpret the lack of the formation of any notable national Filipino movement prior to the late 1800s in the Philippines as being the result of two factors.
The first factor is the geography of the region, which was inhospitable to cross mountain and cross-island communication and social movements or island-to-island protest. The second factor was that, as a whole, the Spanish leadership generally was always much more internationally oriented. The Spaniards and ruling classes made their wealth through trading and commerce with Asia, the America, and Europe.
Therefore, as a merchant oriented class, they did not place appropriate effort in organizing the production of large plantations. They were not-nationalistic in their spending and savings habits. The idea of improving local infrastructure, such as building roads or aqueducts between regions, was not so important to these outward looking leaders. This tunnel-vision, of course, led to a relatively underdeveloped sense of connected Filipino identities as well—along with maintaining for centuries a relatively underdeveloped local economy, i.e. as compared to many other Latin American colonies controlled in the same era, such as Mexico or the Caribbean.
While it is true there was a lot of cultural and poltical-economic exchange between Mexico and the Philippines for 300 years because the Spanish Viceroy of Mexico controlled the Philippines, only with the full independence movement taking hold in Mexico (during the 1810 to 1820 period) were attempts made to unite Filipinos against the crown alongside their Mexican and Latin American bretheran. For example, Cruz notes in her paper, from Queretero, Mexico, the brothers, Emeterio and Epigmenio Gonzalez, arrived to help organize Filipino communities and to call out independence for New Spain in the archipelago.
Emeterio stayed in the country for 30 years. His younger brother returned to Mexico in 1835. Meanwhile, another Mexican military officer, Andres Noveles, arrived in the Philippines with the intention of doing the same sort of organizing but he was captured and executed soon after his arrival.
With the opening of the Suez Canal in the 1850s, trading wealth in Manila and Cebu grew sharply with the increasing activities of exchange with Europe. This increased wealth enabled a new class of creoles and mestizo families to gain some local political and economic power.
At this stage in history, a group of young Filipinos created what the called “La Propaganda” movement. The propagandistas called for a national project and they desired to create through their writings and projects a new identity for others in the land of their birth. Later, Jose Rizal, Marcelo H. Pilar, and Graeceano Lopez Jaena were to become the most famous of these sort of writers and thinkers. However, initially, there attention was mostly on the court of opinion in Madrid—rather than focusing on organizing a full radical or revolutionary movement in the Philippines.
Meanwhile, emotional fires had already been burning in the countryside throughout the island of Luzon due to growing religious campaigns amongst the local populist leadership. For example, there was a strong millennialist movement. Thee was also a movement which eventually led in 1901 to the founding of the Filipino Independent Catholic Church, i.e. a national church movement where the church said its sermons, prayers, & stations of the cross in tagalong—the major language of the Luzon region.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine_Independent_Church
Manila was a city run by the Spaniards. Apolinario de la Cruz was just one of many of the local Tagalog preachers who threatened Manila’s hierarchy of church and state. By their radical interpretations of Catholicism and their ability to organize the poor and repressed rural peoples of Luzon, Cruz and others populists were seen as demagogues and threat to the Spanish control of the Philippines. Cruz was eventually executed by the Spanish crown, which had seen its first duties to protecting the Catholic church from indigenous rebellion.
http://www.slideshare.net/corpuz/filipino-early-revolts-by-mr-herbert-saquing-corpuz-presentation
Other church movements took form in the early 1870s. These movements, centered around Cavite, demand that more duties and control at the country’s many local parishes be turned over to laity control—as there were not enough priests in most of the rural regions by then. Again this so-called revolt was put down and the local leaders executed.
Finally, in 1892, Jose Rizal returned back to the Philippines. By the time, he and others had realized that the Propagandista movement had not succeed in convincing the Madrid courts to share more control locally.
It was time for stronger pressure at home. He helped found the La Liga Filipina to push for more rights. Rizal, however, was not interested in an armed revolt, so when the movement became more radical he was usually not out front. In any case, the Spanish crown had Rizal arrested and sent to from Manila to a distant island in Visayas over the next 4 years.
Meanwhile, La Liga Filipino , under the leadership of Andres Bonifacio, became more active. Bonifacio had been one of the main leaders who had organized a secret association known as Katipunan, which used much of the language of Masonic orders. These secret subgroups were formed in small villages and large towns across the Luzon and Visayas regions. On August 23, 1896, Bonifacio openly called for a revolution against the colonial powers.
http://filipino.biz.ph/history/katipunan.html
The first anti-colonial “battle took place on August 25, 1896 and this followed a reign of terror” by the Spaniards. “Due to [internal] conflict, the rebels were split into two groups, Magdiwang and Magdalo in Cavite, Luzon. When Bonifacio tried to mediate, he attempts were rebuffed.”
Later, “Bonifacio’s acts and plans were termed as harmful for the unity and he was arrested and executed for ‘treason and sedition. The execution was ordered by Gen. Emilio Aguinaldo, the elected president of the provisional revolutionary government. Bonifacio was executed on May 10, 1897 in the mountains of Maragondon, Cavite.”
http://www.historyking.com/Biography/Biography-Of-Andres-Bonifacio.html
The Spanish had an easy time at first against the rebels because of their lack of organization, lack of good leadership and good training of its opposition.
On the other hand, Emilio Aguinaldo of Cavite had several victories. Nonetheless, his troops eventually had to flee to the mountains. Next, Aguinaldo “entered into an accord with the Spaniards, agreeing to exile in Hong Kong in exchange for 400,000 pesos. Soon after his arrival there, Aguinaldo purchased the weapons his troops would require to continue the struggle.”
It was only “[a]fter the U.S. declared war on Spain, [that] Aguinaldo saw a possibility that the Philippines might achieve its independence; the U.S. hoped instead that Aguinaldo would lend his troops to its effort against Spain. He returned to Manila on May 19, 1898 and declared Philippine independence on June 12”.
Eventually, “[w]hen it became clear that the United States had no interest in the liberation of the islands, Aguinaldo's forces remained apart from U.S. troops. On January 1, 1899 following the meetings of a constitutional convention, Aguinaldo was proclaimed president of the Philippine Republic. Not surprisingly, the United States refused to recognize Aguinaldo's authority and on February 4, 1899 he declared war on the U.S. forces in the islands.”
http://www.loc.gov/rr/hispanic/1898/aguinaldo.html
After his capture on March 23, 1901, Aguinaldo agreed to swear allegiance to the United States, and then left public life. His dream of Philippine independence came true on July 4, 1946.
REVOLUTION 1890s?
By some stretch of the imagination, one might call what happened in the Philippines in from 1896 onwards “a revolution”. A revolution means that the world or society is turned upside down (on its head) —and eventually goes back into place. This, in fact is what occurred with colonialism in the Philippines in a period of less than 5 years.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution
First, there were men of ideas, like Bonifacio calling for revolt and battles. Then the first phase of revolution ends with the execution of the leaders of the first phase, like Rizal and then Bonifacio.
In the second phase, the revolutionaries who-are-still-around refuse to cooperate with any powers-that-be. The revolutionaries flee into the mountains.
Next, a military leader, like Aguinaldo makes himself president after having found USA forces escorting him back to Manila from an exile in Hong Kong.
Finally, the revolution is over and the status-quo of colonialism back in place (a full revolution)—this time to be exercised by a more active colonial power, the USA—which soon forces its own culture and language on the newly founded Pan-Pacific colony.
NOTES
Cruz Guerrero, Gemma (1997) “La Revolucion Anticolonial y la Primera Republica” , EL GALEON DE MANILA , Mexico City: Philippine Centennial Commission & National Commission of Culture and Arts, pp 175-180
Labels: filipino revolution identity history Philippines USA Mexico Spain
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