Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines: Literature, Law, Religion, and Native Custom 9789048556656

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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 settlements [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 The Fact of Conquest Pacification as Discourse and Performative Utterance The Peace that Wasn’t Protracting Colonialism

49 51 57 65 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 Reducción or Forced Resettlement in Theory and Practice A God Is Weeping Desengaño as Theopolitics Disciplining the Shamans Conjurations of Law

107 110 120 128 136 141

4 Miracles and Monsters in the Consolidation of Mission-Towns Routinizing the Sacred Disease, Derealization, and the Hostile [Racial] Other in the Tigbalang Complex Antipolo, 1596: a Tale of Two (or Three, or a Multitude of) Crosses

149 152 160 169

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 Commonwealth vs. Cult in the Conjuration of Law Confabulations of Philippine “Split-Level Christianity” ReOrient or ReOccident?

309 309 314 316

Bibliography 319 Index 349



List of Illustrations

Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3 Figure 4 Figure 5 Figure 6 Figure 7 Figure 8 Figure 9 Figure 10 Figure 11 Figure 12 Figure 13 Figure 14 Figure 15

The mission fields of the several religious Orders and the secular clergy c. 1650, with designation of missiontowns and placenames in the book. Banaue Rice Terraces, Ifugao Province. Frontispiece to Fr. Gaspar de San Agustín (OSA), Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas, etching. “Per me Reges regnant,” detail, from Fr. Gaspar de San Agustín (OSA), Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas (frontispiece). Drawing 227 from Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (1615 / 1616), manuscript. Drawing 234, from Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (1615 / 1616), manuscript. Drawing 233, from Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (1615 / 1616), manuscript. “Village Tagal de Bacor, sur la route de Cavite á Manille” [1828]. The fortress-like construction of the Augustinian church in Miagao (Iloilo) (completed in 1797). The Ati-Atihan festival in Kalibo, Aklan (on the island of Panay), where Aetas or highland natives mingle with residents in blackface. Poster or estampa of the image of Nuestra Señora de Guía (Our Lady of Guidance). Virgin of Antipolo. Virgin of Antipolo (detail). First page of “Catalogus Christianorum quos colit Societas in Philippinius Anno 1675” [Catalog of Christians the Society (of Jesus) Worships (?) in the Philippines]. “Cafres”: detail from Fr. Pedro Murillo Velarde (SJ), Carta Hydrographica y Chorographica de las Islas Filipinas (1734).

13 19 34 34 82 83 84 113 113 165 193 195 195 222 279

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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). 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). Figure 18 Performance of a moro-moro in Iloilo, Panay (Central Visayas), c. 1895. Figure 19 Makeshift shrine atop outcropping boulders at the foot of the puwesto Sta. Lucia Falls. Table 1

A comparison of Frs. San Agustín and Bencuchillo’s accounts of the Virgin of Caysasay.

279

281 283 311 205

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: Philippine 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 LópezCalvo, 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, Vernadette 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 community, 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 CounterHistory 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 UNESCO’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

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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 backlands 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.

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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.

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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.

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By reading this literature of the early modern period against that other living “book” of native flight and deracination etched into the Ifugao rice terraces, 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.

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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 matrix 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 theology 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 “frontierization” [Sp. fronterización], see Cecilia Sheridan Prieto, Fronterización del espacio hacia el norte de la Nueva España, 63–64.

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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 surrender 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.

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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 Philippines 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 appropriation 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 during 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,

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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 oftentimes 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” appears 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

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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 ambitions 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.

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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 writings, 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.

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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.

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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.

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“spiritual conquest,” undeception (Sp.: desengaño), the Devil, and the threat of religious relapse or “backsliding,” as well as cultural artifacts and paraliturgical 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.

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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.

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established Manila as the seat of Spanish authority over the declared possession of the islands in 1571 under Spanish king Philip II (hence, Philippines). Barely three years later, Philip II’s 1574 Ordinances on the Discovery, Population, 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.

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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 condensed 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.

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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 mission 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.

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“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 parishes 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].

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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 difference 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.

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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 …

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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

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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.

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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 epistemological, 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 translation 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.

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[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 resettlement 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 denatured 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.

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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.

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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 instruction, 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, contrapuntal 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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MacCormack, Sabine. Religion in the Andes: Vision and Imagination in Early Colonial Peru. Revised Edition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. Magos, Alicia. “The Suguidanon of Central Panay,” Edukasyon: Harnessing Indigenous Knowledge for Education. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: University of the Philippines Education Research Program, Center for Integrative and Development Studies, 1996. 117–141. Mann, Charles. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. New York, NY: Knopf, 2005. Maravall, José Antonio. Cultura del barroco. Análisis de una estructura histórica. Madrid, Spain: Editorial Ariel, 2012. First published 1975. Meñez, Herminia. “The Viscera-Sucker and the Politics of Gender,” in Explorations in Philippine Folklore. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1996. 86–94. Mignolo, Walter. “Cartas, crónicas y relaciones del descubrimiento y la conquista,” in Historia de la literatura hispanoamericana v. 1 (Época colonial), ed. Luis Íñigo Madrigal. Madrid, Spain: Cátedra, 1982. 57–116. Mojarro, Jorge. “Colonial Spanish Philippine Literature between 1604 and 1808: A First Survey,” in More Hispanic Than We Admit, v. 3. Mojarro, Jorge, ed. Manila, Philippines: Vibal Foundation, 2021. 423–464. Mondzain, Marie-Jose. Image, Icon, Economy. The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary. Trans. Rico Franses. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Nemser, Daniel. Infrastructures of Race Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017. Nuttall, Zelia. “Royal Ordinances Concerning the Laying out of New Towns,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 4:4 (November 1921). 743–753. Olsen, Marvin. “Durkheim’s Two Concepts of Anomie,” The Sociological Quarterly 6:1 (Winter, 1965). 37–44. Pagden, Anthony. Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500–c.1899. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995. Park, Paula. Intercolonial Intimacies: Relinking Latin/o America to the Philippines, 1898–1964. Tuscaloosa, PN: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022. Pilar, Marcelo H. 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. Barcelona, Spain: Imp. De F. Fossas, 1888. Potet, Jean-Paul. Seventeenth-Century Events at Liliw. Morrisville, NC: Lulu.com, 2016. Rafael, Vicente L. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993.

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Reed, Robert. Hispanic Urbanism in the Philippines: A Study of the Impact of Church and State. Manila, Philippines: University of Manila, 1967. Restall, Matthew. Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2004. Ricard, Robert. The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966. Rivera Cusicanqui, Silvia. Sociología de la imagen: Miradas Ch’ixi desde la historia andina. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Tinta Limón Ediciones, 2015. Rizal, José. Poesía completa, ensayos escogidos. Madrid, Spain: Cátedra, 2014. Rozat Dupeyron, Guy. “Reflexiones personales sobre la conquista spiritual y consolidación temprana de la colonización hispana en el Septentrión novohispano,” Nóesis. Revista de ciencias sociales y humanidades 24: special issue (July-December 2015). 76–108. San Agustin, Fr. Gaspar de (OSA) and Merino, Manuel. Conquistas de Las Islas Filipinas: la temporal, por las armas del señor don Phelipe Segundo el Prudente; y la espiritval, por los religiosos del orden de nuestro padre San Augustin. Madrid, Spain: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Enrique Florez, 1975. San Antonio, Fr. Juan Francisco de (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. Sampaloc (Manila), Philippines, 1738. Santiago, Luciano P. R. “Pomp, Pageantry, and Gold,” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 33:1–2 (March-June 2005). 57–75 Schmitt, Carl. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Trans. George Schwab. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Scott, James. The Art of Not Being Governed: Towards an Anarchist History of Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Scott, William Henry. Cracks in the Parchment Curtain and Other Essays in Philippine History. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: New Day Publishers, 1982. Scott, William Henry. The Discovery of the Igorots: Spanish Contacts with the Pagans of Northern Luzon. Quezon City (Manila0, Philippines: New Day Publishers, 1974. Scott, William Henry. Of Igorots and Independence: Two Essays. Baguio City, Philippines: ERA, 1993. Scott, William Henry. “The Unconquered Cordilleras,” in Rediscovery, eds. Cynthia Nograles Lumbera and Teresita Gimenez Maceda. Manila, Philippines: National Book Store, 1982. 31–41. Sheridan Prieto, Cecilia. 2013. Fronterización del espacio hacia el norte de la Nueva España. City, Mexico: CIESAS, Instituto Mora, 2015.

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Taylor, William. Magistrates of the Sacred: Priests and Parishioners in EighteenthCentury Mexico. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Turner, Dramas, Fields and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1974. UNESCO. “Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras.” https://whc.unesco.org/en/ list/722. Web. Last accessed November 17, 2022. Valle, Ivonne del. Escribiendo desde los márgenes. Colonialismo y jesuitas en el siglo XVIII. Mexico City, Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores México, 2009. Vas Mingo, Marta Milagros del. Las Ordenanzas de 1573, sus antecedentes y consecuencias. Madrid, Spain: Editorial Complutense, 1985. Quinto centenario. Woods, Damon L. The Myth of the Barangay and Other Silenced Histories. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: University of the Philippines Press, 2017.

1

The War of Peace and Legacy of Social Anomie Acaso el verbo pacificar significase hacer guerra — José Rizal, in Antonio de Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, xxxiv 1

Abstract: This chapter analyzes the euphemisms of peace and pacification by examining the role they played in the legal rhetoric of conquest. This rhetoric reflects how the conquest and colonization of the Philippines actually happened; and that its unfolding in most respects did not differ from the conquest and colonization of the Americas. What was different, however, was the way the Spaniards insisted on remembering the conquest; specifically, through a quasi-legal framework that recorded the conquest as inseparable from the legitimacy of Spanish rule overseas. The discourse of pacification masked the permanence of conquest measures (invasion, plunder, impunity) as well as a state of social anomie on the missionary frontier. Keywords: pacification, depopulation, incursion [entrada], fugitives / fugitivism [remontado, cimarrón, mundo, vagabundo, tulisan], settlement [población], 1582 Synod of Manila.

One may credit Dr. José Rizal (1861–1896) for being the first to systematically investigate and question the history of colonial Spanish rule in the Philippines as it had been recounted by Spaniards since the time of the conquest. His inquiry opens our own, because it was the first to speculate on the possibility that Spanish rule [dominio] in its overseas frontier colony was, in fact, a fiction. Rizal’s original intention (in 1888) was to write a book on Philippine history: lack of resources and time forced him to settle for 1

It could be that the verb to pacify means to wage war.

Blanco, J.D., Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463725880_ch1

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republishing (with extensive annotations) the first history of the Philippines not written by a religious missionary. The work in question, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas [Historical Events of the Philippine Islands] was originally published in 1609 by colonial high court official [oídor] Antonio de Morga; and dealt with the first thirty-odd years of Spanish rule in the Philippines following the period of conquest and treaties between Admiral Miguel López de Legazpi and various native chiefs throughout the islands. Yet the length, detail, and oftentimes exasperated tone of Rizal’s annotations upstage the presentation of the original text: boldly calling into question the truthfulness of colonial histories and documents as a whole.2 One such annotation by Rizal, which he repeats later in another footnote, serves as the epigraph to this work: “Perhaps the verb to pacify would mean to wage war” (Acaso el verbo pacificar significase hacer la guerra); highlighting one of Rizal’s epiphanic “a-ha!” moments in that crucial year of the author’s intellectual growth.3 Said once, a casual reader might pass over Rizal’s comment as a wry remark by the most notorious propagandist for colonial reforms in the Philippines at the time. But when Rizal repeats the observation a second time later, it cannot but take on a deeper meaning. What if words like “pacify” really did substitute for words like “war” and “conquest” in the colonial archive? What if these and other euphemisms constituted a kind of code that ran through official documents and religious chronicles alike, requiring decipherment and translation before the act of interpretation could even begin? And what if the decipherment of that code exposed the staging of a central fiction – pax Hispanica – at the root of Spanish colonial law overseas as well as the Christian evangelizing mission? Peace – was there any political or religious authority that spoke more incessantly about it than did the Spanish Catholic kings? At the same time, were there any regions and peoples more vulnerable to random violence, abuse, exploitation, and impunity than those under Spanish rule overseas? The purpose of this chapter is to undertake the task of decoding this euphemism of peace by first analyzing the role it played in the legal rhetoric of conquest. This rhetoric shows how the conquest and colonization of the Philippines, contrary to the disavowals of certain historians, actually happened; and that its unfolding did not differ in many respects from the conquest and colonization of the Americas. What was different, however, 2 I have treated the Rizal edition of Morga’s work in greater detail elsewhere: see Frontier Constitutions, 249–252. 3 Rizal, in Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas [ed. José Rizal], xxxiv and 57.

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was the way the Spaniards insisted on remembering the conquest; specifically, through a quasi-legal framework that recorded the conquest as an exercise of establishing the law and legitimacy overseas. The invisibility of the conquest of the Philippines, in other words, owes itself not simply to the repression and falsification of the facts and their concatenation, but rather to the overcoding or overwriting of those facts by a discourse of pacification. 4 Once exposed, a very different experience of the conquest of the Philippines comes to light: one characterized by the death or exile of gods, the devaluation or debasement of native sources of knowledge and order, the uprooting of communities and populations, and an enduring melancholy of colonial subjects at the ruin unleashed by resettlement and so-called Christianization. Both the discourse of pacification and the legal-institutional framework it animated had various consequences. The one that we will explore in greater detail in this book is the contribution of this discourse to the prose of spiritual conquest, and the imaginary matrix of Christianity it projected in the mission lands.

The Fact of Conquest The fact of conquest inaugurates the history of Spanish rule in the Americas: from the atrocities recorded in Fr. Bartolomé de las Casas’s famous account of the Columbus expedition; to the conquest of the Aztec city-state of Tenochtitlán in 1519; to the murder of Incan sovereign Athawalpa and the conquest of the Incan Empire in 1524.5 Yet of all the unsolved mysteries behind the Spanish conquest of the Philippines, certainly the one that takes pride of place and chronology concerns whether the conquest even happened: to recall Phelan’s estimation, “The conquest of the islands was relatively pacific” (Hispanization of the Philippines, 105). Phelan’s evaluation, of course, merely echoes a prevailing argument in missionary writing throughout the colonial period. As Dominican provincial Fr. Ambrose Coleman (OP) would state in 1899, the conquest did not even happen: “there was no conquest in the strict sense of the term. The Spaniards in most places simply showed themselves to the natives; and the missionaries of religious Orders who 4 On the process of “overcoding” characteristic of imperial state representation, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus. Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 200–222. 5 These events are also recounted in Las Casas: see Brevísima relación sobre la destruición de las Indias.

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accompanied the conquistadors and soldiers persuaded the untutored savages to submit to the King of Spain, through whom they would obtain the two-fold blessing of civilization and Christianity.”6 His choice of the word “pacific,” not coincidentally, repeats a word that appears with frequency throughout Spanish descriptions of conquest. What does this mean? Reassessing these claims regarding the virtual nonexistence of conquest necessarily begins with a brief summary of the events leading up to and including the claim of Spanish possession over the archipelago. Three Spanish expeditions, beginning with Ferdinand Magellan’s 1521 attempted circumnavigation, took place throughout the sixteenth century, before the arrival of conquistador and former civil governor of Mexico City Admiral Miguel López de Legazpi, also called “El Adelantado” (roughly translated as Acting Provincial Commander). When Legazpi arrived, he proceeded to pillage the coastal settlements in the Central Visayas (Cebu, Bohol, Leyte) before establishing various treaties with the local headmen or datus. Upon receiving news that larger native settlements lay north, on the island of Luzon, and that these settlements engaged in a robust trade with the Middle Kingdom, Japan, the Ryukyu kingdom (in present-day Okinawa), and the Muslim sultanates to the south, Legazpi invaded these northern settlements around Manila [called Maynila], establishing Intramuros as the capital of the Philippine province in 1571; and declared the islands to be Spanish possessions. With this declaration, the Spaniards launched expeditions called entradas or military raids and pillaging expeditions into outlying communities, which the natives called bayan or barangay (literally, “boat” [of people]).7 Legazpi’s fellow conquistadors Juan de Salcedo and Martín de Goiti would repeat the declaration of Spanish sovereignty over the region, secure agreements with local datus [also called maginoó] to acknowledge Spanish rule; and, in the event that leaders refused, the conquerors would declare that their refusal justified the declaration of war. In the case of either surrender or flight, the village or settlement would be deemed “pacified.” Admiral Legazpi would then assign to the conquered region an encomendero: these royal grantees were given the right to collect tribute from the subject populations, in exchange for furnishing these peoples with religious ministers to preach 6 Fr. Ambrose Coleman, Friars in the Philippines, 13. 7 Zeus Salazar and Damon Woods note the preference of scholars to identify these units as barangay despite slim evidence, demonstrating that bayan more accurately describes native settlement prior to the Spanish arrival: see Salazar, “Ang Babaylan sa Kasaysayan ng Pilipinas,” 4–5; and Woods, The Myth of the Barangay, 117–153.

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the Christian faith; as well as administering government to the subject peoples by resettling them [reducción] into larger towns.8 Only upon the fulfillment of these conditions, at least in theory, would encomenderos thenceforth receive permission to extract a tribute from native subjects. Presented in the manner of a reasonable and deliberate process, the limited acts of outright depredation followed by Spanish effort to secure treaties with the native elite indeed mimic a legal procedure. Yet a number of problems arise when we understand the conquest and colonization of the Philippines in this way, i.e. from the perspective of apologists who insist on seeing the Spanish possession of the islands as the execution or enactment of some always-already established juridical procedure. The first problem is that it elides the unwillingness of many native communities to submit to Spanish rule; and the ensuing violence that Spaniards inflicted upon these communities under the euphemism of “pacification.” While works like Phelan’s Hispanization focus on the principled and peaceful approach to colonization envisioned by Philip II; or the native “blood” compacts signed between a select few native leaders and Admiral Legazpi upon his landing in Bohol and Cebu, T. Valentino Sitoy’s The Initial Encounter records the eyewitness accounts of outright plunder inflicted upon the many native groups that refused. One Augustinian account of the Spanish presence in Zubu [Cebu], probably written by Fr. Diego de Herrera [OSA] describes the process of “pacification” as follows: [The Spaniards] go at first to the more immediate villages, and then to others much farther, not only in Zubu but also on the neighboring islands. Striking at dawn, they seized provisions, as well as gold and jewelry, that they found in the houses, killed many of the inhabitants when these sought to defend themselves, or at times forced these to flee … This mode of pacifying the land lasted for some time … Thus was destroyed the greater part of that Island of Zubu [Cebu], causing the death of many inhabitants from hunger and the depopulation of many villages.9 8 In Spain’s overseas possessions, the creation of towns for Spanish settlement was meant to exclude natives until they freely converted to Christianity and accepted Spanish vassalage (see Zelia Nuttall, “Ordinances Concerning the Laying Out of new Towns,” 743–753; and Daniel Nemser, Infrastructures of Race). 9 Cited in Valentino Sitoy, A History of Christianity in the Philippines, 126. In Cebu, where Admiral Miguel López de Legazpi’s first intended to establish the capital prior to the discovery of settlements around Manila Bay, not ten years had passed from Legazpi’s arrival before “the greater part of that island of Cebu was destroyed and the natives died of hunger and many villages were depopulated, because as their food, goods, wives and children were seized, they

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One of the first witnesses of the conquest in northern Luzon, Augustinian missionary Fr. Martín de Rada (OSA), describes the expedition to the provinces of Pangasinan and Ilocos in the following manner: all those villages were entered in the same way, by f irst summoning them to submit peacefully, and to pay tribute unless they wished war. They replied that they would first prove those to whom they were told to pay tribute, and consequently, with the Spaniards attacking them, an entrance was made among them by force of arms and the village was overthrown and whatever was found was pillaged.10

Fr. Rada’s account lines up with Francisco de Ortega’s 1573 account regarding the entradas taking place in northern Luzon: military expeditions would enter [sic] villages demanding tribute without any attempt to preach to the natives or offer them gifts. When some attempted to flee, the soldiers had pursued and killed as many as they could, and then returned to their villages and destroyed their homes, animals, and provisions. He claimed the expedition had resulted in 4000 houses burned and more than 500 people killed, and he estimated it would take six years or possibly a lifetime to recover from the devastation caused.11

These and many other accounts by religious ministers of the Augustinian Order prompted them to write a report to the king in 1573. Fr. Herrera begins his list of grievances against the conquistadors as follows: Firstly, this is the manner in which the pacification [Sp. el apaciguar] of the land and populations takes place: a captain with his troop and interpreters goes to a town that he has only just heard about or which went about restless not daring to live in their houses or to sow” (Isacio Rodriguez, Historia de la Provincia Agustiniana del Smo. Nombre de Jesús de Filipinas, v. 14, 222; cited in Newson, Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Spanish Philippines, 71). “Wherever the invaders went,” adds Filipino historian O.D. Corpuz, “the people were robbed; soon they learned to flee at seeing the Spaniards. Within a reported radius of forty leagues from the old barangay (town or village) of Cebu, most of the barangays became either depopulated or deserted. By 1568 the island was devastated” (Roots of the Filipino Nation, v.1, 67). 10 Fr. Martín de Rada, “Letter to the Viceroy of Nueva España, Martín Enríquez,” in Emma Blair and James Robertson, The Philippine Islands (hereafter BRPI), v. 34, 286–287; cited in Keesing, Ethnohistory of Northern Luzon, 15. See Also Sitoy, ibid. 192–194. See also Fr. Rada’s account of Panay in Colin-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v.2, 665. 11 Linda Newson, Conquest and Pestilence in the Early Modern Philippines, 180.

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the Spaniards had robbed in the past and they tell [the inhabitants] that should they desire to be friends with the Castilians they must then give tribute … and in the case that [the natives] do not come with what [the Spaniards] have asked of them the latter would rob the settlement, in fact consider robbing them as just, [and] if they came unexpected [the natives] would abandon their houses and all this without their ever having given them anything in return, without making [the natives] understand that [the Spaniards] were sent by His Majesty nor spreading the word of God.12

Further south in Camarines province (in the Bicol region), resistance to Spanish rule lasted five months: in Fr. Martín de Rada’s words, “more people died in that land than in any other part the Spaniards had conquered” (quoted in Sitoy 185). To these eyewitness accounts, colonial scholar and geographer Linda Newson has recently added demographic estimates that prove that “the conquest itself was a bloodier affair than generally supposed and resulted in significant depopulation … bringing significant restructuring to Filipino economies and societies.”13 By the turn of the seventeenth century, some thirty-five years after Legazpi’s landing in Cebu, Newson gauges the native population throughout the archipelago to have declined by about 36%. While this is still a far cry from the remarkable devastation of the indigenous population throughout the Americas (estimated around 95%) due to a combination of genocide, epidemic disease, and deracination, Newson’s research refutes those historians who insist on characterizing the colonization of the Philippines as a “pacific” and measured affair. Aside from the outright brutality of the entradas into native communities outside Manila, other factors – including the Hispano-Dutch War, the failed ongoing conquest of the Muslim sultanates and retaliatory Moro slave raids, the spread of famines and epidemics, and the perpetual and repeated flight of native communities beyond the pale of the towns and mission settlements – all contributed 12 Relación del agustino Diego de Herrera para remedio de las Filipinas, AGI Filipinas 84, n. 3. “Primeramente en el apaciguar la tierra y poblaciones hay esta manera va un capitán con gente e ynterpretes al pueblo de quien se tiene noticia solamente o al que ha sido robado de estos españoles y les dicen que se quiesen ser amigos de los castellanos que les den luego tributo y debiendo de si separan a concertar que tanto ha de dar cada hombre y que lo den luego y algunas veces por no venir con lo que les piden les han robado El pueblo, y lo mismo les parece ser justo rovarlos, si no aguardan que desamparan sus casas y todo esto sin averles hecho ningún Beneficio sin darles a entender a que son embiados de su Magestad ni darles noticia de Dios.” See also Sitoy, The Initial Encounter, 193. 13 See Newson, Conquest and Pestilence, 9 and 24.

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to maintaining the high mortality and low fertility rates throughout the seventeenth century. In fact, it is not until the beginning of the eighteenth century when the population of the archipelago comes close to matching the demographic estimates of the pre-conquest period (Newson, 99). A second problem with the misrecognition of “conquest” as a legal procedure is the assumption among scholars that it takes place within a determined period of time, after which all parties assume the fact of conquest as a fait accompli. But the story of plunder and depopulation doesn’t end with the initial entradas of the sixteenth century. Throughout the seventeenth century Spaniards would launch entradas in the hills in order to capture fugitives from the coastal areas and either enslave them or sell them as slaves, with ecclesiastical approval.14 In the province of Ilocos in northern Luzon, missionaries like Fray Esteban Marín [OSA] were martyred (in 1601) in their attempt to convert or subdue the Igorots, who initially agreed to be baptized but later regretted the continued presence of the Spaniards.15 This prompted another invasion or entrada in 1623, which “many were converted by fear of arms … [and] in the sack of villages they found much gold, cut precious gems, nutmeg, and very tall wild pine trees, good for producing tar … Thus did the Igorots flee, fearful and fugitive (remontados) until 1754” (ibid., 87: italics addded).16 The understanding of these military incursions as entradas reflects the acknowledgment that these areas throughout the archipelago did not recognize the legitimacy of Spanish rule. A third and final problem with the unacknowledged violence of conquest as the foundation of the colonial order is that it effectively marginalizes or writes out of existence entirely the history of those who either resisted or fled that violence; but resettled in communities just beyond the pale of the towns and settlements under missionary rule. As we will see, the terms cimarrón [maroon], remontado [hill-seeker], mundo (an abbreviation of Sp. vagabundo, vagabond or vagrant), or tulisan [Tag. bandit or outlaw] came to refer not to isolated individuals but entire populations, whose movements 14 See Danilo Gerona, “Text and Politics: Transactions of Power in the Early Provincial Philippines,” 35. “So many were enslaved that when the Crown ordered all slaves to be released in 1679 there were vigorous protests from slave owners as the emancipated slaves fled to the hills” (Newson, 160). 15 See Fr. Agustín María de Castro, Misioneros agustinos en el Extremo Oriente, ed. Manuel Merino, 85–87. 16 [se convirtieron muchos por temor de las armas … [y] en el saqueo encontraron mucho oro, piedras cornerinas, nuez moscada y pinos silvestres muy altos, buenos para sacar alquitrán … Así se mantuvieron estos igorrotes, huidos, temerosos y remontados hasta el año de 1754].

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and actions worked against the imperial imaginings of Spain overseas and therefore remained excluded from the history of the Spanish empire.

Pacification as Discourse and Performative Utterance If we take seriously the desperate accounts of Spanish conquistador rapacity and abuses written by the Augustinian priests throughout the first decade of Spanish rule, and trace the accounts of native resistance, flight, and fugitivism all the way up to the nineteenth century, a very different picture of Philippine history presents itself. We begin to doubt and question any talk of peace and the pacification of native society. This is the first, critical meaning of Rizal’s sardonic statement in the introductory epigraph: “It could be that the verb to pacify [for the Spaniards] means to wage war.” But the prominence of this conception of the conquest owes itself to not only a disavowal of brutality involved in every act of conquest, but also its usefulness in coordinating the various stakes of the Crown, conquistadors, and the religious or regular clergy in colonial settlement and dominion under Spain. This introduces us to the second meaning of Rizal’s jibe, which is the literal one, and which testifies to the creative period of lawmaking under Philip II. What if the use of the words “pacification” and “peace” could simultaneously prescribe the reality they purported to describe? What if the idea of conquest as a form of peacemaking could not only erase the injustice of Spanish rapacity, but also portray it as the necessary and consequent enforcement or implementation of a(n always-already) just title to possession? Latin American historian Charles Gibson traces the imbricated histories of the terms conquest and pacification, which emerged in response to the legal debate taking place among Crown officials, jurists, theologians, and international powers throughout the late sixteenth century regarding the legitimacy of Spain’s claims to the newly discovered lands of the Western hemisphere as well as the Philippines.17 Drawing upon the interventions of Dominican priests and jurists Bishop Bartolomé de las Casas (OP) and Francisco de Vitoria (OP) in crafting the legal basis of Spain’s overseas possession, Gibson shows how both the Church and Crown recognized the need to coordinate their respective roles overseas in the face of conquistador violence; and establish Spain’s just title to overseas possessions beyond 17 See Charles Gibson, “Arrival and Conflict: Conquest and So-Called Conquest in Spain and Spanish America,” 111–130; and Rabasa, Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier, 88–96.

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the religious sanction of the Church. At a time when the Protestant wars of religion coincided and entered into reciprocal influence with political doctrines like Machiavellism and anti-Machiavellism; and Spain saw its imperial hegemony challenged both within and outside Europe, the term pacification [pacificación] acquired a performative dimension and legal authority that combined the roles of Crown and Church in the assertion of just titles to overseas possessions in the eyes of other sovereign kingdoms. Yet in contrast to the a priori authorization of these possessions, as the papal bulls beginning with Pope Alexander VI in 1493 had tried to do, it was the Crown’s defense of the universal rights of preachers to evangelize and teach non-Europeans the moral codes and civil laws that facilitated peaceful coexistence. The inversion of this relationship takes place in the work of Vitoria: who, while denying the Spanish Crown’s claim it had fulfilled the bases for securing such just title, also laid out a criterion by which a just title could be claimed. This criterion included the protection of rights such as the right to free travel, the right to preach and express opinion, the right to engage in commerce, the right to peaceful coexistence, and the right to wage a just war when such rights were violated.18 Spanish jurist Gregorio López’s gloss on the word conquest in Spain’s legal code in 1565 already hints at the drift of the changing representation of the Spanish presence overseas: away from the mere sanction of the Pope in Rome as well as the controversial right of first discovery. López’s commentary reads: “With regard to such a conquest undertaken not through arms nor terror, as would be the case among wild enemies, good and honest men are to be sent to the people, who would spread conquest by their lives and teachings.”19 Philip II or his secretary, Juan de Obando, may have had López’s commentary in mind when a royal council appointed by the king drafted the Ordinances on the Discovery, Population and Pacification of the Indies in 1573 [Ordenanzas sobre el descubrimiento, población, y pacificacón de Indias]. A brief analysis of this document illustrates the warping influence the concept of pacification has had on both an understanding of Philippine history and the vexed political matter of the just title. 18 See Phelan, “Some Ideological Aspects of the Conquest of the Philippines,” 221–239; and Anthony Anghie, “Francisco de Vitoria and the Origins of International Law,” 321–336. 19 “Iin hac conquesta, non ab armis neque à terroribus, velut contra hostes fieri solet, incipiendum. Sed mittendi sunt ad eos boni & probi viri, qui vita & doctrina polleant.” Gloss on ley 2 of the second (of seven) divisions of law or Partidas, title 23: cited in Gibson, 127. The Siete Partidas was the code of Spanish law originally drafted under the direction of Alonso X “the Wise” of Castile around 1265.

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José Rabasa writes that the publication of royal Ordinances in 1573 intended to proclaim “the Crown’s monopoly over all expeditions and formulate models for the pacification and settlement of new territories.”20 The first order reads: “No person, irrespective of their status or condition, may authorize new discoveries by their own authority on land or sea, nor may they conduct military incursions [entradas], make colonial settlements [poblaciones], nor hamlets in the presumably discovered or to be discovered areas without license and provision from either [the king or] one invested with our power to give under pain of death and loss of all their possessions.”21 By declaring a monopoly on the legitimate exercise of violence in the Indies (both the New World and the Philippines), Philip II attempted to rein in the social anomie that had beset Spain’s overseas possessions from the very beginning. Yet two other features of Philip II’s Ordinances deserve mention here. The first is the prominent role to be played by the religious in either facilitating or moving along the sequence of “discovery, colonial settlement [nueva población], and pacification.” Even as the king restricted the claim of “discovery” as the basis of the legal title to Spanish possession to the Crown’s discretion, he left it available to the religious (Ordinance 26).22 On the one hand, both the king and the religious would prohibit Spanish settlers from entering Indian settlements that remained “unpacified,” i.e. resistant to the acceptance of Spanish rule. On the other hand, these would be the very places missionaries were encouraged to preach the Gospel, as a way of softening the disposition of native subjects (Ordinance 136–137 and 147). And if the Indians of these regions interfered in the work of the religious in any way or expressed disrespect for the religion, the transgressors could always be punished (Ordinance 142). The designation of a missionary 20 José Rabasa, Writing Violence, 89. 21 “Ninguna persona de qualquier estado y condiçion que sea haga por su propia autoridad nueuo descubrimiento por mar ni por tierra ni entrada nueua poblaçion ni ranchería en lo que estuuiere descubierto o se descubriese sin licencia y prouission o de quien tuuiere nuestro poder para la dar so pena de muerte y de perdimiento de todos sus bienes” Ordenanzas de Felipe II sobre descubrimiento, nueva población y pacificación de las Indias (13 de julio de 1573). See web. These instructions were repeated in the king’s instructions to first Philippine governor Don Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas: see “Instruccion a Gomez Perez Das marinas (9 de agosto de 1589),” in “Registro de oficio y partes de la Audiencia de Filipinas,” AGI, FILIPINAS,339.L.1, par. 46. 22 “Hauiendo frailes y religiossos de las ordenes que se permiten passar a las Indias que con deseo de se emplear en seruir a nuestro señor quisiesen yr a descubrir tierras y publicar en ellas el sancto evangelio antes a ellos que a otros se encargue el descubrimiento y se les de licencia para ello y sean faboreçidos y proueidos de todo lo necesario para tan sancta y buena obra a nuestra costa.”

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frontier thus created a jurisdiction beyond the pale of Spanish (civil) laws but paradoxically also within the sphere of Spanish rule or dominion. A second feature ensures that, with the Crown’s assumption of authority over its overseas possessions, colonial officials must cease referring to the Conquest as such: “Forbear that any titles and the name of conquest accompany any present and future discoveries: for insofar as the matter [of colonial settlement] ought to be conducted with all the peace and charity that we desire, we do not want the name [of “Conquest”] to give any occasion or excuse for using force or injury against the Indians.”23 The 1624 Recopilación de las Leyes de Yndias, which consolidated the various decrees, ordinances, and laws overseas, used even stronger language: “In those agreements in the matter of the discoveries let the word Conquest be excised, and the words Pacification and Colonial Settlement [población] be used instead” (italics added).24 The identification of the Spanish conquest of the Philippines and other Pacific possessions as a pacification rather than a conquest, then, would thenceforth owe itself to primarily this new principle of Iberian governance under Philip II.25 Taken together, the prominent role given to the religious overseas and the substitution of conquest for pacification as a descriptor for Philip’s just title to the overseas kingdoms of New Spain (which included the Philippines) and Peru, allow the Crown to complete its new conception of the just title over Spain’s overseas possessions: one based on neither papal grant, discovery, or conquest, but rather on the protection and upholding of the rights of the religious and Christian communities. The religious, in turn, became the arbiters of so-called pacification. They claimed for themselves the responsibility to determine the legal conditions under which the past atrocities committed against the Indians might be compensated or redeemed; the conditions under which the king or his agents would be authorized to collect tribute; or the conditions under which Spaniards were allowed to pass through the Indian settlements. With the religious in control 23 “Los descobrimientos no se den con títulos y nombre de conquista: pues habiéndose de hacer con tanta paz y caridad como deseamos, no queremos quel nombre, dé ocasión ni color para que se pueda hazer fuerza ni agravio a los indios.” See Charles Gibson, “Arrival and conflict,” 126. Translation modified by author. 24 “En las capitulaciones de descubrimientos se excuse la palabra Conquista, y se use de las de Pacificacion, y Poblacion” [ley 6. Tit. I. Lib. 4] (italics added). Cited in Recopilacion de leyes de los reynos de las Indias, v.3, 79. 25 For an incisive contrast between the changing role of the missionaries in the New World vs. the Philippines, see María Dolores Elizalde and Xavier Huetz de Lemps, “Un singular modelo colonizador,” 185–220.

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of the interpretation of “pacification” as the threshold of Spanish dominion [dominio], the conquest was literally written out of existence. The 1582 Synod or Council of Manila, in which Manila bishop Domingo Salazar (OP) gathered together the provincials of the monastic Orders, Jesuits, diocesan clergy, and Spanish laymen versed in matters of law, has long been understood as the attempt of the religious to stem the abuses of the encomenderos – royal grantees authorized to collect tribute from the native population – by providing a handbook for the administration of justice and resolution of moral cases. Bishop Salazar was himself a Dominican preacher, and his arguments for establishing and upholding the rights of the Indians echo those of his predecessor in New Spain, Fr. Bartolomé de las Casas.26 Yet the chapter of its proceedings dedicated to these questions under the title “On the captains and soldiers who participate in the Pacifications they call conquests” [De los capitanes y soldados que andan en la pacificaciones que llaman conquistas], also demonstrates the complicity of the religious in providing a rather Machiavellian logic to the encomenderos under the sanction of the Crown.27 While repeating the king’s intentions that the just title of the Crown over the Philippines should come about through love, friendship, conversion, etc., the bishop also begins to engage in a kind of double speak. Clearly, the bishop reasons, neither religious conversion nor the collection of tribute originally came about this way in “those pacifications they call conquests.” But if the greater good of peace, which facilitates the conversion of natives to the Christian faith, has taken place in the long run, does this greater good not outweigh the collateral effects, which are evil? Applying this logic to various cases, the authors specify the conditions under which Spaniards in extreme need are justified in taking what they need from native settlements by force, while also condemning “bad government and the ill manner of soldiers in their dealings with the Indians, taking their possessions from them, or at a lesser price, or forcing them into servitude” [mal gobierno y mal modo de los soldados para con los indios, tomándoles lo que tienen, o a menos precio o forzándoles a trabajos personales] (331). Depredation without the proper justification for force, they maintain, is evil. But if, the authors continue, “as the result of this evil there follows the original intention with the good [way], which is the pacification and conversion of the Indians, [Spaniards] will / should not be obliged to make restitution for what they took” (ibid.). The authors extend this exoneration 26 See Fr. Jesús Gayo y Aragón, Theology of the Conquest. 27 Fr. Domingo de Salazar, El Sínodo de Manila, 330. For a recent English translation of these proceedings, see Paul Dumol, The Manila Synod of 1582.

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to the military incursions or entradas as well as the atrocities committed by Spaniards who sought pacification in order to facilitate the preaching of the Gospel: We may say then, that not by the injuries and insults committed by those who accompany the preachers would [the preaching of the Gospel] cease to be just; nor would the Pope, king, or governor lose the right of sending preachers to exercise their office as best as they can, and if those who accompany them as guards obstruct the task of evangelization with their vices, let their complaints be reprimanded and punish them as is fitting. And [Equally?], not by certain things remaining unresolved [sin remedio], should one cease to preach, because it is not the preaching that is evil, such that, even if it should happen that the same preacher lives with a woman, not by this would his words cease to be true (332).28

The ends justify the means. By setting out the terms by which the restitution of wrongs committed in the act of conquest might take place, the authors paradoxically end up exonerating the conquest by treating acts committed in violation of the king’s authority as if they had made justice possible. In doing so, the authors of the Synod erase the violence of the conquest through the promise of restitutions. The Synod achieves this by imagining the goal and end of pacification as simultaneously an already partially or incompletely established condition. It is probably safe to assume that both the king’s Orders and the Manila Synod were largely disregarded until at least 1586, when Philip II appointed the first governor and captain general who was not also a conquistador in the Philippines. In fact, in his writings Fr. Rada suggests that the immediate consequences of Philip II’s Ordinances and the Synod of Manila only worsened the incidence of Spanish outrages: “From hereon, a new order of pacifying the provinces was adopted, because (the soldiers) were entering the villages not at night but in broad daylight; and through their interpreters they summoned and required peace of the people. If they said no, this alone was sufficient cause, as it is to this day, to kill, rob, and destroy” (cited in Sitoy, 28 “Decimos pues ahora, que no por los agravios e insultos de los que acompañan a los predicadores, deja esto de ser injusto ni por ello el papa, rey, o gobernador pierden el derecho de enviar predicadores a hacer su oficio lo mejor que pudieren, y si los que los acompañan para su guarda, con sus vicios impidieren el oficio de la predicación, repréndanles las quejas y castíguenles como es razón. Y, si no se pudiere remediar todo, no por eso se debe dejar la predicación, pues no es ella mala, que, aunque suceda que el mismo predicador esté amancebado, no por eso dejará de ser verdad lo que predica.”

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175–76). The shibboleth of “pacification” here accelerates Spanish rapacity in the very act of outlawing conquest. By substituting the actual history of the conquest with the presumption of a soon-to-be pacified territory, the discourse of pacification disavows any act of violence that isn’t always already a form of law enforcement. The redundancy of pacif ication informs all succeeding debates and parliaments [parlamentos] on the just title of Spanish dominion in the Philippines. In 1586, the Jesuit priest Fr. Alonso Sánchez (SJ) presented his case to Philip II and his council for believing the Crown had a right to the just title of the Philippines by distinguishing four peoples or communities in the archipelago: 1) the Spaniards; 2) the pacified and Christianized Indians; 3) the friendly but not Christianized Indians; and 4) Indians “neither pacified nor Christianized” (88). Each in their different way, Fr. Sánchez argued, deserves the peace that only the Spanish monarchy can provide. The Spaniards are simply exercising the natural rights that derive from the law of nations. The second group, the pacified and Christianized Indians need teachers, moral examples, leaders, and even occasional coercion lest they lapse into paganism and apostasy. The third group, the friendly but not Christianized Indians, threaten by their very existence the Christianized ones, for their exposure to Christianity has not yet led them to convert. The fourth group “is so bad that they rob, kidnap, kill, burn, etc., sparing no people lives, or property of the other three. It is therefore not only just, but necessary to have people to defend us and aid the convert and the simple, and, if Christian mercy does not moderate it, there is enough reason to wage open and merciless war on them” (88–92). Readers will smile when they recognize that the very same rhetoric used by the Augustinians to describe the rapacity of the conquistadors is here employed to characterize the unchristian and so-called unpacified native elements of the country. The question, in any case, has shifted from a critique of the just ends of the conquest to a concept of pacification as a necessary means and precondition for any kind of justice whatsoever. Philip II’s decision clearly shows Fr. Sánchez’s influence on the deliberations. The Crown’s instructions to governor Gómez Pérez Dasmariñas (in 1589) read as follows: It is said that there is great need of such pacification in the said islands, especially in the very districts where the Spaniards live and travel, for all of the natives are in revolt and unsubdued … Moreover, as we are informed from there, many provinces of the island of Luçon [Luzon] either have never been subdued, or, if subdued, have revolted – as, for instance, those

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of Cagayan, Pangasinan, and now also Çambales [Zambales], Balente [Valencia?], and others, which are situated among the pacified provinces quite near and round about Manila; all the provinces, therefore, are in confusion and disorder … Besides there is the great obligation to continue the indoctrination of the many people already converted [to Christianity] and who are under my royal protection but who, because of the lack of requisite peace and quiet they desire, live in great hardship and danger; for those who are in revolt and unpacified harass them daily, kill and assault them, and burn their cultivated fields.29

Philip’s instructions, like Fr. Sánchez’s recommendations before, revolve around the rhetoric of pacification as pure redundancy: the Crown expresses the need to pacify the islands because, well, many of these areas are unpacified, which poses a danger to the pacified ones, lest they too become unpacified, which would pose a danger to the Spaniards, etc.30 What is striking about this redundancy is the way pacification as a prescriptive term acquires a descriptive and historical dimension through its repetition: it refers to a previous condition accomplished by the conquistadors, which now appears threatened by the unpacified enemy. By the time the first substantial history of the conquest in the Philippines is written by Dr. Antonio de Morga in 1609 (Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas), the language of pacification had become well entrenched. The extensive use of the word in Morga’s text exemplifies a constant slippage between its normative and descriptive registers. In the author’s account, Legazpi receives instructions from the king to proceed to the Philippines (at that time called the Luzones Islands), where he should “procure their pacification 29 Grande es la necesidad que se entiende hay de la d(ic)ha pacificación en las dhas Islas y especialmente en las mismas partes donde residen y andan los Spañoles por estar todo alterado e inculto con respecto de la falta que hauido de gente y de los agravios y enojos que la que ay hacen a los naturales … en las Islas de Lucon ay muchos provincias lo que nunca se han allanado, o que estandolo se han alterado como son las de Cagayan Pangasinan y aya andan Çambales, Balente y otros que se an entregerido con las pacificas cerca y entorno de Manila y por esto con uno y lo otro en confusión y mala orden llegado que se aya a las dhas Islas … ademas de la obligacion grande que ay de procurar se prosiga la dotrina de tantas gentes como ya ay convertidos y están debajo de mi Real amparo los quales por no tener la paz y sosiego que se quiere pasan grandes Fraudes y daños Respecto de que los que están alterados y no pacificos cada día los perturban, matan y saltean y queman las sementeras. “Instruccion a Gomez Perez Das marinas,” par. 45. Partial English translation (with corrections) in BRPI, v.7, 157–158 [par.45], italics added. 30 For an insightful analysis of the semiotic of redundancy in the interpretation of law, see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattarí, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. Brian Massumi), Pt. II, 111–148.

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and reduction to the obedience of His Majesty, and that they receive the holy Catholic Faith” (7). Given this frame, the inhabitants of the islands can only respond in one of two ways: either by offering “peace, friendship, and obedience” (the formulaic phrase varies upon each iteration); or by resisting, in which case they must be “pacified.” When Legazpi dies, his informal successor and fellow conquistador Guido de Lavezaris “continued the conversion and pacification of the islands” (13); then upon the new election of a governor and captain general by the Manila colony, Francisco de Sande, the government “continues the pacification of the islands” (15); to be succeeded by Gonzalo Ronquillo de Peñalosa, who confronts the necessity of “populating [and] pacifying” the islands (17); after whom Doctor Santiago de Vera assumes leadership, and is tasked to “pursue the pacification of some provinces of the islands” (22). The rhetoric of pacif ication here is at once linear and circular. Normatively, it prescribes a future state or condition that appears always on the horizon of Spanish achievement; and that conditions the reader to understand the relationship of history to the present along these lines. But descriptively, it introjects some sense of that same anticipated progress back into the narrative of conquest as a past event, at least until the outbreak of rebellion; or the flight of natives into the interior of the islands; or the next pirate attack by Chinese, Japanese, or Muslim pirates from the sultanates in Jolo and Mindanao. As “performative” utterance (a term coined by linguist J.L. Austin), pacification forecloses the very history it claims to be describing.31

The Peace that Wasn’t The clear immediate consequences to Spanish entradas and the subsequent assignment of missionaries, imposition of tribute, forced labor, and the forced sale of goods at values fixed by the colonial government (tributo, repartimiento / polos y servicios and vandala), were depopulation and mass flight. However mild, benevolent, or passive the Spanish conquest may have seemed in comparison to the brutality of the conquest of Peru, for example, it is difficult to accept the thesis of historians like Patricio Hidalgo Nuchera, who insisted that the establishment of encomiendas preserved almost intact the prehispanic structures of native authority and social organization while having a minimal influence on depopulation. There is no such thing as a “soft(ened) encomienda” 31 See J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 5.

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[encomienda suavizada].32 At the risk of being partial or schematic, a few historical examples will have to substitute for a more comprehensive sketch of the Great Unsettlement, which highlights the general state of social anomie that persisted throughout most areas of the archipelago from the immediate aftermath of conquest all the way to the nineteenth century. We have seen what Legazpi did with the island of Cebu; the neighboring island of Panay saw half the population destroyed because of a combination of famine and pestilence likely brought over by the Spaniards by 1572.33 The forced resettlement of natives along the coasts exposed them to slave raids, as the Spanish “were generally unable to defend the Visayas” (Newson, 34). The resulting depopulation was further “prolonged by forced labor drafts and exactions during the Hispano-Dutch War. By the end of the seventeenth century, the population had only just recovered to its level in 1600” (99: italics added). According to Fr. Francisco Colín’s Labor evangélica, in Bohol [the Central Visayas region], much of the population lived in the hills, away from the coastal settlements and beyond the reach of missionaries, throughout the seventeenth century (94). And further south, in Mindanao, despite Jesuit successes in Christian conversion during the early part of the century, the resistance of the Moro sultanate under their leader Qudarat were exacerbated by the excesses and impunity of Spanish royal officials, leading to mass flight from the mission areas towards the end of the seventeenth century: the lesser-known towns all fled, without a soul remaining, with the people being restored to the darkness of their infidelity, all in order to find justice among the more intelligent ones … they considered as a lesson the misfortune of their neighbors, and they all deserted [the towns].”34

While depopulation and flight in the Visayas and Mindanao regions were particularly alarming (in Visayas it was closer to 50%), the depopulation of 32 See Hidalgo Nuchera, Encomienda, tributo y trabajo en Filipinas (1570–1608), 245–248. 33 Newson, Conquest and Pestilence, 73. 34 “Huyéronse los pueblos inaudidos sin quedar alma, restituyéndose a las tinieblas de su infidelidad, por hallar entre ellas con mas luz la justicia; y los que no lo fueron, preuiniendo el caso, y prendiendo la seguridad en su concepto, que nuestro trato les prometía, miraron como escarmiento la desgracia de los vezinos, y se ausentaron todos, juzgando, por lo sucedido, que la bondad, y agasajo de los Españoles, era afectada apacibilidad en los principios, hasta con la confianza asegurar la presa” Fr. Francisco Combés (SJ) et al., Historia de Mindanao y Joló, 192. See also William Henry Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines, 54–55. Scott notes that both the disarming of subject populations and the decisión to wage war on the Muslim kingdoms to the south (Borneo, Sulu, Maginanao, and Ternate) led to “the depopulation of entire coasts and islands which Spain claimed but could not defend” (54).

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Luzon in the north only differed to a relative degree (40%).35 The requisition of mandatory labor for public works [Sp. repartimiento, called polos y servicios in the Philippines] drew men throughout southern Luzon away from their communities, to work in the Cavite shipyards: many never returned, either dying or joining the ranks of a floating population in and around Manila, in search of livelihood. Beginning in the seventeenth century, the friars (including the Jesuits) also began to collect land titles to form large estates (haciendas), which succeeded in not only displacing native farmers from communal lands but also accelerating the process of creating a landless, poor, itinerant labor force (30 and 143). It is for this reason, Newson argues, that “southwest Luzon gained a reputation for lawlessness and rebellion as many landless persons turned to crime and as rural poverty drove many to seek restitution of their lands and the improvement of conditions on the estates” (143). Fr. Agustín María de Castro (OSA) noted that the desolation extended to the provinces around Taal Lake, where formerly populous regions had become deserted and plagued with bandits, apostates, and slave raiding pirates: Who would not despair at seeing how, after two hundred and twenty-six years of conquest … we find them so surly, so cimarrón [returned to a wild or savage state], so incorrigible, so lacking in courtesy and urbanity that they do not even greet one in the street … And what can we say of their cunning, their perversities, their outrages? We inspect those dungeons that pass for parish town settlements [cabeceras]: what drunken revelries, gamblers, treacherous murders, traitors, thugs, false moneylenders, pimps, swindlers, witches and shamans, and other like delinquents! … Who can ignore the troops of bandits, rebels, and apostates that are hidden around the volcano and the banks of its islet … I need not elaborate or detain us by enumerating the innumerable damages they have caused, the towns they have robbed, burned, and destroyed, not to mention the noble families they have decimated here.36 35 Newson, 80–112. 36 “A quién no abismará el ver que después de doscientos y veintiséis años de conquistados estas gentes … los hallamos tan ariscos, tan cimarrones, tan intratables, descorteses e inurbanos que ni aun le saludan a uno en la calle … ¿Pues qué diremos de sus mañas, de sus resabios, de sus siniestros? Registramos esos calabozos de las cabeceras y ¡la de borrachones, de jugadores, de homicidas alevosos, de traidores, de salteadores, de monederos falsos, de alcahuetes, de endilgadores, de brujos y hechiceros, y de otros delincuentes semejantes! … ¡Quién ignora las tropas de tulisanes [ladrones], de alzados y de apóstatas que están escondidos en el volcán y sus riberas … No quiero ahora alargarme ni detenerme en numerar los innumerables perjuicios

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While only a handful of rebellions – the Tamblot and Bancao rebellions (1621–1622), the Sumuroy rebellion (1649), the Pampanga and Malong revolts in Pangasinan (1660), the Chinese rebellions, and the Silang-Palaris revolts during the 1762 British occupation of Manila – extended beyond the local grievances of one province or region, threatening to become a national or in any case regional autonomous movement, it is in the almost innumerable accounts of flight, vagabondage, and lawlessness where the legacy of Spanish conquest in the form of entradas, along with the refusal of natives to submit to Spanish rule, makes itself most manifest.37 Even in the supposedly “pacified” territories, the absence of the enforcement of Spanish law beyond the routine collection of tribute and conscription of workers for public works like churches, as well as cutting wood for the galleons, is striking. Attempts to corral natives into working in the shipyards, paying tribute, or building churches could simply result in the natives disappearing from the town in question, only to turn up in another town or to be captured in entradas and punitive expeditions into the highlands, in order to force them back into Spanish settlements.38 In 1682, when the royal council or Audiencia in Manila attempted to implement the Crown’s decree on manumitting all slaves in the Philippines, the religious Orders protested against the decree, and gave the following reasons for the impossibility of implementing it: It is public knowledge and well known … that all those Indians who have been converted in these islands were first subjugated to the Royal Crown by force of arms, these still being considered necessary to keep them in the faith once professed, and that as soon as they do not find themselves restrained by force, they have abjured the law of the Gospel, que han causado, de los pueblos que han robado, quemado y destruido, ni de las nobles familias que han aniquilado aquí.” Cited in Manuel Merino, “La provincia filipina de Batangas vista por un misionero a fines del siglo XVII,” 170. 37 Both attempts to take the Philippines by the Chinese pirates Limahong and Koxing (in 1574 and 1662) involved their collaboration with Chinese residents of the city. For a partial list and summary of insurrections that took place in the seventeenth century, see Fernando Palanco, “Resistencia y rebelión Indígena en Filipinas durante los primeros cien años de soberanía Española (1565–1665)” 2–24; and “Insurrections by Filipinos in the seventeenth century [Accounts by various early writers covering the period 1621–83],” in BRPI 38: 87–240. 38 For desertion on building churches, see Fr. Félix de Huerta, Estado geográfico, topográfico, estadístico, histórico-religioso de la santa y apostólica provincia de S. Gregorio Magno, 121 and 127. For the case of presumed “idolatry” among the natives in Panay, see the conflict between the Jesuits and Augustinians over the jurisdiction of Panay, which resulted in populations abandoning the Augustinian settlements and either fleeing to the hills or claiming they belonged to the settlements and towns administered by the Jesuits: “Carta de Fausto Cruzat sobre los indios mundos,” AGI FILIPINAS,16, R.1, n. 6.

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profaning temples and sacred vessels and killing their missionary ministers … who have never been safe from the treacheries of the converted Indians themselves unless it be by the protection of arms [italics added].39

Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the religious Orders became increasingly vocal about closing off a frontier that their own missions had helped to open. The regular clergy routinely expressed their frustration at the impossibility of enforcing the boundaries between Christian and nonChristian populations. “Some [unbaptized natives] descend the mountain to trade with our Christian Indians,” writes Fr. Baltasar de Santa Cruz in 1676: This island so abounds with these people that they are encountered at six leagues from Manila … But when they hear that the Christians pay tribute and vandalas [forced sale of goods], and that here are personal services (which it is necessary to have, for a civilized and domestic life), they return to their liberty. Some are reduced, but it is generally a fact that this becomes continually more difficult so long as the Lord who died for them does not drive from their side that enemy who makes them daily more obstinate and hard. 40

Other missionaries blamed the difficulty of reduction policies on the “vicious Liberty” they enjoyed outside of colonial obligation. In the words of one Franciscan friar in 1732: “The vexations with which the Indians excuse themselves from being reduced / concentrated in their Towns, are sometimes true, sometimes false; and they all stem from the natural repugnance they have to live as rational beings; and as they see with particular aversion how opposed it is to their Vicious liberty, so do their injuries, ill-feelings, and complaints pile up, desirous as they are of maintaining their possession of what they enjoy.”41 By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the provincial heads of the various religious Orders found themselves compelled to draft a collective letter of 39 Cited in William Henry Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines, 37. He lists the original document as: “Testimonio de los autos que siguió el Real f iscal con el Cabildo secular de la Ciudad de Manila …1 diciembre 1861–8 octubre 1682,” AGI FILIPINAS 67–6–13, although I have been unable to locate the original in Spanish. 40 Fr. Baltasar de Santa Cruz (OP), “The Dominicans in the Philippines. 1641–69,” in BRPI, v. 37, 101. 41 “Las Vejaciones que protestan los Indios para no ser reducidos a sus Pueblos, unas son Verdaderas, y otras falsas; y todos nacen de la nativa repugnancia que tienen a Vivir como racionales; porque como miran con especial aversión quanto se opone de su Viciosa libertad, aglomeran daños, sentimientos, y quejas, deseosos de mantenerse en la posesion de lo que gustan.” Cited in Bruce Cruikshank, Spanish Franciscans in the Colonial Philippines [v. 1], 184 n. 50.

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urgent protest and solicitation of support by the Crown for the failing mission: “In these provinces near Manila,” they write, “there are a great number of Indians whose mode of life may be appropriately be compared to that of the gypsies in Spain; for they go from one village to another accompanied by some women, and, without labor, they travel, eat, and are clothed; while they prove to be the authors of many murders, robberies, rapes, and other iniquitous deeds.”42 The letter goes on to berate the then governor and captain-general of the Philippines for the failure of the government to maintain the military posts and garrisons (ibid., 122). The result is the exposure of Christian villages to the depredations of not only “infidels and apostates,” but also colonial officials and missionaries themselves; for the latter, in order to attend to the demands of temporal and spiritual government, see themselves obliged to force even the unconverted natives to pay tribute and labor under conditions they have explicitly rejected (123). The flouting of the most basic principle advanced by the religious during the early part of the conquest – the free and willing acceptance of the Christian yoke and concomitant subordination to Spanish rule – has not have been lost on the conquered, the authors say, leading to flight from the missions as well as apostasy and rebellion. The authors end by enjoining the government to reinvigorate the project to reduce the natives into concentrated populations (139). Curiously, however, due to internal conflicts and political scheming involving the viceroy and the two branches of Church authority, the royal decree to concentrate populations into settlements was actually suspended in the archipelago, to the dismay of the missionary orders. In 1731, Augustinian Provincial head Fr. Félix Trillo [OSA] appealed to the king that the suspension be lifted. His argument provides a perspective of the missionary endeavor over the past century and a half. “For the most part,” Fr. Trillo asserts, “[Spaniards] only possess the coastal areas, with the center of [these islands] being full of infidel nations,” and adds: not because we have not sought their conquest by means of preaching, but because however much the evangelical Ministers do … is undone by the dispersion in which many Indians live: the mountains, f ields and cultivated lands from which they manage an ongoing trade and 42 “Conditions of the Islands [1701],” cited in BRPI v. 44, 128. Beginning around 1700 in the Cavite shipyards near Manila, those natives drafted to cut wood or work in the galleys “not only raised mortality rates, but also encouraged fugitivism on a wide scale,” leading some natives to sell themselves as slaves or commit suicide. Some stayed on Cavite once their tour of duty had finished, while others became vagamundos [vagabonds] or turned to crime (Newson, Conquest and Pestilence, 145).

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commerce with infidels, imitating them in everything and persuading them to despise our preaching, saying that we only intend to subject them to pay the royal tribute and to enslave them in the royal [mandatory] labors [servicios]43

In Fr. Trillo’s account, populations “gather together with great facility in hamlets [rancherías] … and manage to obtain the title of towns and the assignment of judges in order to live without them, and even with greater freedom than those who live scattered … with the state of wretchedness among these hamlets or little towns.”44 He goes on to narrate that in at least two cases, these towns were paying tribute to the highland tribes of Igorots instead of the Crown (187). The result of these settlements, according to the Augustinian provincial head, was not “civilization” or the conservation of pre-Hispanic traditions, but social anomie. “There are many parts or ministries,” Fr. Trillo added, “where thieves outnumber laborers”: the latter which, according to the report, diminish by the day, leading to other vices like incest and adultery, concubinage, murder; as well as alleged sodomy and “other innumerable errors” (187). As these frontier communities proliferated, they eroded the edges of established towns and settlements: offering an escape for those wishing to evade the conscription of laborers for government works; and forcing town leaders and “Ministrillos,” “little priests” [by which he is probably referring to ordinary or secular priests] into perpetually withholding the revenues that they accrued from tribute payments, not to mention the encouragement of fraud (188). The disregard and even contempt for religious authority naturally follows. Fr. Trillo laments the continuity of native “abuses, vain observances and superstitions”; and recounts various episodes of natives who, rather than denouncing and renouncing their ancient religion, either continue to practice it in secret, or simply sell their “instruments” of ritual worship to their unbaptized neighbors. 43 [por la mayor parte, sólo poseemos las playas, estando el centro de ellas lleno de naciones infieles … no porque por medio de la predicación no se solicite su conquista, sí porque cuanto hacen los Ministros evangélicos … lo desbarata la dispersión en que viven los muchos indios por montes, campos, y sementeras, desde cuyos sitios lograron el trato y comercio con los infieles, imitándolos en un todo y persuadiéndoles el desprecio de nuestra predicación, con la que les dicen que sólo intentamos sugetarlos a pagar el Real tributo y esclavizarlos en los servicios Reales]. Fr. Félix Trillo, in Manuel Merino, “La reducción de los indios a pueblos, medio de evangelización,” Missionalia Hispánica, 3 (1946), 186–187. 44 “se juntan con gran facilidad en rancherías; para las que no con menor, logran títulos de pueblos y nombramientos de Justicias para vivir sin ella y aun con mayor libertad que los que viven esparcidos.”

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Fr. Trillo’s fellow Augustinian missionary Fr. Francisco Mozo (OSA) witnessed the same discovery of unbaptized communities [parages, or hamlets] near the province of Zambales in 1763, thirty years after the Fr. Trillo’s earlier petition to the king: [There is] a hamlet, which they call Marangley, placed among vast and closed wilderness … In these forests and hills one finds mixed up together many residents of diverse Nations, both Christian and pagan / infidel: some from the mountains, which cast them out; others, fleeing the law [las Justicias], which pursues them. Many, too, (reside here) in order to live unrestrainedly, and to be free from paying tribute, and to comply with other obligations; and many because it is the land where the pagans were born, and where they have always lived. There they are all mixed together, with pagans married to Christians, and mixing up a thousand superstitions with the Law of Jesus Christ. 45

Fr. Mozo saves the full weight of his exasperation, however, for those runaways who had originally converted to Christianity but had either relapsed [Sp. reincidía, backslid] to their pre-Christian ways or had simply apostatized out of antipathy for the new faith: “[T]he Apostates, who are entirely corrupt, are impossibly difficult to resettle, and they with their corruption, persuasive arguments, and appalling customs, pervert to a great degree the simplicity of the pagans, similar to the words of Saint Paul (1 Corinthians 15)” (ibid.). The Augustinians were not alone in their frustrations. Several decades prior to Mozo’s account of Marangley in the northern Luzon region, Franciscan and Recollect ministers of central and eastern Luzon as well as the central Visayas were describing parallel form of social anomie taking place in these regions. Fr. Vicente Inglés [OFM], who conducted an inspection of the Franciscan doctrinas or mission churches around Laguna de Bay (in central Luzon) and 45 [(Hay) un parage, que llaman el Marangley, que fon unas anchifsimas, y cerradas felvas … En dichas felvas, y cerros habitan entreverados muchos de diversas Naciones, Chriftianos, é Inf ieles. Los unos, por tirarlos el monte de donde falieron. Otros por huir de las Jufticias, que les bufcan. Muchos también por vivir holgazanamente, y librarfe de pagar el tributo, y de cumplir con otras obligaciones; y muchos por fer territorio adonde nacieron, y adonde han vivido Infieles. Eftanfe alli mezclados unos con otros, cafandofe mutuamente Infieles con Chriftianos, y mezclando mil fuperfficiones con la Ley de Jefu-Chrifto]. Fr. Francisco Mozo (OSA), Misiones de Philipinas de la Orden de Nuestro Padre San Agustín, 118–119. See also Patricio Abinales and Donna Amorsolo, State and Society in the Philippines, 68. Rosario Cortes tells us that Malunguey (probably the hamlet “Marangley” to which Mozo refers) was an ancient village that has since become absorbed by the larger town of Bayambang in Pangasinan.

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eastern Luzon, encounters pueblos like Binangonan, which was “an aggregate of fugitives, who have fled here because of crimes that they have committed in their own pueblos” (Cruikshank, 186). In the surrounding visitas or sitios visited by the missionaries from Binangonan, he adds, lived “cimarrones, apostates, Aetas, and Balugas … These cannot be made to live in the pueblo nor attend to the obligations of being a Christian” (187). Meanwhile, an anonymous Recollect missionary priest recounts the same phenomenon, taking place on the island of Masbate, which had become something of a magnet for fugitive populations fleeing from the neighboring islands: Those were certain men, if they can be called so, who, having apostatized the faith, had taken to the deserts and high places, where they defended their native barbarity at every step, against those who were trying to reduce them and to procure their own good. They had gathered there (1724, in Masbate and Burias), either they or their ancestors, from the villages of the same islands, as well as from Zebu [Cebu], Leyte, and other [islands], to escape the punishment due them for their crimes. Consequently, they were people especially fierce (cited in BRPI v. 41, 223. Italics added).

If we are to believe historian of the Franciscan mission Bruce Cruikshank, such social anarchy only increased after the British invasion and takeover of Manila in 1762–1763 (Cruikshank, 151). Thus would the Franciscan Provincial head in the Philippines write to Order’s representative in Mexico: “There has arisen such a mob of thieves that they have destroyed pueblos, committed robberies in the streets without concealing their faces, and killed … The Indians, most of them, do not come to Mass … Many of them during the year do not fulfill any precept nor learn the Doctrina [Christiana]” (150). 46 While it remains unclear whether the suspension of reduction policies continued unabated throughout the eighteenth century, Fr. Sebastian Moreno (OSA)’s exasperation at the continued condition of the open frontier seems to suggest that the entire colonial project outside the walls of Intramuros had stalled. After comparing the conditions of the numerous visitas or hamlets administered by the missionaries to the larger settled towns or pueblos, he analyzes the conundrum of pronouncing laws in a colonial netherworld where the enforcement of such laws is impossible: 46 The Doctrina Christiana consisted of the basic tenets of the Christian faith that missionaries were encouraged to teach to those desiring baptism, including brief discussions of the Ten Commandments, the Immaculate Conception, and the Passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. See Fr. Juan de Olivier, Doctrina Cristiana en lengua Tagala.

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What has been achieved in two hundred years, with orders, Edicts, Proclamations, etc.? … Neither Royal Laws, nor ordinances, nor edicts have accomplished anything, and if they have had any little success, against all other abuses, it is due to the benefit of living in concentrated settlements [Sp. vivir reducidos] and nothing else … Because, what does it matter that Your Most Illustrious Lord Governor gives orders; give assistance, and fulminates the rigor of justice demanded by such ills? Who will execute them? What means will be applied [and by whom]? By the Alcalde-mayors?47

While the discourse of pacification insisted on portraying a diachronic progression from a conquest under erasure to an only occasionally disturbed pax Hispanica, the sheer repetition of the word throughout the literature of spiritual conquest resembles more the symptom of a colonial trauma that has remained unresolved. The historical evidence, in any case, suggests less a trajectory from pre-Hispanic to Hispanic, pre-Christian to Christian; and more an ever-shifting counterpoint between conquest in the name of “pacification,” resistance, and / or flight, settlement and un-settlement or expatriation between coastal towns and the backlands – colonial netherworlds characterized by the erosion of native ecologies and economies before the ever approaching, ever receding threat of Spanish encroachment. These and other examples allow us to bring a fresh pair of eyes to the social anomie that saturated the archipelago, including around and even within the so-called Tagalog lowlands where the Spanish foothold seemed the most secure. While colonial histories strain to narrate the gradual, progressive spread of Christianity and Spanish administration – its churches and convents, hospitals, schools, and town plazas – radiating out from Manila in a manner akin to the chessboard design of the Renaissance city transplanted onto Spain’s American colonies, the fact is that many of these colonial towns and settlements did not come into existence until the mid- to late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. 48 47 “¿Qué se ha logrado en doscientos años, con ordenes, Edictos, Bandos, etc.? … Que ni Reales Leyes, ni ordenanzas, ni edictos han logrado cosa alguna, y si se ha conseguido algo de esto, y de todos los demás abusos, se debe al beneficio de vivir reducidos y no á otra cosa … Porque, ¿qué importa que el Ilmo. Señor Gobernador imparta sus ordenes; dé todos los auxilios, y fulmine todos los rigores que piden tantos males? Quién los ha de ejectuar? ¿Porque medios se han de aplicar? ¿Por los Alcaldes Mayores?” Cited in Angel Pérez, comp., Relaciones agustinianas de las razas del norte de Luzon, 266–267. 48 For an image of the conquest as the Spaniards had wanted to project it, see Angel Rama’s classic work, La ciudad letrada, 17–30 (“La ciudad ordenada”).

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These examples also force us to reconsider the quasi-anthropological explanation colonial officials and priests alike give for natives living in small, scattered, and dispersed clusters or barangays as conforming to pre-Hispanic patterns of society. Such explanations certainly do not apply to the communities of flight coalescing everywhere outside the nucleated settlements along the coasts: consisting of lawless fugitives and apostates who survived the early onslaught of temporal and spiritual conquest, yet not without experiencing the obliteration of the resources and knowledge of their ancestors’ traditions. In a word: deculturation.

Protracting Colonialism In James Scott’s The Art of Not Being Governed, the author stresses the determining character of frontier zones in the creation and limitation of urban centers and their imperial imaginings. He writes: It is not possible to write a coherent history of the hills that is not in constant dialogue with the lowland centers; nor is it possible to write a coherent history of lowland centers that ignores its hilly periphery … In each case, an external frontier conditioned, bounded, and in many respects constituted what was possible at the center. Accounts of lowland states that miss this dimension … ignore a set of boundary conditions and exchanges that make the center what it is. 49

These boundary conditions and exchanges were shaped by a conquest that never ended: continuing under the euphemisms of entrada, pacificación, apaciguamiento, and the like. The circular logic of pacification facilitated both the coordination of the relationship between Crown and Church in the early articulation of international law (or jus gentium); and the prose of pax Hispanica in early histories of the Philippines. The resulting conflation between the words “conquest” and “pacification” reflect an underlying ambiguity between depredation and the enforcement of established law, with the understanding that at a certain point one cannot tell them apart. This ambiguity tells us something about the creative force of fiction in the genesis of colonial law. The foregoing analysis of pacification as discourse and performative utterance ushers in a history of social anomie that friar and Jesuit literature 49 Scott, The Art of Not Being Governed, 26–27; see also 326.

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abundantly documented, but also encoded in such a way as to render it unrecognizable. In the following chapter, I will explore the tropes and narrative devices that presented social anomie as episodes of spiritual conquest.

Bibliography Abinales, Patricio and Amoroso, Donna. State and Society in the Philippines. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005. Anghie, Anthony. “Francisco de Vitoria and the Colonial Origins of International Law,” Social and Legal Studies 5(3): 1996. 321–336. Austin, J.L. How To Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Blair, Emma, and Robertson, James, eds. Project Gutenberg’s The Philippine Islands, 1493–1803. 55v. EBook #13255, 2004. Blanco, John D. Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empirein the Nineteenth-Century Philippines. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009. “Carta de Fausto Cruzat sobre los indios mundos.” AGI FILIPINAS,16, R.1, N. 6. Castro, Fr. Agustin María de [OSA], and Merino, Manuel. Misioneros agustinos en el Extremo Oriente, 1565–1780: Osario venerable. Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo, 1954. Coleman, Fr. Ambrose [OP]. The Friars in the Philippines. Boston, MA: Marlier, Callanan & Co., 1899. Colín, Fr. Francisco (SJ) and Pastells, Fr. Pablo (SJ). Labor Evangélica, Ministerios Apostólicos De Los Obreros De La Compañía De Jesús, Fundación, Y Progressos De Su Provincia En Las Islas Filipinas. 3v. Madrid, Spain: Joseph Fernández de Buendía, 1900. First published 1663. Combés, Fr. Francisco (SJ); Fr. Pastells, Pablo (SJ); and Retana, Wenceslao. Historia de Mindanao y Joló. Madrid, Spain: Viuda de M. Minuesa de los Ríos, 1897. Corpuz, Onofre D. The Roots of the Filipino Nation. 2v. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: University of the Philippines Press, 2005. Cruikshank, Bruce. Spanish Franciscans in Colonial Philippines 1578–1898. Catalogs and Analysis for History of Filipinos in Franciscan Parishes. Hastings, NB: copyright by author, 2003. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [v. 1]. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1975. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [v. 2]. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Dumol, Paul. The Manila Synod of 1582: The Draft of Its Handbook for Confessors. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2014.

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Elizalde, Ma. Dolores and Huetz de Lemps, Xavier. “Un singular modelo colonizador: El papel de las Órdenes religiosas en la administración española de Filipinas, siglos XVI al XIX,” Illes i imperis: Estudios de la historia de las sociedades en el mundo colonial y post-colonial 17 (2015). 185–222. Gayo y Aragon, Fr. Jesús (OP). The Theology of Conquest. Manila, Philippines: Historical Conservation Society, 1993. Gerona, Danilo. “Text and Politics: Transactions of Power in the Early Provincial Philippines,” Asian Studies 34 (1998). 15–77. Gibson, Charles. “Arrival and conflict: conquest and so-called conquest in Spain and Spanish America,” in Ursula Lamb, ed., The Globe Encircled and the World Revealed. Aldershot, UK; Brookfield, VT: Variorum, 1995. 111–130. Hidalgo Nuchera, Patricio. Encomienda, tributo y trabajo en Filipinas (1570–1608). Madrid, Spain: Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 1995. Huerta, Fr. Félix de. Estado geográfico, topográfico, estadístico, histórico-religioso de la santa y apostólica provincia de S. Gregorio Magno, de religiosos menores de scalzos de la regular y más estrecha observancia de N.S.P.S. Francisco, en las islas Filipinas : comprende el número de religiosos, conventos, pueblos, situación de estos, años de su fundación, tributos, almas, producciones, industria, cosas y casos especiales de su administración espiritual, en el Archipiélago Filipino, desde su fundación en el año de 1577 harta el de 1853. Ymprenta de los Amigos del pais, á cargo de D.M. Sánchez, 1855. “Instruccion a Gomez Perez Das marinas (9 de agosto de 1589),” in “Registro de oficio y partes de la Audiencia de Filipinas,” AGI, FILIPINAS,339.L.1. Keesing, Felix Maxwell. The Ethnohistory of Northern Luzon. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1962. Las Casas, Fr. Bartolomé de. Brevísima relación de la destruición de las Indias. Madrid, Spain: Cátedra, 2005. First published in 1552. Merino, Manuel (OSA). “La provincia filipina de Batangas vista por un misionero a fines del siglo XVIII,” Missionalia Hispánica 34:100–101 (January-December 1977). 139–248. Merino, Manuel. “La reducción de los indios a pueblos medio de evangelización,” Missionalia Hispánica 3 (1946). 184–194. Morga, Antonio de. Sucesos de las islas Filipinas, ed. José Rizal. Manila, Philippines: National Historical Institute, 1971. Mozo, R.P.Fr. Francisco Antonio (OSA), Misiones de Philipinas de la Orden de Nuestro Padre San Agustín. Madrid, Spain, 1763. Nemser, Daniel. Infrastructures of Race Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017. Newson, Linda. Conquest and Pestilence in Early Spanish Philippines. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009.

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Nuttall, Zelia. “Royal Ordinances Concerning the Laying out of New Towns,” The Hispanic American Historical Review 4:4 (November 1921). 743–753. Olivier, Fr. Juan de (OFM). Declaración de la Doctrina Christiana en idioma tagalog. Cruz, Fr. José M. (SJ), ed. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1995. Ordenanzas de Felipe II sobre descubrimiento, nueva población y pacificación de las Indias (13 de julio de 1573). Web: www.biblioteca.tv/artman2/publish/1573_382/ Ordenanzas_de_Felipe_II_sobre_descubrimiento_nueva_1176.shtml. Last accessed September 22, 2021. Palanco, Fernando. “Resistencia y rebelión Indígena en Filipinas durante los primeros cien años de soberanía Española (1565–1665),” in Cabrero, Leoncio, ed. España y el Pacífico Legazpi (t. 2). Spain: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales (SECC): 2004. 2–24. Pérez, Ángel, comp. Relaciones Agustinianas de las razas del norte de Luzon: coleccionadas. Manila, Philippines: Bureau of Public Printing, 1904. Phelan, John Leddy. “Some Ideological Aspects of the Conquest of the Philippines,” The Americas 13:3 (1957). 221–239. Rabasa, José. Writing Violence on the Northern Frontier: The Historiography of Sixteenth-Century New Mexico and Florida and the Legacy of Conquest. Durham, NC and London, UK: Duke University Press, 2000. Rama, Angel. La Ciudad Letrada. First edition. Hanover, CT: Ediciones del Norte, 1984. Recopilacion de Leyes de Los Reynos de Las Indias: Mandadas Imprimir, y Publicar Por La Magestad Catolica Del Rey Don Carlos II, Nuestro Señor: Va Dividida En Quatro Tomos, Con El Indice General, y al Principio de Cada Tomo El Indice Especial de Los Titulos, Que Contiene. Por Iulian de Paredes, 1681. First published in 1624. Web. Hathi Trust, https://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/100240199. Last accessed November 17, 2022. Relación del agustino Diego de Herrera para remedio de las Filipinas, AGI Filipinas 84, N. 3. Salazar, Zeus. “Ang Babaylan sa Kasaysayan ng Pilipinas,” Bagong Kasaysayan 4. Diliman, Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Palimbagan ng Lahi, 1999. Scott, James. The Art of Not Being Governed: Towards an Anarchist History of Southeast Asia. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010. Scott, William Henry. Slavery in the Spanish Philippines. Manila, Philippines: De la Salle University Press, 1991. Sitoy, T. Valentino. A History of Christianity in the Philippines. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: New Day Publishers, 1985. Woods, Damon L. The Myth of the Barangay and Other Silenced Histories. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: University of the Philippines Press, 2017.

2

Monastic Rule and the Mission As Frontier(ization) Institution Chaque ordre de Religieux s’est donc emparé de ces provinces; ils se les sont pour ainsi dire partagées entr’eux; ils y commandent en quelque sorte … ils y sont plus rois que le Roi même … de cette saçon ils sont les maîtres absolus des espirits des Indiens de ces Isles. — Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean Baptiste Le Gentil de la Galasière (1767)1

Abstract: Following Marcelo H. del Pilar’s insight that “Spain abdicated its sovereignty in favor of monk rule in the Philippines,” this chapter establishes the legal and institutional bases of Spanish rule overseas, with attention to the role assigned to the religious Orders in the aftermath of the so-called conquest of the Philippines. Specif ically, I analyze the peculiar character of friar and Jesuit authority: while both served as agents of the Crown, neither were subject to the Crown or even off icial Church laws and authority. The exploration of this paradox reveals the full implications of the institutional anarchy of Spanish rule overseas. Keywords: immunity [fueros], doctrina, royal patronage [Patronato Regio], Omnímoda, Concordia, counter-Hispanization.

1 “Every Religious Order has taken possession of one or another province; they have, so to speak, partitioned them out amongst themselves; they give orders regarding every matter … they are more king than the King himself … in this way they are the absolute masters of the minds the Indians of these Islands.” Le Gentil de Galasière, Voyages dans les mers de l’Inde, v. 2, 3.

Blanco, J.D., Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463725880_ch2

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“Era público y notorio” [It was well known and infamous] The phrase appears repeatedly in a 1674 report that in all likelihood was never meant to see the light of day: it was submitted by seventeenth-century Archbishop of Manila, Felipe Fernández de Pardo (OP), who was also a member of the Dominican Religious Order.2 In it, Archbishop Pardo’s fellow confrere Fr. Juan Santos (OP) reports the testimony of many villagers who lived in or around the mission-town settlement or doctrina called Bolinao in the Zambales region, concerning the many atrocities perpetrated on the people of Bolinao and the outlying settlements by the missionary prior or regional superior, Recollect Fr. Padre Martín de San Pablo [OAR].3 It was “well known and infamous,” for example, the Recollects would exact a tribute from the settlements, which missionaries had no authority to do; or that they engaged in forms of contraband; that they would coerce the young men and women who had not yet come of age to be conscripted into forced labor by the colonial government, to work as servants for the missionary priests; that the religious would publicly whip any members of the mission town for disobeying their orders. Finally, it was well known and infamous, as reported in the 1674 document, that the aforementioned regional superior would rape women and children, and violently deflower girls who were as young as ten years old; and that he and other missionaries would illicitly father generations of orphans who roamed the streets of the town like vagabonds. When this pitiless religious superior of the barefoot Augustinian or Recollect Order in question sent one of his child victims back to her village, 2 See “Carta de Felipe Pardo sobre la idolatría de los naturales de la provincia de Zambales,” AGI FILIPINAS,75, n. 23. Carolyn Brewer’s work on shamanism and Catholicism from the perspective of gender relations in the early modern Philippines features the remarkable procurement of this document, which she calls the Bolinao manuscript. She reports the findings of an investigation originally conducted by the Dominicans in Zambales province, ostensibly translated for the Archbishop from the original native Binubolinao: see Shamanism, Catholicism, and Gender Relations, 143–188. Fr. Pardo was Archbishop of Manila between 1680–1689. 3 The Recollects had been assigned to preach and establish missions in the province of Zambales, which lies on the western coast of Luzon facing the South China Sea: north of Bataan, which surrounds the coast of Manila Bay. The eastern length of the province is bordered by the Zambales Mountains range, on the other side of which lies the central plain and breadbasket of Luzon. In 1674, the Dominicans had commissioned the report in anticipation of their proposed takeover of the missionary activity originally performed there; arguing successfully, against the Recollect assignment to the region and before the Archbishop; and saying that the latter religious order had failed to effectively reduce the Zambales natives into concentrated settlements (see Brewer, 150–151). Several decades later (in 1712), it was the Dominicans’ turn to resign their efforts, surrendering the mission province back to the Recollects after failing to reduce the population there.

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called Tambac, after violating her, the young girl’s neighbors and community reported her to be near death: el dicho Padre llevó en su compañía a la dicha doncella, y vio que tenía con ella tocamientos deshonestos, y después de media noche la mandó volver el dicho Padre al Pueblo de Tambac, de donde era la muchacha, y entonces la vio ensangrentada y muy de peligro de morir, porque era muy pequeña, que tenía unos diez años por el aspecto que reconoció en dicha muchacha. 4 The aforementioned Father brought with him said young child, and [the witness] saw that he would touch her in inappropriate places, and after midnight said Father ordered her to return to the town of Tambac, from where the girl was, and then [the witness] saw her bloodied and in danger of dying, because she was so small, by the look of said girl she was ten years old.

To hide his debauchery, the prior burned his blood-soaked blanket in a field, while accompanied by fellows (the document doesn’t explicitly name them as priests) who were known to commit the same atrocities throughout the mission territory.5 “And the case was well-known and infamous,” the testimony laconically concludes, “because many people saw [the prior] in addition to this witness” [y el caso fue público y notorio porque lo vieron muchas personas juntamente con este testigo]. The sickening account of moral degeneracy and impunity among the religious outside the reach and control of the colonial government – a negligence that only reinforced a larger alliance of predatory interests – may come as a surprise to Philippine studies scholars. We are far more accustomed to unhesitatingly accepting the prevailing accounts of heroism and humanitarianism among the Spanish friars known for protecting their flock against the rapacity of encomenderos and corrupt officials like the corregidor [frontier marshal] and alcalde mayor [regional governor]. Curiously, however, the predatory behavior of missionaries throughout the provinces of Perú, New Spain, and other areas of Latin America, has remained 4 “Carta de Felipe Pardo sobre idolatrías,” 17. 5 “era público en este Pueblo, como también lo era el que el dicho Padre pecaba con cualquiera de las delante de las demás, y aun de los remeros, que iban remando en su embarcación, porque lo hacía sin recato alguno, y también supo del mismo Padre, que había desflorado tres doncellas, la una en ocasión, que iba al Campo a quemar la Sabana en compañía de muchas personas, que iban a lo mismo”

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Figure 5: Drawing 227 from Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (1615 / 1616), manuscript. Royal Danish Library, GKS 2232 kvart, page 564 [578]. The caption reads: PADRES / QUE HAZE TEGER ROPA por fuerza a las yndias, deciendo y amenazando questá amanzibada y le da de palos y no le paga / dotrina [PRIESTS / WHO FORCE (Indian women) TO WEAVE CLOTH, saying and threatening that they are promiscuous and he beats her and pays her nothing / mission]. Copyright permission by Royal Danish Library.

“public and notorious” since the seventeenth century. No reader of Peruvian chronicler Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala’s El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (finished around 1615 but not widely circulated until 1938) can erase from memory the author’s many illustrations of friar depravity, which the author had either witnessed or meticulously documented from his fellow Indian subjects throughout the highland mission provinces he would travel (Figures 5–7). Their outrages were in fact the same in the Philippines as Perú: from the forced labor and rape of unmarried women and children, to the unwarranted violence of the religious without discretion on the people in their charge, to their zealous prohibition of outsiders entering the mission areas, lest others see and report the abuses these ministers visited upon their subject populations.6 Colonial governor Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera 6 See Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615–1616), 590–705. More recent historical accounts by Inga Clendinnen and Nathan Wachtel only verify and reinforce with historical data what the Indians of Peru and Central America had told and

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Figure 6: Drawing 234, from Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (1615 / 1616), manuscript. Royal Danish Library, GKS 2232 kvart, page 585 [599]. The caption reads: PADRES / CASTIGA CRVELMENTE los dichos padres a los niños. De cinco años a de entrar a la dotrina, de ciete años a de salir a las comunidades y obligaciones; entiéndase muchacho que no muchacha. / muchachos de la dotrina de [se]ys años que no pase a más castiga / dotrina [PRIESTS / CRUELLY PUNISH the aforesaid parents (to obtain) their children. At the age of five they must report to the mission, at seven they must leave their communities and obligations; meaning the boys rather than the girls / boys of six in the mission lest they be punished further / mission]. Copyright permission by Royal Danish Library.

(1635–1644)’s descriptions of the religious Orders in 1636, for example, could stand in as a descriptor for any one of a number of Guamán Poma’s drawings: “[The friars] make slaves out of the Poor Indians by selling their rice and textiles after forcing them to surrender these at a price of their choosing … Not only do they attempt to teach the Religion and administer sacraments but to govern all and tell the Indians in public and in secret ‘There is no king or Pope above them’ and they command their deputies [Sp. fiscales] to give fifty lashes to an Indian and even his women for any childish caprice.”7 The atrocities of the Recollect mission in Bolinao may only represent one example of what many colonial officials and even priests understood to be a well-known and infamous truth about areas of the archipelago outside retold one another for centuries. See Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570; and Nathan Wachtel, Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes 1530–1570. 7 “Carta de Corcuera criticando a los religiosos,” AGI FILIPINAS, 21, R.10, n. 42 (1636).

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Figure 7: Drawing 233, from Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala, Primer Nueva Corónica y Buen Gobierno (1615 / 1616), manuscript. Royal Danish Library, GKS 2232 kvart, page 582 [596]. The caption reads: VERDVGO, P[ADR]E, CASTIga afrentosamente desnudo en cueros cin miramiento ci es principal o yndio pobre o yndia [EXECUTIONER, PRIEST, outrageously punishes naked (Indian) without looking (to see) if he is a noble or poor Indian man or woman]. Copyright permission by Royal Danish Library.

Manila: as nineteenth-century advocate of colonial reforms, Marcelo H. del Pilar, put it: “The impunity of the assaults and the preponderance of elements of rebellion force out the most regrettable conclusion that Spain abdicated its sovereignty in favor of monk rule in the Philippines.”8 But if we are to understand Pilar’s statement beyond the realm of hyperbole or “anti-friar propaganda,” we need to clearly establish the legal and institutional bases of Spanish rule overseas; the role assigned to the religious Orders in the aftermath of the so-called conquest of the Philippines; and the consequences that derived from the peculiar character of friars and Jesuits serving as agents of the Crown without, however, being subject to Crown or even Church laws and authority. With the exploration of this paradox, I argue, the institutional 8 La impunidad de los atentados y la preponderancia de los elementos de la rebeldía, arrancan la más triste persuasión de que ya España abdicó de su soberanía en favor del monaquismo f ilipino (Pilar, La soberanía monacal en Filipinas 5). See also Benedict Anderson, “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines,” in Discrepant Histories, ed. Vicente Rafael, 5.

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anarchy of Spanish rule overseas allows us to explore the tragic dimension of the colonized peoples beyond easy reference to processual metaphors like “Hispanization,” “Christianization,” and “Philippinization.”

Patronato Regio [Royal Patronage of the Church] vs. Omnímoda [Complete Powers of the Religious Orders] The discovery and conquest of the Americas, the European wars of religion (following the beginning of the Protestant Reformation), and the rise of the Hapsburg monarchy under Charles V in 1516, all contributed to the revival and recombination of the medieval ideas of a universal Christian community or respublica Christiana and a universal empire or monarchy [monarchia universalis].9 The 1550 Valladolid debate between Fr. Bartolomé de Las Casas and Spanish philosopher Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda reflected the Spanish king’s concern about not only the moral implications of colonization and the rights of colonized peoples, but also more broadly the legitimacy of the Spanish just title to its overseas possessions, which would in turn provide a basis for international law [jus gentium]. Given the prominent role given to the Christian religion in the Reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula under the “Catholic kings” Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile (significantly also known as “Isabela la Católica” for her religious piety); and with the papacy in Rome serving as the de facto principle of cultural cohesion among European powers in the sixteenth century, the monarchs understood the central role Christianity would have to play in consolidating the basis of Spanish rule. In fact, as early as 1508, Pope Julius II granted the Spanish Crown the rights of royal patronage over the Church overseas in the bull Universalis ecclesiae, Universal Church. This meant the establishment of the king as the vicariate supreme pontiff in the newly discovered lands. Throughout the early decades of the sixteenth century, the Spanish Crown promised to financially support the maintenance of the Church overseas, as well as preside over certain matters of its ecclesiastical organization. In return, Charles V assumed the right and responsibility to not only direct and defend the Church’s efforts by his authority as king, but also to provide a secular argument for Spain’s legal title to the Americas that would supplement the religious one. Royal patronage or the Patronato Regio, however, encountered a significant complication with the introduction of the religious Orders as central 9 For the development of these ideas during this period, see Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain, and France c.1500–c.1800, 29–62.

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agents in the conversion effort. Due to what turned out to be the enormous scope of establishing the Church overseas, as well as the prospect of a massive evangelization effort in Asia, Pope Leo X authorized members of the religious or mendicant orders – in the Philippines, these were the Augustinians, followed by the Franciscan and Dominicans, as well as the Jesuits (not a mendicant order but rather a “company”) – to spread Christianity in distant lands until the Church could replace these overseas missions with parishes under the administration of secular clergy. It should be noted here that the latter category of religious ministers are priests ordained by the Church after a period of study and examination, in order to administer all the sacraments in resident parishes. Ordained or secular priests also answered to the ecclesiastical hierarchy of bishops. Both the tasks and responsibilities as well as their structure of accountability within the established or ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Church diverge from those specific to the friar or mendicant Orders. During the medieval period, monks severed all familial and social ties in order to live in cloistered communities. Nineteenth-century Filipino propagandist Marcelo H. del Pilar explains this exemption as a civil death, which frees the monk or friar from social and legal obligations to dedicate himself entirely to the rule of the Order: The monastic profession amounts to civil death, just as canon law mandates, and civil death is incompatible with civil life, which manifests itself first and foremost in national affiliation … That civil death, that national death, is not a purely metaphorical phrase … upon taking his vows, the friar unbinds himself from established civil authority [la patria potestad] … he stands unburdened, in sum, of any obligation to consider, take interest in, or ensure the [welfare of a] family or the prosperity of the nation.10

What is important to recognize here is that monastic withdrawal signified not only the renunciation of worldly possessions and ambitions in the 10 “La profesión monástica es una muerte civil, como así lo estatuye el derecho canónico, y la muerte civil es incompatible con la vida civil, cuya primera manifestación es la nacionalidad … Esa muerte civil, esa muerte nacional, no es una frase puramente metafórica … el fraile, al profesar, queda desligado de la patria potestad; se hace incapaz del derecho dominical y comercial; está excluido de la sucesión activa y pasiva; exento del servicio militar; queda, en fin, relevado de la obligación de mirar, de interesarse y velar por la familia y por la prosperidad de la patria.” Marcelo, H. Del Pilar, Frailocracia, 20. “Active” inheritance refers to the inheritance of assets, while “passive” refers to the inheritance of debt.

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spiritual pursuit of absolute obedience to the rule of the Order [from Latin regula, which is why monks were called regular clergy], but also immunity [immunitas, also called fueros] from civil and even canon law. As we will see, the retention of friar immunity as a privilege granted to members of the religious Orders by the Church constituted the greatest single obstacle to the aim of Spanish hegemony throughout the archipelago. One can already anticipate the problems friar immunity will pose to the emergence of colonial rule under the Crown or viceroy overseas with the 1521 papal bull Alias felicis recordationis [Other Precedents], which reads in part: Superiors and their delegates [of the religious Orders] can announce the word of God in the territories that have been assigned to them. They can preach to all people, hear the confessions of the faithful, administer the sacraments as is the custom in parishes, dispense from impediments, impose ecclesiastical punishments, and absolve from them, commute vows, administer confirmation and minor orders (where no bishop is available), give blessings that are reserved for bishops, buy, change and sell buildings, build, bless and reconcile churches and regulate divine worship (Italics added).11

“As is the custom in parishes … where no bishop is available” are the key phrases that underline the expedient authority of the regular clergy overseas: a provisional authority to participate in civil and religious affairs outside their Orders without, however, ceasing to live outside accountability to either. In the 1522 papal bull Exponi Nobis [We Show or Exhibit, also referred to as Omnímoda, Complete Power(s)], Pope Adrian VI further recognized the expediency of these privileges, which “granted to religious provincials who were two days’ journey from a bishop ‘all manner of our authority in both fora’ (omnimodam auctoritatem nostrom in utroque foro).”12 “The phrase ‘both fora,’” religious historian Stafford Poole adds, “was ecclesiastical terminology for universal jurisdiction … This bull became the single most powerful weapon in the hands of the religious in their struggles with the bishops” (ibid.). 11 “Poterant Superiores eorumque delegati in territoriis sibi destinatis verbum Dei proponere, omnibus praedicare, omnium fidelium confessiones audire, sacramenta paroechialia ministrare, ab impedimentis dispensare, censuras infligere, et ab iisdem absolvere, vota commutare, confirmationem administrare, et ordines mimnores conferre (in defectu Episcopi), benedictiones Espiscopis reservatas dare, domos acquiere, mutare, alienare, ecclesias aedificare, benedicere, reconciliare, divinum cultum moderari.” S. Masarei, De Missionum Institutiones ac de Relationibus inter Superiores Missionum ac Superiores Religiosos, 54. 12 Stafford Poole, Pedro Moya de Contreras, 67

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The license of friars (and later, the Jesuits) to act as ordained priests until such a time as secular clergy became available would not have seemed so extreme, were it not for the fact that, as members of the religious orders, they retained their exemptions or immunitas from civil and canon law, which included oversight by any but their immediate superiors within the order. While tasked with the dual responsibility of introducing Christianity into the native populations and reducing / resettling them to facilitate their exploitation, the religious themselves remained above or immune to the law: “untouchable” as national martyr José Rizal pointed out on several occasions. The regular or monastic clergy’s defiance before the Crown’s attempt at centralizing the control of the Church overseas in the hands of the king and breaking up the autonomy of these missionary orders in Latin America should come as no surprise. Towards the end of the sixteenth century in Latin America, the heads or provincials of the religious orders threatened to withdraw their missions en masse from the Americas when faced with the king’s attempt. Such a move would have precipitated a complete collapse of authority in most areas outside Mexico [City] – Tlaxcala and Lima.13 The following year (in 1574), the provincial heads of the religious Orders traveled to Spain to prevail upon the king himself to rescind the Ordenanzas or Ordinances commanding the implementation of royal patronage, which Philip II did (Poole 151). As we will see, this pattern of resistance to the extension of Crown authority into mission lands became routine in the Philippines all the way up to the nineteenth century.14 The immediate result was the permanence of the doctrina or mission parish under the control of the religious Orders, whose original purpose was to be transitory. These mission parishes, led by regular clergy who were authorized to perform all the sacraments and duties of ordained priests (or secular clergy), never transitioned into parishes in the proper sense of the word. Instead, they remained under friars and Jesuits, who maintained their immunity from civil and canon law as regular clergy.15 13 See Stafford Poole, Pedro Moya de Contreras, 66–67; and Fr. Pablo Fernandez (OP), History of the Church in the Philippines (1521–1898), 108–115. One of the common defenses of the religious orders to their subordination to the inspection of their missions by the bishop and the replacement of said missions with parishes staffed by ordinary or secular priests, was that it would interfere or compromise the authority of the provincial heads of their respective orders (Fernandez, History of the Church in the Philippines, 114–115). 14 See Ma. Dolores Elizalde and Xavier Huetz de Lemps, “Un singular modelo colonizador,” 185–220. 15 See Robert Ricard, The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico, 109: italics added. See also Pedro Rubio Moreno, Don Diego Camacho y Avila, arzobispo de Manila y de Guadalajara de México, 1695–1712, 89–120.

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The jurisdictional stalemate between the missionary orders and the official Church under royal patronage, remained a defining structural feature of colonial government in the Philippines. It also added a peculiar twist to the more prominent controversies unfolding between the Church and Crown in the face of encomendero atrocities.16 These controversies included the question of whether or not Philip II could lay claim to just title to the archipelago; the arbitration over whether or not war against the Indians issued from just causes and was therefore legitimate; the method and approach to deploying the religious to preach the Gospel; and the debate over whether it was lawful to collect tribute from subject populations that had not received the benefits of Christianity or Spanish laws.17 As Jesús Gayo Aragon’s account of these debates illustrates, even the religious Orders were divided in the resolution of these questions, which prompted a series of councils or synods convoked by Bishop (and later Archbishop) Domingo Salazar (OP) in 1582 (ibid.). Yet despite the disagreements between the bishop and provincials of the religious Orders constituting the Synod, both agreed on the primacy of conversion and instruction as the basis of colonial governance – “in ordine ad finem spiritualem” (in order to accomplish the spiritual end[s]) (Sínodo de Manila, 159). The Synod proceedings read as follows: Although there are many causes and reasons why learned men have cast much doubt on the right of possession held by the Spaniards over the lands of the Indians, the chief ones can be summarized as follows: that the captains and soldiers, governors and justices, do not hold any more rights than those given to them by the king, nor does the king hold any more rights than those he has received from the Pope, nor does the Pope hold any more rights than those given to him by Christ. This is the precept and right to be able to go and send [missionaries] throughout the world to preach the Gospel.18 16 By the time Bishop Salazar had convened the Manila Synod in 1582, he was in fact quite familiar with the jurisdictional conflicts taking place in New Spain. See Poole, Pedro Moya de Contreras, 138–141). 17 See Gayo Aragon, “The Controversy over Justification of Spanish Rule in the Philippines,” 5. 18 “Aunque son muchas las causas y razones porque los varones doctos han puesto siempre mucha duda en la posesión que los españoles tienen sobre las tierras de los indios, mas todas se resumen en esta: de que los capitanes y soldados, gobernadores y justicias, no llevasen más derecho del que su rey les había dado, ni el rey les dio más del que él tenía recibido del papa, ni el papa le dio, ni pudo dar, a él, más de lo que él tiene de Cristo, que es el precepto y derecho de poder ir y enviar por todo el mundo a predicar el evangelio.” Fr. Domingo de Salazar, El Sínodo de Manila, 384–385.

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This pronouncement from the 1582 Synod of Manila sternly reminds the Crown that its authority depends directly on spiritual or religious aims of the conquest. Per me reges regnant: through me do rulers rule (see Introduction). Yet the hidden irony behind this solemn declaration of the Synod lay in the non-reciprocal nature of the agreement: while the Crown’s title to its possessions depended on and answered to the mission as frontier institution, the mission and its agents answered to neither the royal patronage of the Church overseas nor the ecclesiastical hierarchy of bishops. Colonial subjects would soon realize that they had become subject to not one rule of law, but a proliferation of petty tyrants, each assigned a town or population that most Spaniards were prohibited from seeing or visiting.

The Regular Orders Against Crown and Church Bishop (and, after 1595, Archbishop) Salazar’s honeymoon with the missionary orders (including his own) did not outlast the Manila Synod. When Fr. Salazar later attempted to enforce the official replacement of missions by parishes (and missionaries by secular priests), the inspection (called visitation) of the doctrinas, and the accountability of church records, the Augustinian Order was the first to refuse, invoking their privilege of autonomy or Omnímoda faculties granted to them by the Pope Adrian VI; and the other religious Orders quickly followed suit.19 Later, amidst the escalation of war against the Muslim sultan Qudarat in Mindanao and the insurrection of Chinese residents during the administration of Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera (1635–1644), the governor general found himself almost immediately in conflict with the religious Orders over the implementation of laws. Corcuera’s 1636 report to the Spanish Crown illustrates the governor general’s exasperation with the following words: It seems that Your Majesty (may God protect you) did not send me to govern your Philippine Islands but to conquer them from the religious Orders of Saint Dominic [the Dominicans], S. Francis [the Franciscans], and S. Augustine [the Augustinians] as in the eleven months since I arrived to [the islands] I have had no other matter to attend than establishing the jurisdiction of Your Majesty and His Royal Patronage and reducing said Orders so that they understand that Your Majesty is their natural Lord, and Lord of said Islands and up to now either because they have governed 19 Fr. Horacio de la Costa, Jesuits in the Philippines, 258.

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the governors, reached and obtained all they have desired or because [governors] fear their dissolute Preachings or because between their Pleadings and threats they have been denied nothing, [the authorities] have conceded to them all their requests, just or unjust.20

The regular clergy, Corcuera alleges, oppose the orders and instructions of the provincial governor or Alcalde Mayor and justices of the towns “in everything and entirely”; they falsely inflate the number of missions in order to request more religious personnel and stipends; they rob the Indians of their merchandise at a price of their choosing, enslaving them to poverty; they oppose the requisition of goods for redistribution by alcalde mayors; they punish Indians by whipping them or having their minions whip them.21 Finally, and most disturbingly, Corcuera alleges that friars use their ill-gotten wealth to lobby for bishops who would support the autonomy of the religious Orders against the encroachment of the Crown and colonial government. Most bishops, not coincidentally, who served in the Philippines came from one of the monastic Orders. Corcuera’s simultaneous conflict with Archbishop Guerrero (OSA), himself a member of the Augustinian Order, during this period, has tended to overshadow the colonial governor’s more systematic critique of the conflict of temporal and spiritual authorities. The oftentimes spectacular clashes between the two led to not only Corcuera’s (temporary) excommunication but also his imprisonment for two years upon retiring from the governorship in 1644.22 Yet the publication of high court justice [oidor] Don Salvador Gómez de Espinosa’s pamphlet, titled Discurso parenético [Parenthetical Discourse] in 1657, clearly demonstrates that the conflict between “the 20 “Parece que V. Magestad (Dios le guarde) no me embio a gobernar sus yslas Philippinas sino a conquistarlas de las Religiones de Santo Domingo, San Francisco, y San Agustín pues en onze meses que a que llegue a ellas no he tenido otra cossa que hacer que entablar la Jurisdiccion de V. Magestad y su Patronazgo Real y rreducir a las dichas Religones a que entiendan solo V. Magestad es su Señor natural. y assi mismo de las dichas yslas y hasta ahora o porque han gobernado a los gobernadores, alcanzado y obtenido quanto an querido o por temor de sus Predicaciones tan desembueltas o porque con sus Ruegos y amenaças nunca se les anegado nada… se les an conçedido sus Peticiones Justas o injustas.” “Carta de Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera, gobernador de Filipinas, dando cuenta del proceder de los religiosos de Santo Domingo, San Francisco y San Agustín, que no obedecen a Su Santidad ni acatan las cédulas reales.” AGI Filipinas, 21, R. 10, n. 42 (1). 21 See Chapter 5 for examples of priests represented as kings. The practice of corporal punishment by the parish priest continued well into the eighteenth century: see Le Gentil, Voyage dans les mers de l’Inde, v.2, 59–63; and Monsieur (Pierre Marie François) de Pagès, Travels Round the World in the Years 1767, 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 197. 22 See Nicholas Cushner, Spain in the Philippines, 162–165.

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Church” and “the Crown” masked the underlying conflict between the legal immunity or fueros of the religious Orders within and against both official Church and Crown.23 While Gómez de Espinosa emphasized that his exposé of friar abuses should not cast aspersions on the character or accomplishments of many missionaries, he begins by charging that the few and limited, publicized cases of friar abuses were enough to represent the religious Orders as “the most absolute in power and least resisted in obedience.”24 A survey of Espinosa’s enumeration of friar abuses shows how these abuses can be divided into four or five categories. First are the various exactions committed by the religious upon the natives: the f inancing of lavish f iestas (158 par. 9); obligatory church donations, which they call the Pasalamat [lit. in thanks of / for] (159 par. 11); outright and violent extortion (160 par. 16); and excessive fees for the administration of sacraments. The second category encompasses various subcategories of forced labor, whether these concern the official requisition of mandatory labor in public works [repartimiento, 161 par. 23 and 164 par. 36); unpaid domestic labor for the missionaries [tanores, 162 par. 27); personal services assigned specifically to young unmarried girls [servicios personales, 162 par. 29]; and the continuance of slave labor on the Sabbath and various holidays [ibid.]. A third category covers a particular form of exaction, in which missionaries pressured dying natives to bequeath to the missionary order or Church whatever wealth their children would otherwise inherit (165 par. 42). It is through this form of religious blackmail that the missionary orders began to accumulate landed estates [haciendas], which contradicted the vow of poverty professed by the mendicant Orders.25 The fourth category deals with corporal punishment (170 par. 61 and 177 par. 91), in which the missionary priest takes it upon himself to administer the civil law without authorization to do so by the Crown or colonial government. The final category also involves the friar’s infringement on the civil power, as it concerns the friar’s self-appointed authority to apply exemptions to the tribute for various native subjects without approval from or consultation with either encomendero or alcalde mayor. The result, Espinosa concludes, 23 The Jesuit historian J.S. Cummins reads the Discurso parenético against the background of uprising and rebellion throughout the archipelago during this period: see J.S. Cummins [with Nicholas P. Cushner (SJ)], “Labor in the Colonial Philippines,” in Jesuit and Friar in the Spanish Expansion to the East, 123. 24 D. Salvador Gómez de Espinosa, Discurso parenético, in Cummins, Jesuit and Friar, 157. 25 Significantly, the Jesuits had no such vow of poverty, which accounts for at least some of the tension between Jesuits and the other religious Orders in the encroachment of their province on the land of other existing missions.

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is the perpetuation of a world in which “the laws, ordinances, and [royal] instructions, which are not observed, are nothing but dead letters cast about in the streets and plazas, which only serve to bring scandal upon these kingdoms” (194 par. 15). The response of the religious Orders to Espinosa’s work was predictable: with the exception of Jesuit priest Fr. Francisco Combés (SJ), who approved the printing of the discourse, the rest of them denounced the discourse from the pulpit as well as official correspondence, leading to its censorship, recall, and the burning of most copies. Quite tellingly, one of the strongest arguments against the publication of the document reads as one of the strongest arguments in favor of publishing such a work today. In the words of an anonymous writer, “the theological error of the Discurso lies in its intolerable and scandalous attempt to impose laws upon the ecclesiastical state” (Cummins, 141). The assumption that lay behind such indignation, of course, was that there was neither cause nor reason for the religious Orders to obey or acknowledge any laws insofar as these Orders were administered according to their own rules of governance; and exercised oversight over their own operations. The changing vicissitudes of the Spanish-Portuguese-Dutch commercial rivalry, the ongoing war with the sultanate of Mindanao (southern Philippines) and Moro piracy, and the rapid influx of Chinese immigrants throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, should not obscure the remarkable continuity of the fault line between the colonial government and the religious Orders, with the Archbishop siding with one or the other depending upon his loyalties. With every attempt to oblige the Orders to submit to royal patronage, the missionaries would threaten to resign from their doctrinas en masse. Faced with a possible shortage of secular priests to replace them, the colonial government would have to back down.26 And while the Council of the Indies would routinely reiterate the illegality of the missionaries’ position, it had no means to enforce their judgment. Such was the situation at the end of the seventeenth century. The same year that the Augustinian missionary Fr. Gaspar de San Agustín highlighted the higher unity and interdependence of the temporal and spiritual authorities in their joint “spiritual conquest,” Archbishop Don Diego Camacho y 26 See Costa, Jesuits in the Philippines, 419–429 and 524–529; and Pedro Rubio Merino, Don Diego Camacho y Ávila, 121–152. As Fr. Costa underlines, however, “This did not mean, of course, that the royal council to the captain-general and governor or audiencia had come to recognize the justice of the religious orders’ cause. They merely recognized the impossibility under the circumstances of enforcing the claims of the Crown” (428–429).

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Ávila instructed soldiers to put an axe to the doors of the Binondo church, which had been locked by the Augustinian missionary priest Padre Marrón in protest of the Archbishop’s official visitation and inspection of the doctrina.27 In anticipation of the Archbishop’s arrival, the religious Orders had conspired to defend themselves against the episcopal authority of the Church and Crown by signing a Concordia, common agreement, in which the Orders agreed to stonewall any action to subordinate any of the religious Orders to civil law or official visitation by the Church. Should the government attempt this, the Orders agreed to act in concert to resign from the missions and retire to their monasteries.28 Archbishop Camacho’s indictment of what amounted to collusion among the religious Orders deserves to be cited at length: Since many previous Bishops have attempted to conduct official visitations to the churches and ministries, or doctrinas, under the charge of the religious orders in the administration and official duty of parishes, and [since] the Provincials [official heads] have always regarded it as their obligation to abandon the ministries before submitting themselves to such an official visitation, as they [believe themselves as] conduct[ing] this official duty not out of legal obligation but out of charity, and such charity cannot be exercised under the sufferance of visitation, since their principal obligation is to secure in the most effective way the greater and perpetual observance of their profession and solemn vow, subject only to God, as well as thereby forestalling any cause, motive, or occasion that might bring about the relaxation of observance of the laws they have professed (cited in Rubio Merino, 117–118. Italics added).29

This passage condenses and frames the eighteen chapters under which the Concordia among the religious orders is organized. Here, the rule that binds missionaries to the respective rule of their orders prevails over their 27 See Rubio Merino, Archbishop Don Diego Camacho y Ávila, 138–151. 28 For the full text of this remarkable document, see ibid., 509–520. 29 Puesto que muchos Obispos anteriores han intentado visitar las iglesias y ministerios, o doctrinas, a cargo de los religiosos en la administración y oficio de párrocos, y los Provinciales siempre han visto ser su obligación abandonar los ministerios antes que someterse a tal visita, por tenerlo solo por oficio de caridad y no de justicia, y que dicha caridad no la pueden ejercer con el gravamen de la visita, pues su principal obligación es procurar eficacísimamente la mayor y perpetua observancia de su profesión y voto solemne, sujeto solo a Dios, previniendo también para ello cualesquiera causa, motivo u ocasión que se pueda tomar, para la relajación de la observancia de las leyes que han profesado.

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administration of and fealty to either civil or canon law, insofar as their vows to the rule of their respective monastic orders allow them to occupy a jurisdictional space whose relationship to the law is anomalous. Their fulfillment of certain ecclesiastical obligations in the role of ersatz parish priests, therefore, does not negate the fact that they do not operate within the jurisdiction of the law, and in fact have no obligation to it: in the words of the Concordia they act “not out of legal obligation but charity … being subject only to God” (“por tenerlo solo por oficio de caridad y no de justicia … sujeto solo a Dios”).30 The anarchy of colonial law coalesces around this central enigma: at what point does the jurisdiction of the Church become accountable to the jurisdiction of the king’s laws, if at all? Archbishop Camacho rightly saw the legal absurdity of monastic immunity, which placed the episcopal authority of the bishop in the situation of asking permission from the religious Orders to enforce both canon and civil laws over them (Rubio Merino, 170–71). The Archbishop’s attempts to counteract the intransigence of the monastic Orders and Jesuits entailed both the recruitment of secular or ordinary priests from the Americas and the development of a secular clergy in the Philippines. In his proposal to replace the mission parishes with secular clergy trained in the Philippines, Camacho begins his proposal by denouncing “the apparent and contemptible evasions and pretexts of said Regular [Orders], with which they have wanted to equivocate and confuse the matter in order to conserve the absolute liberty in which they have lived with deep roots in the past one hundred and forty years, with notorious laxity in the observance of their customs, ill example, and scandal throughout these parts.”31 The friars observe “neither respect nor fear of the laws” and enjoy “total independence from fear and human punishment.” The result is “a monstrosity never before seen, nor foreseen in the Old World nor in past ages, and which has consistently and permanently worked against any order to the Universe under your most just Highnesses, and inscrutable judgments of God, to our confusion and as punishment of our abominable sins” (ibid., 298). After outlining the various difficulties of developing a secular clergy under institutions that are themselves owned and managed by the religious Orders, Fr. Camacho laments the easy disappointment of 30 See “Traslado auténtico de la Concordia de las Religiones,” in Rubio Merino, Archbishop Don Diego Camacho y Ávila, 509–20 [Appendix A]. Inga Clendinnen observes a similar threat of a “friars’ strike” organized by the religious Orders against Bishop of Yucatan, Fr. Francisco de Toral in the sixteenth century: see Ambivalent Conquests, 97. 31 “Informe de Sr. Camacho a SM sobre el modo mas ajustado de administración de las Islas en caso de que los regulares se resistan a la visita.” UST Archives (Libros), Tomo 59.17.

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candidates for the priesthood, when they see the poverty of the secular clergy in stark contrast to the opulence and liberty of the missions (300). He also deplores the various forms of extortion the religious Orders commit against their own subjects. In a passage reminiscent of Fr. Bartolomé de Las Casas’s indictment of conquistador abuses, Archbishop Camacho condemns the members of the religious Orders in the following way: the unfortunate natives of these Islands suffer and feel [friar impunity], as with the lack of protection, doctrine, and rights they see themselves innocently stripped to the bone, and ravaged by those same Pastors transformed into savage wolves, and thus under such continuous and cruel undertakings, spoliations, and stripping of the small fortune of said natives they see themselves today grown extinct and exhausted as they are no little more than dry cadavers deprived of their own substance and blood (301).32

The impunity granted to friars through their immunity to laws, in conjunction with the frontier context of the mission, cannot avoid the characterization of institutional and legal anarchy, whose resolution had to eventually and oftentimes involve the direct intervention of the king.33 Anarchy prevailed in the institutional conflicts concerning the Crown, the viceroys, the bishoprics, and the missionary orders. Both the Crown and Council of Trent labored to centralize authority within their respective domains of civil and canon law; and to further unify these projects under royal patronage. Yet neither party anticipated the original character of the overseas frontier, which allowed monastic rule to fester like a social cancer. The preservation and consolidation of friar license provides the basis for exploring how, contrary to serving or facilitating the interests of Hispanization or Hispanic acculturation in its legal, institutional, social, and cultural dimensions, the religious Orders exercised a counter-Hispanizing influence: buttressing the legal anomalousness of the frontier province while also elevating the resulting double-standard to the highest colonial offices. Juxtaposed to what colonial historians and propagandists called the spread of Spanish “civilization” and institutional development, what we are in fact 32 [sienten los desventurados Naturales de estas Islas, que con falta de protección, Doctrina, y beneficio propio se ven inocentemente ex carnificados, y destrozados de los mismos Pastores convertidos en fieros lobos, y así con tan continua y cruel ejecución, despojo, y saca del corto caudal de dichos Naturales se ven el día de hoy tan erradicados y exhaustos que ya no son sino unos secos cadáveres deshechos de su propia substancia. 33 See Alejandro Cañeque, The King’s Living Image.

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witnessing is the spread of its inverted, Bizarro-like twin process, which Mexican Cecilia Sheridan Prieto (examining a similar historical development in northern Mexico) has identified as frontierization: the preservation and defense of legal and institutional anarchy.34

Immunity and / as Impunity in the Mission as Frontier Institution One may, of course, argue that the denunciations of friar abuse by Corcuera, oídor Espinosa, Archbishop Camacho, and other colonial off icials and Church representatives would be biased from the beginning. In fact, the very acknowledgment of the existence of “two Majesties” – the temporal and spiritual, or religious powers – as distinct but equal authorities upholding the legitimacy of Spanish rule, could not but generate conflicts and exacerbate already existing overlapping jurisdictions. In 1668, for example, twelve years before Archbishop Camacho’s tenure, Augustinian priest and high commissioner of the Holy Inquisition Fray Joseph de Paternina had then-governor general Diego de Salcedo imprisoned in the Augustinian convent, under charges of heresy in his treatment and communication with the Dutch.35 Several decades later (in 1716), Governor Manuel de Bustillo Bustamante and his son were murdered in the government palace by a mob incited by the religious Orders. The governor had imprisoned Archbishop Francisco de la Cuesta for refusing to release a fugitive from the cathedral, where the latter had sought sanctuary.36 Uncertain about how to proceed, Archbishop Cuesta consulted the Jesuit and Dominican Orders for advice, whereupon he was told in no uncertain terms that Governor Bustamante’s request for the extradition of the fugitive from the cathedral constituted a transgression against religious immunity from the law.37 Yet the Bolinao manuscript, as we have seen earlier, seriously challenges the charge of bias among secular authorities, by presenting a case in which one religious Order (the Dominicans) felt compelled to denounce another (the Recollects) for manifesting so clearly the fears of the colonial 34 Cecilia Sheridan Prieto, Fronterización del espacio hacia el norte. 35 See Henry Charles Lea, “The Decadence of Spain,” The Atlantic (July 1898). 36 For a fuller account of the death of Governor Bustamante, see Fr. Juan de la Concepción (OAR), Historia general de Philipinas. Conquistas espirituales y temporales de estos españoles dominios, establecimientos progresos, y decadencias, v. 9: 267–424. An abbreviated version of Fr. Concepción’s account can be found in BRPI v. 44, 148–195. 37 Concepción, ibid., 277–279.

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government regarding the administration of Indian towns under the mission parish or doctrina. The cultural historian Carolyn Brewer reads the Bolinao manuscript primarily as a “holy confrontation” between the Animist traditions and practices of native communities on the one hand, and the intrusive and inquisitorial imposition of Christian dogma and resettlement policies of the Spaniards on the other.38 Strangely, she misses what one may argue was the fundamental factor in the perseverance of native belief and devotion to the memory of pre-Christian, animist, and ancestor-worship traditions; namely, the utter neglect, moral bankruptcy, turpitude, and impunity of the Recollect missionaries in Zambales province. According to the testimony of numerous witnesses, the Recollects committed virtually every excess and abuse of authority that missionary priests could possibly commit; and that Gómez de Espinosa’s Discurso had warned so sternly against. These abuses began with illegal and excessive fees (particularly for the administration of sacraments like marriage and last rites / burial fees) and forced donations [limosnas]; moved up to the ladder of crime to extortion, bribery, blackmail, theft of native goods, and contraband trade directly with Manila; and culminated in coercing young men and women to labor in the fields and in the convent; and where they (particularly young girls) would be raped. Recollect ministers would inspect the surrounding missionary settlements or visitas only once or twice a year, mainly to coerce the existing population to donate funds and resources to the flailing mission. Anyone showing signs of disobedience or disagreement would be whipped. One of the primary interviewers, Fr. Santos, focused on the Prior of the Bolinao mission, Fr. Padre Fray Martín de San Pablo, as the anchor of missionary corruption and impunity in this harrowing account: [The witness or declarant] said, that one of the principal causes responsible for the destruction of the Christianity of these natives has been the most serious scandals, which they have seen in the aforesaid Recollect Fathers in matters of dishonesty and great addiction to temporal things, these being well-known and infamous in this town, that the majority of said Father ministers who have administered in the range of the past sixteen years in this area, have been cohabiting, to the great scandal of these natives, with not one woman, but with many, and there had even been a religious of the said Recollects, who during the time he served as Prior 38 See Brewer, Shamanism, Catholicism, and Gender Relations in Colonial Philippines, 183.

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had from different women five children, which are considered and called by the town the children of the chief Father (5–6).39

Fr. Santos’s testimony, which was corroborated by other witnesses, relates how the Recollect prior, kept a retinue of up to five girls and / or women; and, “fornicated with the one he wanted the most in the presence of the others, who stared on at the sexual act, and even more, [the witness / declarant] heard a woman, who was one of those who ordinarily entered the cell named Mariana Medrana, that [the women] resisted the said Father, who became angry, even if their resistance was but little, and he whipped them for that” (italics added). 40 The unguarded testimony of the latter victim is heartbreaking: at one point, Mariana Medrana declares that she would turn away from watching her companions being sexually assaulted, because the priest exercised such violence, and one of the victims herself was “so young and almost incapable of the [sexual] act,” that the other women feared for her life. 41 The aforementioned prior would also force other young girls to accompany him when he traveled to the surrounding native settlements in order to extort “donations.” As if this were not enough, he also pursued by bribery and blackmail the wives of other town members to satiate his wickedness: some of these town members even held official posts in the Spanish government. While the abhorrent catalog of outrages committed by the Recollect missionaries in the report deserves fuller elaboration elsewhere (there are many others), several main consequences of missionary depredation and abuse need to be highlighted immediately. The first is perhaps the most obvious: with the attention of the missionaries so occupied with their “great addiction to temporal things,” none of the Christian neophytes receive 39 Dijo, que una de las causas, que principalmente a destruido la Cristiandad de estos Naturales, han sido los gravísimos escándalos, que han visto en dichos Padres Recoletos en materia de deshonestidad y grande apego a las cosas temporales, por ser público y notorio [en] este Pueblo, que los más de los dichos Padres Ministros, que han administrado en el de mar de diez y seis años a esta parte, han estado amancebados con notable escándalo de dichos Naturales, y no con una sola mujer, sino con muchas, y ha habido Religioso de dichos Recoletos, que en las veces que ha sido Prior ha tenido en diversas mujeres cinco hijos, los cuales son tenidos y llamados en este Pueblo hijos del dicho Padre Prior. 40 se juntaba con la que mejor le parecía en presencia de las demás, que estaban mirando el concúbito, y más oyó a una mujer, que era de las que ordinariamente entraban en la Celda llamada Mariana Medrana, que resistían al dicho Padre se enojaba, aunque fuese poca la resistencia, y que las azotaba por eso. 41 volvía ella el rostro a otra parte, porque tenía gran empacho en de ver tan gran desenfrenamiento, y que siendo ella muy chiquilla y casi incapaz para el acto.

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sufficient instruction in any matters of the faith or the meaning of Christian sacraments. 42 The Dominicans discover to their scandal that the sixth commandment (Do not commit adultery) has been translated imprecisely into Binbubolinao as “Do not commit excessive adultery” (“andica pacalauran sa ombo mon asaua, que quiere decir, no fornicarás mucho con la que no es tu mujer”); that many natives do not know how to pray; that nobody believes the Virgin Mary willingly agreed to conceive Jesus Christ; and that the translation of the word “redemption” to describe Christ’s mission comes across as the term for economic exchange or barter (pt. 2: 4 and pt. 3: 15). 43 And when a holy crucifix is sent to Bolinao from Manila, many baptized Christians do not recognize “that Spaniard” hanging on the cross, and ask the Dominican preachers what crime he has committed. While the “pestilence of Idolatry” cannot be wholly ascribed to friar abuses, the Dominicans themselves repeatedly link the observance of pre-Hispanic customs to the negligence and indifference of the Recollects. The second consequence of missionary abuse is the deracination of native societies and culture (a theme that will be further explored in Chapter 3). Prohibited from practicing their ancient forms of worship and ritual, Christian neophytes found themselves at the same time ignorant of and deprived of access to the new religion – and, by extension, the law or order that it presumes. Caught between the impossibility of going back to an existence that preceded the Spaniards; and the impossibility of adjusting, accommodating, or absorbing the new religion and law, natives follow the anticipated path of unsuccessfully doing both. On the one hand, they continued to practice their veneration of anitos (ancestral spirits and divinities) in secret. A transcript by a Dominican priest of the rituals practiced by members of a sitio or visita of Bolinao called Masinglo in honor of their ancestral spirits exemplifies the natives’ recourse to secrecy: “Anitos and those dead who are honored with this food, which we offer to you, grant us your favor, and give us what we need, food and health, now that the time of the great ritual feast (Maganito) draws near, the unfortunate thing being that there is oftentimes little opportunity (to hold ritual sacrifices) because there are many Spaniards (pt. 3: 12). 44 On the other hand, natives also mimic the Spanish 42 toda ella estaba inf icionada de la peste de la Idolatría, y llenos de los mismos errores, y totalmente ignorantes, de las cosas de Nuestra Santa Fe. 43 For the sixth commandment, the English translation probably reads something more like: “Do not repeatedly frolic with another’s spouse” as opposed to “Do not ever…” 44 The original reads: Mangancomoyna malabay anito nangamati aricamo yacatabang ybueng pacabiguen a pamanganmitan pacaligsanen cami matindig away aulon panganito duca tucay cauanauana ta omangay castila (pt. 3: 12).

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religion and culture without understanding any of it. In the words of Fr. Santos, “although [the interviewer] found some Indians [men and women], who knew the literal text of the doctrine, they didn’t understand it, nor did they understand the mysteries of our Holy Faith, and they call the Ten Commandments [simply] discretionary.”45 Even worse, to the scandal and dismay of the Dominican preachers and the natives alike, the imitation of Spanish ways and customs extended beyond what the friars taught to their actual example. As one of the native leaders or principales of Bolinao, Don Gaspar Montoya bemoans: “speaking of the aforesaid Recollect Fathers, they destroyed us with their scandals, because after seeing what they did we imitated them, doing the same; and this is what another leader named Don Antonio Valdes, at present the watchman, also told the declarant” (pt. 2:6: italics added).46 Any scholar investigating the roots of Philippine misogyny would do well to study the history of the religious. The third consequence constitutes the most general and visible manifestation of frontier (in)justice: impunity. The Recollect mission exemplified the fundamental impossibility of enforcing a law in a zone defined by the absence or unenforceability of law, with the mission as a frontier(ization) institution. From the perspective of the law, the responsibility of enforcing religious discipline among the community or “flock” of believers would or should lie with the priest; the discipline of the pastors, in turn, lies with the head priest or prior. The prior, in turn, reports to the provincial, chief priest, or spiritual director of the religious Order in question, in Manila; who, in turn, reports to the Holy See in Rome. Notably, however, the provincial did not report to the Archbishop, who answered to not only the Pope in Rome but also the Crown. This is because, as we saw earlier, missionaries did not recognize the intermediary episcopal authority of the Archbishop, who reported to the viceroy. A host of questions regarding the administration of law under a jurisdiction characterized by the law’s absence emerge. How can priests be expected to enforce a law that they themselves do not recognize? Above all, what if a situation obtains (as it does here), which allows all parties outside the Crown to benefit from the breakdown or absence of law and oversight? When the natives of Bolinao protest to the inspector from Manila about the crimes visited upon them by the Recollect missionaries, the inspector’s response 45 aunque halló algunos Indios, Indias, que sabían el texto de la doctrina, no la entendían, ni sabían los misterios de Nuestra Santa Fe, y a los mandamientos de Ley de Dios llaman consejos” (pt. 3: 15). 46 hablando de dichos Padres Recoletos, ellos nos destruyeron con sus escándalos, porque nosotros viendo lo que hacían les imitábamos haciendo lo mismo; y así mismo le dijo a este declarante otro principal llamado Don Antonio Valdes actual Celador.

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is inexcusable but not entirely unpredictable. As the declarant Fr. Juan Santos reports: although inspectors belonging to the aforesaid Recollects, or their provincial heads came to the aforesaid Province, to inspect the Religious in question, these disorders and scandals were neither remedied nor given satisfaction, and … when the Provincial head or Inspector came, some town leaders came to him and presented various grievances they had against the Prior, or minister, and instead of these being addressed, [the town leaders] were fined by the aforesaid inspector, or Provincial head [italics added].47

This response of the Recollect Order’s provincial director prompted an exclamation of despair from a native witness to the investigation: “and thus a woman named Clemencia Sinagan, who has since passed away, told the declarant on one occasion, after recalling these things with regret, that the reason [the grievances] were not addressed, despite the Inspectors’ visit, was because they were all of [sic] the same way.”48 Her faithlessness in the religious ministers was well earned: in the Recollects’ only other known response to the report on Fr. Martín de San Pablo’s outrages, we read that the Order had him transferred to various doctrinas where the latter continued to serve as Prior. Fr. Martín de San Pablo was then promoted to chief provincial Inspector [Visitador] of Naujan and Calavite (on the island of Mindoro); and afterwards provincial Inspector, Vicar, and President of the Order’s hospice in Mexico. He died en route to Acapulco from Manila in 1696. 49

Counter-Hispanization and / as Frontierization In 1923, American historian Herbert Bolton famously identified the missions of California and the rest of Latin America as a “frontier institution.”50 He 47 aunque venían a esta dicha Provincia visitadores de dichos Recoletos, o sus Provinciales a visitar a dichos sus Religiosos, no por eso se remediaba ni se daba satisfacción a estos desordenes y escándalos, y el dicho Mestizo Don Andrés de la Cruz le dijo a este declarante, que habiendo venido un Visitador, o Provincial, acudieron a el algunos principales presentando algunas quejas contra el Prior, o Ministro, que entonces tenían, y en lugar de salir remediados salieron multados por dicho visitador, o Provincial, (pt. 2: 7–8). 48 “y así una mujer llamada Clemencia Sinagan que ya es difunta, le dijo en una ocasión a este declarante lastimándose de estas cosas, que la razón porque no se remediaban , aunque viniesen Visitadores, era porque todos eran de una misma manera” (ibid., italics added). 49 Thanks to Jorge Mojarro for this information. 50 See Bolton, “The Mission as Frontier Institution.”

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unabashedly ascribed the so-called civilization of indigenous peoples of the Americas to a combination of the missionaries’ role as pioneers and explorers and their emphasis on that highly esteemed Western value of discipline (53–59). While his exaggerated exaltation of Spain’s “frontiering genius” (61) cannot detain us here, the essay’s title nevertheless captures a paradox that the religious never ceased to invoke in their favor: (that) the mission was an institution authorized by the Crown to labor in an area where the law cannot be effectively applied. The Latin provincia (from which the Spanish term is derived), which the religious orders used to refer to their jurisdiction within a given region or island in the Philippines, evokes this ambiguity: from its etymological roots pro- [before, to the front (of)] and vincere [to conquer], it designates an area, singled out for the administration of religious authority, but not yet absorbed or assumed under the jurisdiction of the Crown. By ceaselessly laboring to maintain the pro- or frontier character of Spanish rule in the Philippines, the religious Orders not only succeeded in arresting the progress of Spanish civil institutions throughout the period of colonial rule but also reinforced missionary autonomy from said institutions. Far from encouraging what Phelan identified as the “Spanish aim” of “Hispanization,” then, the agency of the religious Orders set in motion a counter-Hispanizing process described by Cecilia Sheridan Prieto as “frontierization”: the establishment and perpetuation of legal and institutional hypocrisy until at least the end of the eighteenth century, if not all the way up to the end of Spanish rule. The two main consequences of frontierization included the production of a colonial wasteland or netherworld, defined by transient populations living just beyond the reach of the mission (see Chapter 1); and the perpetuation of conquistador violence and abuse under the mantle of friar impunity, depredation, and fraud. One may ask: can individual cases like those of the Recollect Order call into question the innumerable acts of justice, mercy, and sacrifice that the religious Orders credit themselves with performing over the course of three hundred years? For every monkish predator, can we not also read many examples of true spiritual “warriors,” whose feats of abstinence, self-castigation, devout prayer, and tireless service – extraordinary lives illustrated in religious chronicles as exempla – deserve more praise than blame, and more innocence than guilt? These questions remain a source of popular debate in the Philippines today. Yet they cannot serve as the point of departure for a proper inquiry into the anomaly of the mission as frontierizing institution, whose task was to mirror on a legal level the state of social anomie: accommodating it in the name of accommodating Indians to resettlement and conversion to Christianity. The stage is set, in any case, for the religious Orders to narrate their history of the Philippines, as one of spiritual conquest.

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Bibliography Anderson, Benedict R. O’G. “Cacique Democracy in the Philippines,” in Rafael, Vicente, ed. Discrepant Histories. Translocal Essays on Filipino Cultures. Philadelphia, PN: Temple University Press, 1995. Blair, Emma, and Robertson, James, eds. Project Gutenberg’s The Philippine Islands, 1493–1803. 55v. EBook #13255, 2004. Brewer, Carolyn. Shamanism, Catholicism, and Gender Relations in Colonial Philippines, 1521–1685. London, UK: Ashgate, 2004. Cañeque, Alejandro. The King’s Living Image: The Culture and Politics of Viceregal Power in Colonial Mexico. London: Routledge, 2004. “Carta de Corcuera criticando a los religiosos,” AGI FILIPINAS, 21, R.10, N. 42 (1636). “Carta de Felipe Pardo sobre la idolatría de los naturales de la provincia de Zambales, y de los del pueblo de Santo Tomás y otros circunvecinos,” (1686–88). AGI FILIPINAS, 75, N. 23. “Carta de Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera, gobernador de Filipinas, dando cuenta del proceder de los religiosos de Santo Domingo, San Francisco y San Agustín, que no obedecen a Su Santidad ni acatan las cédulas reales” (1636). AGI FILIPINAS, 21, R.10, N. 42. Charles Lea, Henry. “The Decadence of Spain,” The Atlantic (July 1898 issue). https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/toc/1898/07/. Last accessed November 17, 2022. Clendinnen, Inga. Ambivalent Conquests: Maya and Spaniard in Yucatan, 1517–1570. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Concepción, Fr. Juan de la (OAR), Historia general de Philipinas. Conquistas espirituales y temporales de estos españoles dominios, establecimientos progresos, y decadencias, v.9. Manila: Imprenta del Seminario Conciliar, y Real de San Carlos: Por Agustín de la Rosa y Balagtas, 1788. Costa, Horacio de la. The Jesuits in the Philippines, 1581–1768. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961. Cummins, J. S. Jesuit and Friar in the Spanish Expansion to the East. London, UK: Variorum Reprints, 1986. Cushner, Fr. Nicholas (SJ). Spain in the Philippines: from Conquest to Revolution. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1971. Elizalde, Ma. Dolores and Huetz de Lemps, Xavier. “Un singular modelo colonizador: El papel de las Órdenes religiosas en la administración española de Filipinas, siglos XVI al XIX.” Illes i imperis: Estudios de la historia de las sociedades en el mundo colonial y post-colonial 17 (2015). 185–222. Fernandez, Fr. Pablo (OP). History of the Church in the Philippines (1521–1898). San Juan (Manila), Philippines: Life Today Publications, 1988.

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Galaisière, Guillaume Joseph Hyacinthe Jean Baptiste Le Gentil de La. Voyage dans les mers de l’Inde: fait par ordre du roi, à l’occasion du passage de Vénus, sur le disque de soleil, le 6 juin 1761, & le 3 du même mois 1769. Chez Les Libraires Associés, 1780. Gayo y Aragon, Fr. Jesús (OP). “The Controversy over Justification of Spanish Rule in the Philippines,” in Anderson, Gerald, ed. Studies in Philippine Church History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1969. 3–21. Guamán Poma de Ayala, Felipe de. El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615–1616), on The Guaman Poma Website. Royal Library, Copenhagen, Denmark. Web. www5.kb.dk/permalink/2006/poma/info/en/frontpage.htm. Last accessed November 18, 2022. “Informe de Sr. Camacho a SM sobre el modo mas ajustado de administración de las Islas en caso de que los regulares se resistan a la visita” (3 October 1704). Libros Tomo 59.17. Masarei, Seraphinus. De Missionum Institutiones ac de Relationibus inter Superiores Missionum ac Superiores Religiosos (Gregorian doctoral diss. 267, 1940). Pagden, Anthony. Lords of All the World: Ideologies of Empire in Spain, Britain and France, c. 1500–c.1899. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1995. Pagès, Monsieur (Pierre Marie François) de. Travels Round the World in the Years 1767, 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, v. 1. London, 1791. Pilar y Gatmaitan, Marcelo Hilario del. La frailocracia filipina. Madrid, Spain: Imprenta ibérica de F. Fossas, 1889. Pilar y Gatmaitan, Marcelo Hilario del. La Soberania Monacal En Filipinas. Madrid, Spain: Fossas, 1888. Poole, Stafford. Pedro Moya de Contreras: Catholic Reform and Royal Power in New Spain, 1571–1591. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1987. Ricard, Robert. The Spiritual Conquest of Mexico: An Essay on the Apostolate and the Evangelizing Methods of the Mendicant Orders in New Spain, 1523–1572. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1966. Rubio Merino, Pedro. Don Diego Camacho Y Avila, Arzobispo de Manila de Guadalajara de Mexico, 1695–1712. Seville, Spain: Escuela de Estudios Hispano Americanos, 1958. Salazar, Fr. Domingo de. Sínodo de Manila de 1582. Edited by José Luis Porras Camúñez. Madrid, Spain: Centro de Estudios Históricos del Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1988. Wachtel, Nathan. Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes 1530–1570. Translated by Ben and Siân Reynolds. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble Import Division, Harper and Row Publishers, 1977.

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Stagings of Spiritual Conquest The creation of colonial reality that occurred in the New World will remain a subject of immense curiosity and study … Whatever conclusions we draw about how that hegemony was so speedily effected, we would be unwise to overlook the role of terror … the space of death where the Indian, African, and white gave birth to a New World. — Michael Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man 5.

Abstract: This chapter juxtaposes the project of spiritual conquest as the dual project of religious conversion and resettlement, against the haphazard spread of Christianity as the ideology and propaganda of the Spanish conquest. Both themes appear regularly throughout the missionary chronicles, which documented the progress of each monastic Order (including the Jesuits) in establishing doctrina, a word that came to refer at once to a Christianized population, a mission-town, and the inculcation of the basic tenets of Catholic orthodoxy – in Spain’s overseas possessions. The juxtaposed themes of missionary progress and social disintegration appear in a language and imaginary that represent the native experience of deracination as episodes of spiritual “battle”: shot through with magic, demonic possession, monsters, miracles, and divine apparitions. Keywords: theo-politics, undeception [desengaño], shaman [catalonan / babaylan], anito [ancestral spirit], Devil / demonology, idolatry.

The recasting of the conquest as pacification; and with it, the recasting of the religious effort to congregate and convert native populations to Christianity as the work of “spiritual conquest,” set the stage for the pastoral power of the religious Orders to assume its decisive political character in the conquest and colonization of the Philippines. While early missionaries

Blanco, J.D., Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463725880_ch3

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like Augustinian priests Frs. Diego de Herrera and Martín de Rada saw themselves as the intellectual and spiritual heirs to Dominican priest and advocate of the American natives Fr. Bartolomé de las Casas, their Jesuit counterparts Frs. Alonso Sánchez and Pedro Chirino saw their Christian presence in the Philippines and Asia as inextricably linked to the universal monarchy under the Spanish Crown and its royal patronage of the Church. In many ways, the story of the spiritual conquest of the Philippines boils down to the degree to which these two divergent positions regarding the relationship of the religious to Crown authority could be reconciled – even as members of both religious Orders themselves shifted positions over time. Beyond the pastoral approaches of the various Orders, however, the conquest had left a legacy of social fragmentation and widespread displacement throughout the archipelago. Limited Spanish access to many regions prevented priests from corralling natives into concentrated settlements and Christianizing them. Their efforts to do so were further hindered by encomenderos, who preferred dispersed settlements to hide the depredations they committed in the name of the Spanish king. Yet both the direct and indirect influence of the Spanish presence made itself felt everywhere: permanently destabilizing the commercial and diplomatic networks and forms of social organization preceding the Spanish arrival. In just such a situation, the religious ministers often served as the only visible link between the world the Spaniards were kicking to pieces; and the conjuration of a vision of universal monarchy and law that promised to replace the old. This chapter pits the truths of spiritual conquest as the dual project of religious conversion and resettlement, against the fact of spiritual conquest as the long-term consequence of both over the course of three centuries. These truths, I argue, begin with a recognition of the oftentimes haphazard and chaotic spread of Christianity as the ideology and propaganda of the Spanish conquest; and end with Christianity as an instrument of deculturation, also called cultural genocide. Both themes appear regularly throughout the missionary chronicles, which documented the progress of each monastic Order (including the Jesuits) in promoting doctrina – a word that came to refer at once to a Christianized population, a mission-town with a resident priest, and the inculcation of the basic tenets of Catholic orthodoxy – in Spain’s overseas possessions. Yet the juxtaposed themes of missionary progress and social disintegration appear in a language and imaginary that represent the native experience of deracination as episodes of spiritual “battle”: shot through with magic, demonic possession, monsters, miracles, and divine apparitions. By critically analyzing these episodes, I

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suggest that the prose of religious conversion provided a smokescreen for the violence and impunity of conquest. Yet it also encoded that violence: embedding the consequences of social anomie in narratives of redemption and liberation – the very opposite of forced population concentration and subjection to colonial institutions, which Christianity reinforced. Borrowing from the language of Freudian psychoanalysis, one might compare the prose of spiritual conquest to the “dream-work” of condensing and displacing the experience of native life in the frontier provinces, through a language of war and peace, enchantment and disenchantment or undeception [Sp. desengaño], captivity and liberation.1 The objective of this encipherment, as we will see, is the creation of what Philippine scholar Nicanor Tiongson called the “colonial illusion,” or more specifically colonialism as illusion: the illusion and projection of a Christian universe and its corresponding phantasmagoria, which simultaneously supplemented and supplanted the rule of (Spanish) law.2 This entailed the gradual absorption and erasure of native cosmogony, value systems, and the natural and spirit worlds, into an interface of Christian signs and symbols. While I owe the larger idea of Spanish Christianity as an imaginary matrix or interface to Serge Gruzinski’s study of the conquest of New Spain and to Reynaldo Ileto’s study of the Tagalog Pasyon or Passion of Christ, my own account of the phantasmagorias of spiritual conquest in the Philippines highlights the role this matrix would play toward the reinforcement of friar autonomy among the missionary Orders in the frontier provinces.3 Only this stake explains the disparity between the missionaries’ own interpretations of religious conversion among their flocks of neophytes, and their actual experience of social anomie. 1 Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey, 295–325. The rhetoric or discourse of disenchantment or desengaño occupies an important place in what Spanish sociologist of culture José Antonio Maravall called Spain’s culture of the baroque, as well as the CounterReformation movement more broadly. See José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 173–204 (esp. 202); Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama; and Jeremy Robbins, The Challenges of Uncertainty, 13–40 passim. For a broader treatment of the intellectual debates that distinguished a medieval Christian universe from a modern one, see Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern World, 125–228. 2 See Tiongson, “Ang Pusong sa Dulang Tagalog: Panimulang Pag-aaral,” in Memories, Visions, and Scholarship and Other Essays, 329. In Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, the author describes the “logic of supplementarity” by which writing simultaneously aids (spoken) language by making it visible while undermining or eliding the fixation of linguistic signifiers to their (putatively) corresponding signifieds. See Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, 293–344. 3 See Gruzinski, Conquest of Mexico, 2–3; and Ileto, “Rizal and the Underside of Philippine Revolution,” in Filipinos and Their Revolution, 29–78.

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Reducción or Forced Resettlement in Theory and Practice Both Crown and Church agreed that the colonial occupation and administration of colonial law throughout Spain’s overseas possessions would rely on the success of “reducing” scattered populations into concentrated settlements. Prior to the conquest of the Philippines, in 1542, the New Laws of Charles V decreed this to be one of the responsibilities of colonial government, with the assistance of the religious Orders.4 Fr. José de Acosta (SJ)’s famous treatise on the preaching of the Gospel among the barbarians [full title is: De promulgatione Evangelii apud Barbaros, sive De Procuranda Indorum salute, On the Promulgation of the Gospel among Barbarians, or On Procuring the Salvation of the Indians] in 1588 underlined the fundamental importance of concentration and settlement as a precondition to the effective administration of a Christian populace (26). In the eyes of the Crown, Indian reduction / resettlement would also facilitate the collection of tribute and the requisition of labor for public works, which colonial officials would take on the task of imposing after encomenderos and / or the regular clergy completed the task of reduction.5 From the outset, the varied geography of the archipelago complicated mission efforts in both its transoceanic and intra-islandic dimensions. Moreover, the relative absence of Spanish colonial settlement and the restriction of Spanish travel in the mission areas contributed to the risks involved in missionary activity and the difficulty in enforcing resettlement objectives.6 Finally, the active resistance or in any case agency of the natives’ reception to Christianity and settlement ranged from revolt, flight, and fugitivism, to more subtle strategies of evasion, deception, and misinterpretation.7 Considering these factors, one must admit that the pioneering efforts of many members of the regular clergy remain a testament to the courage and religious zeal of certain individuals. But these efforts also highlight these pioneering individuals as singular and uncommon occurrences, i.e. 4 These laws prompted an outcry among the conquistadors in Peru, which led to their rescission their following year. Philip II’s Ordinances of 1574, however, restate the necessity of native resettlement in concentrated populations: see Introduction. 5 Carlos Zerón’s contemporary study of the architecture of the Jesuit missions echoes Acosta’s emphasis on the ultimate dependence of the religious enterprise on the prior conditions of the discipline of Indian populations to a regime of labor and their consequent “civilization” [Fr. police or Sp. policía], or Westernization (Zerón, “Mission et espace missionnaire,” 308). 6 See Daniel Doeppers, “The Development of Philippine Cities Before 1900,” 776. 7 Phelan, Hispanization of the Philippines, 72–89; Newson, Conquest and Pestilence, 133–211; Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, 208–209.

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far from the norm, in a period characterized by social anomie. A distinction between the project of reduction in theory and its actual (attempted) practice will thus better contextualize the larger reevaluation of the spread of “Christianization” during the first two centuries of colonial rule, as well as a deeper exploration of the consequences of frontierization. The religious efforts of the monastic Orders usually followed on the heels of the forced entries or entradas of the conquistadors and (later) the native-assisted Spanish forces. This latter detail is important. Not only does it testify to the swiftness with which the Spaniards entrusted the task of conquest and coercion to the religious. It also suggests that native leaders also quickly came to participate in the work of conquest; and that these leaders benefited from the spoils of war, which included the enslavement of “rebels” as well as plunder.8 In the early years of the mission, it was customary for friars to first spend some time in Manila learning one or more of the native languages, before being dispatched to a given region. Their assigned destination would consist in either the place of an already existing settlement or a general field of small settlements, in which they would insert themselves. With perseverance, along with the collaboration of native leaders as well as the encomendero, the regional governor [alcalde mayor or corregidor], and fortune, they would eventually establish a convent and chapel for their base of operations; facilitate the election of native headmen [cabeza de barangay] or chiefs [gobernadorcillo] to collect tribute, conscript forced labor, and silence resistance; and otherwise continue the work of conversion and resettlement.9 Missionary strategies among the various religious Orders varied, but they all had in common the initiatory attempt to establish a social relationship with the leaders of the community after a military expedition had overrun the region; and to stake a legal claim for the inclusion of Christian preachers as a reward of conquest. The most common strategies employed by missionaries regardless of religious Order were best captured in a phrase repeated in various ways throughout early Jesuit priest Fr. Pedro Chirino (SJ)’s history, reproduced and augmented by Fr. Francisco Colín (SJ) in the 8 This was certainly the case among the Maya of Yucatán; see Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 41. 9 These positions of authority began with the assignment of a local community headman [cabeza de barangay] and a petty chief [gobernadorcillo], although native leaders had no access to the formal education of laws, policy, or understanding of colonial government until at least the middle of the eighteenth century; and remained utterly dependent on the parish priest and / or encomendero regarding his relationship with the colonial government. See Luis Ángel Sánchez Gómez, “El gobierno y administración de los territorios en Filipinas (1565–1898),” 465–532.

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seventeenth century: “building churches [or convents and chapels], planting crosses, baptizing children.”10 These three steps provided the infrastructure for preaching, instructing, and supervising a Christian community in the hinterland; and connecting it to a larger one on the coast or in Manila. The planting of crosses, for example, amounted to a public declaration of mission territory; and the building of a church or convent (usually of local materials at first, usually bamboo or nipa) reinforced the autonomous permanence of the mission, as well as providing the existing communities with a place to gather together as a baptized Christian community. In fact, up to the very end of the Spanish rule, in many towns the only existing stone structure was the church. These stone structures oftentimes doubled as fortresses, with features built into their construction that would facilitate their defense in the event of pirate raids, bandit attacks, local uprisings, or foreign threats (see Figures 8 and 9). The third strategy, the baptism of infants and children, conferred an immediate set of privileges as well as obligations on the newly baptized members of the flock, which became especially important in times of want, danger, or illness. Needless to say, the fulfillment of Christian obligations fell to the parents with the inability of children to perform or fulfill them independently: which in turn provided an incentive for the parents of baptized Christians to become Christian themselves. The construction of the church and convent would identify a particular settlement as a cabecera or “capital,” with surrounding scattered populations of Christian neophytes designated as visitas [also called sitios].11 Ideally and in theory, visitas would exist in relatively close proximity to 10 [hazer Iglesias, levantar cruces, bautizar los niños] (Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v. 1, 475; v. 2, 115, 390 and 391–393 passim. See also Costa, Jesuits in the Philippines, 159. Guillermo Wilde’s study of the Jesuit mission in Paraguay breaks down the establishment of mission territory into successive stages, beginning with the possession of territory and the erection of a banner, and leading to the distribution of land among native leaders or caciques; the construction of a church and the houses of the missionary priest and Indians; and the assignment of political and military occupations as well as the creation of artisan corporations (Wilde, Religión y poder en las misiones guaraníes, 63). 11 Barrios or neighborhoods of un-Christianized natives were referred to as rancherías and even parajes. For the cabecera-visita complex, see Phelan, Hispanization, 124–125; Costa, Jesuits, 259–269; Daniel Doeppers, “The Evolution of the Geography of Religious Adherence in the Philippines Before 1898,” 95–110; and Doeppers, “The Development of Philippine Cities Before 1900,” 774–776. Doeppers (following John Phelan) notes that by 1655, there were 180 cabeceras administered by the religious Orders but only six poblaciones, i.e. settlements administered by the colonial government and secular or official Church (ibid., 775). The Jesuits did not resolve the matter of missionary residences in the areas they preached until 1615. For nomenclature of settlements, see Sánchez Gómez, “The Structure of Pueblos de Indios,” 191–208.

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Figure 8: “Village Tagal de Bacor, sur la route de Cavite á Manille” [1828]. In most towns outside Manila, Cebu, and Arevalo [Iloilo City], the only stone building was the church. From Edmond de La Touanne, vicomte, et al., Album pittoresque de la frégate la Thétis et de la corvette l’Espérance. Reproduced by the Special Collections & Archives, Geisel Special Collections, University of California, San Diego.

Figure 9: The fortress-like construction of the Augustinian church in Miagao (Iloilo) (completed in 1797) features tapering towers with buttresses that prevent scaling, and walls that are approximately 1.5 meters thick, with buttresses up to 4 meters thick. Photo copyright by author.

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the cabecera; at least close enough for the missionary to travel to and from the areas of missionary activity within a short period of time. And ideally and in theory, the cabecera would provide the basis for the conversion of the settlement into a town or pueblo (also called población) officially recognized by the colonial government and assigned colonial officials. The surrounding visitas would then be either eventually absorbed into the town (by force, persuasion, or both), or provide beachheads for a new cabecera-visita complex or network. According to the 1582 Synod, in areas where a forced conquest or entrada had already taken place, natives had no choice but to accept their subjection to the colonial policies of tribute and mandatory labor, as there was no going back to a condition prior to their absorption into Spanish and Christian society.12 In most other areas, however, natives remained exempt from tribute for a period of time, with the understanding that after this period they would be prepared to assume the obligations following colonial subjection. Not coincidentally, this period of time (usually ten years) coincided with the maximum amount of time a member of the regular clergy was ostensibly allowed to administer a parish. Yet, due to the refusal of the regular clergy to admit the authority of the bishop, many mission parishes or doctrinas remained as such in perpetuity (see Chapter 2). Because missionary priests also kept records of Christian subjects who were required to pay tribute and donate labor or services for public works, and often continued to do so well after the arrival of a colonial official like the town secretary, the religious also had the power to extend these various exemptions from tribute and labor to various members of the community indefinitely. The predatory interests of conquistadors, encomenderos, and early Spanish officials like the alcalde mayor or Corregidor, acted as both an obstacle and spur to the early evangelization and initiative to reduce populations into concentrated settlements. Often identified as “bad Christians” or “bad Spaniards” [malos Christianos / españoles], many of these colonial actors undermined the religious and cultural program of town settlement promoted by the religious.13 Moreover, the rapacity of these “bad Spaniards” spurred the arrival of Spanish fortune-seekers from Manila and the five or six Spanish villas throughout the archipelago. Both Dominicans and Augustinians report how Spanish officials and encomenderos even threatened the religious with death when the goals of evangelization impeded the goals of wealth 12 See José Luis Porras Camúñez, in Fr. Domingo de Salazar, El Sínodo de Manila, 177. 13 See Magnus Mörner, La Corona Española y los foráneos en los Pueblos de Indios de América, 27–36.

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accumulation at the expense of colonial subjects.14 William Henry Scott provides us with an early, sixteenth-century record of a native chief who openly confessed his doubts to a priest about converting to Christianity, after realizing that the Spaniards in the Philippines neither respected nor followed the tenets of their own religion.15 Fr. Aduarte (OP) later recalled the protests of the Dominicans’ Christian neophytes, whose reluctance to become baptized comes from the observation that Spaniards so consistently fail to follow their own precepts.16 When the natives of Irraya in the northern province of Cagayan revolted (in 1596), the Dominican missionary’s efforts to pacify the natives by assuming the blame for Spanish abuses was rebuked in the following manner: “It is not because of grievances or ill feeling that we have towards the religious … but [because we are] tired of the vexations that the Spaniards impose on us.”17 Later, Jesuit historian Juan de Delgado’s account of the natives went so far as to ascribe the corruption of those who lived around or near Manila to the “bad example” of the ancient Christians, i.e. the Spaniards.18 These cases reinforce the determination with which the religious pursued the prohibition of Spanish travel outside the designated cities or villas throughout the islands. This ban remained largely in force all the way up to the nineteenth century.19 Yet the marked informality of colonial administration [policía] in the areas of evangelizing activity also created a number of problems. Mission towns were politically isolated from the colonial seat of government, which made many laws a dead letter.20 The absence of colonial administration was compounded by the inflated ambitions of the religious themselves, to spread religion in areas unprotected by laws or administration. When Jesuit priest Father Pedro Chirino (SJ) was recording the first fruits of the missionary endeavor around 1604, his chronicle abounds with stories of large populations flocking to the missionary centers, seeking baptism, without accounting 14 See Fr. Diego Aduarte (OP), Historia de la provincia del Santo Rosario de Filipinas, Japón y China, v. I, 70; and Fr. Juan de Medina (OSA), Historia de Los Sucesos de La Orden de N. Gran P. S. Agustín, 140–141. 15 See Fr. Juan Pobre de Zamora, in William Henry Scott, “The Conquerors as Seen by the Conquered,” 493–506. 16 Aduarte, Historia de la provincia del Santo Rosario de Filipinas, v.1, 134. 17 Aduarte, Historia, v. 2, 153; see also Sitoy, 226–227. “no es por agravio, ni sentimiento que tengamos contra religiosos, dijeron los indios, sino cansados de las vejaciones que nos hacen los españoles.” 18 See, for example, Fr. Juan José Delgado (SJ), Historia general, sacro-profana, política y natural de las Islas del Poniente llamadas Filipinas, 270–271. 19 See Doeppers, “The Evolution,” 102–103. 20 See Phelan, “Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial Bureaucracy,” 47–65.

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for how many of those people had been baptized already, only to desert the mission at a later stage; or how many would later desert those same centers when the missionaries left or the site was raided. Within the first ten years of missionary activity, Fr. Chirino had already acknowledged the relapse of provinces like Taytay, a mere ten miles outside of Manila, where the mass baptisms of the Franciscans were followed by the inability of the Order to administer the settlements they had presumably converted to Christianity.21 In Bataan, the northern peninsula facing Intramuros on Manila Bay, Fr. Aduarte attributed the superficiality of Christian conversion to lack of resources, as well as poor evangelization methods.22 His complaint mirrors Chirino’s, despite the forty-odd years and different religious Orders to which both belonged: And there was even a priest who, with such little regard for the office, baptized [the natives] by force, without teaching them what they had to believe … (and) because the baptism was not voluntary, but rather by force, and that because of this they would hold baptism with such little regard, they fled, and in order to avoid any similar bind in the future, they kept their (Christian) names and said they were Christians, and in doing so avoided baptism … And first some, then others, would return to their idolatries, superstitions, and sins, as if they had never been baptized (Aduarte, Historia, 116).23

The result of mass baptisms by force, particularly in areas where the mission could not be sustained, often resulted in the early abandonment of the recently established mission stations.24 Franciscans, Recollects, and Jesuits all recorded episodes of truncated missions throughout the three centuries of colonial rule.25 21 See Fr. Pedro Chirino and Jaume Górriz, Història de la província de Filipines de la Companyia de Jesús, 1581–1606, 239–241. 22 See Aduarte, Historia, 115. 23 [Y aun hubo sacerdote tan poco industriado en este oficio que, sin enseñarlos lo que debían creer, los bautizaba por fuerza … [y] porque como el baptismo no era voluntario, sino por fuerza, por poco que se descuidasen en guardarlos, se huían, y, por no ver otra vez en semejante aprieto, guardaban los nombres y decían que eran cristianos, para con esto evitar el bautizarse … Y los unos y los otros se volvían a sus idolatrías, supersticiones y pecados, como si nunca hubieran sido bautizados.] 24 See also Aduarte, 565. For a general discussion on the shortage of religious and frequent abandonment of missions by the religious, see Newson, Conquest and Pestilence, 61–62; Bruce Cruikshank, “Disobedient but Faithful,” 567–584; and Greg Bankoff, “Devils, Familiars, and Spaniards,” 37–55. 25 In describing the penetration of Franciscans into the province of Nueva Ecija, north of Manila, Fr. Félix Huerta (OFM) relates: “[Fr. Esteban Ortiz] planted the holy tree of the cross everywhere, although it is true, that due to the poverty of the missionaries during that period

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The precarity of missionizing was particularly acute in the central Visayas and the southern part of Luzon, where a combination of Dutch and Moro piracy and native apostates living outside established Christian settlements rendered missionary efforts ephemeral. When Fr. Sanlúcar (SJ) visited the island of Samar in 1600, which had been visited earlier by a truncated Augustinian mission, he had this to say about the state of the baptized natives he met: “When we arrived here there was no trace of Christianity: because there were neither churches, nor anyone who knew how to pray, or who knew Sunday, Friday, or Easter season: nor can I rest assured of the future; because there is no one in whom one may confide … The only Christians that I have found here are dead.”26 While many natives seem to want to become Christian, he laments: “many of whom are children between eight and fifteen years old: I don’t dare to search them out only to leave them as I have found them” (ibid.). Fr. Sanlúcar faced a similar dilemma on the missionary frontier: should religious ministers proselytize in an area they would not themselves commit to residing in? How should religious preachers measure the spiritual consequences of eternal condemnation under the practice of “some mag-anito” – a ritual venerating ancestral spirits in the wake of a person’s death – against the material and social consequences of baptizing children who receive neither protection, sacraments, or teaching from the Church? In this case, Fr. Sanlúcar prudently decided that the risk of eternal damnation to the unbaptized might be preferable to the early Franciscan practice of baptizing neophytes without much instruction. But Sanlúcar’s fears continue to haunt him on his visit to the mission of Catubig in the northern part of the island, where he meets a community of baptized Christians who despair at realizing that his stay is only temporary. One father of a family explains to the Jesuit priest why they would opt to refuse Christianity and remain attached to their pre-Hispanic ways of life: “Father if it is that you [1578] it became necessary to withdraw to other points, leaving this vine abandoned … until the year of 1609,” Fr. Félix Huerta [OSA], Estado geográfico, topográfico, estadístico, histórico-religioso de la santa y apostólica provincia de S. Gregorio Magno (Binondo, 1865), 88. Native uprisings forced the Jesuits to abandon even the baptized Christians in Butuan at the turn of the seventeenth century (Colín, Labor Evangélica, 280–283). Later, due to the wars against the Muslim sultanate under Kudarat, the entire island of Mindanao was abandoned in 1688. 26 Cited in Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v. 2, 300 [Quando llegamos aqui no auia rastro de Christiandad: porque ni auia Iglesias, ni quien supiesse rezar, ni sabian de Domingo, de Viernes, ni de Quaresma; ni tanpoco puedo dexar buen orden en lo poruenir; porque no hay persona a quien se le pueda confiar … Pues los Christianos que e hallado muertos … A los que nuestro Señor da desseo de ser Christianos, que son muchos niños de ocho a quince años; no me atreuo a hazellos por no dexallos como los halle.]

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will remain with us by decision; I and my wife, and all of my children, we will become Christian; but if it is that you will leave, I will tell you the truth: all that you have told us we will forget, and the Christians will return to the life we lived as it was before.”27 But would the ministers return? Perhaps in some cases, they did. But the case of Samar shows precisely what happens when the religious abandon the mission entirely. While Jesuits later claimed to have made great strides in settling the population in towns around the coasts of Samar and Leyte during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Augustinians who inherit the islands for missionary activity after the 1768 Jesuit expulsion discover to their disappointment almost no trace of Christianity whatsoever. “In general,” Fr. Agustín María de Castro (OSA) would write, “all the Indians (in Leyte and Samar) are for the most part cimarrones and mountain-dwellers, and although the land is good they neither work nor cultivate it … because they are not reduced into concentrated settlements nor civilized life (policía), and they prefer to live alone in the forests and mountains where they enjoy complete liberty. They obey neither the Priest nor the Alcalde-Mayor, who resides on the island of Samar.”28 Even in areas where the missions appeared to succeed, the lack of Spanish presence is pithily demonstrated in Dominican priest Fray Domingo Fernández Navarrete (OP)’s account of mission efforts in the province of Cagayan (Luzon) in 1650: “All of these people are, as villagers of the mountain regions, sincere, and without a bit of malice. They attend church with great devotion … But there they are held by a mass every two or three years … There were visitas where the cura [parish or doctrina priest] had not set foot for fourteen years.”29 Furthermore, ministers left unsupervised by their superiors – whether these belonged to the religious Orders or were secular priests under the authority of the archbishop – could have as debilitating an effect on the prospects of native (re)settlement and the effectiveness of Christian catechism, as no minister at all. An annual report / letter written by Jesuit procurator 27 [Padre si es que as de estar de proposito con nosotros; yo i mi muger, i todos mis hijos, nos haremos Christianos: pero si es que te as de ir, yo te digo la verdad: de todo quanto nos dixeres nos emos de oluidar, i los Christianos se an de voluer a viuir como antes que lo fueran]. 28 Fr. Agustín María de Castro (OSA), Misioneros agustinos en Extremo Oriente, 355. “[T]odos estos indios, por lo general, son muy cimarrones y montaraces, y la tierra aunque es buena no la trabajan ni cultivan … porque no están reducidos a poblado ni a policía, y más quieren vivir sólo en los bosques y montes en done gozan de suma libertad. No obedecen al Ministro ni al Alcalde Mayor, que reside en la Isla de Samar.” 29 Cited in BRPI v.38, 33–34, italics added. See also Fr. Huerta’s account of the lack of ministers in Bataan (Huerta, Estado geográfico 561); and Jesuit provincial Fr. Juan de Bueras (SJ), “Carta Anua de la Provincia de Filipinas de la Compañía de Jesús, del año de 1633.”

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Juan de Bueras (SJ) in 1634, concerning the mission to Mindoro, sets out to evaluate the prospects of establishing a mission among the Mangyan highlanders on the island, only to discover that most settlements on the coast, populated by native Indians [Indios] from other islands (mainly Tagalogs from Luzon) live for the most part in a state of apostasy.30 After noticing how the coastal settlements all treated the Christian sacraments with such contempt and disregard, Fr. Bueras solicited the assistance of the female shaman or catalonan to help him understand why baptized natives choose instead to venerate their ancestors and make sacrifices to them under her guidance. She tells him: Father I see now that all these [ancestral native practices] are nonsense without head or tail, and that it is a great sin, but do not be surprised, that although it may be true that for many years this island has been in the power of the Saint Peter Fathers [i.e. secular priests], they have never taught us [anything]. In the harvest season for beeswax the Father would pass through here, two or three days, and collect his beeswax, abundant on this island, the barangay chiefs would come just to give it to him as repaid debt, and then he would leave us without even an image for the church … [and] if they had done what you are doing now, there wouldn’t be idols or even their traces (ibid.: italics added).31

In this as in other cases, the religious Orders like the Jesuits were quick to blame secular priests [“Saint Peter Fathers”] under the official Church for the flight and apostasy of natives, as well as the poor discipline in the upkeep of the parishes.32 Frequent lapses in native religiosity reinforced the Jesuit priest’s claim that secular priests had neither the administrative oversight 30 [Aunque es verdad que ha cincuenta años, que administraban este partido Clérigos, estaban los naturales tan faltos de doctrina y enseñanza, como si estuvieran en las partes mas remotas de Japón, o China, son dados a sus idolatrías y supersticiones, como si nunca hubieran visto cristianos, y así el entrar en esta misión fue entrar en una selva insular.] Bueras, ibid., 84. 31 [Padre bien echo de ver que todo estos son disparates sin pies ni cabeza, y que esta es un gran pecado, pero no te espantes, que, aunque es verdad, que ha muchos años que esta Isla está en poder de Padres de San Pedro nunca nos han enseñado. En tiempo de la cera pasaba por aquí el Padre, dos o tres días, y recogía su cera de que abunda esta Isla, venía a los cabezas [de barangay] sino se la daban de presto, y luego nos dejaba sin una imagen en la Iglesia … si hubieran hecho lo que tú haces ahora, ya no hubiera Ídolos, ni rastro de ellos.] 32 For Archbishop Pardo’s report on the discovery of “idolatry” in Laguna, see “Carta de Felipe Pardo sobre idolatrías, AGI FILIPINAS, 75, n. 23; for Fr. San Agustín’s account, see Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas … parte 2 … año 1720 (manuscript), 219, v.-222. See also Danilo Gerona, “Text and Politics: Transactions of Power in the Early Provincial Philippines,” 45–47.

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nor the moral fortitude to take over the task of administering sacraments. Yet the accounts of truncated missions throughout the first two centuries of Spanish rule lead one to wonder whether the religious Orders could claim greater success than the official Church under the hierarchy of bishops and ordained secular priests. The persistence of challenges to the support and financing of missions, the cross-purposes of the religious orders and other Spanish fortune-seekers, and the abandonment of existing missions under duress, determined the ever-shifting prospects of the religious Orders on the colonial frontier. The absence of Spaniards in these provinces – whether it be in the form of a military fortress or garrison, trade and commerce, or colonial bureaucracy – rendered many teachings of the Church and devotional piety incomprehensible. Finally, the ongoing native refusal to submit to Christianity or forced (re)settlement made fugitivism, vagabondage, and apostasy virtually a way of life. As we will see in the following sections, these are the conditions under which the imaginary matrix of spiritual conquest would take root and thrive.

A God Is Weeping Stories of early encounters between the religious ministers and the natives they sought to convert reveal the palimpsest of acculturation and deculturation taking place on the colonial frontier, in which the promise of Christianity and law shimmers before the collective trauma of conquest. Early accounts of missionary progress by Jesuit provincial Fr. Pedro Chirino (SJ) and Dominican preacher Fr. Diego Aduarte (OP), for example, record prophecies or legends reportedly told by the natives of Bohol (in Chirino’s chronicle) and Pangasinan (in Aduarte’s) of their tragedy. In the eyes of spiritual conquest, these legends promoted the inevitable advance of religious conversion as foreseen by the natives themselves. A closer reading, however, suggests that these stories also reveal the tragic experience of the erosion of native societies upon the arrival of the Spaniards. These interpretations, in turn, direct us to alternative ways of reading the history of the mission’s progress between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries: i.e. not as a history of “Christianization” but rather the creation of a colonial netherworld, with the mission as the agent of frontierization. In Fr. Chirino (S.J.)’s 1604 History of the Philippine Province of the Society of Jesus, the author relates how, while on the island of Bohol in the Central Visayas, Chirino spoke to a native who had lived through and witnessed

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the period just prior to the Spanish conquest.33 This native told Chirino about a female shaman or “witch” (“Baylana,” or rather baylan / babaylan in the Visayan region and catalonan among the Tagalogs of Luzon) who went about “sing[ing] among them in a flood of tears an unmistakable dirge” about the impending catastrophes the Spaniards would visit upon the native Boholanos.34 “She was called ‘Caryapa,’” Chirino writes, “and she chanted this”: Bai abai co sa nagbanua, Bulung co sa nagcubayon Cay magcacaliualiura ang banua, Magacapuer, ra, ang cubayon,35 Mabual agra quining lousor. Mabuncag ra qiining cubayon. (p. 125).36

My lamentation to those who dwell here My whimper to those native inhabitants How laid to waste will be the land Changed will be the settlement Ruined, surely, this place. Desolate this settlement.

Chirino continues: “Shocked at such a strange song, the whole community … berated the Baylana with insults and anger … But, melting in tears, she continued despite everything, and when pressured, she replied that the spirit [diwata] was forcing her to state it. Without a doubt, it was the devil, like the one who sent a note to Montezuma [Moctezuma] of Mexico” (125). 33 See Manuel Ruiz Jurado, “Fr. Pedro Chirino, S.J. and Philippines Historiography,” 345–360. Padre Chirino’s arrival in 1590 coincided with the first significant expansion of Jesuit missionaries in the Philippines, which took him not only to the outlying missions beyond Manila on Luzon island, but also the main islands of the Central region of the Visayas (Panay, Iloilo, Leyte, and Cebu) (Manuel Ruíz Jurado, “Fr. Pedro Chirino, S.J., and Philippines Historiography,” 356–357). Much of Chirino’s manuscript was copied and elaborated in Fr. Francisco Colín’s 3–volume history of the Jesuit Order Labor evangélica, ed. Fr. Pablo Pastells (SJ). 34 For an early description of the catalonan or babaylan, see Isaac Donoso’s transcription and edition of The Boxer Codex: A Modern Spanish Transcription and English Translation, 16–17, 34–35, and 80–83; Miguel de Loarca’s account, “Relación de las Yslas Filipinas (1582),” in BRPI v. 5, 34–187; and Juan de Plasencia (OFM)’s description of native customs in southern Luzon in BRPI v.7, 173–198. For contemporary accounts, see Scott, Barangay, 83–86 and 239–241; Carolyn Brewer, Shamanism, Catholicism and Gender Relations in Colonial Philippines, 83–142; and Zeus Salazar, “Ang Babaylan sa Kasaysayan ng Pilipinas,” 1–25. 35 Bayon is the Boholano equivalent of bayan, which refers to one’s place of birth or origin and (in the twentieth century), the nation as native land more broadly. Today, the word baybayon in Boholano refers to the beach or seacoast. 36 Fr. Chirino’s translation reads: “¡Duelo mío para el que pobló aquí! ¡Tristeza mía para el que pobló aqui! Porque el trasladará e! Pueblo, Cambiarse ba el Lugar, Será destruido, este pueblo. Será asolado este lugar” (cited in Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v.2, 152 n.)

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Chirino’s dialogue with the eyewitness immediately tells us a few things about the encounter between the Spanish missionary and the native Indian [Indio]: it tells us, for instance, that the eyewitness has remembered Caryapa’s dire forecast as a singular event that he (the eyewitness) deemed worthy of remembering. Given that conquistador López de Legazpi signed the first treaty of Boholano native leader or datu Sikatuna in 1565; and the babaylan Caryapa was said to have sung this song before the Spanish arrival, we can surmise that, by the time Chirino would speak to his interviewee, between twenty and thirty years must have passed. Yet the singular character of Caryapa’s prophecy can also be gleaned from the resulting censure of the female shaman by her community, given that shamans were respected for their ability to communicate with spirits (both natural and ancestral), placate the invisible forces that bore down upon an individual or community, and heal the sick.37 The added fact that this babaylan refuses to retreat from her prophecy, ascribing it instead to a spirit or diwata, denotes her conviction in the face of the skepticism of her peers. It remains for Chirino to insert a proposition that assumes the veracity of her prophecy while displacing and transposing it (the language of dreams in psychoanalysis here is unavoidable) to the larger narrative of spiritual conquest: “Without a doubt, it was the devil, like the one who sent a note to Montezuma [Moctezuma] of Mexico.” Chirino’s Catholic brand of Western rationality, which encodes (one might say “overcodes”) and reframes the presence of the spirit in a way that connects it with a universal history of the devil, here ties disparate peoples across the Pacific Ocean to the same principle of causality.38 But the haste of Chirino’s explanation unwittingly draws our attention to another, implied dialogue that is taking place among natives with one another, which can be characterized by the questions: “what is happening to us? And what are we to do about what is happening to us?” The babaylan or shaman, of course, did not have to depend wholly on native spirits to sense a change in the weather with the arrival of Europeans to the Philippines. Island societies were already engaging in commerce and trade throughout the region. Muslim sultanates had established settlements all throughout the 37 See W.H. Scott, Barangay, 239–241; Jean-Paul Potet, Ancient Beliefs and Customs of the Tagalogs, 46–60; and Alicia Magos, The Enduring Ma-Aram Tradition. 38 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari distinguish the rise of the state, or state sovereignty, from both nonstate communities and capitalist societies by their respective techniques of administering “regimes of signs,” with the state def ined by its “overcoding” of preexisting communities through the law and bureaucracy. See Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, 200–221 and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia II, 111–148.

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southern parts of the archipelago, even all the way to Tondo, near Manila in Luzon. The island of Bohol in the southern, Visayas region, was already part of an Islamized polity or kedatuan based in Dapitan on the Zamboangan peninsula of Mindanao, the southernmost island in the Philippines.39 Mindoro, an island just southwest of Luzon, had received traders from commerce of the Islamized kingdoms of Brunei and Ternate; and many parts of Mindanao had been converted to Islam. 40 From this perspective, the question of whether or not Caryapa was possessed by the Devil becomes secondary to the question of how conscious she must have been about the activities of the Portuguese, Spaniards, and Muslim kingdoms in Brunei (Borneo) throughout the first part of the sixteenth century. Yet Fr. Chirino’s almost seamless transition from anecdote to interpretation sets the stage for a Christian staging of spiritual conquest: the Devil as Universal Enemy, speaking through diwata or spirits according to the native’s presumably primitive beliefs; the community showing itself ready to disavow their traditions to welcome the arrival of Christianity; the imminent arrival of the missionary priest, who will deliver the good news of universal salvation, etc. Almost: for in the sutured gap between one form of experience and another, we glimpse the cultural and psychological effects of social anomie throughout the colonial period under the mantle of spiritual conquest. Chirino’s narrative has led us to believe that Caryapa’s prophecy was wrong. But could it perhaps be she was right? The original hidden question in Fr. Chirino’s account – “what is happening to us?” – finds echoes in the tale of the weeping god related in Dominican missionary Fr. Diego de Aduarte’s 1641 Historia de la Provincia del Santo Rosario de la Orden de Predicadores en Filipinas, Japón, y China. Much of Fr. Delgado’s history takes place in northern Luzon, which was the main area of evangelization assigned to the Dominicans when they arrived in 1587. The region of Pangasinan – which literally translates into “the place of / for salt [asin] – lies on the northwest coast of the island of Luzon, some 200 km north of the Spanish settlement Intramuros in Manila (est. 1571). We know it was also the site of a pre-colonial sovereign Philippine polity, Kaboloan, recorded in the Chinese annals as the huangdom (Chinese influenced kingdom) Feng-chia-hsi-lan [馮嘉施], which engaged in trade relations with 39 In 1521, Portuguese captain Ferdinand Magellan encountered the Islamized Rajah Humabon in Cebu in the Central Visayas region (to the immediate west of Bohol); and had invaded settlements along the coast of nearby island Mactan, before being killed by native chief or datu Lapu-Lapu. 40 See Isaac Donoso, “Al-Andalus and Asia: Ibero-Asian Relations Before Magellan,” 9–36.

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the Ming Dynasty in China as well as the Ryukyu kingdom (which included Okinawa) and the Ashikaga shogunate in Japan. 41 In 1571, the Mexican creole and nephew of Admiral Legazpi, Captain Juan de Salcedo conducted a military invasion [entrada] throughout the Cordillera mountain region of northern Luzon, where many native groups succeeded in resisting the encroachment of colonial society throughout the duration of Spanish rule. Salcedo encountered three Japanese vessels, leading the latter to flee. The natives of the nearby settlement promptly decided to burn their houses and retreat. 42 Pursuing the Japanese vessels led Salcedo to the trading colony of Agoo, on the north side of Lingayen Gulf [province of La Union], where Chinese, Japanese, and Ryukyuan merchants traded their wares with native groups upriver for gold. It is for this reason that Miguel de Loarca’s 1575 account called Agoo Japan’s Port (Puerto del Japón). 43 Several years after Salcedo’s conquest of Pangasinan, in 1574, the Chinese pirate Limahong attempted to unseat the Spaniards in Manila and establish a kingdom there; failing this, he and his crew raided and took over Kaboloan, with the intention of using it as the basis of pirate raids throughout Spain’s new and still precarious overseas possession. Another military campaign led by Salcedo and consisting of Tagalog and Visayan recruits from the south, as well as Mexicans in the Philippines, succeeded in unseating Limahong, thereby further facilitating Spanish expansion into northern part of the island. Before the arrival of the Dominicans in Pangasinan (in 1587), the highland indigenous groups had rebuffed earlier attempts to penetrate the interior of the island by the Augustinian and Franciscan Orders. Given the tumultuous history of colonization in the region, it should come as no surprise friars had a difficult time attracting natives to the Catholic faith with the few resources they had at hand. 44 Even after the Augustinian Order admitted 41 See Wang Zhenping, “Reading Song-Ming Records on the Pre-Colonial History of the Philippines,” 257–258; William Henry Scott, Filipinos in China Before 1500, 1–19; and Scott, Barangay, 187. 42 Felix Keesing, The Ethnohistory of Northern Luzon, 53. Juan de Salcedo was the grandson of Admiral and first governor-general of the Philippines Miguel López de Legazpi; he was also the “master-in-cap” of the Spanish military forces (see ibid., 14–15). 43 “Quatro leguas adelante esta vn puerto qe llaman el puerto del Japon qe Ay en el Vna poblaçon de [español: barré dans le manuscrit] yndios ques vna misma g te qe la de pangasinan.” Miguel de Loarca, La relación de las Ylas Filipinas de Miguel de Loarca, Chapter 3. Cited in Shuinsen Jidei, “Extrait de la Relación de las Ylas Filipinas de Miguel de Loarca,” https://shuinsen.hypotheses. org/tag/miguel-de-loarca. 29 November 2017. Web. See also Arturo Giraldez, Age of Trade, 19; and Rosario Mendoza-Cortes, Pangasinan 1572–1800, 18–49. 44 See Fr. Gregorio López S.J.’s statistics on the missions in the early seventeenth century, “Status of the missions in the Philippines,” BRPI v. 17, 189–212: Two ministers for 800 souls.

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first the Franciscans, and later the Dominicans, to the Philippines, in order to preach Christianity in the northern regions of Luzon, the resettlement and conversion of the natives, (particularly in and around Pangasinan) seemed a formidable task. 45 As Aduarte narrates about the missions in northern Luzon: “although there were secular priests and Franciscan missionaries desirous of [the natives] … their efforts have never borne any fruit, due to the natives’ great resistance. [The natives] have remained wretchedly victorious, and with their contradictions they forced the ministers to depart, the latter leaving the natives in their darkness, which they held so dear.”46 It was around the time of the Dominicans’ arrival that a troop of native Indians [Indios] from “below” [abaxo] – meaning, the pacified Tagalog or Pampangan territories, closer to Manila – was traveling through a densely forested area, en route to conduct some unspecified routine business with the un-Christianized Igorot mountain tribes to the east of Pangasinan. As Fr. Aduarte relates, the members of the party heard a terrible voice wailing in the forest, just beyond the range of sight. Yet the repeated attempts of the troop to discern the source of the lament remained fruitless, even as the voice continued to cry in their immediate vicinity. Finally, a member of the company dared to address the voice and inquire after the reasons of its lament. The voice identified itself as Apo Laki or “great Lord”: who, “among them,” Aduarte adds, “is akin to Mars among the Roman gentiles, or the God of war, whom they call, when they travel by sea, or engage in their daily business”).47 This set the natives in a panic, until one of the braver ones asked: “Apo Laki, O anito of ours … to whom we have dedicated sacred festivals, 45 See Fr. Juan de Medina (OSA), in BRPI v. 23, 234. The pressure to spread Christianity throughout the archipelago quickly and in coordination with the settlement of native populations in Spanish-style pueblos led Augustinians to petition to bring in other missions: ibid. 227; and also Fr. Juan de Grijalva (OSA), Crónica de la Orden de N.P.S. Agustín en Las Provincias en Nueva España en Cuatro Edades desde el año 1533 hasta el de 1592, 503–504. The Franciscans arrive in 1577; the Jesuits in 1580, and the Dominicans in 1581. 46 Fr. Diego de Aduarte (OP), Historia, v. 1, 70. In 1630, Fr. Juan de Medina (OSA) also noted that the Dominican mission in Cagayan encountered a “bellicose people; every day they rise up, burning convents and churches [resulting in the] death of some religious” [Estos Cagayanes son gente belicosa; cada día se levantan, quemando conventos é Iglesias con Muerte de algunos religiosos] (Medina, Historia de los sucesos, 104). 47 Ibid. “que entre ellos es, como entre los Romanos gentiles Marte, el Dios digamos de la guerra á quien tambien llaman, quando navegan, ò vàn a fus tratos]. As Rosario Mendoza Cortes explains, “Apolaqui [Apo Laki] is an expression with overtones of veneration. Apo is a term of respect for the aged while laqui is an honorific title for grandfather or extremely old person” (Pangasinan, 1572–1800, 237 n. 75). This description alone seems to call into question Aduarte’s characterization of the Apolaqui cult as similar to that of the Roman god of war Mars. One may add that “Apo” is also the Quechua word used by Incans to designate a lord.

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what reason have we given you cause to fear, as we have not offended you?”48 The word anito, also common to various Philippine languages (in this case, both Tagalog and Pangasinense), refers to an ancestral or divine spirit: both of whom are worshipped and venerated. 49 To the native’s query the god replies: “I cry for seeing fulfilled what I have feared for years: that you would welcome foreigners with white teeth and cowled … I will no longer go among you in search of those who will follow me, since you left me for foreigners, I who was once your ancient lord” (ibid.).50 After years of encroachment by religious missionaries, Aduarte implies, the native spirits and ancestors were finally preparing to abandon their people.51 This is a theme to which Aduarte’s history, obsessed as he is with the idea of the Devil’s role in fomenting popular resistance to Christian conversion, returns again and again.52 In another example, as Aduarte describes the task of missionaries to uncover and destroy the small huts that natives build in remote areas, in order to practice ritual sacrifice, he reports eyewitness accounts of devils howling in the cultivated plots or sementeras: The Indians would hear [the devils] groaning aloud in the fields, and complaining that the natives had left them, believing instead those men with white teeth … Some idolaters made pretexts that they could not resist admitting the religious, because the Spaniards had mandated their presence, something they could not resist; and asked the devils to cast [the missionaries] out, if they were so powerful. To this the demons replied that they could not cast them out, or even see them as they regarded them with such hate, and that is why they had left the towns and wandered through the mountains.53 48 [Apo Laki, anito nuestro … a quien hacemos fiestas, ¿qué causa te hemos dado tanto temor sin haberte ofendido?] 49 In the Visayas and Mindanao islands south of Luzon, the word diwata [from the Sanskrit deva or dewa] refers to the same thing. 50 [lloro por ver cumplido lo que años recelaba: que recibiréis entre vosotros unos extranjeros de dientes blancos y encogollados … Ya yo me voy de entre vosotros a buscar quién me siga, pues por extranjeros me dejáis, siendo vuestro antiguo señor.] 51 See San Agustín, Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas, 293; and Conquistas … parte 2, 360. 52 In another anecdote, the “idol” Ana Gaoley (or Ama Gaoley, which means “Supreme Father” and is often identified with Apo Laki) claims to have been driven away from a settlement by the cross (“that straight pole that they had installed in the town, with another crossing it in the manner of a body with two arms”) and by the “men who wear small caps on their heads” [los hombres que traían capillas en la cabeza] (Aduarte, Historia de la Provincia del Santo Rosario, v. 1, 137).” [A]quel palo derecho que habian puesto en el, con otro atravesado a manera de un cuerpo con dos brazos.” 53 Aduarte, Historia de la provincia del Santo Rosario de Filipinas, v. 1, 626.

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Yet, while Aduarte’s stories of weeping gods and anitos, with Apo Laki being the first among them, stage the efficacy of Christian ministers before the pagan world, they also invite the careful reader to pursue an unanswered question. Why did Apo Laki appear and communicate his message to these lowlanders, instead of the Pangasinense people whose towns and villages were ostensibly and at that moment beset by pressure to convert to Christianity and render vassalage to the Spanish king and his representatives? Could there have been a non-rhetorical question embedded in the god’s lament: not along the lines of “why do you no longer follow me?” but rather: “will you also” or “once again follow me?” Fr. Aduarte was careful to record the god’s words: perhaps he should have considered recording the natives’ response. As the background history of this northern region of Luzon has already shown, neither the people of Pangasinan nor the Christianized populations from central Luzon lived in the total darkness and ignorance of a larger world, as the author seems to think.54 In fact, an economic trading network involving other parts of Asia as well as Pangasinan had preceded the Spanish by half a millennium; and had penetrated the interior of Luzon through the web of rivers linking the coastal settlements to the mountains. While indigenous peoples living north of the Spanish capital were certainly living without the Christian gospel, they certainly did not live in ignorance of the Spanish arrival, just as they were familiar with the Asian kingdoms and empires across the sea. Seen in this way, the weeping god in Aduarte’s chronicle recounts not so much a sign of conf irmation that the inevitable Christianization of the archipelago was at that time taking place, as it betrays the author’s belabored staging of a scene – the scene of spiritual conquest over the Devil and the subsequent conversion of the natives. Behind the masks and props, however, the Indians in Aduarte’s account also express a collective lament, shared by the natives of Pangasinan who recognized Apo Laki, as well as the Tagalog and Pampangan visitors from the colonized areas around Intramuros in Manila. Both groups had borne witness to an unprecedented social transformation that had left their gods in a cultural limbo: neither efficacious nor entirely demystified, the flight of the gods and their ensuing years of wandering had become an enigma for natives to ponder. Would the god find new followers, and return? Would his old followers convert to the new religion; or “relapse” [reincidir] as the missionaries often accused 54 This is a mistake that followers of Phelan’s Hispanization thesis are doomed to repeat again and again. See, for example, Robert Reed’s otherwise thorough and erudite history of the cult of the Virgin of Antipolo, in Converging Interests, 158.

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the natives of doing; and follow Apo Laki even deeper into the mountains and forests? The range of possible answers to these questions paints a more complex picture of the Spanish colonization of Luzon and the archipelago in the seventeenth century than the kind of history sketched by the theory of Hispanization / Filipinization: complex in the sense that what Fr. Aduarte obscures or ignores seems to be of equal importance to what he has included. On the surface, both Chirino and Aduarte’s accounts contribute to a general theme that anchors the idea that the Devil was vanquished, the natives were undeceived [desengañados], and the path to religious conversion to Christianity was a fait accompli. In the light of a history we now know, however, these anecdotes begin to reveal a different story: one characterized by native loss, deracination, forced abjuration, and a profound sense of perplexity regarding the future. Following the arrival of the conquerors and missionaries, native settlements around Lingayen and the port of Agoo were closed to inter-Asia trade; Agoo became the center of military campaigns to “pacify” the native tribes of the northern Cordillera mountain provinces; and Lingayen went from being a trading partner with China and Japan to a frontier pueblo and cabecera for the Dominican mission. In the colonial borderlands between highlands and lowlands, gods like Apo Laki weighed their future in the face of the sporadic penetration of Christian mission stations under the administration of the friars. And Apo Laki’s worshippers, far from hastening to adopt Spanish suzerainty, became subjects of a protracted, that is to say, perpetually unfinished and partial, colonialism.

Desengaño as Theopolitics55 If a metaphysical war featuring the Devil as the Universal Enemy represented the narrative frame of this literature of spiritual conquest, we might say that its point(s) of inflection centered on the event of native conversion, in which the neophyte transferred their status from “condemned” to that of one capable of divine salvation. Religious chroniclers portrayed this drama as the simultaneous disenchantment, among native addressees 55 I borrow the term “theopolitics” from recent debates of political anthropology and the anthropology of religion, which propose to “examine the theological sensoria through which performances by the living, the dead, and a host of more-than-human entities are able to incarnate [the political], beyond or in flight from their capture by the sovereign powers of church and state (3).” See Carlota McAllister and Valentina Napolitano, “Incarnate Politics beyond the Cross and the Sword,” 1–20.

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of evangelization, of their pre-Hispanic notions and practices; and the inflammation of their enthusiasm to embrace the Christian faith. Bringing natives to this threshold of abjuring their very knowledge of the world and corresponding set of values and traditions, however, presupposed not only the religious minister’s confidence in the universality of the Christian message, but also an effective interpolation of the “Devil’s” snares, as well as the conviction that the natives’ identification of their own past was wholly created by the Devil and subject to his tyranny. It should thus come as no surprise that the enterprise of religious conversion in the literature of spiritual conquest pivoted around a fixation on the Devil and demonology in the New World and the Philippines.56 In Fernando Cervantes’ illuminating study of the Devil in the New World, the Devil as Universal Enemy served as one of the primary translating mechanisms connecting the overseas missionary experiences of the conquest and its aftermath with native ones, which animated the imaginary matrix of spiritual conquest.57 The obsession of the sixteenth-century Church with the problem of evil, as well as the Devil and demonology, may be ascribed to a variety of domains – the rise of the Ottoman Empire, the Protestant Reformation, the circumnavigation of the world, and the Iberian encounter with the Amerindian civilizations as well as the Middle Kingdom, being some of them. The epistemology of crisis that it reflected found a receptive audience among members of those Amerindian civilizations who had witnessed the Spanish invasion and its consequences. Its roots, however, belong to an earlier, radical challenge from within the Church promoted by Franciscan scholars, particularly Franciscan nominalism. This challenge called upon Christianity to rethink its very conception of God (borrowed from Aristotelianism and its reformulation by St. Thomas Aquinas); and with it, the concept of evil.58 Nominalists – and later, Calvinists and Lutherans – identified a radical separation of nature and (divine) grace in the overall framework of the Divine Plan, which effectively divorced the will and volition of an omnipotent God from any necessary or causal relation to His creation, nature: not to mention any responsibility to nature or any dependence on its existence for the fulfillment of Christian eschatology. From a theological standpoint, this emphasis on the absolute freedom and inscrutability of God’s 56 See Brewer, Shamanism, 101–126. 57 See Fernando Cervantes, The Devil in the New World, 1–74. 58 See Hans Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 127–144; and Cervantes, The Devil in the New World, 15. A more careful exposition of Cervantes’s argument can be found in his The Idea of the Devil and the Problem of the Indian.

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will would increasingly place the burden of Christian ethics on a radical disavowal of the world in the pursuit of divine grace; and place the burden of Christian morality on Scripture, particularly the Decalogue, vs. Christian tradition.59 The separation of nature and grace in Christian theology would come to see the existence of evil almost exclusively in terms of idolatry: a direct attack on the First Commandment by those seduced or enslaved by the Devil to worship him and / or his “idolatrous” forms (idol, from eidos or “form, shape,” + latria as worship or veneration: see Cervantes, 18–25). The implications of this radical turn became most clearly manifest in the work of sixteenth-century Jesuit priest Fr. José de Acosta (1539–1600), whose treatises on missionary method [De procuranda indorum salute, On the Procurement of the Salvation of the Indians] (1588) and an early history of the Indies [Historia natural y moral de las Indias, Natural and Moral History of the Indies] (1590), were widely read and studied. In the opening lines of the first text, Fr. Acosta presents the Devil as an anthropomorphic will whose single aim throughout eternity is to oppose God: “The Devil, enemy of the human race, tormented by the most acerbic envy, labors with all his might and artifice for the conversion of gentiles to the faith [which is] the work of God to not prosper; and thus he erects innumerable barriers to arrest the flowering of the divine seed in the hearts of those who hear it.”60 The diabolic insistence on thwarting God’s will extends everywhere and to everything outside it: particularly in nature, a playground for the Devil’s traps and snares.61 For this reason, Fr. Acosta went so far as to declare that without direct teaching of the Decalogue and the New Testament, conveyed by religious pastors to non-Christian cultures, any knowledge of God or access to eternal deliverance was impossible.62 Idolatry, for Acosta, referred to the natives’ worship of and slavery to the Devil through the veneration of images, oftentimes of ancestors or legendary 59 See in particular, Fr. José de Acosta’s argument against the influence of writings by the Church Fathers against the literal words of Paul in his Predicación del evangelio, 144 (Libro V, cap. 1). 60 Acosta, Predicación del evangelio en las Indias, 64. See also Historia natural y moral de las Indias, 311 (Libro Quinto, cap. 1). 61 On the association of evil with nature and creaturely existence, see Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, 91–95. 62 Acosta, Predicación, 145–150 [Libro V, cap. 3]. See Francisco José Delgado Martín, La necesidad de la fe explícita en Cristo para la salvación en el P. José de Acosta, S.I.; and Joan-Pau Rubiés, “Theology, Ethnography, and the Historicization of Idolatry,” 571–596. As Cervantes writes of Acosta: “by denying paganism any natural means towards a supernatural end … Acosta effectively equated paganism with idolatry” (Devil in the New World, 29; see also Alexandre Coello de la Rosa, “Más allá del Incario: Imperialismo e historia en José de Acosta, SJ (1540–1600),” 55–81).

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figures; and the development of customs and rituals around this veneration. These ranged from feasts involving intoxication [borracherías]; to sacrifices involving the killing of animals or other natives; to adivinations [called bilao in Tagalog], or the channeling of ancestral spirits or deities through the trance of a shaman; to the more abstract dimension of laws and the resolution of disputes. In Fr. Acosta’s words, “[Idolatry] is the greatest of all evils, being the origin and end of every evil thing in the words of the Wise One, and which makes war on the true religion in every way” (57).63 His tautology, while intending to elevate idolatry above all other “evils,” in fact attributes all evils to idolatry (“being the origin and end of every evil thing”). Christianity, according to Fr. Acosta, appealed to and depended upon both the knowledge and will of the neophyte to become Christian. This entailed an understanding of Christianity’s promise of emancipation from sin, which involved a genuine repentance and regret for the idolatrous past.64 Breaking the Devil’s hold on the so-called barbarian peoples thus meant first of all spreading the teachings of the Christian faith, in order to dispel the worship of images and spirits as errors [errores] in thought as well as abuses [abusos] of practice against Christian orthodoxy and natural law. The exemplary preacher would proceed by teaching the natives “the vanity of their gods, inducing them to despise them and seek to destroy them, with reason and authority, with modesty and benevolence … because then they will persuade the rest of the folk (vulgo) of their conviction without difficulty, and the latter will do whatever it is their leaders desire” (Ibid. 60).65 Since the source of all evil could be traced back to idolatry as the worship of the Devil through false images, the task of the religious would be to break through the Devil’s (false) images, which amounted to deceptions [engaños], over non-Christian populations; and to thereby undeceive or disabuse [desengañar] them of their mistake, which was also their sin.66 Fr. Acosta’s influence across the Pacific can be seen with the first Jesuit mission in 1581, just prior to the 1582 Synod of Manila convened by Bishop Domingo Salazar (OP). Acosta’s Jesuit confrere in the Philippines, Fr. Alonso 63 Compare this passage to Acosta, Historia natural, 313. 64 “Conviene repetirlo que la fe no es sino de los que quieren, y ninguno debe hacerse cristiano por la fuerza” [It bears repeating that faith is nothing but what they want, and no one should become a Christian by force” (Historia natural, 60: see also 79). 65 “la vanidad de sus dioses, e induciéndolos a que los despreciasen y procurasen abolirlos, con razón y autoridad, con modestia y benevolencia … porque éstos sin ninguna dif icultad persuaden al resto del vulgo su sentir y hacen cuanto ellos quieren.” 66 Fr. Motolinía’s (OFM) Historia de los Indios de la Nueva España also describes the Devil’s activity as rooted in deception (146 and 152).

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Sánchez (SJ), cited Acosta’s classificatory scheme of barbarism in his Natural and Moral History of the Indies as the basis for understanding the justice of war against non-Christian indigenous communities, which constituted the overwhelming majority of the population at the end of the sixteenth century. One can also discern Acosta’s influence on Philippine Jesuit procurator Fr. Pedro Chirino (SJ), who wrote one of the earliest reports of the Philippines in 1604. In it, Chirino discusses the diversity and variety of pre-Christian understandings of religion and the spirit world among the natives he has encountered under the chapter titled “Of the false pagan religion, idolatries and superstitions among the Filipinos.”67 The chapter begins: “Although upon entering the dark chasm of the blindness of idolatry, I find a disordered confusion of the most vile, abominable things worthy of their inventor … the light of truth grants me [the power] to reduce them to method” (ibid. 74: italics added). Encountering at once a “disordered confusion” of native ideas and beliefs, Chirino draws from Acosta a classificatory schema to “reduce [native beliefs] to method.” And beginning with this “reduction” (a descriptor that also corresponds to the task of resettlement as reducción), Fr. Chirino proceeds to itemize the natives’ objects of worship: their ancestor-spirits, or anitos; the images and statues they make in honor of those spirits, called larawan [or likhâ]; trees and various animals; the ministers or spirit-mediums called Catalonan among the Tagalogs and Babailan among the Visayans, who “have a pact with the Devil,” and allow the dead spirits to speak through them; the instruments, offering, and rituals associated with sacrifice; and a description of the small huts that natives set aside to venerate the spirits (74–78). Once these elements of native practice are brought to light, the religious may proceed to destroy them. Fr. Chirino’s analysis shares with his predecessor Acosta that peculiar mix of Manichaeism and scientific rationality – one reason that historian Anthony Pagden credits Acosta as an early founder of comparative ethnology.68 In place of any extensive description or analysis of native practices and their significance, Acosta and Chirino’s writing prioritize a more urgent task: the categorization of any and all signs of non-Christian worship or veneration in order to revile and debase them, as these signs could only arise at the Devil’s bidding for the express purpose of promoting the Devil’s tyranny. The “reduction … to method” of the native spirit world was described as a process of desengaño. The word literally translates into English as “undeception,” although other translations may include disabusal, disillusion, 67 Fr. Pedro Chirino, Relación de las Islas Filipinas, 74. 68 See Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 146–197.

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disenchantment, or even enlightenment. Note that the Spanish version of desengaño remains distinct from the scientific rationality that sociologist Max Weber described in terms of “disenchantment.” Let us briefly recall how the latter understood disenchantment in relation to the advent of modern science and empiricism: The increasing intellectualization and rationalization [of modern life] … means that principally there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play, but rather that one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service.69

In Weber’s account, “disenchantment” amounts to the marriage of radical doubt in the knowability of “mysterious, incalculable forces” with the new empiricism of Galileo, Newton, and the Royal Society in London (among others). What is important to understand about the evangelical project overseas, however, is that the role of desengaño in religious conversion to Christianity does not work toward the eradication of the “mysterious powers” mentioned by Weber; rather, it ascribes such powers to exclusively one of two sources – God or the Devil – so as to integrate them into a narrative of Christian eschatology. The intended result, in any case, is not “intellectualization or rationalization” in the service of empirical knowledge, but rather a streamlining process of ideas and beliefs towards the dogma of God’s omnipotence in dispensing favor (grace) as well as divine punishment. One might thus characterize desengaño for overseas missionaries like Chirino as “partial disenchantment,” or more specifically disenchantment in the service of re-enchantment: a new credulity to the implantation of Christianity or Christian universalism.70 Desengaño as a trope of Christian conversion unites the politics of resettlement or reduction with deculturation or abjuration of native knowledge and values in its myriad forms. The identification of conversion as resettlement helps to explain that combination of intellectual arrogance and dogmatic blindness that pervades the writings of the religious. Christianity 69 Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” 129–156. 70 For an insightful discussion of the entanglements between secular “disenchantment” and ever-new proliferating forms of “re-enchantment,” see Saurabh Dube, Subjects of Modernity: Time-Space, Disciplines, Margins.

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or Christianization, in any case, had two very different sets of consequences for colonial subjects and religious ministers: what the latter saw as an emancipation from illusion, which the ministers validated with every cultural artifact destroyed, every hallowed field razed, amounted to native subjugation and forced acceptance to resettlement, tribute, forced labor, and theocratic government, without recourse or reference to the universe they had been “liberated” from. Needless to say, these acts of undeception did not go unopposed. When Fr. Chirino [SJ] recounts a “general epidemic” that struck Manila, he recalls how the unbaptized or former catalonan or baylanas [shamans] perpetrated rumors that the epidemic stemmed from the vengeance of natives’ ancestral spirits.71 In response to these rumors, Padre Diego Sánchez’s passionate sermon “addressed their error,” Chirino writes, “and the deception (engaño) in which the Devil was embroiling them … with such efficacy, and spirit, which God placed in his words, that that deception (engaño) of their understanding was left completely banished” (ibid., v.2, 419). In fact, throughout the pages of Fr. Colín (SJ)’s three-volume history of the Jesuits in 1663 (much of it taken from Fr. Chirino’s notes), the word for the Devil [demonio] appears almost always accompanied with the word deception [engaño]; and the phrase is just as often followed by the attempt(s) or success of the missionary in the work of disenchantment [desengaño] or undeception. In practical terms, the act of conversion as desengaño signified the severance of the native past completely from the Christian future. Again, Fr. Acosta’s treatise is illuminating: “Although the principal care of the priest should be to remove those idols from the heart of the Indians [Indios] and this one does better with doctrine and exhortation, at the same time, one should also not neglect the removal (of idols) from their eyes, separating them entirely from any use in life.”72 For missionaries, Christian conversion and resettlement entailed nothing less than the complete invalidation of anything that anchored the veneration of gods and spirits to what one might call the “use-values” of everyday life.73 Doing so not only negated 71 Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v. 1, 418–419. Much of Fr. Colín’s history is taken directly from Fr. Chirino’s unpublished manuscript, which was recently published in Spanish and English: see Història de la província de Filipines de la Companyia de Jesús, 1581–1606. 72 Acosta, Predicación, 62: italics added. The original reads: “Aunque el principal cuidado del sacerdote debe ser quitar los ídolos del corazón de los indios y esto se hace más con doctrina y exhortación, sin embargo, no ha de descuidar el quitárselos también de los ojos y apartarlos de todo el uso de la vida.” 73 The reintroduction of the Marxian category of “use-value” (which Marx opposes to the process of commodification, which assigns “exchange-values” to commodities as a precondition for their

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the subject people’s estimation of the natural, human, and human-made forces that informed their sense of agency, but also their very ability to give value to these forces without or outside primary reference to Christianity. This key expedient explains why Fr. Acosta went so far as to contradict his otherwise general rule that natives ought to convert to Christianity freely. Contrary to this rule, he insisted on the necessity of seizing and destroying any evidence of idolatry, even against the will of the natives.74 To achieve this objective, friars and Jesuits necessarily depended on the cooperation of the baptized community and their willingness to turn against each other as well as their unbaptized members. Baptized children were the first ones asked to expose the practices of ancestral veneration among their parents.75 Most were taught, either implicitly or explicitly, that their unbaptized parents and elders were going straight to hell. Chirino says as much in his recounting of the following episode: “One day, on finding one particular young man from among the native elite sad, and crying, the Padre asked him, what was the reason? And he said: Padre would you not also be sad as I in recalling to mind that the father who sired me, and all my ancestors are burning in hell?”76 Once the religious ministers were able to leverage the innocence of young Christian neophytes against their own parents or community, they followed the method outlined by Acosta: ferreting out the knowledge of the places of spirit veneration (Tag: simbahan), the instruments or images associated with these rituals (likhâ or larawan), and the identity of those who observed or presided over them (catalonan or baylan / babaylan). Places of veneration would be either destroyed or sanctified with the installment of a cross and the incorporation into markets, appears in recent works of historical sociology and anthropology. See, for example, Michael Taussig, The Devil and Commodity Fetishism, 13-40; Bolívar Echeverría, La modernidad de lo barroco, 36-41; Siliva Rivera Cusicanqui, Sociología de la imagen, 18-24; and Daniel Inclán, et al., “Apuesta por el ‘valor de uso’: aproximación a la arquitectónica del pensamiento de Bolívar Echeverría,” 19–32. 74 See Acosta, Sobre la predicación, 86–87. 75 One anecdote relates the strategy of Franciscan priest Fr. Domingo Pérez [OFM], who asked the baptized children to reveal these practices to him in secret. He then called together the community and exposed those members who had continued these practices in secret, as if he had learned of them by divine revelation. After seizing the secret “diabolical instruments” used for rituals of sacrifice and destroying them, he had the children urinate on their remains in the latrines (Schumacher, Readings in Philippine History, 186). Other religious orders also followed this practice. For the Jesuits, see Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v.1, 482. For the Dominicans, see Aduarte, Historia, v. 1, 377. 76 [Particularmente vn mancebo principal, que hallándole vn dia el Padre triste, y lloroso, le preguntó, que era la causa? y el dixo: No quiere Padre que esté triste quándo me acuerdo, que el padre que me engendró, y todos mis antepassados están ardiendo en el infierno?] Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v. 2, 119.

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casting of holy water.77 Upon the discovery of native instruments of worship, religious ministers would either seize them or arrange to have the neophytes deliver them to the priest, upon which the images would be desecrated, burned and / or otherwise destroyed in public fashion.78 Anywhere and everywhere natives expressed some form of awe or veneration, missionaries would rush to “undeceive” them: demonstrating how such places or beliefs held neither authority, value, or use. They cut down “enchanted” trees, climbed enchanted volcanoes, or placed crosses on enchanted rocks or in enchanted fields. The punishment for such practices included exile, imprisonment, or corporal punishment (usually whipping). Either missionaries or their native converts would then preach or pronounce the inefficacy and cowardice of the Devil, thereby “freeing” the natives from their fealty to the eidos of idolatry.79 In this way, the dispossession experienced by the natives under the pillage of Spanish conquest continued unabated under its “spiritual” counterpart.

Disciplining the Shamans Extirpation entailed not only the burning of images and instruments of ritual observance, as well as the desecration of revered objects of nature; but 77 See, for example, Fr. Aduarte’s discussion of the small huts where native sacrifices were performed (Historia, v. 1, 626); see also Chirino, Relación, 74–78; and Colin-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v. 3, 575. 78 An illustrative instance of this process appears in Fr. Francisco de Santa Inés (OFM), Crónica de la Provincia de San Gregorio Magno de Religiosos Descalzos de N.S.P. San Francisco en las Islas Filipinas, China, Japon, etc., v. 2, 179–181. He relates how Fr. Diego de Villar (OFM), who had stumbled upon the secret practice of consulting catalonan for adivination and healing unbeknownst to the ministers, rounded up the natives involved in the practice – many of whom belonged to the elite or principales – and had them imprisoned while he searched and confiscated around 200 images and instruments of ritual worship (likhâ or larawan), many adorned with silver and gold. After depositing them in a chamber and deliberating on what to do with them, there arose a tumult from the chamber, which lasted all night, “as if a smithy of devils lay within, thus were there blows, confusion and shouting, that it seemed like the walls of the convent were being demolished and the very boards dislodged” [dentro del aposento donde estaban los ídolos, como si allí hubiera una herrería de demonios, así eran los golpes, confusión y grita, que parecía que las paredes del convento se demolían y todas las maderas se desencajaban] (Santa Inés, 180). Fr. Villar resolved to incinerate them in a great bonfire before the alleged witches and warlocks. Afterwards, the gobernadorcillo had all the so-called witches whipped (Santa Inés speculates on whether he was simply enacting an order from Fr. Villar); the prisoners then had their hair shorn and were forced to wear insignias that revealed their identity (ibid.). For a discussion of extirpation of idolatry campaigns in Mexico and Peru, see Pedro Borges, Métodos misionales en la Cristianización de América, 247–306. 79 For other examples, see Colín [SJ], v. 1, 420; San Agustín, Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas, 293 and 667–668.

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also the segregation, conversion, or persecution and incarceration of native shamans, who were labeled witches.80 “Against the warlocks and witches,” writes Dominican provincial Fr. Aduarte, “one must wage a vigorous struggle in order to uncover their frauds and deceptions [engaños], demonstrate their ignorance, mock their stupidities and refute their cleverness … they have to be separated from the rest, if it is possible, and punished vigorously.”81 Members of the religious Orders perhaps had every reason to loathe the bailanes / babaylan (as they were called in the Visayas) and catalonan (as they were known in the Tagalog regions). These shamans (most of whom were women) safeguarded the vital link between the spirit and natural worlds, which expressed itself in the use-values of everyday life: from medicinal knowledge and botany to midwifery and divination. They were oftentimes the first to flee a settlement when the missionaries arrived; and they were the last to convert to Christianity. In the early years of the mission, it seems, these figures simply chose to live on the outskirts of a town or hamlet: continuing to serve their community under the nose of the religious minister. In refusing to participate in the initial capitulation of native communities to Spanish rule, catalonan and babailan sought to preserve the traditions that their fellow native companions forgot and abjured; and offered a return to those ways if and whenever baptized Christians wanted to flee the mission settlements (Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v. 2, 56). When natural calamities like earthquakes or disease epidemics struck, the catalonan and babailan raised the alarm that the spirits of the ancestors or Anitos were angry; and they were taking vengeance upon the abjurers of the old tradition for their faithlessness (ibid., v.1, 418 and v.2, 269). From these dire prophecies came even more dangerous ideas. One was that of a shaman in Leyte around the turn of the seventeenth century, who, after a particularly destructive hurricane had ravaged the island and caused a general famine, “took occasion to spread an infernal voice and blaspheme against our Holy Faith, so shameless and unrestrained, as had never been seen until now” and continues: [She] told the populace that a great Spirit (Diguata [sic]) was angry at the lies that the [Christian] fathers were teaching, and that is why such a great storm had come; which would be succeeded by another greater 80 See Carolyn Brewer, Shamanism, Catholicism, and Gender Relations in Colonial Philippines, 83–142. 81 Fr. Aduarte, Historia, v. 1, 65; see also 377. Compare these passages to Fr. Acosta’s “Sobre la predicación,” 65.

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one, if the natives did not separate themselves from this doctrine, which was an invention of the Castilian King, all in order to assure his Dominion, and other awful, and abominable things, with the intention of killing the new plant of the Faith, no less than the hurricane’s destruction and obliteration of the fruits of the land (italics added).82

Fr. Chirino’s history of the Jesuit province abounds with stories of babailan / catalonan and their “undeception,” which often meant their incarceration or indefinite confinement. In the establishment of Antipolo mission in Luzon (also around 1600), resident priest Fr. Almerique caught wind of a woman whose mystical dreams of Jesus Christ led her to knowledge of various herbs with curative properties, which she began to use in the service of tending to the sick members of her town. After forcing her to confess that she was, effectively, mad, Fr. Almerique “undeceived” the town [Desengañé al pueblo] by denouncing her and having her imprisoned in the house of a deputy or fiscal. Almerique and his fellow Jesuits later pursued an active and unbaptized native shaman who lived in the mountains near Antipolo, and who had apparently inherited his office from another shaman who was discovered and denounced three years earlier (ibid., 271–272n). After destroying the instruments of the shaman’s ceremony (which included vases, ceremonial dress, various trees and plants, and a house where sacrifices were performed), “so that there would be no memory of it,” Almerique denounced the shaman’s practice from the pulpit, and had him arrested and sequestered / imprisoned “in one of the houses where the rest of those belonging to this office (of Catalonan) are kept” (ibid.).83 This small detail tells us that with the founding of mission residences of the religious Orders came the establishment of incarceration and the institution of public censure to every settlement. In all these cases, Jesuits followed the same method: it consisted of discovery; extirpation / destruction of instruments of worship; public condemnation of said healers or shamans before the community; 82 Ibid., 387. The original reads: “De aquí tomó ocasión aquella mala muger para derramar una voz infernal, y blasfema contra nuestra santa Fé, tan desvergonçada, y libre, quanto jamas hasta este tiempo se auia visto … Porque dezia, que el Diguata, esto es, su ídolo, estaua muy enojado de las mentiras que enseñauan los Padres, y que por esso auia venido aquel tan grande temporal; a el qual sucedería otro mayor, si los naturales no se apartauan de esta doctrina, que era inuencion del Rey de Castilla para asegurar su reyno, o otras cosas feissimas, y abominables, ocasionadas a matar la nueua planta de la Fé, no menos que lo fue el Huracan para destruir y consumir los frutos de la tierra.” 83 fue desterrado de su pueblo y puesto en una de las casas donde están reclusos los demás deste oficio.

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and in many cases, the enforced separation or incarceration of the shaman priests and priestesses.84 In the minds of ministers, the abasement of native catalonan or babaylan went hand in hand with the preemption of political rebellion. In fact, many rebellions were led or abetted by these figures. During the rebellion of native chief or datu Bankaw on the island of Leyte in 1622, shamans instructed fugitive women and children to dress in white, i.e. in the manner of celebrants at a Christian liturgy.85 During the 1663 Tapar rebellion in the visita of Malonor (located within the province of Otón on the island of Panay in the Visayas), “a malignant Indian, great wizard and priest of the devil” named Tapar, who went about dressed as a woman (as befitting the office of a babaylán), declared himself to be God the Father Himself, and proceeded to name among his closest confidantes a Son, a Holy Spirit, “and to an impudent harlot they gave the name of the most Holy Mary.”86 When Tapar and his followers established themselves in the mountains, the Augustinian priest Fr. Francisco de Mesa attempted to win them back. Tapar responded by informing him in no uncertain terms: they didn’t want to leave their location … [which] they had chosen for their safety, not out of fear of the Spaniards, whom they held in little regard, having as they did in their company the entire Holy Trinity and the Most Holy Virgin Mary, and all the Apostles, who would defend them by making miracles. And they didn’t need Father Ministers, because they had Popes and Bishops and Priests who would administer them in their way, if very different from that in which the Fathers were accustomed (italics added).87 84 Anecdotal evidence seems to verify that the separation of the catalonan / babaylan from their communities and their incarceration, oftentimes in convents or prisons, was a common practice among not only the Jesuits but also the Dominicans and Augustinians. For the forced transference to Manila and incarceration of a shaman from Ibahay, Panay, see Gaspar de San Agustín, Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas … parte 2 … año 1720 (manuscript), 221 (Book 2, Chapter 9). This manuscript is housed in the Augustinian convent in Valladolid. San Agustín also mentions in the manuscript the “imprisonment and punishment of many witches, and hexes, that were found throughout the Tagalog and Pampangan provinces” (219). 85 See Fr. Gaspar de San Agustín, Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas pte. 2, ed. Fr. Casimiro Díaz (OSA), 135. 86 San Agustín, Conquistas pte. 2, 120–121. [S]e declaró diciendo ser el Padre eterno, y de los mas confidentes suyos compuso una diabólica farsa, nombrando a uno por el Hijo y al otro por el Espíritu Santo, y a una impúdica ramera dieron el nombre de María Santísima. 87 Ibid., 124–125. Italics added. The original reads: “No querían salir del lugar que … habían escogido para su seguridad, no por temor de los españoles, a quienes tenían en poco, teniendo en su compañía a toda la Santísima Trinidad y a la Virgen María Santísima, y a todos los Apóstoles, que los defenderían haciendo milagros. Y que no necesitaban de Padres Ministros, porque tenían

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When Fr. Mesa persisted in trying to win them back, he was killed by the members of the visita or outlying village undergoing Christian pre-baptismal instruction. An expeditionary force put a quick end to the rebellion in Malonor, with the bodies of the leaders of the “diabolical farce” tied to stakes at the mouth of the Araut River. The Spaniards saved the cruelest punishment for the young native girl who had been assigned to play the role of the Virgin Mary. They had her entire body skewered through and staked at the mouth of the Laglag River, all for the greater glory of God and Spain (ibid., 125–126). These examples demonstrate the political consequences of native unbelief or refusal to confess the Christian faith, which in turn reflected the enforcement of Christianity as a kind of ersatz law in the frontier provinces. More importantly, however, these episodes also reveal the (over)codification of violence by the discourse of desengaño or undeception in the staging of spiritual conquest. The gendered aspect of this suppression lies at the center of these campaigns: as Carolyn Brewer (among others) has argued, the persecution of pre-Hispanic beliefs and practices associated with the veneration of ancestral and nature spirits cannot be divorced from the suppression of the prominent role of women in the social organization of native communities.88 The manuscript version of Fr. Gaspar de San Agustín’s Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas (Segunda parte), which contains material that was later suppressed in the printed version, reinforces the misogyny of the religious, which manifested in the mass incarceration and even public burnings at the stake under the authority of an Inquisitorial commission. Alleging that these witches constituted “a third of the residents” of any particular town, the inquisitor, Dominican Fr. Theodoro de la cuadre de Dios (OP), went so far as to claim that some women confessed to killing “90 or 100” people, most often beginning with their husbands and fathers (!). The inquisitor emphasizes how the Devil would target girls and women in particular and would fornicate with girls “as young as nine to eleven years old,” because males make poor servants (219v.). His f inal recommendation – surprise – prescribes the “complete separation” (meaning incarceration) of these women from their communities, as well as their public shaming from the pulpit (ibid.). Fr. Gaspar de San Agustín himself recalls the capture and incarceration of a “witch” in Aklan (Panay) in 1677, who stirred up the people living in Papas y Obispos y Sacerdotes que les administrasen a su modo, aunque muy diferente del que los Padres usaban.” 88 See Brewer, Shamanism,101–126. For the larger context of misogyny and its role in both the witch trials in Europe and the Conquest of Mexico and Peru, see Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch, 219–242.

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the outlying sitios / visitas of the Augustinian mission to rebellion. She was distinguished by her pale skin and blonde hair, “como si fuera Flamenca” [as if she were Flemish].”89 The Devil had allegedly spirited this woman to “the most hidden deserts of the island of Borneo,” where he corrupted her. As a sign of his possession of her, she wore her hair in a “strange and exquisite braid” that trailed behind her, one and a half feet on the ground, and wound so tightly and smoothly that one could hardly see the imbrication of its strands. After being captured, the interim parish priest had the woman incarcerated in the convent of Santa Potenciana in Manila, where she was effectively sentenced to spend the rest of her life. In a perverse afterword, Fr. San Agustín mentions how he and his fellow priests had the braid cut from her head. He recounts with fondness how he took possession of the woman’s braid and had it dyed, to admire as a souvenir from a holy scalping expedition (ibid., 220).

Conjurations of Law Philippine historians and scholars depend upon the literature of the early religious chronicles as sources to understand the otherwise obscure and inaccessible facts of the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Philippines. As Oona Paredes has argued, however, to do so often ignores or neglects the violence that arises from the concatenation of such facts into a narrative, which produces its own truth or “truth-effects” in the thesis of Hispanization and Christian conversion.90 Analyzing these truth-effects thus takes seriously Marcelo H. del Pilar’s characterization of colonial rule as a form of monastic sovereignty or monachocracy: an ersatz form of government organized around the conflation of religious conversion with forced resettlement (see Chapter 2). By portraying the history of the mission as one of civilization, religious chronicles promote the interpretation of Spanish conquest as the advent of Spanish peace. Yet the animating scene that drives these histories is not one of recognition of Spanish dominion, but rather one of spiritual epiphany, revelation, or enlightenment, which “liberates” the protagonist or convert from either the unreliability of appearances or the tyranny of the Devil’s deceptions. Needless to say, the rhetorical message of desengaño / undeception preaches the exact opposite of what baptism and resettlement actually entailed. Its importance as a trope owes itself to the writer’s ability to 89 San Agustín, Conquistas, 2a parte … 1720 [manuscript], 221. 90 See Paredes, “Projecting Order in the Pericolonial Philippines: An Anthropology of Catholicism Beyond Catholics,” 1–17.

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represent social anomie as a demonic enchantment from which the Christian neophyte had to be liberated, paradoxically through colonial subjection. The friars’ obsession with the Devil, and his conjuration by the catalonan and babaylan masked a different kind of “conjuration” in the literature of spiritual conquest: the conjuration of law, which covered the landscape in the imagination without ever existing in fact or effect. Not coincidentally, missionary chronicles seem to discover and record “exemplary” moments of religious enlightenment everywhere, while simultaneously casting a larger fog on the phantasmagorias of Hell and Paradise that serve as their backdrop. With their former leaders or soothsayers locked in convents, native peoples wandered throughout a netherworld with its now defunct cosmogony: perplexed and bewildered at their displacement, surrender, and condition of servitude to a higher power they neither understood nor recognized. While setting out to mitigate the most catastrophic consequences of the conquest – genocide, epidemics, wanton brutality, fraud, and corruption among officials and even members of the religious Orders – the mission as frontier institution also paradoxically prolonged it: perpetually announcing while at the same time deferring the arrival of Spanish law and civil institutions. As we saw in the last Chapter, the mission also engendered new forms of abuse and exploitation. The time of the conquest was a time of weeping gods, dishonored ancestors, exiled patron spirits, and disenchanted nature. Yet these episodes present themselves to us as already part of a preestablished code or cipher, organized around the nominalist-inspired mentality of religious ministers. More than just a narrative, then, the Christian imaginary of spiritual conquest served as a parasitic matrix capable of grafting itself onto native understandings of the spirit world in order to distort, displace, and transpose them, much in the way the “dream-work” described by Freud seizes on the impressions of conscious living: rearranging and reformulating data around the unresolved contradictions of personal (or in this case, historical) trauma. In sum, while prioritizing the acts of cultural translation as the necessary prelude to and scene of Christian conversion, we cannot neglect the coercive mechanisms of terror and cultural genocide that have been deliberately “lost in translation” through their inversion in the literature of spiritual conquest. This literature recorded the erosion of native societies, knowledge and economic networks, traditions, and values by warping and recasting these accounts as a triumph of Western civilization. Among its legends and trophies we include an impeccable braid of golden hair, cut at the root, and dyed some dirty color by the friars to mask its brilliant luster. Such souvenirs, tucked away in the manuscript pages of these chronicles,

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bear counter-witness to a counter-history written between the lines of the spiritual conquest.

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4

Miracles and Monsters in the Consolidation of Mission-Towns El sueño de la razón produce monstruos (Reason’s sleep / dream produces monsters) — Francisco Goya

Abstract: Representations of the “efficacy of divine grace” informed the projects of conversion and concentrated settlement, while also serving as a cipher for recording the native experience of deracination and state of social anomie. The prose of spiritual conquest allowed the friars and Jesuits to promote the practical usefulness of apparitions and miracles. But for the presumably conquered peoples under Spanish rule, the reception of miracles and apparitions suggests a collective ambivalence and uncertainty regarding the prospect of abjuring native understandings of the spirit world for the faithless promises of concentrated settlement. The theo-politics of undeception masked an underlying conflict around the autonomy of native Indians to assign values (social, economic, and otherworldly) to their environment and community / communities. Keywords: [divine] efficacy, use-value, deculturation, Agnus Dei medallions, monsters, cult(s) of the Holy Cross.

The staging of spiritual conquest in missionary literature represented the Christianization of the Philippines, much in the same way later historians would characterize Hispanization as a sociological process: a progressive, cumulative, even “evolutionary” accomplishment. This is certainly the way religious chroniclers have insisted on remembering it; a two-step forward, one-step backward affair. As we have seen in previous chapters, this willful narrative comes at a great cost: to the point of reinventing war as a form of peace, masking the rule of expediency as the rule of divine justice,

Blanco, J.D., Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463725880_ch4

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and portraying the persistence of an unconquered frontier as the impetus towards an ever-unfinished conquest. The propagandistic value of this literature served as a constant reminder that for the religious Orders, the promotion of the Christian faith and the recounting of the historical deeds of the conquistadors meant the same thing. The act of desengaño and spiritual emancipation as strategies of deculturation (see last chapter) exposes the instrumentality of Christianity as a colonial ideology. At the same time, it omits the issue of its efficacy or inefficacy among native populations. It is one thing to explain how friars and Jesuits explained the task of evangelization to each other and colonial officialdom. But how did they explain Christianity to the conquered peoples? What combination of coercion and persuasion led colonial subjects to profess the Christian faith and settle in and around the mission towns? This question was all the more pressing when we consider that Christianity and resettlement in many ways not only worked in tandem, but also oftentimes in conflict. How could a religion of emancipation and salvation at the same time facilitate colonial enslavement and subjection to impunity and abuse? As the early generation of friars and Jesuits knew, in order for spiritual conquest to acquire a positive dimension, it had to go beyond the mere suppression of customs. After all, spiritual warfare constituted only one facet, and in fact the basest one, of the larger concern among religious ministers with the spiritual welfare of those under their supervision. And to address that [spiritual] welfare, pastors had also to concern themselves with the relationship between the religious imagination and the material needs of the populations, whose lives were afflicted by the violence, disease, and social anomie that had accompanied Spanish dominion. Pastoral power, in other words, had to address not only the demolition and reconstruction of native cosmogonies but also the reconceptualization and reorganization of needs and values in and around the mission pueblo. The goal of this reconceptualization would go beyond mere acquiescence to colonial subjection, which the religious in any case had no means of enforcing. Colonial subjects had to be made to need Christianity and resettlement, Christianity as resettlement, to the degree that the existence of both would be inconceivable otherwise. Adopting a term from Marxian anthropology, and particularly its renewed interest in Latin American studies, the creation of such a need would entail the rearticulation and reorientation of use-values around the process and the end of reducción (see Chapter 3). The friars (and Jesuit)s’ preoccupation with translating spiritual welfare into material terms shows itself, above all, in their particular approach to the Christian apparitions and miracles that permeated the mission territories

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during the first two centuries of Spanish rule.1 The almost predictable occurrence of miracles or near-miraculous events found a ready explanation among the religious during the sixteenth century. Jesuit writer Fr. Pedro de Ribandeyra (SJ), whose hagiographical work on Jesuit founder St. Ignatius Loyola and catalog of saints’ legends Flos Sanctorum widely disseminated the popular knowledge of Christian saints outside Europe, would attest that God recognized the necessity of miracles for the implantation of faith among unbaptized peoples.2 Behind this convenient rationale, however, loomed the larger question of how the efficacy of the religious (in this case, Christian) imagination depended, at least in part, on its ability to alloy itself with the imagination of its neophytes – an imagination that stemmed from local understandings and the (use) values that they engendered. While this dependence necessitated, on the one hand, the relentless promotion of the workings of divine (Christian) grace, on the other hand it also indicated the constitutive role that the native imagination would have to play in the implantation of the faith overseas. This chapter examines the interplay of imagination and interpretation in the literature of spiritual conquest, with attention to the diverse perceptions and evaluations that contribute to the consolidation of mission towns. At the heart of this interplay lies the ambiguity of the idea of eficacia, efficacy, as a word used to describe the workings of divine grace but which could also address the usefulness of Christianity as a whole. The working through of these two interpretations took place in and around the dissemination of Christian symbols: from relics, wax medallions imprinted with the figure of Christ in the form of a lamb [Agnus Dei], and scapulars containing written fragments of prayer, to the holy Crosses erected in the plazas of mission towns. Reading the stories of miraculous happenings that circulated around these symbols, one witnesses the two sides of the colonial imagination in its coalescence: the implantation of a universe of Christian signs and symbols, which announces and anticipates the arrival of law and order to the frontier provinces; and the encroachment of a frontier wilderness, in which Christian signs and symbols disappear or acquire new meanings and values in the encounter with monsters, demons, and unsympathetic priests. 1 While this subject has received a great deal of critical attention in Latin America, Philippine historiography has, on the whole, tended to take the religious chronicles at face value and to leave unexamined the apparent workings of divine intervention. Two recent studies that go against this trend are Christina Lee, Saints of Resistance; and Luis Castellví-Laukamp, “Los milagros en la Relación de las islas Filipinas (1604) de Pedro Chirino,” 177–194. 2 Ibid., 179.

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Routinizing the Sacred What use did / would unbaptized natives have for Christianity? In relating Admiral Miguel López de Legazpi’s arrival on the island of Cebu in 1567, Jesuit provincial Fr. Pedro Chirino (SJ) believed he had an answer. When Legazpi and his men received word that the natives had refused to receive and supply them, the conquistadors laid siege to the coast, with the natives burning their residences in retreat and fleeing to the hills. While sacking the abandoned houses, one soldier of Legazpi’s expedition (a Vizcaino) discovered an image, which turned out to be that of the Holy Child or Santo Niño.3 Fr. Chirino writes this account of the discovery: And the Indians, partly because of the novelty of the image (which they understood to be the God of the Christians), partly because of the respect and reverence that the Lord Himself put on them, held the image with great veneration (as was later learned from them), and beseeched [the image] to provide for their necessities, making sacrifices in their way to him, and anointing him with their oils (as they customarily do to their idols). And treating [usando] it with whatever mildness they knew, in the company of those who honored the image without knowing him, as one who would use [something] amongst those who, not knowing [the Hold Child], alternately injured him, petitioned him without restraint with their needs, for signs and for granting them the greatest indulgences … Thus they used [the image] often to beseech from him these things; naming the image the Diwata of the Castilians, a Diwata being among them a God, whom those from the Manila region call Bathala or Anito (italics added). 4

Chirino’s explanation obviates the task of Jesuit missionaries to explain the nuances of native beliefs (although he did so elsewhere). As he implies, 3 “[Un soldado] halló en una cesta, entre otras cosas, una imagen de bulto del sagrado niño Jesús, que se presume había quedado por despojos de la devoción de algún buen soldado de la primera armada de Magallanes.” Fr. Pedro Chirino, Relación, 9. 4 Chirino, Relación, 9–10. “Y los indios, parte con la novedad de la imagen, que entendían ser el Dios de los cristianos, parte con el respeto y reverencia que el mismo Señor les puso, le tenían en gran veneración (como después se supo de ellos), y acudían a Él en sus necesidades, haciéndole sus sacrificios a su modo, y ungiéndolo con sus aceites (como solían a sus ídolos. Y usando de su acostumbrada clemencia … el que la usó con los que desconociéndole, juntamente le injuriaron, les socorría liberalísimamente en sus necesidades, en señal y prenda de las mayores mercedes … Por lo cual usaban mucho acudir a él en ellas; nombrándole el Diuata [sic] de los Castillas, que entre ellos el Diuata es el Dios, a quien los de Manila llaman Bathala, o Anito.”

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prior to the Spanish arrival natives were already dimly conscious of the usefulness of the Christian image, while knowing next to nothing about the Christian religion.5 In fact, Chirino’s repeated use of the word “use” conveys what the author sees as this partial regard the natives had for the Christian image. The Cebuano natives, he implies, approach the image as a kind of rudimentary technology for satisfying needs and granting wishes, in exchange for the appropriate propitiatory rites and offerings.6 Chirino does not doubt in the least the image’s efficacy. And even without knowledge of the Christian tradition or the transcendental source of its authority, he suggests, they already needed it, much in the same way the Romans needed the Unknown God to whom they had dedicated an altar in the days of primitive Christianity.7 What is lacking among the natives, however, is the knowledge of the image’s provenance; and the appropriate corresponding set of rituals, observances, and moral teachings that would link the Holy Child to the Christian tradition. Chirino’s history demonstrates how a primary stake in spiritual conquest was persuading natives that Christianity provided an eff icacy to their material as well as spiritual needs: indeed, the word “efficacy” [eficacia] is often used to characterize the manifestation of divine grace in the profane world (see Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v. 1, 418; and v.2, 112, 114, 307, 399). The efficacy of divine grace afforded the unsettled populations some protection against epidemic disease, plagues of locusts, the vengeance of ancestral spirits for the abjuration of their cult veneration, and the exposure of communities to potentially hostile neighbors.8 As the Jesuits came to understand it, these dangers were in fact inseparable. Fr. Chirino’s history of the Jesuit province in the Philippines records how, in 1601, an epidemic in Manila provided the occasion for certain “old women” [catalonan?] to claim that the anitos or ancestral spirits were taking vengeance upon the Tagalogs for turning their backs on them (Colín-Pastells, v.1, 418–19 and v.2, 5 This legend echoes the legend of St. Thomas’s arrival to the New World in the first century of Christianity, whose memory the Mayan and Mixtec peoples venerated under the figure of the serpent-god Quetzalcóatl. See Jacques Lafaye, Quetzalcóatl and Guadalupe: The Formation of Mexican National Consciousness, 1531–1813. 6 One century later, Fr. Gaspar de San Agustín echoed Fr. Chirino’s observation, referring to the irreverence natives held for God when they did not obtain what they asked for. See San Agustín, cited in Fr. Juan-José Delgado [SJ], Historia sacro-profana, 283. Such a conception, of course, is not far afield from folk Christianity elsewhere, even Spain: see William Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, 32. 7 See Bible, NIV: Acts 17:23. 8 See Castellví-Laukamp, “Los milagros,” 179–188.

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269).9 Two decades later, Fr. Bueras’s annual Jesuit report in 1633 clearly ties together the spread of epidemic disease, the missionary extirpation of idolatry, and the experience of delirium on the island of Mindoro: Thanks to our Lord, the pestilence [smallpox?] has ceased, which had afflicted these towns for many days, and in which many people seeking divine mercy through the [administration of Christian] sacraments, died after having arrived from the mountains … Many more still are those to whom we have given more attention and care at this time, who suddenly fall spellbound, and stupefied, as if without judgment, this happening even to Spaniards; and many said they saw terrible figures, who told them, that the religious Father and the frontier magistrate [corregidor] were in hell, for their having burned a large piece of land full of reeds; and their having made great offerings to God, since that place had been formerly consecrated to [native] idolatries.10

Fr. Bueras’s account demonstrates several important aspects of Christian conversion and the development of colonial culture in Mindoro, as well as many other parts of the archipelago during the colonial period. The first is the role of smallpox and other epidemics, whose severity must have increased significantly with the progress of mission resettlement. The spread of epidemics and locust plagues (also facilitated by concentrated settlement) propelled mass flight into the interior. But these calamities also drove deracinated natives who had been separated from their communities back out to the coastlands out of desperation, to die, along with newly infected highland populations seeking respite. Another important feature is the relationship of disease to derealization. The connection between psychosis and the extirpation of idolatry in this case is unmistakable: “they saw terrible figures, who told them, that the religious Father and the corregidor were in hell, for their having burned a large piece of land full of reeds; and [for] their having made great offerings to God, since that place had been formerly consecrated to [native] idolatries.”11 The fact that it is the religious Father and magistrate who “go to hell” demonstrates the 9 P. Gregorio López explains in his Carta anua de la Provincia de Filipinas de 1610 a belief common to the Visayas and Luzon, that illness signified the arrival of a departed ancestor’s soul to the sick person, in order to bring that person’s soul to the netherworld (cited in Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v. 3, 253n). 10 Fr. de Bueras, “Carta Anua de la Provincia de Filipinas…1633,” 118r. 11 In P. Diego Sánchez’s Carta Anua de 1596–97 (in Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v. 2, 116), a similar case of delirium overcomes a catalonan, following the Jesuit priest’s discovery and

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ambivalence of Christian neophytes, forced to choose between incompatible systems of veneration. On a larger level, the abjuration of ancestral veneration as just one more of the Devil’s deceptions, also eroded the very foundation of value as it had been understood by pre-Hispanic society.12 Just as resettlement came to represent for the religious Orders the only effective means of propagating the Christian faith, it may have represented for many natives an opportunity to mitigate the effects of social anomie – the constant irruption of encomendero violence, the spread of unknown diseases, the combination of droughts and floods, pirate raids on the coast, and, perhaps most notably, the extirpation of so-called idolatry. Resettlement would anticipate a rule of order sanctioned by new customs and laws; which, however alien, were still customs and laws. These would allow deracinated populations to once again act upon their environment and themselves in a meaningful way. To this end, missionaries labored to demonstrate the efficacy of Christianity not only to the Indians’ souls, but also their bodies. Specifically, miracles and Christian paraphernalia like the Agnus Dei expressed not only the gift of divine favor on Christian communities, but also a practical cure for illness and malady. In the sixteenth century, Peruvian Jesuit Fr. Acosta’s De Procuranda Indorum Salute characterized this project of deculturation and re-acculturation as one of substitution: “One must cure a bad custom with a good one” [La mala costumbre hay que curarla con otra costumbre] (66). His formulation anticipates Fr. Borges’s more contemporary portrayal of Christianity as a form of spiritual compensation, although Acosta’s use of the word “cure” is conspicuous.13 Sickness or illness, in fact, constituted one of the chief objects of Christian charity and missionary work. Acosta further recommended burning of the image she had kept hidden. Afterwards, the woman is buffeted by the Devil’s visions and threats. 12 This condition, which the Mixtec peoples of Mesoamerica called nepantla, manifested itself in the community’s attempt to accommodate both the cultural traditions of the past and the demands of Christianity. In 1587, Dominican friar Fr. Diego Durán described this concept according to his indigenous source as follows: “Y como entendiese lo que quería decir por aquel vocablo que quiere decir, estar en medio, e insistí me dijese qué era aquel en que estaban. Me dijo que, como no estaban aún bien arraigados en la fe, que no me espantase la manera que aún estaban neutros, que ni bien acudían a la una ley ni a la otra, por mejor decir que creían en Dios y que juntamente acudían a sus costumbres antiguas y del demonio, y esto quiso decir aquel en su abominable excusa de que aún permanecían en medio y estaban neutros” (Diego Durán, Historia de las Indias de Nueva España, 234) 13 “[Ministers],” Fr. Borges wrote, “knew that, with the indigenous deprived of their simulacra, they would end up seeking a spiritual compensation in Christian dogmas and ceremonies.” See Borges, Métodos misionales en la evangelización de las Américas, 88.

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the regular use and circulation of the “new signs and Christian uses,” i.e. paraliturgical practices that accustom the natives to Christianity.14 In doing so, he reasoned, Christianity would fill the vacuum left by the undeception [desengaño] of their values in the face of the conquest. Equally important is the fact that such practices would derive from the Church’s approval. Echoing Max Weber’s observation of the modern State as the “monopoly of lawful violence,” we might call Acosta’s conception of reduction policies as the “monopoly of lawful customs and traditions” under the shadow of the religious Orders.15 The simultaneous orthodoxy of “good customs” and their routinization in the mission pueblo was a point repeated by Fr. Chirino, who elaborated this dual concern in his idea of healthy or “salubrious” Christian rites: one must take great care in introducing salubrious rites in the place of pernicious ones and erase certain ceremonies with others. Let the blessed water, holy images, rosaries, blessed beads, candles, and other things that the holy Church approves and dispenses, persuade priests that these are very opportune for the neophytes, and [the priest] should end his sermons to the people with praise for those that accustom themselves to the new signs and Christian uses [Sp. usos cristianos], leaving behind the old superstitions.16

Chirino’s use of the word salubrious [saludable] here names a central concern of his treatise – the spread of Christian doctrine as both spiritually saving and physically healthy: both come from the same Latin root salus. Missionaries would extend this line of thought to explain natural disasters and human epidemics as perpetrated by the Devil, or divine punishment for human sin. As the Augustinian friar Gaspar de San Agustín (OSA) would write in his introduction to the first Virgin apparitions taking place in a visita of Taal, Batangas (Calabarzon province, in Luzon south of Manila) in 14 See Ivonne del Valle, Escribiendo desde los márgenes. Colonialsimo y jesuitas en el siglo XVIII, 18–23. 15 See Weber, “Politics as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, 78. 16 Fr. Pedro Chirino (SJ), Relación de las Islas Filipinas, 63: italics added. “[H]ay que tener gran cuidado de que en vez de los ritos perniciosos se introduzcan otros saludables, y borrar unas ceremonias con otras. El agua bendita, las imágenes, los rosarios, las cuentas benditas, los cirios y las demás cosas que aprueba y frecuenta la santa Iglesia, persuádanse los sacerdotes que son muy oportunas para los neófitos, y en los sermones al pueblo cólmelas de alabanzas para que, dejada la antigua superstición, se acostumbren a los nuevos signos y usos cristianos. Con lo cual se conseguirá que, ocupados en ritos mejores y más decentes, dejen caer de sus manos y de su corazón las viejas supersticiones de su secta.”

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1611: “Divine Clemency … manifest[s] its magnanimity to these natives with various apparitions of miraculous images … with the great devotion and care of the natives and the benefit of not only their souls, but their bodies, since through the intercession [of divine grace] they are free of various illnesses.”17 In Fr. Francisco Colín (SJ)’s history of the Jesuit Order Labor Evangélica (much of which draws from Fr. Chirino’s notes), Chirino relates the official reception of holy relics donated to the Philippine Jesuit Order to promote Christian piety, inspire the undecided, and – who knows? – perhaps facilitate some miracles. These relics included “the bones of 155 Martyrs, and among them twenty Popes.”18 While the relics had arrived by 1595, the festivities in which they were put on display did not take place until 1597. The celebration lasted for nine days; and included the construction of triumphal arches on the streets; fountains of liquor and milk; numerous processions of religious members adorned in gold, jewels, and finery; and dances and performances prepared by “all the Confraternities, Communities, and States”; and, on the last day, poetic jousts in Spanish.19 The schedule of the novenary or nine-day celebration reads like a blueprint for routinizing the sacred through paraliturgical rites, as well as the formation of native confraternities. The veneration of holy relics, the staging of pious works, performances, and inventions, the religious procession throughout the city, the ritual transfer of holy objects between sites, the preaching of the Gospel in native languages (presumably Tagalog), and the formation of confraternities to support these and other works of devotion, describes a circuit of activities that encouraged the more zealous fulfillment of the sacraments.20 It also provided a model for what Chirino would identify as “the [general] reform in customs.”21 One particular practice that natives seem to have seized upon, almost immediately, was the reception of Christian paraphernalia like medallions 17 San Agustín, Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas … pte. II, 117. “La Divina Clemencia [manifiesta] a estos naturales su liberalidad, con varias apariciones de imágenes milagrosas … con grande devoción y consuelo de los naturales y provecho no solo de sus almas, sino de sus cuerpos que por su intercesión son libres de varias enfermedades.” Compare the language of this passage to Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v.2, 134–135 n. 1. 18 Colín-Pastells, ibid. 104. “Son reliquias, y huessos de ciento y cinquenta y cinco Martyres, y entre ellos veinte Papas.” 19 Ibid., 106. 20 D.R.M. Irving provides a description and analysis of many of these early attempts, especially by the Franciscans, to stimulate Christian piety by drawing upon both native musical and performance traditions and introducing new ones. See Colonial Counterpoint. 21 “Y fue manifiesta a todos la reformación en las costumbres.” Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v.2, 107.

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of the cross, saints, and the Virgin Mary, or scapulars or wax medallions, popularly called Agnus Dei; as well as the liberal use of holy water to work miracles.22 In 1597–1598, Fr. Raimundo del Prado (SJ) from the Antipolo mission writes of the Agnus Dei’s “efficacy” in introducing Christianity and encouraging the abjuration of native beliefs and customs: “The devotion of the Agnus Dei … that has been engendered among them is great, with all requesting them with great urgency, saying that these give them a weapon against the Devil and against the dangers to the body.”23 The equation established by Fr. Prado – “a weapon against the Devil and against the dangers of the body” – explains the immediate “uses” to which these medallions were put. The idea behind its efficacy is the presumed equivalency between physical ailments and misfortunes like disease or accident, and acts of the Devil. This equivalency made Christianity particularly appropriate as a remedy against disease and misfortune.24 The religious Orders’ method of substituting various native practices with Christian analogies, particularly when convictions shared a sense of the supernatural, inevitably anticipates the question regarding syncretism and the limits of paraliturgical customs like that of the Agnus Dei. To what degree did Christian neophytes themselves distinguish the pre-Christian universe from the Christian one? On the one hand, the efficacy of such substitutions seems to have been immediate, preserving as they did an analogical correspondence with the bedrock of animism. But did this easy correspondence go unchallenged? Fr. Juan de Bueras’s annual report from 1633 provides one of many examples of this ambiguity. “[M]any were undeceived [desengañados],” he writes, “by the various devotions and saints medals, especially those that were distributed among them every month, which they keep in their pockets, and bring them to their cultivated plots, and wherever they go.”25 22 See Filomeno Aguilar, Clash of Spirits, 38–44, although my interpretation of these departs somewhat from Aguilar’s. For the early distribution of these medallions, see Fr. Manuel Ribandeira (OFM), Historia del Archipiélago y otros Reinos / History of the Archipelago and Other Kingdoms, 68. The traditional image imprinted on the Agnus Dei medallions is a lamb, signifying Jesus as the “lamb of God,” accompanied by a cross. Fr. Ribandeira also mentions saints’ images stamped on paper, which devotees would wear around their necks known as scapularies. 23 “Hase introducido la deuocion del Agnus Dei … y por esto es grande la deuocion que en todos se ha engendrado pidiendo todos con grande importunación dicen que les den aquella arma contra el demonio y contra los peligros del cuerpo.” Cited in Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v.2, 112; see also 120, n.1. 24 For holy water see Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v.2, 154, 284, and 305. 25 “[M]uchos eran desengañados con algunas devociones y medallas de los santos, en especial los que se les reparte cada mes que guardan en sus bolsillas, y los llevan a sus sementeras, y a

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Bueras’s use of the word desengañado[s] here synthesizes the insistence of Christian (partial) undeception in preserving the immanence of the divine in the material world (see Chapter 3). Of equal importance, however, is Bueras’s surprise at the natives’ predisposition to believe in the material and spiritual benefits of these medallions. This hints at both the desperation the natives themselves experienced before the disenchantment of the conquest; and the Jesuit priest’s extreme indulgence in allowing natives to believe what they would. As the letter makes clear, even Bueras expressed some skepticism at the readiness of natives to adopt the phantasmagorias he had unleashed among those to whom he preached. In one episode, an “Indian woman who at times went mad” cast her gold jewelry in a f ield, only to regret and lament her loss later. After receiving an Agnus Dei medallion from Fr. Bueras, lo and behold, a fellow parishioner found the woman’s lost gold jewelry and returned it to the church. Bueras concludes: “I confess that I don’t remember having ascribed [the rediscovery of the jewelry] to the medallion, but seeing what the Indians were saying, I took the occasion to confirm with emphasis the estimation and devotion that such objects should have among them. 26 Bueras’s imprecision, refraining as he does from actually confirming the miraculous nature of the recovery of gold jewelry, unwittingly betrays the Jesuit priest’s ambivalence regarding the blurring of lines between the so-called idolatry and superstition the religious were trying to extirpate – the ascription of magic or mystic forces to individual objects of nature or worship and veneration such as images – and the dedication to icons or iconophilia promoted by the Church. This oscillation between concession and sanguine enthusiasm among the regular clergy when faced with the proliferation of miracles testifies to contradictory demands they faced in the dual task of extirpating “abuses” and “errors” inspired by the veneration of nature and ancestral divinities while also grafting the imagination onto a new, transcendental root, a new genealogy: along with developing new customs that would stir religious fervor and Christian piety.

donde quiera que van; y es cosa notable la devoción que han cobrado con estos santos, que por suerte les caben. En un pueblo nunca los había dado, y descaminando una vez de haberlo, les declaré esta devoción, y que los santos eran el alma contra el demonio, y contra sus tentaciones, y luego se los repartí.” Bueras, “Carta Anua de la Provincia de Filipinas de la Compañía de Jesús, del año de 1633,” 106v. 26 “Confieso que no me acordaba de atribuirlo al santo, pero viendo lo que decían los indios, tome ocasión para conf irmarles más en la estima y devoción que debían con ellos.” Ibid., 160v.-107r.

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Disease, Derealization, and the Hostile [Racial] Other in the Tigbalang Complex In addition to the experience of disease and derealization, native groups throughout the archipelago were entering into an unforeseen and sustained contact with one another, as well as the intrusion of peoples from faraway worlds. Mexican sailors disembarked from galleons that arrived from Acapulco and settled throughout the archipelago; African slaves deserted the Portuguese merchants who had brought them to Asia for sale, and would flee into the hinterlands of the archipelago.27 The flooding of foreigners from all parts of the world to Manila, which began in the seventeenth century, would certainly have complicated the disruptions brought about by resettlement and conversion. In the eighteenth century, Fr. Pedro Murillo Velarde (SJ) lists a dizzying array of new populations that somehow ended up in Manila as the city became a great entrepôt for trans-Pacific and early modern global trade: there are Kaffirs, and other Blacks from Angola, the Congo, and Africa. There are Blacks from Asia, Malabarians, from Coromandel and the Canaries. There are quite a number of Sangleyes, or Chinese … There are those from Ternate, and Mardicas … there are some Japanese, Borneans, Timorese, Bengalines, Mindanaoans, Joloans, Malaysians, Javanese, Siamese, Tidorean, Cambodians, Mongolians, and those from other Islands, and Kingdoms of Asia, as well as quite a number of Armenians, some Persians, and Tartarians, Macedonians, Turks, and Greeks. There are people from every Nation in Europe … and all of the Americas.28 27 According to Archbishop Miguel García Serrano, by 1621 “slaves constituted one third of an Intramuros population of 6,000” (William Henry Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines, 29). Preferred slaves were from India, Malacca, or the Moluccas, while the least preferred seem to have been Africans, called cafres or kafir, who were accused of being “given to carousing, revolt, thievery and highway robbery” (28). There were also many natives from throughout the archipelago, who had been enslaved by capture through war, piracy, military entradas, impoverishment, or by inheritance. See Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico, 32–72. 28 “[C]reo] que no ay en el Mundo Ciudad, donde concurran tantas Naciones … a demás de los efpañoles , que son los vecinos, y dueños del Pays y los Tagalos, que son los Indios Naturales de la tierra, ai otros muchos Indios de las Islas de lenguas diferentes … ai muchos Cafres, y otros Negros de Angloa, Congo, y el Africa. Ai Negros de Asia, Malabares, Coromandeles y Canarines. Ai muchifinmos Sangleyes, o Chinos … Ai Ternates, y Mardicas … ai algunos Iapones, borneyes, Timores, Bengalas, Mindanaos, Ioloes, Malayos, Iavos, Siaos, tidores, Cambayas, Mogoles, y de otras Iflas, y Reynos del Afia, ai baftante número de Armenios, algunos Perfas, y Tartaros, Macedones, Turcos, y Griegos. Ai gente de todas Naciones de Europa … [y] de todos los Reynos de

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Is it perhaps in this context that, paradoxically, the Devil begins to appear throughout the archipelago in ever more monstrous guises? Chirino mentions almost casually the appearance of the Devil in Leyte, who “took power” over a young man, treating him “with such familiarity, that by growing accustomed to [the Devil] he was no longer frightened of its shocking, horrendous figure, because they ordinarily went about together; and [the Devil] held him so submissive and subject that he made [the young man] fall into the most serious and enormous sins” (Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v.1, 476).29 In another account, this time on the neighboring island of Mindanao, a married (i.e. Christianized) Indian who lived on the coast and had to travel twenty leagues, crossing the mountains, to reach Dapitan on the other side of the island, encounters the devil “as a terrible figure,” who lifts him up and whisks him away through the air. Fortunately, he wore a rosary around his neck; and, after praying fervently, God commanded the evil spirit to drop him off safely in Dapitan, which the Devil promptly did. Not only was the man rescued from certain doom; he also arrived in Dapitan in record time (ibid., v.3, 214)! This theme of being spirited or led astray comes to be associated with a native Tagalog concept of a ghost or phantom, which they called Tigbalang or tikbalang.30 One of the earliest mentions of this spirit appears in Franciscan priest Fr. Juan de Plascencia (OFM)’s 1590 report titled Relación del culto que los Indios tagalos tenían y dioses que adoraban y de sus entierros y supersticiones [Report on the Worship the Tagalog Indians Practiced and the Gods They Adored and On Their Burials and Superstitions]. Here, Fr. Plascencia simply refers to Tikbalang as “phantoms” [ fantasmas], opposed to Bibit, which he characterizes as mischievous spirits [duendes] (Plascencia [manuscript] 92R). Years later, Plascencia’s Franciscan confrere Fr. Pedro de San Buenaventura (OFM) gives a fuller (and later) description of Tikbalang in the first dictionary [Vocabulario] of the Tagalog language he penned in 1613.31 Efpaña, y de toda la America.” P. Pedro Murillo de Velarde, Historia de la Provincia de Philipinas de la Compañía de Jesvs, segunda parte, lib. 1, cap. 1, 5v-6. 29 “Auia quatro, o cinco años que vn demonio eftaua apoderado de vn mancebo Indio Bifaya, y le trataua con tanta familiaridad, que ya con la coftumbre no le atemorizaua la efpantofa, y horrenda figura, porque de ordinario andaua con él; y le tenia tan rendido, y fugeto, q(ue) le hazia caer en grauifsimos, y enormes pecados.” 30 For an early essay on the folklore of tigbalang in the Philippines, see Fletcher Gardner, “Philippine (Tagalog) Superstitions,” 191–204. For more recent studies, see Maximo Reyes, Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology, 21–31; and Damiana Eugenio, Philippine Folklore, v. 1: The Legends, 343–348. 31 See Fr. Pedro de San Buenaventura (OFM), Vocabulario de la lengua tagala, y el romance castellano puesto primero. Primera y segunda parte.

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Fr. San Buenaventura’s informants describe the Tikbalang as a ghoul or phantom with wings, “that brings men wherever it wants, and thus brought hence [the victim] becomes starved unto death, unless he glimpses the ghoul in its natural form (because they say that its form is human [tao]) and commands it to eat something better than [the victim] (an absurdity).” A long time ago, San Buenaventura adds, people would see a “figure, very tall, with long hair, small feet, and a very colorful loincloth (sic), they say that since there have been [Christian] ministers no one has seen them.”32 One can sense their presence, however, from a “bad smell” as if coming from the mountains. San Buenaventura’s exasperation at the imprecision of this depiction leads him to add: “I don’t know more than that they say that [the smell] is bad (ibid.).” The experience of being “spirited away” is recounted in various episodes throughout Fr. Chirino’s history. In one, he relates the story of a highland Christian neophyte who, while conducting a task to collect various curative herbs for the Jesuit priest in Antipolo, was led away by demons and forced to wander “from mountain to mountain” until he was finally brought back to his home (Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v. 2, 273). Around the same time that Frs. Chirino and San Buenaventura were writing their reports, Augustinian missionary and author of the f irst dictionary and grammar in the Visayan language Hiligaynon, Fr. Alonso de Mentrida (OSA) (1559–1637), regularly worked among people who saw tigbalang on the island of Panay. Recalling Mentrida’s life and work, Augustinian provincial and chronicler of the Order, Fr. San Agustín (OSA) described the area of missionary activity in Oton, Panay (near present-day Iloilo City) as “shrouded in the darkness of error. There the devil was well entrenched in those rugged mountains, having solidly established his kingdom and worship among those simple natives – who, influenced more by fear than any other consideration, prostrated themselves before that demon and gave him their worship and adoration.”33 Into those mountains went Fray Mentrida, preaching the Christian gospel and exhorting the native inhabitants to abandon their remote settlements and resettle in larger, coastal pueblos that would be more accessible to the Spaniards from the port of Iloilo. According to San Agustín, natives often saw the devil, who would stand upon a rock and “teach superstitions and give laws to a great multitude of 32 Cited in Jean-Paul Potet, Ancient Beliefs and Customs of the Tagalogs, 577. Translation modified. 33 San Agustín Conquistas…Parte II, ed. Casimiro Díaz, 352.

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Indians, who followed him, [being] deceived by him.” His description of the Devil transitions almost seamlessly into the description of tikbalang: [I]n those mountains are many demons, which appear to the natives in horrible forms – as hideous savages, covered with bristles, having very long claws, with terrifying eyes and features, and which attack and maltreat those whom they encounter. These beings are called by the Indians Banuanhon, who are equivalent to the satyrs and fauns of ancient times. Even up to today these hideous monsters are wont to appear to the Indians, some of whom remain in a demented condition for months from the mere sight of them; others go away with these demons, and are lost for a long time, and then they often return in a terrified and fainting condition, few of them failing to die soon afterward … They are called in the Tagal[og] language Tigbalang; and many persons who have seen them have described them to me in the same terms.34

San Agustín goes on to describe the tikbalang as having a “face like a cat’s,” covered in long hair and with bristles on top of the head. He describes the legs as being “so long that, when he squats on his buttocks, his knees stand a yard above his head; and he is so swift in running that there is no quadruped that can be compared with him.”35 The creature’s penchant for driving people mad or confusing them recalls San Buenaventura’s description: both are responsible for the disorientation and displacement of the unlucky person who encounters it. San Agustín’s account, however, conveys a visceral horror, bestiality, hideousness, uncanny swiftness, and predatory character to the monster: traits that not only elicit revulsion but also foreclose the possibility of negotiation, compromise, or persuasion, which the native informants of 34 Ibid. 354–355. The original reads: “En el tiempo de la predicación de este Ministro Apostólico en los montes de Ogtón, se aparecía el Demonio visiblemente sobre una peña enseñando supersticiones y dando leyes a una copiosa multitud de indios, que engañados le seguían. También había en aquellos montes muchos demonios que se aparecían a los naturales en horribles formas de salvajes muy feos, cubiertos de cerdas, uñas muy largas, ojos y facciones terribles, los cuales acometen a los que encuentran y los maltratan. A estos llaman los indios Banwanhon, que equivale a los Sylvanos y Faunos de la antigüedad. Hasta el día de hoy se suelen aparecer a los indios semejantes vestiglos, y algunos están dementados muchos meses de solo haberlos visto, y otros suelen andar con ellos perdidos mucho tiempo, y luego suelen volver asombrados y desfallecidos, y pocos dejan de morir muy presto … Llamanse en lengua Tagala Tigbalang (sic), y muchos que los han visto me han explicado concordes su forma.” 35 Ibid. “[D]icen tiene la cara como gatos, la cabeza no redonda, sino llana; por arriba con muchas barbas y cubierto de largo vello. Las piernas son tan grandes que sentados en cuclillas sobrepujan una vara la cabeza, son tan ligeros que no hay cuadrúpedo que se les pueda comparar.”

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San Buenaventura’s description insisted on including. It is their repulsive, abject character that allows San Agustín to interpret tikbalang to be quite simply devils, either subject to or versions of the chief apparition who spreads superstition and idolatry to the hapless populace. Curiously, however, in addition to the bestialization of this spirit or phantom under Christian eyes, San Agustín also suggests the monstrosity of these beings to be a product of racialization. For example, he mentions specifically that natives refer to the monsters in the mountains around Oton as banuanhon. Yet this name refers not to some creature but to either a generic reference to local inhabitants (lit. people from a given social unit [banwa]); or perhaps even specifically the Banwaon people (also spelled banuwanon): an indigenous, former highland group from the region of Agusan del Sur on the southernmost island of the archipelago, Mindanao. The possible presence of such groups in Oton, while mysterious, may not in fact be so surprising. In the aftermath of the Conquest, Spaniards routinely conscripted native groups to cut wood in shipyards located in places like Oton. Slave raiders also captured coastal dwellers to be sold or traded as “war captives.” And as we saw in Chapter 3, natives often fled the arrival of Spaniards, sometimes traveling to neighboring islands. The merging of demonic characteristics and racialized ones would seem far-fetched, were it not corroborated by other instances in which the racialization of indigenous groups and enslaved Blacks brought by the Portuguese coincided with their demonization. For example, the Agta, an indigenous highland group of the Bicol region (in southern Luzon) who are identified as short, dark, and with curly hair, are also misidentified as demons or ghouls akin to the tikbalang in the neighboring islands of the Visayas, just south of Bicol.36 Similarly, the name of the mythical spirit creature called kapre comes from the Arabic word for pagan, kaffir (Hispanized as cafre), which was used to refer to slaves that the Portuguese brought and traded in the Philippines and other parts of Southeast Asia.37 The 1684 report by the Royal Audiencia on slavery mentions how, in 1608, Manila residents petitioned to prohibit the sale of cafres “for having found them to be vicious, thieves, and fugitives, and given to becoming highwaymen” (Scott, Slavery, 40). While the 36 See Maximo Ramos, The Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology, 22, 25–26; and Jean-Paul Potet, Ancient Beliefs, 147. For a nineteenth-century description of the Agta in frankly racist terms, see the account by Franciscan priest Fr. José Castaño (OFM), “Breve noticia acerca del origen, religion, creencias y supersticiones de los antiguos Indios,” in Wenceslao Retana, Archivo del bibliófilo filipino, v. 1: 12 (323–380). 37 See Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines, 27–35; and Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico, 74.

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Figure 10: The Ati-Atihan festival in Kalibo, Aklan (on the island of Panay), where Aetas or highland natives mingle with residents in blackface. From Félix Laureano, Recuerdos de Filipinas. AlbumLibro, n.d. (1895). Copyright public domain.

characteristic feature of the Philippine superstition describes the kapre as a large, even giant anthropomorphic creature with black skin, and smoking a large pipe or cigar, it also takes on the mischievous tendencies formerly associated with bibit and tikbalang.38 As a final example, Fr. Chirino’s Jesuit confrere Fr. Gregorio López (SJ) mentions a festival that may well be the origins of the Ati-Atihan festival in Aklan (on the island of Panay) today, which consists of “a hilarious dance organized by the Chinese, in which they carry a great beast that they call Buddha (!), which is chased by those disguised as Blacks, to the sound of musical instruments, all of which culminates in forcing the great beast to prostrate itself before the Most Holy Sacrament” (see Figure 10).39 The representation of racial others – whether they were indigenous highlanders, Black slaves, or Chinese in blackface – further highlighted the presence 38 For legends about the kapre, see Damiana Eugenio, Philippine Folk Literature, v.1: The Legends, 180–191. For the tigbalang or tikbalang, see ibid., 343–348. 39 Carta Anua de 1597–1598, cited in Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v.2, n. 170n. [U]na graciosa danca que h(orde)naron los chinas en que lleuauan una gran bestia que llaman buda acosándola ciertos negros fingidos al son de algunos instrumentos músicos rematando la danca con hacer postrar la gran vestia al sanctissimo sacramento.

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of potentially hostile outsiders, who became associated with the Devil as Universal Enemy. One would thus be hard put to trace the racial representation of monsters like the tikbalang to either the religious ministers or the native eyewitnesses themselves. But there is no reason to deny the possibility that the imagination of such creatures came from both. The (mis)translation of the tikbalang, banuwanhon, and Agta as the figures of the Devil had the corollary effect of allowing the tikbalang to take on other associations that were unanticipated by both the religious ministers and their native neophytes. In these translations, one witnesses the divergent ways in which the Devil became a “useful” cipher for understanding the experience of mass displacement and the intrusion of an unknown and possibly hostile, racialized Other. Yet if the religious translation of the tikbalang as the Devil (or devils) leads natives to ascribe the character of evil to other domains, it also facilitated the reconfiguration of native understandings of the spirit world through the representation of the Devil. One is struck, in particular, by the repeated claim throughout the native eyewitness accounts of such monsters in the literature of spiritual conquest, that one could, in fact, ward off or even negotiate with demons – with the help of Christianity, of course. Returning to Fr. Juan de Bueras’ 1633 annual report of the Jesuit mission, the author reports how, on the island of Negros, a young man is mysteriously abducted. Three days later, his parents find him wandering on the outskirts of the settlement: they asked the reason for his departure, to which he responded that it had not been voluntary, but violent, forced upon him by the ghost [fantasma] he had seen, which had spirited him to the mountain, prevailing upon him to relinquish his bararao, which is a wide dagger that the Visayans often wear; and when the Indian responded that he had no such dagger, nor any other weapon, the ghost insisted that [the victim] strip himself of that which he had wrapped around his wrist – this was a rosary. 40

Bueras does not the tikbalang by name, but he describes the phantom’s signature trait: its penchant for spiriting people away to faraway places, where they either starve or are eaten. What is different about this portrait, however, is the almost human willingness and intelligence of the creature to engage in the act of barter and bargaining. A century after these accounts, Fr. Tomás Ortiz’s (OSA) reinforces this idea in his description of the tikbalang in his handbook on pastoral methods, Práctica del ministerio (1738). This time, 40 Fr. Juan de Bueras (SJ), Carta anua de 1632 / 1633, 188r.-188v.

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the monster exhibits not a revulsion to the rosary but an unexplained, even childlike interest in its usefulness as an instrument of spiritual power. Fr. Ortiz describes the monster alternately as a ghoul, dwarf, or Devil, whose skin or hair is black [en figura de negro], or in the form of an old man or horse or other creature (12 [par. 34]). He adds: “And it makes [the natives] so afraid, that they eagerly make friends with [the tigbalang], giving it their rosaries, and receiving in exchange superstitious things like strands of hair, herbs, rocks and other things, in order to produce prodigious things.”41 The oscillation of these descriptions between the demonic and the almost pedestrian (a creature one can befriend and with whom one can enter into commercial relations for other magical amulets) reflects the uneven colonization of the native spirit world and the idea of the racialized Other by the Christian imaginary. Can we not infer a kind of tug-of-war taking place between conflicting interpretations of the Tikbalang’s existence on the colonial frontier? In some accounts, these creatures are characterized by their hideous monstrosity, which reflects their absolute malignant nature; in others, they seem to represent almost trickster-like genies, who play games and express a willingness to negotiate with their captives. Their putative evil nature certainly betrays the influence of Christian morality. In identifying the “Devil” as such, religious ministers ushered in a profusion of deracinated voices: representations of the native environment and cosmos, which appeared caught between and mutilated by the forced intrusion of the Christian imaginary. The tikbalang’s playfulness and shrewdness, by contrast, evokes a world in which humans share some kind of social relationship with these creatures; and in which agency does not yet wholly depend on divine salvation by an omnipotent (Christian) God. Such values of pluck tended to align themselves less with the Manichean universe of the religious Orders and more with a pragmatic relationship to the supernatural forces of the natural world. What remains constant in all these accounts, in any case, is the terror one experiences: not of death, but of disorientation and displacement of encountering the [Black or highland] Other, and being transplanted somewhere far from one’s original residence. Let us recall again Fray San Agustín’s words: “Even at this day these hideous monsters are wont to appear to the Indians, some of whom remain in a demented condition for months from the mere sight of them; others go away with these demons, and are lost for a long time, and then will return in a terrified and fainting 41 Fr. Tomás Ortiz (OSA), Práctica del ministerio, 12 [par. 34]). See also Jean-Paul Potet, Ancient Beliefs, 577.

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condition, few of them failing to die soon afterward.” Dementia, dislocation, disorientation, and madness: do these conditions not characterize precisely the effects of desengaño and resettlement in the so-called spiritual conquest of the Philippines?42 The circulation of the Tikbalang legend, as well as other creatures of Philippine “lower mythology,” allow us to make at least two concluding observations regarding their presence in the missionary literature of spiritual conquest. First, while folklorists and cultural anthropologists continue to insist on the indigenous and (by implication) pre-Hispanic origin of these phantoms, and while some evidence exists that similar visions haunt other regions of southeast Asia, the social anomie unleashed by the conquest and its protracted aftermath certainly played a role in intensifying the occasions for terror visited upon the native inhabitants undergoing Christian conversion. Nightmares and terror often followed in the wake of a religious minister’s arrival in a community, and his ensuing crusade to destroy any trace of worship or reverence to nature or the ancestral spirits. With native populations stripped of any traditional means for knowing the natural and human environment and thereby being able to communicate and negotiate with it – except under the sign of evil – they did not need to wait for death to see the inferno. For what else is Hell, but the abasement of those values that organize the universe of the living and nonliving alike, without a corresponding culture to anchor phenomena and their representations in place? The reader’s attunement to the identification of the mission provinces as a colonial netherworld leads to the second observation. If these monsters reflect the limit experiences of deracination and derealization before the transformed landscape of the mission province, they also render visible the social need that the concepts of divine favor and the Devil came to address. The Christian phantasmagorias of spiritual conquest would not have taken root among native communities, had the natives themselves not been forced to need the efficacy of Christian grace, as well as the Devil’s existence, in order to preserve some sense of their ancient knowledge, however mutilated, in popular legend and folklore. Monsters and miracles allowed natives to become collaborators if not co-producers of the narrative of spiritual 42 In Monsters of Contact, Mark Van de Logt illustrates how oral traditions of monsters in the Caddoan Indian traditions refer not only to the mythological and psychological terror of social anomie unleashed by the colonization of the western hemisphere, but also to historical traumas specific to various native groups of the Caddoan Nation (Arikara, Pawnee, Wichita, & Kitsai, and Caddo proper). While monsters “tend to survive as metaphors in art and (oral) literature” (12), they often also embed specific perceptions and responses to actual historical events to the attentive listener and transmitter. See Monsters of Contact, 183–187.

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conquest, by preserving the memory of those forces ever destined to be pushed into the forests, backlands, and backwaters of the mission provinces.

Antipolo, 1596: a Tale of Two (or Three, or a Multitude of) Crosses As the preceding account has shown, the implantation of Christianity and Christianization in the literature of spiritual conquest entailed the surrender of native autonomy, which natives had once used to assign value(s) to their natural environments. The incompletion of this project invited the participation of Christian neophytes and frontier subjects in the co-invention of Philippine Christianity. The last two sections of this chapter investigate the co-invention of resettlement in the early devotional cults that grew up around the establishment of the mission towns on the outskirts of Manila. It is difficult to say for certain whether the festival and paraliturgical celebrations in Manila began to change settlement patterns in and around Intramuros and throughout the Tagalog lowlands. But around the turn of the seventeenth century, Jesuit priest Fr. Diego Sánchez of the Taytay mission (near Antipolo) reported the mass arrival of new populations to the town and Jesuit cabecera or missionary base Antipolo (in 1595–96) (Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v.2, 110, n. 2). Antipolo was located where the foothills of the Tagalog lowlands give way to the Sierra Madre Mountains, which run up the eastern part of the island of Luzon. Situated to the north of Laguna de Bay, the largest freshwater lake on the island, Antipolo also lay between Intramuros and the ancient native settlements located on the east side of the lake, which had been evangelized by the Franciscans. According to Fr. Sánchez, the Jesuit mission began to attract not only people from the highlands who wanted to convert to Christianity, but already converted Christians belonging to other missions. While the reasons for their desire to abandon these other mission settlements remains an unexplored topic of future study, disease and the paucity of religious ministers must have played a major role in the migration of highlanders and lowlanders alike to Antipolo. As Fr. Chirino notes in his history of the Jesuit province, a “general sickness” [una general enfermedad] afflicted the Tagalog lowlands in this period, including Manila, and led to the first great challenge of the Jesuits in the spread of Christianity. The Jesuits responded by redoubling their efforts to attend to the sick and dying: including the establishment of a provisional hospital in Antipolo. Natives who received treatment for illness often stayed, alternately drawn by the entreaties of the Jesuits as well as the fear of returning to the highlands where the epidemic had reached.

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Not surprisingly, it is with the relatively sudden influx of new populations, some of which had abandoned the lowlands when the Spaniards first arrived, that the clashes between conflicting traditions begins in earnest. In one case a group of four female shamans led a general relapse of Christian beliefs and customs. One of them, a senior member of the community, went so far as to claim that the anito she worshipped had also come from heaven, “and was quite friendly with the [god] of the Christians.”43 The careful investigation of the “secret fire” of idolatry yielded a “great number” of idols, “some made of clay, others of wood, and two with crocodile fangs, set in gold, with the Anito’s head formed around the point of the fang, also made of gold” (ibid., 116). While the anito of the senior shaman evaded detection for a while – going so far as to “promise” the shaman that the Christian priest would never find it – Fr. Santiago (SJ) one day discovered the idol’s hiding place and consigned it to the fire. After being visited and tormented by the devil with nightmares and hallucinations, the senior shaman finally submitted to conversion to Christianity; and, with the help of the Holy Cross [Santa Cruz], disavowed her past beliefs and received absolution. Quite a different set of miracles begins to take place, however – much larger in scope and scale than that of the native shaman’s conversion – when Fr. Chirino picks up the thread of the founding of Antipolo in the third volume of Fr. Francisco Colín’s Labor Evangélica, which recounts the installation of a large Cross in the plaza of a barrio or sitio / visita, some distance from the Jesuit mission center and cabecera of Antipolo.44 Soon after the cross’s installation, the Jesuit priest responsible for erecting the Cross meets an untimely death; and in the ensuing period the town was left without a priest. During this period, the “Devil” convinces members of the town that the Cross was “infecting the air” with disease, as the town was apparently rocked by an(other?) epidemic; and that the disease would not abate until the Cross was removed.45 Various attempts to remove it by the townspeople, however, were apparently rebuffed by an unspecific series of divine punishments. 43 Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v.2, 115. “cuyo Anito dezia ella, auia baxado del cielo, y que era muy amigo del de los Christianos.” 44 Chirino’s history draws from his confrere Fr. Gregorio López’s Carta Anua de 1597. The episode of the Holy Cross has also been discussed in Christina Lee’s recent work Saints of Resistance: see 113–117. Esperanza Gatbonton makes an interesting analogy between the planting of crosses as a missionary activity and the pre-Hispanic practice of erecting wooden beams in harvest fields. “The folk believed that these beams attracted the spirits of the dead, who used them as a resting place, so placing the fields under their protection” (A Heritage of Saints, 37). This practice was called omalagar or humalagar, which signified ancestral spirits. See also Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v.2, 126–129; and BRPI v. 17, 71. 45 Colín-Pastells, v.3, 101.

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The Jesuits dispatch another priest to pacify the town; under the leadership of various shamans (Baylanas), however, the townspeople plot to have the priest killed and the church and convent burned down. While divine favor apparently succeeds in frustrating these plans, the ambiguous resolution of these various troubles lead the Jesuits to move the Cross to another settlement, closer to the Antipolo mission station proper. Yet another series of attempts to remove the Cross ensues, followed by more forms of divine punishment. 46 As for other attempts to remove the cross, all those responsible for attempting to uproot the cross become afflicted with the (unknown) disease even more gravely, with many resulting deaths (102). The natives of the nearby “pacified” visita of Santiago (now Baras), who had originally helped the now deceased Fr. Sánchez to erect the Cross in its original place, then decide to bring the Cross to their own settlement. In Santiago, the wonders wrought by the Holy Cross include not only dispensing divine punishments but also saving mercy. This begins when natives begin to attribute miraculous cures with the possession of the earth around the Cross. Due to the constant extraction of earth around the base, a gradual hole begins to widen around the cross. Yet mysteriously, just when the resident Jesuit priest begins to worry about repairing the hole, it begins to repair itself, generating an ever-growing mound of earth around the cross. The natives use the soil to cure each other and themselves: sometimes mixing it with water, sometimes laying it on their bodies. But even more strangely, at this point the miracles of the Holy Cross seem to inspire or infect other Crosses with miraculous powers of both divine healing and punishment. As Chirino writes: And the first thing that confronts our eyes, are other marvels wrought by other Crosses; which, for being the image and semblance of our redemption among these pagan and barbarous Nations, the Redeemer honors with so many continued and prodigious effects, that we can justly believe Him to have given this to the Evangelical Ministers … to uproot those predestined [peoples] from the dark Egypt of their paganism, and guide them by means of the holy Sacraments and Catholic Doctrine to the Kingdom of heaven. 47 46 Ibid., 102. 47 Ibid., 107: “Y lo primero que se nos viene a los ojos, son otras marauillas de otras Cruzes, que por imagen, y semejança de la nuestra redempcion, honra el Redemptor entre estas Naciones Gentilicas, y barbaras, con tan continuados, y prodigiosos efectos, que podemos justamente creer nos la dá a los Ministros Euangelicos … para sacar de las tinieblas del Egipto de la Gentilidad sus predestinados, y guiarlos por medio de los santos Sacramentos, y Doctrina Catholica al Reyno del cielo.”

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What is worth highlighting about Chirino’s account is how the miraculous powers of the Cross proliferate much in the same manner as epidemic disease or environmental contamination. As an “image and semblance of [our] redemption,” the Holy Cross anchors a set of founding myths about the settlement of the population around the Jesuit mission of Antipolo. But it also serves as a node or relay point for a new, Christian landscape, coded by the imaginary matrix of signs and symbols associated with the struggle against death, depopulation, and social anomie on the frontiers of the conquest. As a sign and symbol, the Cross travels in a way the law cannot: dispensing miracles wherever the image plants itself yet where the administration of law is lacking. As Chirino notes: “not only was the Cross an instrument of favor, and remedy for the Faithful, who respect it, but (it was) also (an instrument) of punishment, and whip for those infidels who debase it.”48 Chirino’s concluding thoughts on images like that of the Holy Cross as an apparatus for dispensing miracles tell us how the “usefulness” of Christianity in combating depopulation and disease becomes the defining question in the construction of the mission pueblo. “Miracles provide the seed for other miracles,” he ponders, “for animating the Faith; and they generate trust and confidence, which draw [people] to the All-Powerful like a magnet. And so when a Cross, or holy Image is discovered, a shrine is made in the place, and various wonders ensue, because [the presence] of some call others into being” (ibid.).49 While lacking the administration of law, the missions effected, called into being, the law’s arrival in and through the administration of Christian sacraments and provisions for the sick, dying, and deceased. Beginning with cultivating the natives’ trust and confidence in their own survival, the staging of spiritual conquest provided an explanatory framework for a transition between pre-Hispanic and Christian society and culture.

Taal, c. 1600: from Manifest to Latent Grace The second cult of the Holy Cross around the founding of mission pueblos I analyze follows a divergent historical trajectory than that of Antipolo or San 48 Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v.3, 107. “no solamente fue la Cruz instrumento de fauor, y remedio para los Fieles, que la respetan, sino de castigo, y açcote para los infieles que la vltrajan.” 49 “Los milagros son semilla vnos de otros, porque auiuan la Fé; y engendran confiança, que son la iman de la Ominpotencia. Y por esto quando se descubre milagrosamente alguna Cruz, ó santa Imagen, se haze por algun tiempo santuario, y obran tantas marauillas, porque se llaman vnas a otras.”

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Juan del Monte: its differences illustrate the different stakes that various parties involved in the Christianization of the archipelago developed in relation to one another in the fashioning of colonial traditions. In the same way that the Holy Cross of Antipolo anticipates the invención or discovery of perhaps the most important religious cult in the Philippines, the devotion to the Virgin of Antipolo (also called Our Lady of Peace and Safe Voyage), the Holy Cross of Bauan anticipates the first Virgin apparitions to take place in the Philippines, in the nearby area of Caysasay. If Antipolo in the early years of the seventeenth century represented the “backlands” of Manila, the area around Taal Lake in southern Luzon might be more appropriately called the backwaters. According to one of the first Augustinian histories of the mission written by Fr. Juan de Medina (OSA), the area around Taal Lake had once been a densely populated area in Luzon outside Manila Bay; but due to numerous eruptions of Taal Volcano (located on an islet in the center of the lake) throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as well as the spread of epidemic disease and flight that afflicted much of the archipelago, the population became sparse.50 One of the first encomiendas awarded by the Crown was to the conquistador Martín de Goiti, who traveled with Miguel López de Legazpi and secured the surrender of native settlements around Manila. The Augustinians encountered a number of concentrated settlements of Tagalog-speaking peoples; and they established a convent and official pueblo of Taal on the southwestern corner of the lake as early as 1572, the year after the establishment of Manila. The early significance of both Taal and the larger province of Batangas was mainly strategic. As the southern region of Luzon closest to Manila, Batangas formed the beachhead for Moro and Dutch pirate attacks throughout the colonial period.51 Situated on the Pansipit River, Taal connected the peoples of the lake (called Bongbong or Bombon) with San Pedriño (now Balayan) Bay, which opened up to the South China Sea. In fact, as Augustinian priest and missionary Fr. Francisco Bencuchillo attested, the volcanic ash and debris of the 1754 Taal volcanic eruption began to close the mouth of the 50 For a history of volcanic eruptions in Taal, see Hargrove and Medina, “Sunken Ruins in Lake Taal,” 336. For the depopulation of the region, see Fr. Juan de Medina (OSA), Historia de los sucesos de la orden de Nuestro Gran Padre San Agustín de estas islas Filipinas (1630), 80. 51 Its proximity to Mindoro also accounted for the influence of Visayan languages on Batangueño Tagalog: Fr. Medina’s history claims that, from Taal, “which is near the beach in a beautiful cove, one may easily cross over to the Visayas islands with the breeze” (Medina, Historia de los sucesos, 139: my translation). But Medina also suggests that, in earlier periods as well as the present, the region also served as a center for commercial trade with the Chinese sultanates: see 152.

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body of water now known as the Pansipit River, eventually turning the lake into freshwater.52 As one of the f irst historians to document the Augustinian mission during this period, Fr. Medina narrates some of the challenges the order faced in the early decades of their missionizing efforts. At the top of the list were their century-old conflicts with the encomenderos: royal grantees like Martín de Goiti (1534–1575) and other conquistadors, who were given royal license to collect tribute from the native populations within a given area in exchange for surrendering a percentage allotted to the Crown, as well as providing for the temporal and spiritual welfare of the inhabitants. While the Augustinian Order took this to mean the encomenderos’ assistance in concentrating populations, it soon turned out that the latter had economic reasons to do no such thing. For not only did concentrated settlement require expenses and the organization of labor and administration beyond the will and wherewithal of the encomenderos, but the proximity of missionary priests would prevent the encomenderos from the extortions they (and soon, the native elite who served them) visited upon the inhabitants under their jurisdiction.53 What made matters worse, according to the author, was the fealty the natives expressed toward the very encomenderos who oppressed them, on account of their desire to remain free of the obligations and vigilance that characterized the mission settlements.54 Native leaders made common cause with the encomenderos to enact legislation in Manila that would limit the power of the religious: beginning with the right for missionaries to enact corporal punishment on the natives.55 Adding to this list of obstacles to the preaching of the Christian faith were disorders taking place within the Order itself. During the early years 52 Hargrove and Medina, “Sunken Ruins in Lake Taal,” 338. The first map of the Philippines drawn to scale, which appeared in Jesuit priest Fr. Pedro Murillo Velarde’s 1734 history of the Jesuit Province in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, seems to indicate a fairly wide channel connecting the then-saltwater lake to the bay. In 1638, colonial authorities debated the possibility of opening a channel between Taal Lake and Manila Bay, the better to protect the city of Intramuros (Manila) from Dutch attacks, although a royal decree [cédula] by then-governor Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera put the idea to rest. See “Orden sobre abrir dos ríos para abastecer Manila,” AGI Filipinas 330, L.4, F.109R-109V. 53 See Medina, Historia, 140–141. 54 The collusion between natives and encomenderos against the missionaries over the project of population concentration in settlements was not unique to Batangas: for the Jesuits in Luzon, see Chirino, in Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v.2, 278. for the island of Negros, see Angel Cuesta, History of Negros; and for the Bicol region of Camarines in southern Luzon, see Danilo Gerona, “Text and Politics,” 15–77. 55 For a defense of corporal punishment by the religious, see Fr. Juan de Medina, Historia de los sucesos, 143–144.

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of the mission the Augustinian Order also clashed with then Bishop (and later, Archbishop) Fr. Don Domingo de Salazar (OP) (1579–1584). The latter labored to rein in the privileges of autonomy among the religious orders and subject them to the rule of the bishops (see Chapter 2).56 Finally, throughout the second decade of the seventeenth century the internecine politics of the Augustinian Order, split between those religious born in Spain and those in the Americas (criollos or creoles), led to scandals that came to a head in 1617, when the Provincial head (Fr. Vicente de Sepúlveda) was poisoned by his fellow Augustinian priests; and his successor (Fr. Geronimo de Salas) stabbed to death by his fellow confreres while sleeping in his bed in the Augustinian convent of Manila.57 Fr. Medina’s 1630 account of the region around Taal (formerly Bombon) Lake ties the history of the region to the counter-history of the conquest, in which the semi-autonomous powers of the encomenderos and the missionary orders set out to enact a “spiritual conquest” while inadvertently perpetuating native depopulation throughout southwest Luzon. Fr. Gaspar de Agustín’s Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas, published in 1690, picks up the history of Taal several decades later. San Agustín claims that the town of Taal was originally “a town of many people,” but became depopulated when the Crown began to depend on native labor to provide its ships with cordage for rigging.58 Then, when the regional governor [alcalde mayor] devised an ill-conceived relocation of the town, which exposed it to Moro pirate raids and a scarcity of sustainable resources, the stone church fell into ruin (ibid.). Combined with all these factors, of course, is the fact that Taal volcano remains an active volcano.59 San Agustín recounts a heroic story of various Augustinian priests, who, despite repeated warnings and omens, approached 56 Such was the position the bishops in the Americas had already adopted in the wake of the Council of Trent (1515–1545); and the ensuing religious Synods or Councils in Mexico and Peru (see Medina, 144–145). For a history of provincial and spiritual government in the Americas, see Magnus Mörner, La corona Española y los foráneos. 57 The rivalry between creoles and peninsular Spaniards eventually led to the institution of the alternativa, in which official elections within the Order alternated between the election of Spaniards and Creoles for the given term (3 years). See Manuela Águeda García-Garrido, “Peticiones contra el ‘breve de la alternativa’ o el rechazo de la hibridación clerical en Filipinas (siglo XVII),” e-Spania (online) 30 (June 2018). 58 San Agustín, Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas, 370. 59 The 1754 eruption, in particular, succeeded in either burying a number of towns around the lake in volcanic ash; or preparing for their future submergence by the waters of the lake, which grew when the mouth of the Pansipit River (which empties out in the sea) was signif icantly closed.

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the volcano and “exorcized” the Devil’s influence over it by climbing as far up as he could go. Upon doing so, the mouth of the volcano collapsed and the demons inhabiting it howled (371). A later priest placed a great cross upon the very peak, “which required more than 400 men to do, as it was made of the heavy wood called anivión” [Narra]. “And,” San Agustín concludes, “after they planted [the cross] on the volcano, not only has the volcano not erupted, but the islet where it is located has returned to its ancient fertility” (ibid.).60 San Agustín was of course mistaken, for the volcano did erupt again: in 1707, nine years after the publication of San Agustín’s history, then six more times before the great 1754 eruption, which lasted nearly seven months. The volcano remains active to this day. By the late eighteenth-century, according to the report of Augustinian inspector (visitador) to the province Fr. Agustín María de Castro (OSA): “The major part of this province is depopulated and deserted. And as long as one does not rid it of thieves and moros, it will never be re-populated.”61 Fr. Castro’s report reads as a long lament of the Augustinian mission in this area, characterized by a centuries-long legacy of social anomie (Castro, in Merino, 170). Along with lamenting the lack of protection against pirates and slave-raiders from the coast, not to mention thieves and fugitives from the towns; the ruined state of the churches and convents; the lack of hospitals and education; and overall colonial maladministration, Castro even mentions the blasphemous disinterment of bones from hallowed ground by both thieves and “witches and shamans … to perform their spells and evils ” [brujas y hechiceras … para hacer sus hechizos y maldades], as well as the abuses and excesses perpetrated during religious feast days (210). From the outset, then, we see how, in sharp juxtaposition from the Jesuit mission at Antipolo a century earlier, the southern edge of Luzon under the Augustinians had become a colonial wasteland: exposed to the immigration of fugitives from every historical vicissitude, yet without being able to either benefit from the region’s proximity to Manila or to forge a sense of regional identity and belonging among the inhabitants of the province.62 60 “hizo subir una cruz muy grande hasta la misma cumbre del volcán, que llevaron más de cuatrocientos hombres, por ser de una pesada madera llamada anivión. Y después que la colocaron en ella, no solamente no ha hecho daño alguno el volcán, sino que la isleta ha vuelto a su fertilidad antigua.” 61 Manuel Merino, “La provincia filipina de Batangas vista por un misionero a fines del siglo XVII,” 172. ”[L]a mayor parte de esta provincia es despoblada y desierta. Y mientras no se acabe con los ladrones y con los moros, jamás se poblará.” 62 Regarding the economy of the region, see Fr. María de Castro, in Manuel Merino, “La Provincia filipina de Batangas vista por un misionero,” 229.

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Included in Castro’s account is a curious account of the Holy Cross of the old town of Bauan. While inspecting the mission parishes in Batangas in the late eighteenth century, Castro uncovers a document in the archive of the Bauan church, written in Tagalog and signed by twenty-five elder and principal members of the town.63 This remarkable document turned out to be a sworn testimony of the cult of the Holy Cross, whose origins roughly coincided with the cult of the Holy Cross in Antipolo during the late sixteenth century. From Castro’s report, the testimony tells us much about the collaborations and conflicts among the native elite and Augustinian priests, which took place in order to establish (with mixed success) a devotional cult and foundation narrative of the mission pueblo. The elders and principals of the native community recounted how at that time Old Bauan and Alitagtag were formerly satellite visitas to the town of Taal. Taal served as the main parish town and mission station or cabecera for Augustinian mission efforts in the region. This meant that, like the villages or visitas around Antipolo, settlements like Old Bauan went without a resident priest. According to the parents and grandparents of these elders, at the end of the sixteenth century the settlement was overcome by a “plague” of terrifying visions and spirits, which effectively deterred them from going to a fountain called Tolo where the inhabitants drew potable water.64 As mentioned earlier, until the Taal eruption of 1754 the lake was saline, which forced inhabitants to seek freshwater from natural springs and wells. In response to the plague, perhaps brought on by the absence of a resident priest in an area where natives had only recently been converted to Christianity, one town leader made a cross of anubig or Artocarpus wood (also called antipolo, from which the town of Antipolo to the north received its name) and planted it near Tolo. Upon doing so, the visions and ghosts disappeared. One woman, still afraid to fetch water from the fountain yet forced by her abusive husband [“un indio bisaya de malas costumbres,” a Visayan native of bad habits or customs], went instead to the Holy Cross and prayed to it, asking for assistance. Suddenly, from one arm of the cross came a torrent of water, with which she filled her pitcher. Soon others came to bear witness to the miracle, which repeated itself “many times”; lacking a church, they would come to pray and venerate the cross with candles and rosaries. Then at night, when people would come to pray, the cross would uproot itself from its location and “walk”: “(I)t walked in a circle around the 63 Ibid., 240. 64 The document dates the events to have taken place in 1595: see Castro, in Merino, 237. A certain Tolo Hill is located approximately 25km from Alitagtag, near the site of Old Bauan.

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field, accompanied by various, brilliant shining lights, seemingly brighter than stars; and this happened for various nights in the presence of all.” (237–238).65 According to the collective testimony of the native elders and principal leaders, the pastoral minister of the nearby town Rosario also bore witness to the lights from a distance as he rode his horse en route to the cabecera or mission town in Taal; when he attempted to draw near, however, he was “seized with such dreadful terror that it would have cost him greatly [to approach the Cross]” [le sobrevino un género de terror tan espantoso que le hubo de costar caro (para acercar la Cruz)] (237–238). When the head priest or prior of Taal finally visits the site, he orders the community to anchor the cross with a base of lime and rocks, and to construct a sanctuary [ermita] around it out of thatch and cane stalk, to endow it with “a sense of decency” [para la mayor decencia] as more and more people came to venerate the Holy Cross and ask favors of it. After noticing the growth of the devotion and the corresponding donations of the community to the cult, the Taal priests decide to transfer the Holy Cross to the large parish church in Bauan. But “another Prior” – a detail that makes no sense, as there is usually only one Prior appointed to a given region – conspires to bring the cross in secret to the church and cabecera in Taal, with the help of certain “secret and hidden companions” (238). Quite tellingly, a sudden storm from out of nowhere frustrates their attempt; and every successive effort to “steal” the Cross by this rival group of Augustinian priests ends in failure, convincing the conspiring Prior to submit to the original plan, and install the Cross in the town of Bauan. Even there, however, and after several relocations of both the community and the Cross (along with its base of lime and rock), the native testimony complains that the Augustinian priests never ceased to interfere with the community’s veneration of the cult. A later Prior, Fr. Manuel de Zamora, cuts a third of the cross from the bottom to the great consternation of the entire town. He does this in order to distribute pieces of the Holy Cross as relics to devoted Spaniards in Manila, where these fragments of wood work miracles (239). The testimony ends by declaring that every time the community is afflicted by natural calamities or bandits and pirates, the Cross never fails to deliver the community from harm. This claim, in fact, echoes an earlier passage in the sworn statement, where the declarants claim that any time the natives seek divine favor for a public work, they 65 “andaba por circuito de aquel campo, acompañada de varias luces muy resplandecientes, que parecían mas que estrellas; y esto sucedió por varias noches en presencia de todos.”

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repeat a mass and procession of the Holy Cross from its relocated site in the town to the original site in Alitagtag; donate ten pesos as alms as well as the purchase of the necessary candles; “and never have our vows been entirely denied, as we have heard our ancestors tell it, who saw and found themselves often shocked by their fulfillment” (238).66 Four observations strike the reader about the tale of these crosses at Taal, the first on the mouth of the volcano and the second in Bauan, in contrast to the spread and development of the cult of the Holy Cross in Antipolo. The first is perhaps the most obvious: the success of the Augustinian mission pales in comparison to that of the Jesuit mission in Antipolo, due to the environmental and historical conditions that favored the stable concentration of populations and the integration of the frontier, as they did in Antipolo. The miracle of the water spouting cross in Bauan / Alitagtag, for example, was no less worthy of veneration than the one in Antipolo. The decadence of veneration in the cult, however, owed itself to the regular conscription of natives to work in the neighboring Cavite shipyards and the uncontrolled movement of fugitives, pirates, bandits, apostates, and vagabonds in the region. These factors all frustrated the conversion of the mission frontier into a stable Christian doctrina. The second observation regarding the contrast between the development of both cults of the Holy Cross in Antipolo and Alitagtag / Bauan concerns the dependence of the cult’s promotion upon the patronage of the missionary orders – in this case, the Augustinians – which the latter were reluctant to give. To the contrary, the native community portrays the Augustinian priests in Castro’s document as suspicious, halfhearted, and downright opportunistic actors who seek to relocate the object of native fervor. This portrayal contrasts sharply with the infectious enthusiasm of Fr. Chirino regarding the miracles of the Holy Cross at Antipolo – as well as later, throughout the region of the Jesuit mission effort. Of course, writing as he was a century and a half after the Jesuit Fr. Chirino, Augustinian Fr. Castro’s skepticism regarding the immanent presence of divine authority in a mission dating back to the time of the conquest should not strike the reader as too surprising. But from the horror expressed by the Augustinians’ first encounter with the miracle of the walking Cross and dancing lights at Alitagtag / Bauan – an event that actually repels the missionary father from 66 [Esta misa y procesión a la ermita se repetía entre año cuando los indios lo pedían por algún trabajo público, y daban diez pesos de limosna con la cera necesaria; y nunca salieron sus votos defraudados totalmente, como siempre oímos contar a nuestros abuelos, que lo vieron y espantaron (?) muchas veces].

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the scene where the bestowal of divine favor is actually taking place, i.e. under his own jurisdiction – the testimony of the native principals paints a rather unflattering portrait of the religious in charge of administering the devotional cult. One can almost sense the bewilderment of the native leaders when the prior of Taal, after hearing about the miracle of the walking cross, actually tries to anchor it with lime and rock so as to keep it from walking. The fact that the religious ministers conduct these actions only after the community has been witness to a miracle highlights the marginal and even questionable role of the missionaries in the staging of a miracle. In fact, both Fr. Castro and his confreres remained skeptical of the miracle and resulting devotion centuries after the Cross had been revered by the original witnesses. In his preface to the natives’ sworn testimony, Castro writes: “I have seen in my time and my journey great disputes as to whether one may lawfully hold a mass in the Sanctuary (of Alitagtag) and publicly venerate the said Cross” (237).67 After citing the document written by native principals, he reflects on whether or not the sworn statement by the native elders is even truthful: dismissing both those who accept the statement’s veracity as “unreflective in the extreme and pious foolishness” as well as those who dismiss it outright as “a lack of understanding, and possibly … mixed with malice and presumption” (240). As if reinforcing his argument for skepticism, however, Castro goes on to narrate a “rare case,” now completely forgotten, of a cult dedicated to the Holy Child in the town of Bangui (Ilocos Province, also on Luzon), which ascribed to it various wonders and miracles of healing. After being discovered in the sand, the image was brought to the church in Bangui, where its fame for accomplishing “various and exquisite wonders” drew crowds as well as wealth in the form of almsgivings, markets [tiendas], and cockfights. The bishop of the diocese conducted an investigation and, with the help of a missionary priest who had labored in China, judged that the image was in fact “an idol venerated in China” (242). To prevent the natives from committing acts of apostasy, Castro relates, the Church confiscated the image and had it destroyed. In the end, Castro blames the laxity of ecclesiastical oversight on the “greed for alms” (ibid.). Fr. Castro’s reasoning intends to cast skepticism on the claims of the native principales responsible for the sworn testimony; and to advise caution in the pronouncement of miracles when a more sinister intention may underlie the entire operation. On a larger level, however, Castro raises the question 67 “Yo he visto en mi tiempo viaje grandes pleitos sobre si se puede lícitamente decir misa en la Ermita [de Alitagtag] y venerar públicamente la dicha Cruz.”

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of what criterion religious ministers would use to distinguish Christian faith in miracles with mere gullibility. One cannot avoid speculation here whether Castro’s indirect target was the Jesuits. In the zeal to create new, “salubrious” customs best suited for town settlement, yet without any means of enforcing either, regular clergy like the Augustinian minister found themselves losing grip on what customs did emerge; and what exactly passed under their sanction. Third, despite the skepticism of the Augustinian friars to the cult of the Holy Cross in Bauan, we must credit them with preserving (albeit not in its original language) the sworn testimony of these native elders and principals: it is perhaps one of the only records written or dictated by native Filipinos in this early period on the development of religious cults in the Philippines. For the document shows us, among other things, the often humble and confused beginnings of popular devotions prior to their incorporation into the prose of spiritual conquest and Christian settlement; and active promotion as both a paraliturgical practice and justification for collecting donations and alms for the church that houses the cult. Consider, again, the contrast between the account of Bauan by Tagalog community leaders or principals with the cleaner narrative presented by Fr. Chirino regarding the miracles attributed to the Holy Cross in Antipolo. The latter miracles (in Antipolo) fall into neat subcategories that alternately “instruct and entertain” [the Jesuit adaptation of Horace’s definition of poetry as a vehicle for prodesse et delectare] in a frankly pedantic fashion. An explanation follows the account of every miracle, meant to illustrate in no uncertain terms either the sincerity (or insincerity) of the requestor or the divine administration of justice in a region where the rule of law was absent. The ambulant Cross and dancing lights in the backwaters of Taal Lake, however, express a more ambiguous message, which might help to explain the reluctance of the Augustinians to undertake an investigation and pass it through ecclesiastical censure. Why was the Cross walking? Was its circuit around an empty field meant to tell the missionaries something they didn’t seem to already know about God’s plan for the community; but which the community did know? Walking saints, of course, were not unknown in other parts of the Philippines; or, for that matter, Spain.68 At Bauan, however, neither the elders nor the priests hazard an attempt at explaining the meaning of the sign: unless, of course, the Cross anticipated its fugitive destiny in and around the towns of Taal, as it was repeatedly uprooted and relocated over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Why 68 William A. Christian, Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, 70–93.

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was the first minister who witnessed the miracles afraid? And why did later ministers dare to mutilate a miraculous object, all in order to placate some Spaniards desirous of miraculous relics in Taal? To do so, moreover, without even bothering to leave Manila to obtain these? Whatever founding myth the Holy Cross of Bauan bequeathed to its devotees, its meaning remains shrouded in mystery. One and a half centuries after the witnessed miracles, priests like Fr. Castro were complaining that the law and its enforcement by viceregal authority remained largely absent in the region. Fourth and finally, the ambivalence of the missionaries to either confirm or deny the miraculous power of the Holy Cross of Bauan might explain the absence of a clear “official” memory of the legend, as well as the creation of at least one other legend or folktale that diverges significantly from the one reported by Fr. Castro. In Celedonio P. Goria’s 1923 history of Bauan, the author tells the story of the Holy Cross that coincides in many aspects with the account recorded by Fr. Castro’s eighteenth-century report: a wife with an abusive husband, forced to trek outside to fetch water from a well, who comes upon a cross from which water mysteriously springs. But Gloria’s 1923 account prefaces this episode with another, presumably earlier one, which takes place several years before the cross produces the miracle of freshwater. Gloria recounts the folktale as follows: according to tradition, the people of Alitagtag had become afraid of fetching water near the lake because “they saw a very big man on horseback who used to ride on the water. At times, they saw at night a big bonfire floating on the water. Tradition has it that when anybody who saw these things exclaims wonder or surprise, a strong wind accompanied by torrential rain would immediately occur.”69 The inhabitants erected a cross to drive the fearful vision away, but to no avail: “The giant on horseback, however, did not cease to appear around the place. In the course of time, the place around the cross was converted into a forest and nothing was heard of it again until later” (ibid., 3: italics added). The absence of this episode in Castro’s original account can lead to only one of several possibilities: either the retelling of the oral history changed after its original transcription in the sixteenth century, to include details that did not previously exist; or the native elders or principals who wrote the original report ignored or were ignorant of the giant rider on the storm; or these same principals knew these details but omitted them in their sworn testimony out of prudence, fear of priestly censure, or because they 69 Celedonio Gloria, “The History, Archeology, Folklore, and Ancient Songs of Bauan and Its Vicinity,” 2.

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did not believe the story to be empirically true; or the community itself was divided on the historical details of when the Holy Cross first began to channel the efficacy of divine grace. While the first hypothesis seems the most historically plausible, it fails to answer the question of how and why such a story would attach itself to the cult of the Holy Cross at Bauan in the first place.70 The enigmatic character of the man on horseback, for example, suggests a collective phantasm, which would locate the provenance of the vision to the early period of Christian conversion in the region; perhaps even to the “plague of terrifying visions” assailing the community when the priest first transcribed the native principals’ testimony. The mystery of the legend’s origin, of course, should not distract us from the larger point of the narrative, or more specifically counter-history of the town’s origins. In this latter narrative, Christian divine grace (at least in this instance) proved to be largely inefficacious before the giant on horseback. The impotence of the cross suggests the history of an abandoned sitio or visita, of which there were many: a ghost town, akin to the ones littered across the US Southwest during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. What use could such places possibly serve, even the ones sanctified with the presence of a cross or church, when their own founders and administrators deserted or failed to visit them?

Miracles and Phantasms in the Gestation of a Colonial Unconscious “El sueño de la razón produce monstruos.” The famous etching by Spanish artist Francisco de Goya depicts a proliferation of shadowy creatures issuing from the imagination of a man of learning, who has fallen asleep at his desk. The image provides a fitting illustration of the progress of the mission during the seventeenth century. The rational kernel of reducción as both an instrument and temporal goal of religious conversion seems to reflect at once the desirable and inevitable destiny of Westernization in its various dimensions – more cities, more markets, more production and accumulation of wealth. But can one separate the desired outcomes of resettlement and conversion from the phantasmagorias of monsters 70 Perhaps the strongest evidence of the folktale’s origin after the sworn testimony by the native elders is the fact that Taal Lake in the period prior to the 1754 Taal volcano eruption was known as a saltwater lake, in which case the region’s inhabitants would not depend upon it as a freshwater source.

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and prodigies that issue forth in their wake: sometimes as unfortunate misinterpretations of Christian dogma, sometimes as a direct extrapolation of friar immunity and impunity? What do these accounts in the missionary chronicles tell us, not only about the progress of evangelization and conversion but also the experience of native deracination, deculturation, and derealization? As the planting of Holy Crosses in places like Antipolo, San Juan del Monte [Taytay], and Bauan show, one of the primary tasks of the literature of spiritual conquest was to stage a scene of conversion: the creation of a collective as well as institutional memory that would testify to the cooperation of divine grace (facilitated by the arrival of the religious ministers) and native devotion in answering the latter’s needs. This scene would begin with the planting of a cross – an act that was at once territorial and cosmic. This gesture signaled the entrance of missionaries into the region in question and announced their intention to establish Christian settlements that would link settlements across the archipelago to one another – and prepare these populations for the collection of tribute and the rendering of obligatory service. In “bringing light to the dark corners of the earth,” as the verse from the Book of Isaiah found on the frontispiece of Fr. San Agustín’s Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas says, the planting of these Holy Crosses also opened natives to the “efficacy” of divine grace, which would presumably substitute for the disempowerment of colonial subjects to create and reproduce their own (use) values. Divine grace showered favor on populations undergoing Christian conversion through the channels of Christian signs, symbols, and paraliturgical devotions. The spread of “salubrious customs,” like the use of holy water and Agnus Dei, aimed at disabusing nonbelievers of the power of their own beliefs, in favor of accustoming themselves to the signs and wonders of the Christian imaginary. Between the spread of epidemic disease throughout the archipelago, and the promotion of f iestas such as that of the reception of the holy relics in Manila, missionaries like the Jesuits encouraged the solicitation of divine grace through prayer, acts of charity and the publication of miracles produced by paraliturgical practices. The contrasting reception of Christianity in the mission parishes of Taytay and Taal, however, illustrates how, suspended somewhere between superstition and grudging acceptance, the cult of the Cross contributed to a much more critical assessment of the spiritual conquest among eighteenthcentury writers like the Augustinian Fr. Castro than it did among the Jesuits. Castro’s skepticism, while not explicitly directed at the Jesuits, nevertheless resonates with the attacks leveled against them by Philippine Dominican

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preacher Fr. Domingo Navarrette (OP) and other parties within the Church.71 From the promotion of miraculous relics and medallions over dogma, to the defense and even patronage of certain Chinese rites against the charge of blasphemy, to the metaphysical doctrines of probabilism and media Scientia, Jesuits were accused of embracing contradictory positions, even as they consolidated and accumulated wealth and royal favor from their hold over the missions under their jurisdiction.72 Beyond even the sensational rivalries among the religious Orders in the Philippines, however, lay a larger question that addressed the very future of Christianity overseas. If town settlement, which served as the precondition for the effective spread of Christianity throughout the archipelago, itself depended on native Christians to promote their foundation, what authority did the religious Orders possess to dictate the terms of that foundation? To what degree was the supposedly Hispanic and Christian task of reduction in fact a native one? And what end would native enthusiasm towards a Christian imaginaire serve, with its phantasmagorias of divine reward and punishment, if neither the Church nor the Crown – nor certainly, the missions – had the power to direct, correct, or govern it? While monsters and miracles crystallize and provoke the extreme phenomena of terror and salvation that missionaries employed to settle the native population, they also served as metaphors for a continuing, unfinished conquest in regions where Spanish officials, religious ministers, and native populations alike understood the law to be a dead letter; and saw themselves obliged to pursue their ends according to this understanding. The astonishment and puzzlement shared by the inhabitants of Old Bauan and Augustinian pastors alike over the enigmatic signs of walking crosses and dancing lights, suggests the genesis of a spiritual conquest gone wrong: a co-invention of Philippine Christianity that neither the native principals nor the religious ministers could adequately explain. Its ultimate trajectory disappeared into the long shadows of a colonial unconscious, cast by the wilderness of frontierization. 71 Alexandre Coello de la Rosa provides a surprising and thorough account of the accusations and counteraccusations between the Jesuit and Dominican Orders in the late seventeenth century, with the Archbishop, governor General, and royal council or Audiencia taking various sides. See “Pasquines, libelos y corrupción en las Filipinas: los conflictos jurisdiccionales entre el arzobispo de Manila, fray Felipe Pardo y la Compañía de Jesús,” 113–145. 72 On the Chinese rites controversy, see Joan-Pau Rubiés, “The Concept of Cultural Dialogue and the Jesuit Method of Accommodation”; J.S. Cummins, A Question of Rites; and “Juan Palafox and the Chinese Rites Controversy,” in Jesuit and Friar in the Spanish Expansion to the East, 395–427.

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http://archive.org/details/historiadelaprov00muri. Last accessed November 17, 2022. “Orden sobre abrir dos ríos para abastecer Manila.” AGI FILIPINAS 330, L.4, F.109R-109V. Ortiz, Fr. Tomás. Práctica del ministerio, que siguen los religiosos del Orden de N.P.S. Augstín, en Philippinas. Manila, Philippines, 1713. Potet, Jean-Paul. Ancient Beliefs and Customs of the Tagalogs. Morrisville, NC: Lulu.com, 2014. Reyes, Maximo. The Creatures of Philippine Lower Mythology. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: University of the Philippines Press, 1971. Ribandeira, Fr. Manuel de (OFM). Historia del Archipiélago y otros Reinos / History of the Archipelago and Other Kingdoms. Trans. Pacita Guevara Fernandez. Manila, Philippines: Historical Conservation Society, 1970. Rubiés, Joan-Pau. “The Concept of Cultural Dialogue and the Jesuit Method of Accommodation: Between Idolatry and Civilization,” Archivium Historicum Societatis Iesu 74:147 (2005). 237–280. San Agustin, Fr. Gaspar de (OSA) and Merino, Manuel. Conquistas de Las Islas Filipinas: la temporal, por las armas del señor don Phelipe Segundo el Prudente; y la espiritval, por los religiosos del orden de nuestro padre San Augustin. Madrid, Spain: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Enrique Florez, 1975. San Agustin, Fr. Gaspar de (OSA) et al. Conquistas de las islas Filipinas: la temporal, por las armas del señor don Phelipe Segundo el Prudente; y la espiritval, por los religiosos del Orden de nuestro padre San Augustin. Parte II que a beneficio de los materiales que dejó recopilados…. Valladolid, Spain: L.N. de Gaviria, 1890. San Buenaventura, Fr. Pedro de. Vocabulario de la lengua tagala, y el romance castellano puesto primero. Primera y segunda parte. Valencia, Spain and Paris, France, 1994. Facsimilie edition of the original 1613 publication. Scott, William Henry. Slavery in the Spanish Philippines. Manila, Philippines: De la Salle University Press, 1991. Seijas, Tatiana. Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Valle, Ivonne del. Escribiendo desde los márgenes. Colonialismo y jesuitas en el siglo XVIII. Mexico City, Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores México, 2009. Van de Logt, Mark. Monsters of Contact. Historical Trauma in Caddoan Oral Traditions. Oklahoma City, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2018. Weber, Max. “Science As a Vocation,” in From Max Weber,. http://anthropos-lab.net/ wp/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/Weber-Science-as-a-Vocation.pdf. Web, 7. Last accessed November 17, 2022. Originally published in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London, UK: Oxford University Press, 1964. 129–156.

5

Our Lady of Contingency Pucele de haut affaire, A faire men giu enpren. Repren moi tost quant weil mestraire. Traire sanz toi ne po[uv]ons. Tes poons, Fierce Dieu, a traire apren Et pren de nos si grant roi Qu’au grant roi Traire puissons tuit. Amen. — Gautier de Coinci, Miracles, Book II1

Abstract: This chapter examines the proliferation of devotional cults to the “Virgin Queen” Mary against the absence of Crown authority in the provinces in order to highlight the imaginary character of the unfinished conquest and its “spiritual” continuation. The proliferation of devotional cults owed itself to not only the religious ministers but also the participation of Indians in the organization and enactment of paraliturgical traditions like town fiestas, religious processions, assistance with the upkeep of the parish church and the priest’s administration of Christian sacraments. This achievement, however, also created a complication in the coherence and imaginary matrix of spiritual conquest, because it gave way to other forms of native participation in the imagination and construction of the mission settlements. Keywords: cults, iconophilia, foundation narrative [dalit], apparitions, miracles, oaths [panata]. 1 “Maid of high rank, / To play my game undertake, / Reprove me quickly when I want to cheat / We cannot move without you. / Your pawns, / God’s Queen, teach to play / And take such great care of us / That to the great King / We may all arrive. Amen.” Cited in Steven Taylor, “God’s Queen: Chess Imagery in the Poetry of Gautier de Coinci,” 418. For a gloss on the historical coincidence of the cult of the Virgin Mary and the birth of the chess Queen, see Marilyn Yalom, Birth of the Chess Queen, 107–121.

Blanco, J.D., Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463725880_ch5

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By the early years of the seventeenth century, and despite the absence of Crown authority in most areas of the archipelago, one might say that Manila was already ruled by at least two Queens; and the provinces around Manila were ruled by two or three others. Not coincidentally, the devotion to three of them was sponsored by a religious Order: Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, by the Philippine Dominicans (OP), whose Province carried the same name [Orden del Santo Rosario para la conversion de los infieles, 1592]; Our Lady of Good Voyage and Peace, by the Jesuits (SJ), whose Province was established between 1595–1605; and Our Lady of Caysasay, by the Augustinians (OSA), whose Philippine Province was established between 1575 and 1581. The fourth one, which had the benefit of her installment in the Manila Cathedral, was Our Lady of Guidance, whom Philip II decreed to be the “official patroness” of Manila, as early as 1578 (see Figure 11). The sponsorship of her image – a small statue, second only in precedence of discovery to the image of the Holy Child or Santo Niño in Cebu – by the king and the official ecclesiastical hierarchy under the king’s patronage, may in part explain the rare mention of her veneration in most religious chronicles.2 The proliferation of Virgin Queens (not to mention the infant prince of the Holy Child Jesus) in the absence of Crown authority – or more specifically, given the absence of Crown authority – seems to signify, on the one hand, the success of “spiritual conquest” as a metaphor for native resettlement and Christian conversion throughout Luzon, if not the rest of the archipelago. Yet it also reflects the imaginary character of that conquest, as well as the improvisational nature of the law’s proxies in the provinces outside Manila. For one thing, the Virgin represented in these images and multiple devotions is supposed to be the same Person, theologically and historically: this, despite the many identifications she has taken on over the course of Christianity – Theotokos, Mulier fortis, Star of the Sea, Virgin Queen, and so forth.3 The proliferation of venerated images of the Virgin, which did not happen to any significant degree with any other cult, willfully ignores this understanding. To the contrary, the Philippines was populated by many Virgins: each a patroness of “Her” own specific town or settlement, each with 2 See Fr. Juan de la Concepción (OAR), Historia general de Philipinas Conquistas espirituales y temporales de estos españoles dominios, establecimientos, progresos, y decadencia (1788), v.1, 413–417. Fr. Concepción, a Recollect provincial, recorded a brief history of the veneration of the image by natives near Manila and their dispossession of the image by the Legazpi expedition in 1571. Recently, Miguel Zugasti discovered an earlier history of Our Lady of Guidance in the publication of a loa (hymn of praise) dedicated to the celebration of her transference from the Manila Cathedral to her shrine in Ermita, see Miguel Zugasti, “Rescate de una loa inedita en manila a la traslación de a imagen de Nuestra Señora de Guía a su Ermita (1666),” 335–364. 3 See Jaroslav Pelikan, Mary Through the Centuries; and Marina Warner, Alone of All Her Sex.

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Figure 11: Poster or estampa of the image of Nuestra Señora de Guía (Our Lady of Guidance). Image taken from Wenceslao Retana, Aparato bibliográfico de la Historia general de Filipinas v. 1 (Madrid: Imprenta de la Sucesora de M. Minuesa de los Rios, 1906.) Copyright public domain.

Her own history, temperament, and relationship to the community where the shrine of the image is housed. The local character of devotional cults, while reinforcing the growth of popular Christian piety, would also tend to reinforce the decentralized, ad hoc character of the religious effort, its peculiar relationship with colonial governance, and the (lack of) administration of law.

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The proliferation of devotional cults owed itself to not only the tireless work of some zealous religious ministers, but also the participation of native Christians in the organization of paraliturgical traditions like town f iestas, religious processions, assistance with the upkeep of the parish church and the priest’s administration of sacraments. This achievement, however, also created a complication in the imaginary matrix of spiritual conquest. While the growth of Christian piety in the spread of devotional cults and paraliturgical traditions seemed to finally reach that elusive target of native desire, which had constituted the preoccupation of religious ministers from the beginning, this desire could not but have implications for native participation in the colonial politics of resettlement and the effective administration of peace and justice. Accessing the symbols and accoutrements of the off icial faith through the witnessing and testimony of miracles, gestures of prayer, the organization of feast days and processions, and the formation of religious confraternities, would elicit other forms of access to and the functionalization of the instruments of an emerging colonial society. 4 To what degree would the efflorescence of this society, neither “Hispanized” nor “pre-Hispanic,” respect the friar privilege that had facilitated the subjection to natives to colonial institutions – without, however, allowing them access to colonial authority? In her recent book Saints of Resistance, Christina Lee calls John Phelan to account for characterizing what he calls “the Philippinization of Christianity” as a passive process, owing largely to the lack of priests (Lee, 6–7). Following the work of Vicente Rafael and Carolyn Brewer, Lee’s study investigates the founding stories of the earliest devotional cults to the Santo Niño and the Virgin Mary in the Philippines for clues into the ways that natives explained to themselves and one another why the Virgin received their petitions and became their protectress (117–125). Building upon the research of these scholars, my approach nevertheless tends to refashion what I see as an overemphasis on “(native) resistance”-oriented narratives to folk Christianity; and towards an implicit collusion between friars (including Jesuits) and their Christian neophytes to improvise a shared but precarious vision of 4 Remarkably little has been written about the formation of Indian confraternities or sodalities, although a Jesuit Annual Letter from 1601 written by Fr. Francisco Vaez (SJ) to Jesuit Director Fr. General Claudius Aquaviva (SJ) describes the organization of these confraternities for pious work: giving alms to the poor, visiting the sick, tending to prisoners, and cleaning the beds in the hospital. See Vaez, in John Hay, De Rebus Iaponicis, Indicis et Peruanis Espistolar Recentiores, 955–957. A partial translation is found in John Schumacher, Readings in Philippine Church History, 86.

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authority and administration of justice in the absence of both. This collusion amounts to something more than James Lockhart’s characterization of Indian (Nahua) society under Spanish rule in New Spain (Mexico) as a case of “double-mistaken identity.”5 Particularly by the end of the first century of conversion and resettlement efforts, religious ministers recognized the limits, even the undesirability, of creating a colonial society in the image of Spain. Conversely, most native lowland populations throughout the archipelago had no illusion that the friars, Jesuits, provincial governors, and tribute collectors, would leave. What better figure to revere and venerate, than the one who best embodies the agency to reinterpret and bend the law to the contingencies of social anomie? What better strategy could both adopt, than that of elevating such a figure to the role of lawmaking sovereign herself? While my analysis encompasses a broad consideration of these early cults, I focus on the cult of the Virgins of Caysasay (and, to a much lesser degree, Antipolo) because of the way both devotions were tied to the growth of cabeceras by the Augustinians and Jesuits, respectively. Both Caysasay and Antipolo were located in the lowlands of Luzon – far enough away from Manila to prevent easy access to them for anyone but Chinese traders, but close enough to serve as conduits for the constant, ever-growing demand for native conscript labor in the Cavite shipyards near the capital6. Additionally, both cults demonstrate the folding of Spanish religious and native projections of the Virgin Queen, one atop another, in the manner of a palimpsest that ultimately blurs the distinction between projections in favor of the clarity of a general outline. Both cults, finally, illustrate the ultimate successes and failures of spiritual conquest, which anticipated not only the efflorescence of devotional cults in other mission towns but also notably the proliferation of spaces in which social anomie became a way of life. Between these two destinies of the mission as frontier institution as well as agency of frontierization, the strategies of Indian negotiation, evasion, and engagement with and around the mission-town began to take on a collective character. 5 “[O]ne might call … the process of Double Mistaken Identity [one] in which each side of the cultural exchange presumes that a given form or concept is operating in the way familiar within its own tradition and is unaware of or unimpressed by the other side’s interpretation. Thus the Spaniards could imagine that they had introduced Hispanic governance with all its paraphernalia of offices, legal procedures and records, while the Nahuas could imagine that they were the same collection of sovereign city states as before … Neither side would be entirely wrong” (477). See Lockhart, “Some Nahua Concepts in Postconquest Guise,” 465–482. 6 See Newson, 133–152; and Lee, 118–120.

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Dispensaries of Grace On one level, it is not difficult to see how the early cults of the Virgin in Manila, Antipolo, and Caysasay intended to serve the interest of the religious Orders, insofar as each Virgin served as a mascot for each. The early religious chronicles of each Order dedicate a considerable amount of effort recalling the birth of each cult; the miracles ascribed to each upon their invocation; the discovery [Sp. invención] or provenance of each image associated with the cult; and the effort to corral the legends and testimonies surrounding their miraculous power into a narrative that was at once plausible and orthodox. The veneration of these images facilitated the teaching of the Christian faith: ministers used them as instruments of proselytization as well as a source of alms. Among paraliturgical traditions, devotional cults certainly took pride of place. At the center of most cults dedicated to the Virgin Mary or saint is the enshrinement of an image or statue of the cult of worship. This anthropomorphic image – from the expressive eyes that register bemusement or disappointment, the worn or smooth “skin” of wood or ivory, to the little, lifelike hands that hold the baby Jesus (in the case of Mary), a staff or scepter, or some other vestment of authority – incarnates authority and majesty in a magical and unsettling way (see Figures 12–13).7 How? Marie-José Mondzain’s indispensable study on icons compares the Christian image to a kind of portable church: it embodies a “small-scale model of an ecclesiastic institution: it permits the production of rules for an open and profane space, which the church can traverse in all senses and appropriate for itself … For the iconophile … everything that the icon invades becomes sacred and therefore the property of the ecclesiastical power.”8 Mondzain describes the power of images to change the surrounding environment by the tradition they embody and the channeling of divine presence in their gaze(s). On the one hand, they exercise a centripetal force by capturing “holiness,” i.e. by absorbing the indirect sacred power of springs, rocks, trees, mountains, and the like, into the enigma of their human likeness and inhuman (or supernatural) aura (146). On the other, this power is also centrifugal and invasive, in that it “dispenses sacredness by contact and contagion” (ibid.). Her words deserve to be quoted at length: 7 For the adornment of Virgin statues with the vestments of authority, see Regalado Trota Jose, “Imaging Our Lady in Sixteenth-Century Manila: Nuestra Señora del Rosario de La Naval” (working paper), 16. 8 Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 162.

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Figure 12: Virgin of Antipolo. Photo credit: Wilfred Jason Austria Naval, 2022.

Figure 13: Virgin of Antipolo (detail). Photo credit: Jun Figueroa, 2022.

[B]y propagation, [the image] spreads the infinite principle that it includes all the way to infinity, without limiting it. Thus the church, a sanctuary built in the image of the Marian body, cannot become horos, peras, an enclosed and circumscribed precinct … As a result of these principles of iconic production, it happens that from its place within that territory, the church develops an independence with respect to all interior boundaries, and thus an access to territory beyond the profane space of this world, which it can conquer without limits (162: italics added).

By ushering in a Christian universe of signs and symbols, the icon endlessly converts its surroundings: transforming the relations of contingency, contact, contiguity, and analogy into those of continuity, coherence, and genealogy with the revelation of a Divine Plan operating in the profane world. On an institutional level, the icon “designates” a precinct around which a town may be reduced. On a phenomenological level, the icon “claims” for itself a feast day on the calendar, inspires popular devotions, and leads ambulatory and fluvial processions to sanctify the town space. In some notable instances (Caysasay and Antipolo both serve as examples), the devotion around a particular image acquires fame as a shrine and destination of pilgrimage because of the icon’s efficacy in dispensing divine grace. By contact or invocation, the icon facilitates the manifestation of divine presence, which is perceived as

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at once immanent yet contingent, radiating out from the icon’s place and occasion of worship.9 Before the gaze of the Virgin, profane space becomes converted into virgin territory, i.e. a frontier space traversed by a matrix of imaginary or imaginable relations traceable to the Christian tradition.10 The spontaneous and improvised extension of the iconic gaze into the symbolically denuded environment allows a veritable regime of signs, or semiotic order, to emerge as if already fully formed and just waiting to be activated.11 The spread of devotional cults throughout the archipelago, beginning with the discovery [invención] of the Santo Niño [Holy Child] in Cebu; and an image of Nuestra Señora de la Guía [Our Lady of Guidance] on the outskirts of the settlement around Manila [now Ermita] by the expedition of Legazpi in 1565, provide early examples.12 In the first instance, when a member of Legazpi’s expedition finds the image of the Holy Child while plundering a raided settlement, the Augustinians promptly take possession of it and house it in a church they built, “where it stands in complete veneration.” There, the image begins to produce (or facilitate) miracles, particularly ones associated with childbirth. Legazpi names the city after the Holy Child; the church assigns the celebration of its discovery to a feast day (April 29, also the feast day of martyr Saint Vidal); and a chapel is built at the original site of its initial seizure, where a yearly procession brings the image of the Holy Child on the assigned date. Leading the procession is a town councilmember, who carries the banner of the city with him. A public festival ensues, featuring bullfights and fireworks displays. Thus begins one of the first devotional cults and paraliturgical feasts in the archipelago. In the case of the image of Our Lady of Guidance, several years after the sack of Cebu, in 1571, Spanish conquistadors Martín de Goiti and Juan de 9 See William Taylor, “Images and Immanence in Colonial Mexico,” in Shrines and Miraculous Images, 15–61. 10 In the case of Mexico and Peru, this act of sacralization was simultaneously a “resacralization” that followed the desanctification of spaces, signs, images, and authorities revered by the natives. Bernal Díaz’s True History of the Conquest of New Spain [Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España] contains many examples of this. 11 On semiotic order as a “regime of signs,” see Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattarí, A Thousand Plateaus, 111–148. 12 Zugasti suggests that the two images may well have come from the same Magellan expedition, as both are carved of the same (Molave) wood: see 336. Such an argument is in any case more plausible than Fr. Concepción’s, who believes that the images may have been brought by St. Thomas and his followers in the period of primitive Christianity (Concepción, Historia general de Philpinas, v. 1, 417). For the most comprehensive treatment of the origins of the cult of the Santo Niño, see Lee, “Conflictos discursivos en la construcción de la leyenda del Santo Niño de Cebú durante la temprana colonización Española de Filipinas,” 33–53.

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Salcedo (Legazpi’s grandson) defeat the combined Tagalog and Pampangan forces in the settlements around Manila Bay (Maynilad), and return to tell Legazpi about the thriving commerce that existed between these groups and traders from the Middle Kingdom, Siam, and the Muslim sultanates of Southeast Asia. Upon hearing news of this thriving settlement to the north of Cebu, Legazpi decides to move the Spanish capital there. Sometime after their arrival, Legazpi’s men discover another Christian image – this one of a “black Madonna” or Virgin Mary carved out of molave wood, in her familiar pose of the Immaculate Conception – perched atop the trunk of fallen tree. The image is surrounded by pandan leaves and worshipped by the natives, who claim that despite their efforts to move it the image would not budge.13 The Spaniards again take possession of the statue, and eventually build a shrine to house it nearby (present-day Ermita).14 Legazpi consecrates the new Spanish settlement in Manila to Our Lady of Guidance as well as the martyr Santa Prudencia (also called Potenciana), identifying the image with a devotion already recognized in the Spanish towns of Burgos, Pontevedra, Sevilla, and even the Canary Islands. The spontaneous linkage of histories by the act of (re)naming does not stop there. After Legazpi’s successors build a chapel to shelter the image, later administrators name the fort that faces the chapel Nuestra Señora de Guía; later, a galleon was also named after this designation of the Virgin.15 Then in 1578, the Spanish king Philip II issues a royal decree that names Our Lady of Guidance as the “official” patroness of the Spanish city.16 By the spontaneous and rhizomatic extension of the image and its name towards the visualization, intention, projection or anticipation of an underlying order, the image announces the imminent (if somewhat delayed) arrival of political coherence and continuity – in a word, law – to uncharted space and heterogeneous social relations. The Virgin’s gaze homogenizes these: exposing them to the efficacy of divine grace and an economy [oikonomia] or domestication of behaviors through spiritual guidance and administration.17 In the absence of real networks of control and communication that would achieve 13 See Fr. Juan de la Concepción, Historia, v.1, 413. 14 After the destruction of the shrine following the British invasion of Manila in 1763, the image is deposited in the Manila Cathedral. 15 Other early images of the Virgin express a similar modus operandi: see Nick Joaquin, “La Naval de Manila” in La Naval and Other Essays, 3–21; and Regalado Trota José, “La venerada imagen del Nuestra Señora del Rosario de La Naval: an image biography,” in The Saga of La Naval, 45–73. 16 The unknown origin of both images has predictably given rise to various theories: none of which can be verified with certitude. See Julius Bautista, “An Archipelago Twice Discovered: The Santo Niño de Cebu and the Discourse of Discovery,” 187–206. 17 See Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 161.

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such an objective, the Spanish Empire would rely upon this Christian baroque imaginaire, which simultaneously conjured the unknown recesses of the imagination and delivered them to a sacred order prefiguring a temporal one.18

Errantry and Unsettlement in the Legend of the Virgin of Caysasay Mondzain’s insights into the Christian understanding of the icon tells us much about the insertion, deployment, and interpretation of these images by religious Orders like the Augustinians during the early seventeenth century. But they also underline the discrepancies that emerge between this deployment of the religious image and the popular legends that coalesce around it. The origins of the cult of Caysasay, which appear first in Fr. Gaspar de San Agustín’s history of the Augustinian Order (Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas [pte. 2], written before 1732) and later, Fr. Francisco Bencuchllo’s Epitome de la historia de Nuestra Señora de Casaysay y su Novena en lengua tagala, in 1754, provide an occasion to examine these discrepancies more carefully.19 San Agustín’s version, which he allegedly bases on earlier Augustinian reports of Virgin apparitions, identifies the events surrounding the image’s discovery to have taken place around 1611. During this time, the outlying visita or barrio of Binagcasan, near the town (or also barrio?) of Caysasay, would see (especially at night) an exceedingly bright light emitting from the small hollow of a rock near a freshwater brook from which they drew water, and in which they would bathe. Inhabiting as they did a region surrounded by saltwater, natives depended on wells and springs for freshwater sources. 20 In addition to the light, which appeared to some as a great conflagration, others heard “a sweet and harmonious music of the sweetest instruments, which left them spellbound.”21 Still others would even see a beautiful hand and 18 See Anthony Stevens-Arroyo, “The Evolution of Marian Devotionalism within Christianity and the Ibero-Mediterranean Polity,” 50-73; and Isaac Donoso, “El Barroco filipino,” 85–146. 19 San Agustín / Díaz’s account claims that the testimony of Juana Tangui, Catalina Talain, and others has been corroborated in a report sent to Sr. D. Fr. Pedro de Arce, then Bishop of Cebu and Manila Archbishop, by then head priest or prior of Balayan (now Batangas) province, Fr. Juan Bautista de Montoya (Taal: 1611–1620; see Castro, Misioneros agustinos, 172–175). 20 This detail corroborates William Christian’s observation about the strategic location of such apparitions around vital natural resources outside rural villages in Spain. See Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain, 75. 21 San Agustín, Conquistas de las islas Filipinas … Parte II, 118. “una dulce y acordada música de instrumentos muy dulces que los dejaba absortos.”

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arm emerging and returning to the hollow of the rock, with a lit torch. Determined to get to the bottom of the mystery, a group of natives explored the site, and beheld “the image of Our Lady, the size of a palmo [approx. 21 cm or 8 1/4 inches], or a little bigger, dressed in white with a crown on her head, and the child Jesus in her arms, who also wore a crown” (ibid.).22 San Agustín does not specify whether this image was that of an actual statue or simply phantasmic. During the period when these manifestations were occurring, a native woman from the town of Bauang [Bauan] named Juana Tangui, was suffering from a seemingly incurable “fire in the eyes” that had kept her awake. Upon hearing about the reported sightings as well as the news that “everyone who bathed in that brook was healed of whatever sickness they had suffered”, she decided to make the trek to Caysasay (about 32km from Old or Lumang Bauan, near Alitagtag).23 As she bathed at twilight in the waters of the brook, in the company of nine or ten people, she sensed a shadow at her side, which, after a period of time, turned her in a direction where she witnessed a “luminescence, like a great lit candle” (118–119).24 After reporting this to her companions, they told her to return to the same place and inquire aloud about the source of light. Because she could not see well, her companions had a young girl accompany her up to a certain place, after which she proceeded alone. This time, Juana Tangui saw “an image of Our Lady of almost two palmos [approx. 16.5”] in height, dressed entirely in white, and had a crown on her head, and a cross on her breast; and the image seemed to her entirely alive, moving and blinking” (119). The image thanked her for “keeping her in her memory, and for returning to see her.”25 The image also encouraged her to obtain a certain belt worn by the members of the church’s St. Augustine confraternity, whose members were responsible for assisting ministers in the fulfillment of various pastoral duties, as well as engaging in acts of 22 una imagen de Nuestra Señora del tamaño de un palmo, poco mayor, vestida de blanco con una corona en la cabeza, y con el Niño Jesús en los brazos, el cual también tenía corona. 23 [Había oído también decir, que todas las personas que se bañaban en aquel arroyo, sanaban de cualquiera enfermedad que padeciesen]. This is the same town where the miracles of the Holy Cross took place, as discussed in Chapter 3. From 1596–1662, Bauan was located at the site now known as Tambo near Lipa on the eastern side of Lake Taal. Then, for various reasons the town was relocated three times, its final site being closer to the town of Taal on the southern edge of Lake Taal. After the 1754 Taal volcanic eruption, Bauan was again transferred to a site closer to the ocean. For a history of Bauan and its multiple relocations, see Antonio V. DeLacy, “History of Bauan,” web. Last accessed 10 June 2019. 24 [vio una claridad y luz, a manera de una candela grande encendido] 25 [agradeciéndola el haberla tenido en la memoria, y a haberla vuelto a ver].

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devotion pertaining to the spread of faith among the natives. When Juana Tangui returned to the site of the apparition eight days later, belt in hand, she came accompanied by her owner Doña Juliana Dimoyaguin and other town leaders. As before, Juana left her companions at a distance from her destination. The Virgin Mary appeared to her again, this time appearing to have grown to a little more than 2 ft., thanking her for wearing the belt of the confraternity of Saint Augustine. Juana asks the Virgin to give her a sign to take back to her companions, upon which the Virgin asks Juana to give Her the rosary and belt. “And, after giving her belt and rosary to Our Lady, along with the rosaries of her companions, which Juana had diligently brought, she delivered them to the Queen of Heaven, who received them, and later returned them to Juana Tangui” (ibid.).26 Upon receiving their rosaries back, the women accompanying Juana declared that a supernatural fragrance issued from them. And Juana’s vision was cured. More miracles followed. Agustín / Díaz later reports: [I]t is this miraculous image of Our Lady that is venerated today in the hermitage that lies in the town of Casaysay, after having been found in the ocean by Don Juan Moningcar, who, upon casting his net for fish, caught the image, as her Divine Majesty wanted to give us in this way the (in) estimable jewel that was hidden for so many years in that small hollow to which the natives of the entire region flock, with great devotion, every day experiencing strange portents in payment of their good faith, with the sick afflicted with strange diseases are miraculously cured (120).27

Yet the sudden introduction of the Virgin’s image in Don Juan Moningcar’s fishnet, and the brief mention of its original discovery in the ocean, introduces a number of disparities in the text that San Agustín cannot easily brush away. Why would San Agustín or anyone believe, for example, that the image fished out of the ocean was somehow the same image that both the original eyewitnesses of the image saw in the brook; or, for that matter, 26 “Y dando la india a Nuestra Señora su correa y su rosario, junto con los rosarios de sus compañeras, que con cuidado había traído, se los entrego a la Reina del Cielo, la cual los recibió, y después se los volvió a la dicha Juana Tangui.” 27 “Es esta milagrosa imagen de Nuestra Señora a la que se venera hoy en la ermita que está en el pueblo de Casaysay (sic), habiendo sido hallada en el mar por D. Juan Moningcar, quien echando la red para pescar, la sacó en ella, queriendo la Divina Majestad darnos de este modo la estimable joya que estuvo escondida tantos años en aquella concavidad pequeña a la cual acuden los indios de toda la comarca con gran devoción, experimentándose cada día raros portentos en pago de su buena fe, siendo sanos milagrosamente enfermos de raras enfermedades”

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the one that the eyewitness Juana Tangui saw when her eyes were healed? The Virgin that the first eyewitnesses had seen appeared to them dressed in white, with a crown and child Jesus in her arm. How could this small, talking doll-like image of the Virgin be identical to the image that was fished out of the sea by Juan Moningcar, as the latter was neither dressed in white, nor wears a crown, nor carries a child Jesus? The mysteries of Mary’s apparitions only multiply from there: the enigma, for example, of why she would appear to grow between sightings, only to shrink back to her original size as a statue; or how the image was displaced from the brook where she / it first appeared, in order to be rediscovered in the river by someone who did not seem to report any miracles associated with the image at all. Was Fr. San Agustín, or the official reports upon which his narrative history of the apparitions were based, tampering with the evidence: inserting the discovery of the Virgin’s image into a separate set of reported happenings regarding the curative properties of a freshwater spring and perhaps the will-o-the-wisp(s) (called santhelmo, St. Elmo’s fire, by locals) that appeared in the forest? A partial answer to the question appears with the second main account of the Virgin of Caysasay, written some years after Fr. San Agustín’s death in 1724 by Augustinian priest Fr. Francisco Bencuchillo (OSA) (1710–1776). Fr. Bencuchillo had arrived in the Philippines in 1732; and spent most of his years in the Tagalog regions.28 This missionary’s facility with various Philippine languages led him to write various works in Tagalog, including a hagiography of Santa Rita and a treatise on Tagalog poetics as well as a Tagalog dictionary. 29 From 1750 to around 1756, Fr. Bencuchillo served as the minister of Lipa, Batangas, just on the other side of Bombon (now Taal) Lake from the town of Taal and Caysasay. It is from this experience that he likely wrote a versified Tagalog account of the cult of Caysasay (the aforementioned Epitome de la historia de Nuestra Señora de Casaysay), in 1754 (ibid.), in line with the eight-syllable meter called dalit or korido.30 Fr. Bencuchillo’s account of the Virgin apparitions, along with the history of the image’s discovery or invention, lead one to believe that he had either 28 For a biography of Fr. Buencuchillo, see Elviro Pérez, Catalogo Bio-bibliográfico de los religiosos Agustinos de la Provincia del Santísimo Nombre de Jesús de las Islas Filipinas desde fundación hasta nuestros días, 250–251; Juan Catalina García López, Biblioteca de escritores de la Provincia de Guadalajara y bibliografía de la misma hasta el siglo XIX, 21–22. 29 See Pérez, Catálogo bio-bibliográfico, 251; also Poetikang Tagalog, ed. Virgilio Almario, 22–45. 30 Deirdre de la Cruz offers a close reading of various passages of this history, although she seems to doubt that the story related by Fr. Bencuchillo is the same one narrated by Fr. San Agustín in his Conquistas (pte. 2). See Mother Figured, 42.

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never read Fr. San Agustín’s account; or that he had read it at some point but did not have access to it when writing his history in verse. Following various panegyric formulas introducing the subject of his “novela,” Bencuchillo begins with the story of Don Juan Moningcar proper (here named D. Juan Maningcad). According to Bencuchillo, Juan Maningcad reportedly fished the image of the Virgin from the Pansipit River, not the ocean, after deciding that particular morning that he would rather catch smaller fish that might please his child (“One morning, he intended to go / to the sea, but then considered / catching a small fish / which he hunted for his child … / He cast his net there / in the nearby river / and pulling it, realized / he had caught something of great value] (Bencuchillo, Epitome de la historia, n.p. [11–12]).31 The author claims the event to have taken place in 1603, eight years before the miracles reported by Fr. San Agustín would presumably have taken place. In any case, Maningcad delivers the image to the town priest, who has the image brought to the main town [cabecera] of Taal, where the inhabitants celebrate its arrival. Here again, Bencuchillo’s story diverges from that of the Agustín / Díaz history: the image is entrusted to one Doña María Espíritu, wife of the town judge, who is not mentioned in the earlier account (n.p. [14]). The woman keeps the image shut in the tabernacle, watching over it at night; but witnesses the image escaping the tabernacle and journeying afar. The wandering Virgin only returns to the church in the main town of Taal in the early morning. After other witnesses see the image afoot, they trace her path back to Caysasay, a visita or sitio (called Nayon in Tagalog) which lies a short distance from Taal: Ang candilang caramihan iniilao sa daan ay ang tong̃o nilang tanan sa Nayon din nang Caysasay (n.p. [17]. Italics added).

Many brought candles To light the way And they traced her escape Back again to the visita of Caysasay

Note that this is the first time that Caysasay is mentioned in Fr. Bencuchillo’s account; and that by designating it a Nayon, the author intended to designate it as a sitio or visita (also called barrio) of the larger and official settlement

31 [“Ysang umaga’y, nagbanta / paragat, at ang acala’y / cumita nang munting isda / sa anac ipasisila … Doon niya ihinaguis / sa cailogang calapit / nang hilahin ay nabatid / huli ay caibig ibig.”]

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at Taal.32 The priest of Taal (who is never named) retrieves the image from Caysasay and delivers it to the Taal church; but the image again finds its way back to Caysasay, after which the priest has to retrieve it again. Despite the priest’s subsequent attempts to keep the image locked away in a tabernacle, the image always manages to escape. One day, the image seems to disappear altogether, for good. After an unspecified amount of time, it is eventually rediscovered by two women who, while drawing water from a well, see in the water’s reflection the image of the Virgin. The image sits atop the branches of a sampaguita tree, flanked by candles and the local kingfishers that inhabit the region, called casay-casay, whose importance will be discussed shortly. The women proceed to tell the priest in Taal of their discovery, but the priest does not believe them. In fact, he suspects them of lying to him, and threatens to beat them with a rod: “So said this chaste Father / I believe you are lying / and upon saying this he raised / the rod he held against the women (n.p. [20]).33 The author’s implication, it seems, is that the priest is trying to protect himself against seduction, as the priest is repeatedly described as “chaste” [timtiman]. But after the women finally convince him to accompany them to the sampaguita tree in Caysasay, he makes the fateful decision to allow the image to stay there: Natanto’t, walang halaga pagcacalingang talaga caya sa Padreng tinika sa Caysasay maiwan na

The priest decided it didn’t matter How in fact the image got there So it seemed to the priest it should remain in Caysasay

Nag isip nagsang-usapan Padre,t, boong sangbayanan

Those who were speaking together Including the Father, and the whole community

32 Earlier in the text the author writes: “Dito sa sancapoloang / Filipinas ang pang̃ a lan, / sa cabayanang Caysasay / sacop nang Taal na bayan” [Here in the archipelago / That goes by the name Filipinas / in the community of Caysasay / under (or subject to) the town of Taal] (Buencuchillo, Epitome, n.p. [11]). For the various distinctions between mission center towns where one or more religious resided, and the various levels of outlying districts that were infequently visited by the priest (hence they were called visitas), see Luis Ángel Sánchez Gómez, “El gobierno y administración de los territorios en Filipinas (1565–1898),” 465–532. 33 “Anitong Padreng timtiman / icao aniya,y, bulaan / at toloy pinagbuhatan / babayi nang palong tang̃ a n.”

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Tay-án nang Toclong Simbahan Ng̃ uni,t, caya pinang̃ anlan Caysasay ay ang dahlia,y, Ang Virgen ay may casaba Na ibon na Casaycasay Sa una ang quinatay-an nitong benditong Simbahan cagubata,t, caparangan ngayo’y, naging cabayanan (n.p. [21–22]. Italics added).

Decided to build a Temporary Church34 The reason why the town was named Caysasay is as follows: Standing beside the Virgin Were birds called casay-casay [kingfishers] First they began to erect The blessed Church The surrounding forest, uncultivated fields Now became a settlement

The juxtaposition between Caysasay in Bencuchillo’s versified history as an informal settlement and a formal one (i.e. a town recognized as such by the church and the law, whose native elite or principales are invested with institutions of local government) appears as the distinction in Bencuchillo’s text between Nayon and cabayanan. While both can mean “town,” the first connotes the dimensions of an outlying visita settlement (also called sitio) without policía, that is, government officials; and the second a concentrated settlement of institutional authorities and their respective functions.35 The graduation of Caysasay from an outlying mission settlement to a selfproclaimed town, the dalit claims, coincided with the invención of the Virgin in the tree, flanked by casay-casay birds. This not only gave the town a name but also led to the construction of a church. Contrary to Fr. San Agustín’s earlier assumption, this area did not have a name until the miraculous sighting of the Virgin in the tree gave the settlement a name, a church, and the status of a town. From this original miracle others follow. Because the land upon which the church was built was close to the sea, the settlers soon became thirsty. They beseech the Virgin; and a freshwater spring bubbles up from the church (n.p. [23]). Today, believers locate this miracle to have taken place not in the church itself, but rather the Sta. Lucia well, which is a stone’s throw from the Caysasay shrine. Again, this account contradicts that of San Agustín’s: in the latter’s narrative, the freshwater source’s existence (in his case, a brook), preceded the appearance of the Virgin, while in Bencuchillo’s, it 34 Frs. Juan Noceda (SJ) and Pedro Sanlúcar (SJ’s) Vocabulario de la lengua tagala, compiled in 1788, define toclo as a temporary temple or church: see 621. 35 For an example of these off ices in mission-towns, see Sánchez-Gómez, “El gobierno y administración,” 487.

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is the Virgin who effects the miracle of freshwater (in this case, a spring). The importance of this detail, as we will see later, lies in the larger claim that either Fr. Bencuchillo or the native elders of Caysasay with whom he had probably consulted intended to impress upon the reader: namely, the miracle of freshwater comes about as a request petitioned by the people and granted by the Virgin Mary, without the intervention or interference of the priest in the creation or fulfillment of the covenant established between the two parties. The two women who discover the image in the tree are named Doña Maria Bagohin and Doña Maria Talain. Curiously, the earlier account of the Virgin apparitions feature the women Magdalena Pongsoin (Bagohin?) and Catalina Talain. Placing the two stories side by side allows us to line up and analyze the divergences: Table 1 A comparison of Frs. San Agustín and Bencuchillo’s accounts of the Virgin of Caysasay. San Agustín / Díaz account (~1730s)

Bencuchillo dalit (1754)

a. Juan Moningcar discovers the image at some point after the Virgin appears to various women in 1611. b. Juan Moningcar fishes the image out from the sea, where it ended up after being in the freshwater brook near or off the Pansipit River.

a. Juan Maningcad discovers the image in 1603, eight years prior to the first Virgin apparitions mentioned in San Agustín / Díaz. b. Juan Maningcad fishes the image out from the Pansipit River near the visita of Caysasay and delivers it to the mission town or cabecera of Taal, where the resident priest locks it in a “hidden” tabernacle. c. The image escapes its sequestration in Taal and periodically returns to its “home” in Caysasay, with mysterious lights lighting the way, several times. After returning it to Taal each time, one day the image disappears entirely for an unspecified period of time. d. No mention of Juana Tangui or the 1611 healing miracles that took place in the freshwater brook. Significantly, the image is eventually rediscovered through the sighting of its reflection in a well, surrounded by bright lights and casay-casay (kingfisher) birds.

c. (No mention of the “fugitive” image of the Virgin).

d. Reported sightings of bright lights and other marvels appear near a freshwater brook in the visita of Binagcasan near the mission town or cabecera Caysasay. An image of the Virgin dressed in white, with a crown and carrying the Holy Infant Jesus, measuring less than 1 ft. tall (the actual image is 10.7”), appears to be at the stone foot of the brook. Juana Tangui also sees the images; and the waters cure her of her burning eyes in 1611.

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e. Doña Maria Bagohin and Doña Maria Talain are responsible for witnessing the image in the tree. The priest in the mission town or cabecera Taal does not believe them and threatens to beat them for lying and trying to seduce him. f. A shrine or small church [ermita] is built in f. The native inhabitants of the region build Caysasay, near to the place where the Virgin a temporary church [toclong simbahan] in Caysasay and organize a new settlement apparitions first occurred. (The shrine, as around it, but suffer from lack of freshwater. well as the stone monument that stands The intercession of the Virgin causes a atop the freshwater spring known as the freshwater spring to erupt in the church. well of Santa Lucia, were commissioned by The freshwater spring known as the well the Archdiocese in 1620 but not finished until 1639). Other miracles follow but remain of Santa Lucia lies near the actual location of the Caysasay church, and was built by unverified by Agustín / Díaz. Chinese stonemasons in 1639. 36 e. The freshwater brook is assumed to be the location of the Virgin’s image, as the waters cure people of various diseases and ailments, including Magdalena Pongsoin and Catalina Talain.

Now, one would be tempted to credit San Agustín’s account for being the more historically reliable: after all, it was written years before Bencuchillo’s; and San Agustín further claimed that his account was based on official reports by his fellow Augustinian confreres. To do so, however, would be to disavow the willful attempt of either San Agustín or his sources, to tie together the discovery of the image and the miracles of the spring, contrary even to his (or their) own reporting of the events. The entire drama of Juana Tangui requesting the Virgin Mary for some kind of proof of her presence, which the Virgin generously does, also seems to contrivedly frame the encounter in the manner of an Inquisitorial proceeding, in which the eyewitness anticipates the report she will have to make to the religious ministers for verification of the miracle. The representation of her behavior, in fact, recalls a little too easily the famous case of Mexican Juan Diego with the Virgin of Guadalupe on Tepeyac Hill, in which Juan is instructed by the Archbishop to deliver “proof” of the Virgin’s apparition.37 We are dealing, in either case, with a generic convention of religious literature, whose task it is to reaffirm the veracity of apparitions after they have already become the object of cult devotion. 36 Fr. Buencuchillo’s narration reads: “Manga tauo,y, naoohao / and ualang tubig na tab-ang / ay ang Poo,y, dinaingan / y adya sa cahirapan. / Mana,t, agad bungmucal / sa binabangong Simbahan / tab-ang na di ano lamang. / Lahat ay nangalologod / sa tubig na pagcabolboc / agad napaimbolog / cocolocolo ang agos” [The people were thirsty / because of the lack of freshwater / They cried out to the Lord / to deliver them from suffering. / And then, suddenly erupting / from the Church that was being built / was water, that was fresh without doubt. / All delighted / In the flowing water / that sprouted upward / the stream bubbling] (n.p. [23]). 37 While a sizable bibliography treats the image and its provenance, I have used David Brading, Mexican Phoenix.

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There are still, however, two more sets of analogies to explore: these regarding the palimpsest of legend in Fr. Bencuchillo’s own narration of the Virgin of Caysasay. Firstly, the experience of the multiple, dancing lights, recalls not only that of the will o’ the wisp or St. Elmo’s fire, but also that of the celebration of mass. Bencuchillo’s account makes this comparison even more explicit by describing the discovery of the Virgin of Caysasay in a tree surrounded by candles as well as birds. Could the impression of one experience facilitate the visualization of another, to the point that they appear identical? Even more concretely: does the presence of candles surrounding the Virgin’s image in a tree suggest that someone or some group had placed it there, to revere as an object of veneration outside the supervision or protocols and of the missionary priest(s)? Finally, it seems too coincidental that Bencuchillo’s story of the “walking Virgin,” the bright shining lights, and the miracle of freshwater issuing from the walls of the newly constructed church, recalls the legend of the Holy Cross of (Old) Bauan / Alitagtag (see Chapter 4), which also lay in the same Augustinian mission province of Balayan (now Batangas) in southern Luzon. If we recall that story, retold by Fr. Castro in Chapter 4, we find the same elements: freshwater gushing from the icon (in Castro’s case, the Holy Cross), the Cross’s ambulant stroll around a field, the bright shining lights surrounding it, which could be seen at a great distance. San Agustín’s narration further corroborates the fact that natives traveled between mission towns, because he specifically mentions that Juana Tangui (who was the first documented eyewitness to the Virgin apparitions) was in fact from Bauan, where the animated Holy Cross first appeared. The correspondences, in any case, not only invite but oblige fresh speculation on the founding myths of apparitions and miracles that we take to be established truth today. If Fr. Bencuchillo’s story, for example, adheres more closely to the popular memory of the Virgin of Caysasay than Fr. San Agustín, we must then ask: what reasons would we have for prioritizing or giving credit to one history at the expense of the other? San Agustín’s version would seem to be the most straightforward: its purpose is to serve as a testament to the Virgin Mary’s effective presence and divine intercession in the area, which inspired to the construction of a church in Casaysay between 1620 and 1639.38 38 A later episode in the legend of the Virgin of Caysasay concerning a certain Chinese farmer named Juan Imbin (spelled Haybing in Bencuchillo’s version) reinforces this efficacy of divine grace in the region, by narrating the favor and punishment she bestowed on the farmer in the aftermath of the 1639 Chinese insurrection. This episode is treated in greater detail in Lee, Saints of Resistance, 39–72.

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Once installed in “her” rightful place, it remains up to her native followers to maintain her cult by installing themselves in their rightful place(s), i.e. in or near the mission town. By contrast, Fr. Bencuchillo’s legend of the walking Virgin, which was foreshadowed in the Holy Cross of Old Bauan / Alitagtag, highlights the greater autonomy of movement and independent action of the image, which reflects a specific personality and even will, that the image possesses outside the teachings of both the official Church and religious Orders. This autonomy ultimately implies several things. First, in the popular memory the Virgin’s advocacy includes not only the miracles of healing, protection, and (divine) administration of justice, but more fundamentally the friendly disposition of one who possesses knowledge of the land; and could help with practical matters like providing a community with freshwater sources in a saltwater region. How different would this conception be from that of the Tigbalang (see Chapter 3): a creature with whom the shrewd traveler might bargain in order to facilitate his journey? A second implication of the Virgin’s “personality” is that it conveys a certain f ickleness or in any case selectiveness in dispensing favor and disfavor to her supplicants, given that this dispensation of its recipients takes place on an interpersonal level, i.e. with little to no mediation by religious ministers. This intersubjective dimension, which the philosopher Martin Buber once characterized as an “I-Thou” relationship distinct from “I-It” relationships, better approximates the experience of the native spiritworld than it does the institutional organization of religious orthodoxy in Christianity.39 The implication of this dynamic leads to a third observation, which is that the personalization of the Virgin Mary implies an emergent self-understanding among these resettled populations that they did not ultimately depend on priests or ministers exclusively in their dealings with the Virgin Mary – a relationship structured by oaths on the part of the supplicant, and divine favors or punishment on the part of the Virgin Queen. As Bencuchillo makes clear, the elevation of Caysasay from visita to town, symbolized by the erection of a church in 1639, did not arise out of God’s providential plan – or, for that matter, the Augustinians’ instructions regarding settlement and conversion. Rather, “Those who were speaking together / Including the Father, and the whole community” decided on the 39 In The Structure of World History, for example, Kojin Karatani argues that pre-imperial or state forms of exchange are characterized by the understanding that intersubjective relationships extend to nature and inanimate objects (52–55). Marcel Henaff presents a similar understanding in his unsurpassed work on the philosophy of exchange, The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy, 202–241.

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reduction, together (Bencuchillo n.p. [22]). To put the contrast between San Agustín and Bencuchillo’s narratives in schematic terms, while San Agustín’s text anticipates the verification of the Virgin’s apparitions by the law as an official “holy” site, and the identification of Caysasay as a future Augustinian mission town, Fr. Bencuchillo’s history attempts to write an origin story that will serve in place of the law’s perpetually delayed arrival, i.e. as a quasi-legal charter of the town’s origins, which could be passed on by native elders and principales to their descendants through the reproduction of Bencuchillo’s dalit.

Towards a Genealogy of “Split-Level Christianity” The Christian imaginary, as the cult of the Virgin of Caysasay in its early development shows, cleaves in two directions simultaneously. On a symbolic level, devotional cults endlessly project an idealized feudal order between priestly lords, queenly ladies, and credulous paeans, which never existed in either pre-Hispanic or colonial society. This projection extended to the treatment of priests, whom natives in at least one town in Batangas province referred to as “king” [harí].40 Yet the performance of royal pageantry reached even greater extremes in cults like that of the Virgin of Antipolo, also known as Our Lady of Safe Travel and Peace for “her” service in protecting the Acapulco-Manila galleons crossing the Pacific between 1641–1663 and again from 1746–1748. When the interim acting governor-general of the Philippines, Sr. Doctor Don Fray Juan de Arechederra (OP) visited the Antipolo shrine in 1746, he was seized by emotion at the sight of “her,” and presented “her” with his baton, symbol of the Crown’s authority; which accompanies the image to this day (see Figure 13). Eighteenth-century Jesuit chronicler Murillo Velarde does not shy away from identifying the Virgin of Antipolo as an ersatz Queen of the Pacific frontier when he describes her “restitution” to Antipolo at the conclusion of her service to the galleons: “The Image was 40 This misuse is described by Jean-Paul Potet: see Seventeenth-Century Events at Liliw, 23–29. Potet also records an instance documented by Augustinian priest Fr. Joaquín Martínez de Zuñiga (OSA) in his visitation of the provinces around 1800, in which the replacement of one priest by another in the town of San José (also in the province of Batangas) was commemorated by the town’s inhabitants with a ceremony that improvised the pomp and majesty of a royal coronation (26; see also Martínez de Zuñiga, Estadísmo de las islas Filipinas pte. 1, 71–72). Martínez de Zuñiga adds: “This embarrassing ceremony finds disapproval among most religious ministers, and there are many who never allow it to happen … [but] some other practice it without shame, and it is doubtless those same religious who have commanded the Indians to do it” (72: my translation).

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then placed on her ancient Throne, where she may be seen by all, in order to receive the gifts of her followers, who later began to render her tribute through prayers, hosannas, and petitions” (218 [par. 531]). 41 In dramatizing his recognition of the Virgin Queen’s imagined sovereignty, “the highest ranking official in the Philippines at the time ushers the missionary frontier wholly into a political theology where Christian eschatology and Spanish commercial and security interests become inextricably fused.”42 The increasingly extravagant displays of native fealty to queenship, pious devotion, and the ritualization of oaths (called panata) and their fulfillment; accented by archaic rituals of self-abasement like beso mano [kissing the hand or ring], punas punas [touching the feet or head of a holy image with the fingers, lips, or handkerchief], and self-flagellation, however, nevertheless disguise the absence of any effective law beyond the dictates of the lone Spanish figure in the mission territories – the friar. It should come as no surprise, then, to see an opposite drift of resettled populations in the mission town, towards emergent forms of self-assertion and autonomy. As we will see next Chapter, this was particularly the case among members of the refashioned native elite. 43 In fact, priests may have considered themselves ever more marginal players in this pantomime of colonial society, even as colonial authorities saw them as an ever more arbitrary and despotic power.44 It is significant, for example, that the year before Jesuit Fr. Luis Espinelli (SJ) wrote his 1653 report on the (first) restitution of the Virgin of Antipolo as an undeniable sign of victory for spiritual conquest and reduction policies, his confrere, Fr. Magino Sola (SJ), wrote the governor Don Sabiniano Manrique de Lara an urgent request, to send more arms and soldiers to protect and promote the interests of evangelization on the islands as well as suppressing revolts and religious parricide in the provinces by resentful native Indians.45 Recalling this period in his history of the Jesuit Order, Fr. Murillo Velarde remarked how “there were [so] many prisoners in the Prisons, and stocks, not only the old, public ones, but others as well, that it became necessary to 41 “Colocóse la Imagen en su antiguo Throno, donde quedó patente, para recibir los obsequios de sus devotos, que luego empezaron a tributarle en oraciones, en alabanzas, y ruegos.” 42 Blanco, cited in Lee, Saints of Resistance, 120. 43 For an excellent study of these practices in Philippine Christianity, which exist to this day, see Fr. Jannel Abogado (OP), “the Cult of Saints Among Filipino Catholics,” 499–542. 44 See Cruikshank, “Disobedient but Loyal,” 567–584. 45 See “Condition of the Philippines in 1652,” in BRPI v. 36, 49–53. “The reason why the natives in some provinces have risen in insurrection and killed their ministers and the Spaniards,” Fr. Sola writes, “was only because, the ordinary supplies being lacking, the Spaniards could not satisfy the natives for the food and goods that they had given on credit, nor pay them for their work” (50).

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build another [Prison], with the excessive number of those being arrested under orders every day.”46 He colorfully describes the spread of social anomie during the seventeenth century, the same period that saw the efflorescence of popular devotional cults dedicated to the Virgin Mary: During this time dissolution reigned throughout these Islands with such despotic and free dominion, that it was as if no higher Law existed to repress it. The fraud in business dealings and trade, hate, deception, and malice spread everywhere, unfettered. Higher than even these was carnal lust [sensualidad] as the Principal and dominant, widespread vice: which, without being bound by weather, sex, condition, or age, had scorched these Regions with an infernal, inextinguishable fire. Aggravating these crimes, which were committed with impunity, was their scandalous publicity. And under this guise they had filled the land with so much iniquity and abomination, that in a way they had succeeded in corrupting … the very land itself.47

“As if no higher Law existed to repress it.” Indeed, and in fact, no higher Law did: competing jurisdictions throughout the archipelago ensured that none would. Our analysis of the cult of the Virgin cults, which influenced the establishment of later devotional cults as proto-charters of mission pueblos, illustrates how the “invention” of an image – and by extension, a new colonial tradition – comes about through a circuit of verification and validation involving native witnesses and testimonies as well as missionary approval; and leads to the official recognition of a colonial town as the successful result of reducción policies carried out by the spiritual authority. This legitimation process, however, cannot be separated from the circulation of divergent legends, as the example of the Caysasay cult shows. These testify to the collaboration and co-invention of Philippine Christianity between religious ministers and their native neophytes: their willingness or (in some instances) resignation 46 See Murillo Velarde, Historia de la Provincia de Philipinas de la Compañía de Jesús: Segunda parte, que comprehende los progresos de esta provincial desde el año de 1616, hasta el de 1716, 209 [par. 513]). [avia muchos presos en los Cárceles, y calabozos, no solo en los antiguos, y públicos, sino en otros, que fue necesario formar de Nuevo, por el numero execsivo de los que se mandaban prender cada día.] 47 Murillo Velarde 230 [par. 555]. [Reynaba por este tiempo en estas Islas la disolucion con tan libre despotico dominio, como si no vbiera superior Ley, que la reprimiese. La falacia en los tratos, y comercio, el odio, el engaño, y la malicia corrian con generalidad, y sin freno. La sensualidad, sobre todo era como el vicio Principe, y dominante, y tan general, que sin ceñirse a tiempo, sexo, condicion, ni edad, tenia abrasadas estas Regiones con vn infernal inextinguible fuego. Agravaba estos crimenes la publicidad escandalosa, con que se cometian casi impunes. Y avian llenado de tal forma la tierra de iniquidad, y abominacion, que en cierto modo avian corrompido … la tierra misma.]

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to the necessity of bending and negotiating with one another’s credulity or resistance, in order to fashion a simulacrum of colonial society based on their shared fealty to an imaginary sovereign. While friars expressed initial wonder at the fervor of their Christian neophytes, their enthusiasm soon gave way to frustration and indignation that the resulting colonial traditions could wander so far from their own understanding of the faith; just as the Virgin would routinely wander far from the Taal cabecera, to the place(s) where the fate of Philippine Christianity remained unsettled, incomplete.

Bibliography Abogado, Fr. Jannel (OP), “The Cult of Saints among Filipino Catholics: A Study on Inculturation,” Philippinana Sacra XLI: 123 (2006). 499–542. Almario, Virgilio, ed. Poetikang Tagalog: Mga Unang Pagsusuri sa Sining ng Pagtulang Tagalog. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Sentro ng Wikang Pilipino, 1996. Bautista, Julius J. “An Archipelago Twice ‘Discovered’: The Santo Niño in the Discourse of Discovery.” Asian Studies Review 29:2 (June 2005). 187–206. Bautista, Julius. Figuring Catholicism: An Ethnohistory of the Santo Niño de Cebu. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2010. Bencuchillo, Fr. Francisco (OSA). Epitome de la historia de la aparición de Nra. Señora de Caysasay. Sampaloc (Manila), Philippines: (n.p.), 1834. Blair, Emma, and Robertson, James, eds. Project Gutenberg’s The Philippine Islands, 1493–1803. 55v. EBook #13255, 2004. Brading, David. Mexican Phoenix. Our Lady of Guadalupe: Image and Tradition Across Five Centuries. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Castro, Fr. Agustin María de [OSA], and Merino, Manuel. Misioneros agustinos en el Extremo Oriente, 1565–1780: Osario venerable. Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Santo Toribio de Mogrovejo, 1954. Christian (Jr), William A. Local Religion in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981. Concepción, Fr. Juan de la (OAR), Historia general de Philipinas. Conquistas espirituales y temporales de estos españoles dominios, establecimientos progresos, y decadencias. 10v. Manila, Philippines: Imprenta del Seminario Conciliar, y Real de San Carlos: Por Agustín de la Rosa y Balagtas, 1788. Cruikshank, Bruce. “Disobedient but Faithful. An Argument Against the Classic View of the Priest in the Period of Spanish Rule in the Philippines,” Philippinana Sacra XLIII, No. 129, September-December 2008. 567–584. Cruz, Deirdre de la. Mother Figured. Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015.

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DeLacy, Antonio V. “History of Bauan,” in www.wowbatangas.com/towns-and-cities/ bauan-batangas-history/. Last accessed 10 June 2019. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [v. 2]. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. Díaz del Castillo, Bernal. Historia verdadera de la Conquista de la Nueva España. Madrid, Spain: Instituto “Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo,” CSIC, 1982. Series Monumenta hispano-indiana; 1. Donoso, Isaac J. “El Barroco filipino,” in Historia cultural de la lengua española en Filipinas. Madrid, Spain: Editorial Verbum, 2012. 85–146. García López, Juan Catalina. Biblioteca de escritores de la Provincia de Guadalajara y bibliografía de la misma hasta el siglo XIX. Madrid, Spain: [s.n.] (Est. Tip. Sucesores de Rivadeneyra), 1899. Gerona, Danilo. The Lady of the Cimarrones: The Peñafrancia Devotion in the Spanish Kabikolan 1710–1898. Canaman, Camarines Sur, Philippines: Bikol Historical Research Center, 2010. Gorospe, Fr. Vitalino (SJ) and Javellana, Fr. Rene (SJ). Virgin of Peñafrancia: Mother of Bicol. Makati, Metro Manila, Philippines: Bookmark, 1995. Gruzinski, Serge. The Conquest of Mexico: The Incorporation of Indian Societies into the Western World, 16th-18th Centuries. London, UK: Polity Press, 1993. Gruzinski, Serge. Images at War: Mexico from Columbus to Blade Runner (1492–2019). Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001. Hay, John. De Rebus Iaponicis, Indicis et Peruanis Espistolar Recentiores. Antwerp, Belgium: 1605. Henaff, Marcel. The Price of Truth: Gift, Money, and Philosophy. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. Joaquin, Nick. La Naval and Other Essays. Manila, Philippines: A.S. Florentino, 1964. Karatani, Kōjin, and Michael K. Bourdaghs. The Structure of World History: From Modes of Productionto Modes of Exchange. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Lee, “Conflictos discursivos en la construcción de la leyenda del Santo Niño de Cebú durante la temprana colonización Española de Filipinas,” Revista de Crítica Literaria Latinoamericana XLIV, no. 88 (2018). 33–53. Lee, Christina. Saints of Resistance: Devotions in the Philippines Under Early Spanish Rule. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2021. Lockhart, James. “Some Nahua Concepts in Postconquest Guise,” History of European Ideas 6:4, 2012. 465–482. Maravall, José Antonio. Culture of the Baroque: Analysis of a Historical Structure. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. Martínez de Zuñiga, Fr. Joaquín de. Estadismo de las islas Filipinas: ó, Mis viajes por este país. Madrid, Spain: [Imp. De la viuda de M. Minuesa de los Ríos], 1893.

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Mondzain, Marie-Jose. Image, Icon, Economy. The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary. Trans. Rico Franses. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004. Murillo Velarde, Pedro. Historia de la Provincia de Philipinas de la Compañia de Jesus: Segunda parte, que comprehende los progresos de esta provincia desde el año de 1616, hasta el de 1716. Con las licencias necesarias en Manila : En la Imprenta de la Compañia de Iesus, por D. Nicolas de la Cruz Bagay, 1749. Internet Archive, http:// archive.org/details/historiadelaprov00muri. Last accessed November 17, 2022. Newson, Linda. Conquest and Pestilence in Early Spanish Philippines. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. Noceda, Fr. Juan de (SJ) and Sanlúcar, Fr. Pedro de (SJ’s) Vocabulario de la lengua tagala. Manila, Philippines: Reimpreso de Ramírez y Giraudier, 1860. Pelikan, Jaroslav. Mary Through the Centuries: Her Place in the History of Culture. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Pérez, Fr. Elviro J. (OSA). Catalogo Bio-bibliográfico de los religiosos Agustinos de la Provincia del Santísimo Nombre de Jesús de las Islas Filipinas desde fundación hasta nuestros días. [S.l.] : [s.n.], 1901 (Manila, Philippines: Establecimiento tipográfico del Colegio de Sto. Tomás). Potet, Jean-Paul. Seventeenth-Century Events at Liliw. Morrisville, NC: Lulu.com, 2016. San Agustin, Fr. Gaspar de (OSA) et al. Conquistas de las islas Filipinas: la temporal, por las armas del señor don Phelipe Segundo el Prudente; y la espiritval, por los religiosos del Orden de nuestro padre San Augustin. Parte II que a beneficio de los materiales que dejó recopilados … Valladolid: L.N. de Gaviria, 1890. Sánchez Gómez, Luis Ángel. “El gobierno y administración de los territorios en Filipinas (1565–1898), in S. Bernabéu Albert (ed.), Poblar la inmensidad: sociedades, conflictividad y representación en los márgenes del Imperio Hispánico (siglos XV-XIX). Barcelona, Spain: Ediciones Rubeo, CSIC, 2010. 465–532 Schumacher, John (SJ). Readings in Philippine Church History. Second Edition. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Loyola School of Theology, Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1987. Stevens-Arroyo, Anthony M. “The Evolution of Marian Devotionalism within Christianity and the Ibero-Mediterranean Polity,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37:1 (1998). 50–73. Taylor, Steven. “God’s Queen: Chess Imagery in the Poetry of Gautier de Coinci,” Fifteenth Century Studies, 17 (1990). 403–419. Taylor, William. Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico Before the Reforma. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2010. Trota Jose, Regalado. “Imaging Our Lady in Sixteenth-Century Manila: Nuestra Señora del Rosario de La Naval” (working paper). https://cilam.ucr.edu/diagonal/ issues/2008/TrotaJose2.pdf. 16pp. Web. Last accessed November 17, 2022.

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Trota José, Regalado. “La venerada imagen del Nuestra Señora del Rosario de La Naval: an image biography,” in The Saga of La Naval: Triumph of a People’s Faith. Manila, Philippines: Dominican Province of the Philippines, 2009. 45–73. Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and the Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York, NY: Vintage, 1983. Yalom, Mairlyn. Birth of the Chess Queen. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2004. Zugasti, Miguel. “Rescate de una loa inédita en manila a la traslación de la imagen de Nuestra Señora de Guía a su Ermita (1666).” RILCE38.1 (2022). 335–364.

6

Reversions to Native Customin Fr. Antonio de Borja’s Barlaan at Josaphat and Gaspar Aquino de Belen’s Mahal na Pasion Tantae molis erat [So great a task it was] to establish the “eternal laws of Nature” of the capitalist mode of production, to complete the process of separation between labourers and conditions of labour, to transform, at one pole, the social means of production and subsistence into capital, at the opposite pole, the mass of the population into wage labourers … If money …“comes into the world with a congenital blood-stain on one cheek,” capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt. — Karl Marx, Capital (v.1), Chapter 31 1

Abstract: This chapter analyzes the twin existence of native custom alongside Christian tradition on the colonial frontier. This reckoning appears in the publication of at least two important works during the early eighteenth century: the translation of the legend of Saints Barlaam and Josaphat (now desanctified) from Latin into Tagalog by Jesuit priest Fr. Antonio de Borja (SJ) in 1712; and the first verse adaptation of the Passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ into Tagalog by native translator and author Gaspar Aquino de Belen in 1703. I demonstrate their shared concern with the same issue: specifically, the encroachment of Crown officials and the money economy into the religious provinces, which adumbrated the renegotiation of both religious immunity and native custom. Keywords: encomienda, native elite [principalía], Chinese traders [sangleyes], freedom [Maharlika / timawa], slave [alipin], Passion [Pasyón].

1

See Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (web), p. 538.

Blanco, J.D., Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463725880_ch6

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Was the pseudo-gospel, pseudo-lawmaking enterprise of spiritual conquest, with its developmentalist frame of resettle-to-Christianize-to-Hispanize narrative, vindicated in history? At first glance, it would seem so. Despite the expression of panic voiced by the provincials of the various religious Orders to the Crown in 1700 (see Chapter 1), the dawn of the eighteenth century signals the beginning of an important economic transformation in the Philippines: due in no small part to the growth of native settlements. One of the first indicators of this transformation was the recovery of the population for the first time since the Spanish conquest.2 This growth corresponded with the decadence of the institution of private encomiendas, which had anchored the informal abuse of colonial subjects from the time of the conquest. One of the consequences of this reversion of encomienda lands to the Crown was what Luis Alonso Álvarez described as the emerging “efficiency of empire” in the Philippines: the growth of receipts in tribute and income in the colony that freed the colony from its dependence on the financial subsidy it received from viceregal New Spain.3 Although Moro piracy continued to ravage the coastal towns of the Visayas region and southern Luzon even after the end of the Spanish-Dutch War (1648), at one point killing or enslaving almost half the population in the southern islands, in Luzon the extension of colonial bureaucracy into the mission frontier as well as interior commerce led to the growth of settlement populations as well as the number of settlements. 4 Religious historian Fr. John Schumacher (SJ) highlights this period as the “golden age” of the Church overseas, by which he may mean either the success of the religious Orders in resettling populations or the wealth of illicit receipts in fees for masses and the administration of the sacraments (which was forbidden by the Crown), burial fees (also prohibited), and large donations.5 According to Fr. René Javellana (SJ), at least fifteen churches were built for the Jesuit Order alone in the f irst several decades of the 2 Corpuz, Roots of the Filipino Nation, v.1, 193; Linda Newson, Conquest and Pestilence in the Philippines, 9–99; Fernando Palanco, “The Tagalog Revolts of 1745 According to Spanish Primary Sources,” 68. 3 Luis Alonso Álvarez, “La ef iciencia del imperio en las Filipinas coloniales, 1698–1820,” 197–232. On the decline and abolition of the institution of encomienda, see Eric Anderson, “The Encomienda in Early Philippine Colonial History,” 33–34. 4 See Newson, Conquest, 251–64. 5 Schumacher, “A Golden Age of the Philippine Church, 1700–1768,” in Growth and Decline: Essays on Philippine Church History, 23–68. A contrary view was expressed by Don Salvador Gómez de Espinosa, a seventeenth-century high court off icial: see J.S. Cummins, Jesuit and Friar in the Spanish Expansion to the East, 159–167. For an analysis of Espinosa’s critique of the religious Orders, see Chapter 2.

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eighteenth century. Fr. Pedro Galende (OSA) adds that by 1754 Augustinians alone had founded “over one hundred towns.”6 The College of San José in Intramuros was also established, in 1722, not only to educate Spanish and criollo (Philippine-born Spaniards) students; but also, increasingly, Chinese mestizos and natives.7 Such a rosy picture of this “golden age,” however, also corresponds with other transformations to which the perpetuity of the mission provinces contributed. The religious Orders began to face increased scrutiny by the Crown’s main representative overseas, the governor-general, who unsuccessfully pressured the Orders to submit official written records of the lands they claimed to be under their jurisdiction.8 The regular clergy’s refusal to legitimate their land claims (some of which clearly belonged to the natives as common property), as well as the ensuing multiple failed attempts for natives to charge the religious Orders for landgrabbing, led to the outbreak of the 1745 Tagalog mass uprising against them.9 More broadly, the period saw the gradual decadence of native commoners into systemic poverty and perpetual debt. A second problem the Orders faced was the Crown’s injunction for them to educate the native population, with an eye towards training members for ordination as (secular) priests.10 It was on the basis of this decree that Archbishop Diego Camacho y Ávila (from 1696–1704) began to aggressively pursue the opening of seminaries and the ordination of priests to a native clergy, which the religious Orders (with very few exceptions) had traditionally opposed.11 This injunction was followed by another decree in 1694, mandating the establishment of schools and training of teachers to 6 See Pedro G. Galende, Angels in Stone: Architecture of Augustinian Churches in the Philippines, 11. 7 See Fr. René Javellana (SJ), in Gaspar Aquino de Belen, et al., Mahal na Pasion ni Jesu Christong Panginoon natin na tola, 3. 8 See Fr. Nicholas Cushner (SJ), Landed Estates in the Philippines, 64–65; Dennis Roth, The Friar Estates in the Philippines, 49; and Fernando Palanco, “The Tagalog Revolts of 1745,” 65–67. As Palanco observes, the Jesuits agreed to submit records, but with the understanding that they did so as a favor to the Crown and not by obligation. 9 Cushner, ibid., 61. 10 See “Orden para enseñanza y promoción al orden sacro de Indios,” AGI FILIPINAS,331,l.7,F.227R (08/22/1677); and Corpuz, Roots of the Filipino Nation, v. 2, 250–265. 11 See Corpuz, Roots of the Filipino Nation, v. 1, 266–292. While a lively debate between Luciano Santiago and Fr. John Schumacher (SJ) reflects the stakes behind the question of the Orders’ opposition to the growth of the native secular clergy, the fact is that the number of native priests before the 1768 expulsion of the Jesuits did not exceed twelve: see Santiago, The Hidden Light, 31–68. Corpuz’s estimation was 9: see Roots, v. 2, 277–279).

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teach Spanish to the native Indians.12 Because the primary goal of mission settlement had up to that time been religious conversion, religious ministers had customarily studied the native language of the people they sought to convert; and then proselytized (to the best of their ability) in that language. The new push to teach natives the Spanish language, however, stemmed from the expansion of colonial bureaucracy into the mission provinces under the new “efficiency of empire.” These examples all seem to demonstrate the increased pressure of the Crown, through both the governor-general and the Manila Archbishop, to break the privileges of the regular clergy; and to force them to return to the original task assigned to them, i.e. the preaching of Christianity to unbaptized natives. As we have seen time and again, such a task would have entailed the surrender of the doctrinas or mission-parishes under their care, which the Orders would refuse to do all the way up to the 1896 Philippine Revolution. Yet the friars and Jesuits were not the only agents affected by the encroachment of the civil government on the mission frontier. The economic penetration of interior commerce and colonial bureaucracy also awakened a hitherto silent or muted voice in the historical record: the voice of the native principalía, called maginoo and datu in the Tagalog and Visayas provinces. This class constituted the top of a loose hierarchy within native communities, which included a class of “freedmen” or commoners [timawa] below the datus and their families; and “slaves” [alipin] at the bottom.13 This latter class included both indentured laborers capable of securing their freedom by repaying their debt; and those enslaved by birth or by capture in war or raids. In the aftermath of the conquest, the Spanish Crown anticipated and feared the social breakdown of native society; and, following the counsel of the religious Orders, preserved the slaveholding privileges of the native elite while also incorporating them into the colonial bureaucracy, where they would take charge of the collection of tribute (as gobernadorcillos, lit. “petty governors” and cabezas de barangay, community headmen) and the enforcement of labor quotas.14 As late as 1684, the Crown backed down on 12 See “Carta de la Audiencia de Manila sobre enseñanza del castellano a los indios,” AGI FILIPINAS, 26, R.6., n.24. 13 Phelan, Hispanization, 15–18; Scott, Barangay, 127–146; and Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, 137–146 and 161–166. Scott has characterized Philippine pre-Hispanic “slavery” along the lines of debt peonage, which he distinguishes from chattel slavery in the Americas. The latter presupposed a concept of private property that was not fixed in Southeast Asia. See also Laura Lee Junker, Raiding, Trading, Feasting, 131–137. 14 See Antonio de Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (ed. José Rizal), 301; Gómez de Espinosa, “Discurso paréntico,” in Cummins, Jesuit and Friar, 189–191; Alonso Álvarez, “La ef iciencia,”

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enforcing its century-old moratorium on slavery in 1586, after receiving significant pushback from the Philippine royal council [Audiencia] (Scott, ibid.). “To set the slaves of the natives free,” the council members wrote: would be most dangerous and prejudicial, both because the gentry have the major part of their wealth in them and work their fields with them, in this way supplying these provinces with rice and other foodstuffs, and because by setting the slaves free, the general abundance in these islands will cease and they will be ruined … And it may be justifiably feared that by setting the slaves free, the provinces remote from Manila may be stirred up and revolt, such as those in the Visayas and Nueva Segovia, and others … could pass over to the Moros (cited in Scott, ibid., 44–45).

The disfranchisement and impoverishment of native principalía throughout the first two centuries of Spanish rule was widely attested to: not only did they see the decline in the number of dependents and slaves under their command but they were also forced to sell significant tracts of land to stay afloat.15 Yet the perpetuation of slavery paradoxically both facilitated colonial exploitation and obstructed the complete disintegration of native society under forced settlement. With the native elite responsible for implementing colonial policies under local authority, these principales came to serve as the representatives and middlemen between Spanish demands and local grievances: a kind of double agent in the colonial world.16 The persistence of a native class at once inside and outside the colonial bureaucracy, which upheld the institution of pre-Hispanic debt slavery even as Spaniards (outside the religious Orders) were prohibited from owning 396–397; Cushner, Landed Estates in the Philippines, 18; and Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines, 36–47. 15 Cushner, Landed Estates, 17–18; Corpuz, Roots of the Filipino Nation, v. 2, 249. Cushner openly questions whether this land was theirs to sell in the first place, and wonders whether the social anomie that emerged in the wake of the conquest explains the otherwise illegal sale of communal lands: “the social disorder produced by the conquest would have made it quite easy for some principales to assume absolute ownership of communal village lands” (19). 16 One may argue that this role was not new: as we saw in Chapter 3, religious ministers often depended on the conversion of the hereditary nobility to Christianity f irst, with the understanding that the communities in their care would tend to follow the example of their leaders. Fr. Diego Aduarte’s history of the Dominican mission in Pangasinan records how, in 1589, it was the principales who instructed the priests on uprooting native beliefs in the spirit world; and led their communities in the confiscation and destruction of the instruments and “relics of their idolatry,” which they did with the consent of their subjects in a series of carnivals (Aduarte, Historia de la provincia del santo Rosario, v.1, 184).

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Figure 14: First page of “Catalogus Christianorum quos colit Societas in Philippinius Anno 1675” [Catalog of Christians the Society (of Jesus) (Enforces?) Worship in the Philippines]. The rows represent the numbers of married couples [coniugati], unmarried [Soluti], young men and women [Adolescentes / Adolescentule), male and female children [Pueri / Puella], and slaves [Mancipia] in the Jesuit mission pueblos. ARSI Philipp. 11, VFL, Roll 165, 89v. Vatican Film Library, St. Louis University.

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slaves, also implied the coexistence of an alternate social order grafted onto but not absorbed by the mission settlement. What made such an order particularly unsettling was the fact that the mission town itself represented an alternate social order grafted onto but not absorbed into the rule of Spanish laws. In fact, in the case of slavery the religious Orders followed the lead of the native elite: owning and deploying slave labor in their haciendas and mission towns (see Figure 14).17 The preservation of the native elite class all but guaranteed the endemic resistance to the penetration of Spanish and Christian acculturation on the missionary frontier. And in the case of slavery, attempts by both the Crown and ecclesiastical hierarchy of the official Church to abolish the institution openly threatened the nobility’s ancient source of authority.18 This historical backdrop frames the analysis of the last significant moment in the literature of spiritual conquest, which was its reckoning with the shadowy, twin existence of native custom alongside Christian tradition on the colonial frontier. This reckoning appears in the publication of at least two important works during the early eighteenth century. The first is the translation of the legend of Saints Barlaam and Josaphat (now desanctified) from Latin into Tagalog by Jesuit priest Fr. Antonio de Borja (SJ) in 1712, although it was clearly inspired by a host of earlier translations throughout the seventeenth century and destined for the overseas missions. The second is the first vernacular versification of the Passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ into Tagalog by native translator and author Gaspar Aquino de Belen in 1703. While the former work [Barlaan at Josaphat] has been long forgotten or ignored, the latter became perhaps the first truly popular work of literature in Tagalog. By the early nineteenth century, Aquino de Belen’s verse adaptation had spawned not only numerous “corrupt” versions in wide circulation – leading to the first major censorship campaign in the Philippines against these works by the religious authorities – but also various paraliturgical traditions associated with the Passion story. Significantly, the reading [pabasa] of the entire text during Holy Week before Easter, in small or large gatherings where community members take turns singing or chanting sections of the poem, seems to have emerged from circumstances specific to the lack of available clergymen to administer last rites in the doctrina.19 17 See Coello de la Rosa, “Pasquines, libelos y corrupción en las Filipinas,” 113–125. 18 See Tatiana Seijas, Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico, 38–46 and 242–245. 19 Fr. René Javellana (SJ) offers a fascinating glimpse into the dazzling variety of Holy Week traditions that incorporate the reading of the Pasyon [Passion of Christ in verse]: see Casaysayan

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My intention in bringing these religious and literary works into comparative analysis is to demonstrate their shared concern with the same issue: specifically, the encroachment of Crown officials and the money economy into the religious provinces, which anticipated the renegotiation of both religious immunity and native custom. Both Fr. Borja’s Barlaan at Josaphat and Aquino de Belen’s Mahal na Pasion depart from the literature of spiritual conquest as we have examined it hitherto: their employment of narrative artifice is overt and intended to serve a pedagogical and doctrinal function. These texts also address the native elite or principales as their primary audience. In doing so, they represent revisions of spiritual conquest – re-versions, so to speak, with an ambivalent audience in mind.20 Both texts, in different ways, highlight the changing meanings of captivity and liberation, debt and redemption, law and social anarchy at a time when these terms were being warped and entangled with the rise of friar landed estates, or haciendas. Most importantly, however, both texts anticipate the new familiarity of the native elite with the Spanish language, which would allow them to read and understand Spanish laws and religion – in short, to “Hispanize” – without the paternal tutelage of their pastors. With this familiarity, signified by the emergent debates on the proposed ordination of native priests, on the one hand, and the emergence of bilingual or ladino writers, on the other, native leaders and commoners alike prepared to pit the social autonomy of native custom against the legal autonomy of the mission town.

From the End of the Encomienda to the New “Efficiency of Empire” The official end of the encomienda or royal grant system came between 1698 and 1718; but its longer decadence corresponded with the increased Nang Pasiong Mahal Ni Jesucristong Pan︢g︣inoon Natin, 5–7. He also documents the rise of this tradition in the Spanish colonial period (7–9), as well as the attempts of Church authorities to curtail, contain, or suppress its practice altogether. 20 The play on words between “reversion” and “re-version” is inspired in part by Severo Sarduy’s treatise on Baroque thought; and partly by Bolívar Echeverría’s characterization of a “baroque ethos.” See Sarduy, “Barroco,” in Obras completas III (Ensayos); and Echeverría, La modernidad de lo barroco. Sarduy explores the multifaceted meaning of the French word retombeé, which can be translated alternately as “repercussion,” “relapse” (in a religious or secular sense), “reversion,” or “recoil.” Baroque ethos, in Echeverría’s study, follows the partial repetition of the world as it is in order to pursue the infinite ways of diverging from it: an act of recoil that, like volutes as an architectural feature of the period, or the variations of a theme in a fugue, pursue a new foundation or stasis.

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penetration of representatives of the Crown in the provinces: the assignment of provincial alcaldes, tribute collectors, and other functionaries to the regions formerly administered by encomenderos.21 Governor-general Don Fausto Cruzat y Góngora (1690–1701), known to be a zealous advocate of colonial reform, authorized a new campaign of military entradas into the mission frontiers for the purpose of reducing or resettling the indigenous and unbaptized or apostate natives (Alonso Alvarez, “La eficiencia del imperio,” 210). The resulting concentration of populations in towns and settlements, combined with the assiduous accounting of the corresponding increase in tribute-paying subjects, forced settled natives to clear and till ever larger and more distant spaces for agriculture, only to sell their product at a price undervalued by the government monopolies.22 The decline of the encomienda also entailed an equally significant and long-lasting economic and social transformation: that was the reorganization of Crown lands administered by encomenderos into landed estates or haciendas; and the transformation of native subjects and communities into a landless, rent-paying labor force. The friar corporatization of land, particularly the Tagalog-Pampangan lowland provinces around Manila in central Luzon, can be compared to the land enclosures that took place in England’s transition from a feudal to a capitalist order.23 These landed estates, the majority of which belonged to the religious Orders, usurped previous acknowledgments of native rights to the land under native custom and ancestral inheritance; supplanting them with landlord-tenant relations based on rent and administered by either the native principalía, or Chinese and Chinese mestizo lodgers [Sp. Inquilinos]. To draw displaced and landless commoners into this arrangement, the religious Orders (predominantly the Jesuits and Dominicans) would grant the inhabitants an exception from off icial tribute [Sp. casa de reserva]. Their tenants, however, were plagued by a multitude of other forms of exaction. The religious also extended loans to this proletariat-in-the-making to buy tools and provide subsistence until their labor began to generate income. Many commoners never got out of debt and were forced to accept usurious

21 See O.D. Corpuz, Roots, v. 1, 194. As we have seen, the one exception to this general requisition of lands by the Crown was granted to the religious Orders, which were allowed to claim jurisdiction over missionary territory (206). 22 Ibid., 210 and 224–225; see also Corpuz, Roots, v. 1, 228. For the importance and rhetoric of lack in colonial reports like that of Tomás de Comyn (in 1810), see John Blanco, Frontier Constitutions, 27–63. 23 See Marx, Capital I: Chapter 27 [web]; and Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 35–44.

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loans from third parties like the Chinese and Chinese mestizo merchants and inquilinos.24 Triangulating the creation of private land, mediated by rent; and labor, facilitated by the exemption of tribute on predominantly friar haciendas, was the accumulation of capital, mediated by the money economy and growth of commerce. While the Manila galleon trade still constituted the main commercial activity for exterior commerce, the acceleration of economic production in the interior fueled the development of interior commerce for the first time since the pre-Hispanic era. On the end of retail consumption, provincial alcaldes regularly flouted the prohibition on engaging in trade: setting up bodegas and selling government-mandated commodities like tools as well as provisions to the very natives from whom they extracted tribute and obligatory labor.25 The virtual monopoly of provincial alcaldes over an economy that increasingly depended on these commodities accelerated the penetration of Chinese traders [called sangley] in the provinces, who set up “Parians,” or Chinese quarters, by paying license fees to enter the provinces. Chinese settlement outside the Manila Parian was illegal; but following the tried and true colonial custom, Chinese merchants bribed both officials and parish priests to ignore their residence throughout the provinces.26 By 1671, according to Governor general Manuel de Leon, these traders ended up “possessing the greater part of the subsidy from New Spain, since they control the local supply of provisions of all kinds in addition to the sale here of most of the merchandise imported from their country.”27 When natives could not pay for their necessary provisions, the alcaldes or Chinese traders would “give them rice on credit”; and later, loan them money with interest. The increased accumulation, concentration, and circulation of wealth towards the development of interior commerce, not to mention public works and infrastructure, propelled ever new generations of native principales in decline to exploit those beneath them in the social hierarchy.28 As Don Juan 24 See the remarkable memorial written by Don Ciriaco González Carvajal in 1784, in Roth, Friar Lands, 160–170 (Appendix B). González Carvajal was the first director of the Economic Society of the Friends of the Country [Sociedad Económica de los Amigos del País) established in 1781 (ibid., 50–51). 25 Alonso Álvarez, “La eficiencia,” 213–214 and 219–220. Philippine Jesuit priest Fr. Vicente Alemany (SJ)’s unpublished novel Tercera parte de la vida del gran Tacaño (written sometime in the mid-eighteenth century, probably just before the 1769 Jesuit expulsion) narrates with great detail the various rackets of Philippine alcalde-mayors like Don Pablos: see Alemany, 122–123. 26 See the complaint of Archbishop Camacho y Ávila, in Costa, ed., Readings in Philippine History, 66. 27 Manuel de Leon, in ibid., 66. 28 Alonso Álvarez, “La eficiencia” 217 and 224–230; see also the same author, “Los señores del Barangay,” in Margarita Menegus Bornemann and Rodolfo Aguirre Salvador (eds.), 355–406.

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Gómez de Espinosa noted in 1657, areas where the encomienda and mission had installed themselves firmly saw the tendency of the native elite towards impunity only increase with their cooptation into Spanish rule as colonial officers. “The [native] leaders, and principales,” Gómez de Espinosa wrote, “have tyrannical control over the tribute-paying subjects [cabancas] of their barangays … and act in a manner akin to that of absolute masters and lords … [and] as things are exactly as they say, they hold despotic rule and domination over goods, bodies, and wealth alike.”29 Their authority to keep slaves sustained their ability (despite repeated prohibitions) to also enslave commoners who fell into debt, as well as trade slaves as commodities with the penetration of interior commerce.30 In 1684, Franciscan Fr. Pedro de Avila (OFM), who labored as the curate of various doctrinas and outlying settlements in Camarines Sur and Albay (in southeastern Luzon) denounced the various forms of maginoo [the Tagalog word for noble or “elite”] offenses, impunity, and abuse of office in a series of sermons. “What we know,” Fr. Avila inveighs, “is that that maginoos have done nothing but get drunk, they are shameless and do not fear God … Are you a maginoo? But your evil deeds are known throughout the town.”31 Yet as the leadership of the principales in southern Luzon and many other regions during the late seventeenth century has shown, their impunity paradoxically coincided with the overall decline of native authority: which, paired with the endemic weakness of colonial authority outside Manila, left a double legacy. While the incorporation and formal subsumption of the native elite into the colonial bureaucracy and money economy intensified preexisting exploitation by the principalía, most notably through debt peonage, the weakness of colonial authority also kept native leaders to some degree still beholden to the people they led. In other words, while colonial authorities sought to appropriate the pre-Hispanic social hierarchy by conscripting its leaders, these datu and maginóo responded by not only engaging in the same forms of fraud and corruption that remained the 29 Espinosa, “Discurso paréntico,” 190. “Los cabezas, y principales como tienen tiraniçados a los cabancas de sus barangays … y conducen a la manera, que si fuesen dueños y señores absolutos … que solo por ser lo que dicen, que tienen imperio y dominación despótica sobre bienes, cuerpo, y azienda.” One should note that almost the exact same words were being used by the regular clergy to describe the governor-general; as well as by Crown officials to describe the religious Orders. See also Alonso Álvarez, “Los señores del Barangay,” 401, n. 133. 30 As William Henry Scott’s book makes clear, despite the Crown’s attempts to prohibit the practice of enslavement, debt slavery persisted in the provinces outside Manila and was sanctioned by the Royal Audiencia: see Slavery in the Spanish Philippines. 31 Cited in Danilo Gerona, “Text and Politics,” 247.

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hallmark of Spanish rule; but also (by) brokering the contingencies behind a community’s acceptance of Christianity and resettlement. This brokerage ranged from negotiating the limits of tribute and obligatory conscript labor against the demands of the encomendero, alcalde-mayor, and religious missionary, to organizing the native community’s petitions against colonial administrators, to absorbing the debt of those that ran afoul of tribute and labor quotas. The double agency of native gobernadorcillos and cabezas de barangay reflects the continuity of a double demand. Like the regular clergy, who served at once the Crown and the spiritual directors of their own religious Orders, the maginoos and datus also served two masters: the remains of a kinship-based community in the process of dissolution and the inconsistent demands of colonial authority. At stake in this balancing act of the principalía was the danger of being uprooted and entirely replaced by administrative fiat or by the introduction of elections, should they have been found to abuse their authority excessively or defend their communities against Spanish authority.32 Moreover, the reciprocal responsibility between principales and their communities [bayan or barangay] was reinforced by their joint tendency to protect and perpetuate the autonomy of native customs against the “new [Christian] customs” promoted by the religious. Danilo Gerona’s insightful analysis of late seventeenth-century Franciscan priest Fr. Avila (OFM)’s sermons portrays the maginoo class as a “vanguard of resistance” against colonial hegemony in southern Luzon [Bikolandia or Kabikolan], as well as other parts of Luzon and the Visayas.33 His study reveals the degree to which the maginoo or datu’s authority and control over their respective barangay remained entangled with forms of social organization that preceded the Spanish arrival, which remained autonomous from their added role as colonial agents. While missionaries saw resettlement and conversion as instruments of Spanish acculturation or “Hispanization,” Gerona argues, the native principalía labored to reinforce the social structure, kinship network, and economy that had its origins in the pre-Hispanic Bicol region. Where priests promoted fiestas as expressions of paraliturgical devotion – the veneration of a saint, Christ, or the Virgin Mary, as well as the celebration of a town’s settlement – maginoos promoted cults as a means of gaining and consolidating social prestige. Where priests preached and administered the sacraments as a way of suppressing pre-Hispanic customs, native elite sponsored baptisms and marriages to consolidate their extended kinship 32 See Corpuz, Roots, v.1, 208–210. 33 See Gerona, “Text and Politics,” 15–77.

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networks [compadrazgo]. Religious ministers encouraged native principales to lead the membership of confraternities that collected church alms, assisted the ministers, organized the labor necessary for the upkeep of the church, and administered prayers to the dead and dying.34 At the same time, while modeling exemplary behavior in the public observance of religious rules and commandments, maginoos flouted the same strictures in private, regularly conducting illicit sexual affairs [called pagsambay in Bikolano] and then benefiting from the added labor of their progeny in the extended kinship network.35 Most importantly, the persistence of pre-Hispanic slavery (or more properly debt peonage) allowed the maginoo caste to maintain a retinue and labor force of dependents.36 The weakness of the mission as the instrument of social organization even forced the regular Orders, who preached against the practice of slavery, to paradoxically advocate for the preservation and continuity of debt slavery among native subjects.37 Between the encomienda and the mission, colonial agents and native principales would forge an ever-shifting set of informal arrangements regarding the implementation, suspension / deferral, or flagrant def iance of Spanish authority, law, and accountability in the frontier provinces throughout the early colonial period. O.D. Corpuz characterized this frontier-within-a-frontier as the native habitation of three worlds simultaneously: the world of the pueblo or settlement, which was the “world of obligations to the civil regime”; the world of the doctrina, which was governed “by the wishes of the friars and curates, who obeyed only their own superiors in their respective religious corporations; and finally the native world, which was “the world Filipinos fashioned for themselves out of the refunctionalized traces of their pre-Spanish culture.”38 Key to this dynamic is that, while natives were forced to participate in the worlds of the pueblo and doctrina, Spaniards “could not penetrate into the native world, and the people developed techniques for keeping them at bay” (225). In this instance, the persistence of a frontier not only worked in favor of the mission but also the transformed remnants of native society, governed by the observance of customs handed down by earlier generations and adapted to changing circumstances. 34 On confraternities, see Fr. Chirino, in John Schumacher (ed.), Readings in Philippine Church History, 80; see also Phelan, Hispanization, 82–83; and Javellana, Casaysayan, 12. 35 Danilo Gerona, “Text and Politics,” 244–248. 36 Cushner, Landed Estates, 65. 37 Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines, 37 and 47. 38 Corpuz, Roots, v.1, 215–216.

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Yet the death of the encomienda at the beginning of the eighteenth century would alter these arrangements in a fundamental way. To begin with, the removal of encomenderos cut out an intermediary agency between the interests of the colonial government, the friars (and Jesuits), and native elite. The streamlining of authority with the colonial government in Manila demanded the enhancement of its reach and control over the collection and accounting of tribute receipts. The result was a tightening grip of colonial bureaucracy. The decadence of the encomienda as a colonial institution also corresponded with the accumulation of land by monastic corporations, which, in turn, necessitated the clearing of new lands and the growth of interior commerce and education. The growth of friar haciendas hence took place at the expense of communal lands, which sent native freedmen or timawa into monetary debt or indentured servitude in the friar estates or under the native datu or maginoo. Against the backdrop of native dispossession and friar landgrabbing, one can already anticipate the emerging competition between the religious Orders and the native principalía over the control of native bodies and the profits of native labor. Such competition was bound to exacerbate the latent contradiction and conflict between the Christian emancipatory message of universal salvation from bondage; and the remnants of native society (like debt-slavery), which were allowed to persist on the colonial frontier. Looming over their discord, of course, was the imminent penetration of capital and the growth of conditions for a labor market, which would be better suited to generate a profit from the landed estates than individual schemes of friar self-enrichment and the adventurism of Spanish profit-seekers.39

Jesuit Spirituality and the Ambiguity of Emancipation in the Tagalog Barlaan at Josaphat40 The preceding exercise of historical sociology provides us with a frame for understanding the emergence of Tagalog literature in a new way. It is clear, for instance, that the death of the encomienda and the new “efficiency of empire” would require a corresponding form of authority, accountability, 39 Cushner, Landed Estates, 46–55. 40 The full title of this work is: Aral na tunay na totoong pagaacay sa tauo, nang mang̃a cabanalang gaua nang mang̃a maloualhating santos na si Barlaan ni Josaphat na ipinalaman sa sulat ni S. Juan Damasceno [Actual Lesson in Guiding men to Truth, Based on the Holy Works of the Glorious Saints Barlaam and Josaphat Contained in the Writings of St. John of Damascus] (translation by Lumbera: see Tagalog Poetry, 250).

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and administration – in short, a law – that had remained in abeyance throughout most parts of the archipelago from the time of the conquest. Such a law, moreover, would have to demonstrate a usefulness or efficacy that the Christian phantasmagorias of hell and Virgin queens could not provide. From whence would this law come? And upon what foundations would its authority be based? The birth of Tagalog literature owes itself at least in part to the stakes behind these questions. It should be noted that, during the early years of the conquest, the Spaniards realized that many native groups had a writing system or syllabary, which had existed since at least the tenth century if not before.41 Yet the loss of native traditions throughout the years of protracted conquest included the loss of this writing system in many (but not all) parts of the archipelago: those groups that managed to escape the worst effects of the conquest still practice a form of this writing today. 42 Throughout the seventeenth century, priests would employ the Latin alphabet to write poetry and sermons in native languages. These aided in their proselytizing efforts. And natives who learned the Spanish language, called ladinos, would assist priests in translating between vernacular languages and Spanish as well as composing occasional verses of their own. 43 Yet up to the beginning of the eighteenth century, printed works were for the most part neither written in native vernacular languages, nor directed to a native audience: this includes laws, decrees, and ordinances. Aside from novenas and leaflets containing Christian doctrine like the Ten Commandments, the Lord’s Prayer, and Ave Maria, the religious Orders expressed a notable lack of interest in publishing useful works throughout the first century and a half of monachocratic rule; or teaching literacy in the Roman alphabet. 44 The Tagalog translation of the Book of Genesis and the Four Gospels (in 1690); followed by Gaspar Aquino de Belen’s translations of both Tomás de Villacastín’s prayers for the dead and dying and Juan de Padilla’s versification of the Passion of Christ (1704); and Fr. Antonio de Borja (SJ)’s 1712 translation of the exemplum of Saints Barlaam and Josaphat, together signify a watershed moment in the creation of a popular religious culture. 45 We may glean at least one reason for this change of heart among the religious 41 The first extant source of this writing is the famous Laguna Copperplate Inscription, analyzed by Anton Poostma: see “The Laguna Copperplate Inscription: Text and Commentary,” 182–203. 42 See Ramon Guillermo, et al., Baybayin Studies, 3. 43 See Bienvenido Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry, 36–39; and Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, 55–83. 44 A similar case obtained in colonial Mexico and the Yucatán peninsula: see Inga Clendinnen, Ambivalent Conquests, 52. 45 See Gaspar Aquino de Belen and René Javellana, Mahal na Pasion, 83, n. 46.

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from the introduction to the Tagalog version of the Barlaam and Josaphat exemplum [Barlaan at Josaphat].46 In the author’s dedication of the work to “my Tagalog brothers and sisters,” Borja asks to be pardoned for the errors of speech and syntax he may have committed in the Tagalog translation: At tungkol sa kagarilan ng pangungusap o pagsasaysay kayang kulang na masusumpungan ninyo’t matutuklasan dito’y kayo na ang bahalang magpuno’t magtuwid ng magandang loob, kaya siya kong nakaya palibhasa’y di ko sariling wika at hiram ko lamang sa inyo. At nang di nga kayo magpatisod-tisod na lubha…sa pagbasa ninyo nito ay tikis akong nakikimukha sa mga batang eskuwela sa pagpapatuwid ko nitong gawang pinagkapagalan ko sa mga maginoong Tagalog. And regarding the errors of speech or expression that you may come upon and which may irk you, because they seem lacking, it is up to you (kayo na ang bahala) to fill and correct (the grammar and syntax) of this sincere intention, [and] I invite you to make the effort and do so, seeing as it is not my language and I only borrowed it from you. And so that you do not have to stumble through your reading of this [book] … I will sincerely imitate the young schoolchildren in correcting this labor / work (gawang pinagkapagalan) of mine, for the benefit of the Tagalog nobles (17). 47

This passage tells us that, at least in the case of Barlaan at Josaphat, Fr. Borja’s effort was in part mandated by his superiors in anticipation of the implementation of the colonial government’s educational reforms for the children of the native nobility or maginoo. Yet the author’s gesture of modesty, acknowledging as he does the limits of his abilities as a nonnative speaker, also reveals a subtle shift in the power dynamic behind these proposed educational reforms. While the religious Orders remain in charge of the instruction of the colonial subject, they also recognize the encroachment of 46 Fr. Antonio de Borja came from the prestigious Borgia family; and served for a time as treasurer or Procurador of the Philippine Province in Rome, as well as the rector in Marikina, at the foothills of Antipolo. See Javellana, Weaving Cultures: The Invention of Colonial Art and Culture in the Philippines, 1565–1850, 184–185. James Robertson’s Bibliography of the Philippine Islands mentions Fr. Borja as the Procurator general of the Philippine province in a document signed by Archbishop Camacho (225). 47 Borja’s mention of the “new schools” probably refers to King Philip V’s 1702 decree to found seminaries for Indians in Manila. According to religious historian John Schumacher, S.J., it seems that the policy did not really become implemented until after 1720, eight years following the publication of Borja’s Barlaan at Josaphat. See Schumacher, Readings in Philippine Church History, 197–202.

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an added level of supervision, accounting, and answerability to the colonial government and the native principales themselves. This perspective accounts for the otherwise strangely pleading tone Fr. Borja’s introduction adopts, in which the author underlines the sacrifices made by the friars and Jesuits in order to preach the Gospel for the salvation of native souls: [A]ng lahat ng yao’y noong naroon pa kami sa bayan namin sa Castilla, para-para na naming tinalikda’t winalang-bahala, tuloy pinanawa’t iniwan, at naparito kami sa Filipinas at kapuluan ng Maynila. Kaya sa ganitong pagninilay-nilay, tapat na sa inyo ko rin ipalagay itong aking pinagkabagaba’t pinagkapagalan, yayang ang inyo ring kamay ang talagang uuwia’t kapaparoonan. All that had transpired, when we were still in our towns in Castile, we turned our backs on and ceased to care for, then settled our debts and left, and we came to the Philippines and the place [island] of Manila. Following this reflection, I also entrust to you my humble self and toils [pinagkapagalan], since my future home and destination are in your hands (14).

The narrative contrasts dramatically with the tales of conquest and crusade brought by Spaniards to the Philippines; or even the self-aggrandizing rhetoric of “spiritual conquest” in works like Gaspar de San Agustín’s Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas, published in 1698. Borja compares the religious ministers to the Barlaan figure in the Barlaam and Josaphat legend when he writes: “iniwan [nila] ang kani-kanilang bayan, sampu ng kayamana’t bahay, mga magulang at kamag-anakan, at nangagsadyang tumawid dito sa kawakas-wakasang lupa” [they left their respective towns, along with their possessions and homes, parents, and relatives, and purposely crossed over to the absolute end of the earth] (16). These and other examples convey a sense of grievance that pervades the text, in which Borja mentions several times how difficult the work of translation (like the task of conversion) has been; that he was ordered to undertake the translation by his superiors; and that Tagalog neophytes, should consider themselves fortunate to have so many pastors, as opposed to the kingdom of India, which only had one! From serving as the “voice crying in the wilderness” (from the Gospel of Mark 1:1–3 and the Gospel of John 1: 22–23), Fr. Borja here appears to be appealing for recognition, credit, even justice, from the very subjects he and the monastic Orders were charged to convert, settle, and instruct. Can we not also detect in this grievance a pretext: an anticipation of the

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imminent arrival of colonial officials into the provinces, only to discover a native population that was neither settled, educated, nor knowledgeable about the very principles of a faith they had apparently professed through baptism? A population that, moreover, continued to venerate the ancestral spirits or anitos in secret; as well as follow the example of the datus and maginoos, who vituperated in private the friars and Jesuits whom they obsequiously served in public? Of equal significance to Fr. Borja’s message, however, is his addressee. For the first time, outside the place of the pulpit, a pastor is addressing his flock – in public, in writing, and in their language – about the present and future prospect of the mission. The author explains how he has come to see himself as caught between the orders of his superiors, the shortcomings of his flock, the presumed nobility of his intentions, and the meager accomplishments that belie the time he has spent “at the absolute end of the earth.” In the scenario in which he now sees himself, he has come to depend on the very colonial and Christian subjects that he has been sent to instruct and guide. These circumstances significantly alter the question posed by Fr. Borja’s predecessors at the beginning of their missionizing efforts and taken up by Borja a century later: how can Indians be led to abjure their native customs and desire Christianity? Not coincidentally, the medieval romance of Barlaam and Josaphat in Fr. Borja’s telling positions itself to address precisely this question. The story begins with a certain King Abenir, who ruled India during the time of the primitive Apostles. He was a proud and imprudent warrior king who, despite appearances of virtue, possessed a “suffering and wretched soul beyond compare” because he was ignorant of Christianity and (thus) worshipped idols. 48 The arrival of St. Thomas to India during this period leads to the conversion of many subjects, which angers the king. He undertakes a campaign to force his subjects to return to their old ways, by ordering his servants – curiously described as “viceregal representatives and governors, judges and town captains” – to abjure Christianity under pain of prosecution unto death (36). Significantly, King Abenir stresses the importance of persecuting the “Christian(ized) maginoo [nobles]”: “‘Ang lalo pang…pausigin Ninyo ay ang pinakamaginoo ng mga Kristiyano, ang mga padre baga. Sila ang pinakapuno kaya sila rin ang tudlain ng inyong mga kasipagan’” [‘Especially persecute those ennobled among the Christians, 48 “ang kaniyang kaluluwa ay dukha at aba manding walang kapara…. Di niya natutuhan ang maliwanag at ang totooong pananampalatya sa Panginoong Diyos kaya ang pagsamba niya ay sa mga idolo na kamukha ng mga demonyo” (Borja, Barlaan at Josaphat, 35).

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the father ministers. They are the leaders hence they ought to be targeted by your zeal’] (ibid.). Upon the birth of his son, named Josaphat, King Abenir consults a seer to forecast his son’s future. The seer tells him that Josaphat is destined to be a wise and great king, beyond compare … but also Christian (49). In his desperation, the king builds a palace for his son to grow up in, where visitors are prohibited under pain of death. Until the prince comes of age to make his own decisions, the king further decrees, he should not be exposed to any sight that would inspire pity or wound his heart, most notably the sight of death, age, sickness, suffering, or sadness – anything contrary to the experience of joy, comfort, and love for life (50). Josaphat’s eventual awareness of his imprisonment leads him to demand his liberty from his father. Although the father continues to attempt to prevent his son’s exposure to the aforementioned maladies (sickness, old age, death), Josaphat eventually chances upon a man who is crippled because of illness, and later an old man (44–45). These experiences lead him to an awareness of time and the universality of death. With this recognition, he renounces his father King Abenir’s pagan worship of idols, significantly translated as anitos, converts to Christianity under the spiritual pastorship and tutelage of the hermit Barlaan, and eventually convinces his father to abjure his anitos and embrace Christianity. Upon his father’s death, Josaphat in turn abjures worldly power by forsaking the kingdom he has inherited; and subsequently reunites with his spiritual guide Barlaan in the desert, where both die as holy men. The legend of Jospahat began paradoxically as the Christian adaptation of the life of the Buddha.49 According to religious scholar Philip Almond, while never formally canonized by the Church, Josaphat and his spiritual advisor Barlaam “enjoyed a popularity attained by perhaps no other legend [in the Christian West]. It spread into nearly all the countries of Christendom and is extant in over sixty versions in the main languages of Europe, the Christian East and Africa” (391). Yet Almond’s assessment neglects the particular interest among monks and missionaries in spreading the exemplum of saints Barlaam and Josaphat in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, not to mention the adoption of its premise by Golden Age playwrights Lope de Vega (Barlán y Josafá [1614]) and Pedro Calderón de la Barca (La vida es sueño [1635]). Following the full retranslation and circulation of the Barlaam and Josaphat romance to Latin, French, and Spanish in the sixteenth century, 49 See Philip Almond, “The Buddha of Christendom,” 395–396; and Donald López and Peggy McCracken, In Search of the Christian Buddha, 188–215.

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missionaries translated the romance into Japanese (1591), Mandarin (1602), and the Filipino languages of Ilocano (seventeenth century) and Tagalog (1712).50 Provincial of the Dominican Order Fr. Baltasar de la Cruz (OP) translated the Latin version (by Jacques de Billy) in Manila in 1692, although Fr. Borja claims to have used Jacques de Billy’s Latin text for the Tagalog translation. Finally, the Barlaam and Josaphat romance inspired a number of plays written by Jesuits, which were presumably performed in and for the colleges they administered.51 One may discern the politico-theological use of this text for the missionaries by reading Fr. Santa Cruz’s dedication of the Spanish translation of Barlaam and Josaphat to the governor General D. Fausto Cruzat y Góngora in 1692. Santa Cruz enjoins the governor to bear in mind the mutually reinforcing nature of the spiritual and temporal powers, at a time when the latter was extending the exercise of its authority in the frontier provinces. “This book ascetically disabuses [desengaña] all manner of Political and Military matters,” Santa Cruz writes, “proving with evidence that there is no greater work of prudence, nor reason of state, for men dedicated to perfecting to their satisfaction, and in supporting God, and contributing to such a holy providence and preserve, than the saying: ‘favor and mercy rest upon God’s chosen ones’ (Wisdom 4:15).”52 Employing the terms familiar to the political philosophy of the Spanish monarchy, Santa Cruz here restates the necessity of understanding the inseparability of Christian prudence from reason of state, human agency from holy providence. Curiously, however, the undeception that Borja intends, actually depends on a complete fabrication of history, whose translation into Tagalog allows it to stand in as a fictional history of spiritual conquest in the Philippines. In Barlaam at Josaphat, the extension of the Crown’s dominion is allegorically portrayed as the designs of a blind and ambitious man (who is, to wit, a pagan!). His “viceregal representatives and governors,” by virtue of serving at his pleasure, follow suit: all the way down to the native nobility [maginoo or datu], who express their fealty by “worshipping” anitos as idols. Lined up against these forces are the “Christian maginoos,” or father ministers of the 50 Dehergne, et al., “Catéchismes et Catéchèse des Jésuites de Chine de 1584 à 1800,” 434. 51 Patricia Cañizares, “La Historia de los dos soldados de Cristo, Barlaam y Josafat traducida por Juan de Arce Solorenzo (Madrid 1608),” 270. 52 Fr. Balthasar de Santa Cruz, Verdad nada amarga hermosa bondad, xv. “[este libro] defengaña afceticamente en todas materias, Politicas, y Militares prouando con euidencia, que no ay mejor logro de cuydados, ni mas razon de eftado, que efmerarfe los hombres en tener contento, y en fu ayuda a Dios, y contribuir al bien con tan piadofa prouidencia o conferua: RefpeEtus in electos illius (Sap. 4.).”

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religious Orders. With these elements, Borja’s narrative presents a Christian exemplum that need not rely on the complexities of Christian theology or vagaries of Christian tradition to highlight what, for Josaphat, represents the supreme Christian virtue. This is the freedom to desire a virtuous (Christian) life through acts of ascetic withdrawal and the spread of the Christian faith among nonbelievers; and a desire to be free of the “illusory” authority of anitos and their veneration (which native custom demanded).53 We should pause here to mention that the co-articulation of freedom with desire and the imagination was of course a central theme of Jesuit and Counter-Reformation spirituality as well as the baroque mentalité of southern Europe.54 The most famous examples come from Jesuit founder Fr. Ignatius de Loyola (SJ)’s Spiritual Exercises: most of the meditations begin with a narrative, an accompanying visualization or composition of a scene or image, followed by the prompt for the retreatant to “solicit what I want” [demandar lo que quiero]. This instruction to demand, in turn, is followed by a specification of what exactly it is that the retreatant ostensibly wants. The perpetual transformation of the object of desire leads to a liberation or emptying of the retreatant’s investment in desire: a surrender to the divine will or Other, which renders that person indifferent to worldly desires in order to better serve as the instrument of God’s will.55 Yet what is important here is the way Fr. Borja’s Tagalog version specifically translates the freedom or emancipation promised by Christianity in a sociopolitical as well as theological way: in Borja’s text, Christianity not only signifies Josaphat’s liberation from the veneration of ancestral spirits, but also the emancipation from pre-Hispanic social stratification and the persistence of native slavery. Early on in the text, Barlaan emphasizes the precondition of human freedom and an awareness of it in one’s conversion to Christianity. He writes: 53 I have explored this dialectic in greater detail elsewhere: see “Barlaam and Josaphat,” in Ivonne del Valle, et al. (eds.), Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization, 303–329. 54 For the influence of Carthusianism on Fr. Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuit Order, see Michael Foss, The Founding of the Jesuits, 68. Incidentally, the 1600 French version of the Barlaam and Josaphat legend was translated by Carthusian monk Jean de Billy, brother of Jacques de Billy. 55 See St. Ignatius Loyola, Ejercicios espirituales, “Principio y Fundamento,” [par. 23], web. For an excellent essay on this aspect of Loyola’s text, see Michel de Certeau (SJ), “El espacio del deseo,” in Arte y espiritualidad Jesuitas. Principio y fundamento, 38–47. For an incisive study of the Spiritual Exercises as a language of desire that unfolds through the expansion and contraction of the imagination, see Barthes, Sade / Fourier / Loyola, 38–75. For a discussion of this theme and its full development in Molinism, the Jesuit philosophy named after its author Fr. Luis de Molina (SJ), see Blanco, “Barlaam and Josaphat,” 316–317.

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The sanction of free will [sariling kalooban] is a power given to a kind and reflective soul, one that will not refuse whatever the self wants to do, good or bad, for the sake of holiness or to promote evil deeds. God was so disposed to give human souls complete permission and freedom [pagka-mahadlika] of accepting [or] rejecting anything before his [or her] consideration. This is the same as saying that a person’s choice to something is a freedom [ka-mahadlikaan] of every soul that can equally turn or reverse towards a good or bad end to a desired path.56

Fr. Borja has translated “freedom” here with the root word mahadlika or maharlika, which, along with the root timawa, denotes the social stratum of free vassals under a datu or maginoo in pre-Hispanic society. Such members, while contributing to the collective life of the community [bayan or barangay], did so with the understanding that they did so out of choice, not debt. In one of several other passages that convey a similar message, Borja either translates or inserts passages such as the following: “God took me away,” says the converted Josaphat to his father, “and emancipated (tinimawa, from timawa) me from the cruel subjection of the venerable anitos, whose tongues told nothing but lies, mired in meaningless old customs (kaugalian) … You were gotten and removed from the ancient slavery / enslavement (kaalipinan) you suffered.”57 Both the root words for emancipation and slavery (timawa and alipin) here also refer to the pre-Hispanic social categories of free commoners and slaves. The implication in these passages, which might help to explain the publication of an otherwise unwieldy and long-winded exemplum, is that the acceptance of Christianity entails not only an emancipation from the Devil and the “false” anitos; but also an emancipation from the custom of debt-slavery under the native principales, who had successfully resisted the prohibition of slavery over a century after the conquest. To make this claim, as Fr. Borja did, suggests a break with the earlier collusion between the 56 Ang pagtutulot sa sariling kalooban ay isang kapangyarihang bigay sa kaluluwang may bait at pagninilay na di isa man sasawatain sa balang maibig gawin, masama man kaya’t magaling, sa pagkakabanalan man o sa masama kayang kagagawan. Ipinalagay ng Diyos sa kaluluwa ng tao ang buong pahintulot at pagkamahadlika ng pagtanggap at pag-ayaw sa anumang bagay na maisipan niya. Gayundin namang sukat nating wikain na itong pagpapabahalang ito sa tao, ay isang kamahadlikaan ng kaluluwa na sukat bilingi’t baliktarin sa masama’t magaling na ibig niyang sundin (italics added). Borja, Barlaan at Josaphat, 163. See also Virgilio Almario’s brief commentary on the translation of “free will” (ibid., xxx-xxxi). 57 “Ako nama’y inilayo Niya at tinimawa sa malupit na panunuyo sa mga anitong puno ng dilang mga kamalian at doon sa kaugaliang walang kabu-kabuluhan … Kinuha kayo’t inalis doon sa laong kaalipinang pinaghihirapan,” 357.

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religious Orders and the native elite in maintaining the frontier condition of Spanish rule overseas. But it also signifies the new dependence of the religious Orders on the native subjects placed in their care. It is the native subject who would thenceforth give the truth or the lie of the religious dimension of the conquest; who would speak for or against the religious ministers before off icials of the Crown; and who would express either their desire for liberation from pre-Hispanic kinship networks and social stratification, as promised by the mission-doctrina; or conversely, the commoners’ disenchantment with the phantasmagorias of spiritual conquest as a smokescreen for exploitation. While Fr. Borja’s Barlaan at Josaphat legend shares many characteristics found in other works of Counter-Reformation spirituality – the mediatory role of the Church, the agency of free will (which is translated in the text as sariling kalooban) as the vehicle of cooperative grace, the solicitation of sympathy and the fraternal bond, good works as the expression of human participation in a Divine Plan – his translation nevertheless turns these themes to address a very specific social conflict. If Spanish Golden Age works like Calderón’s La vida es sueño (which was inspired by the Barlaam and Josaphat legend) served as a new exemplum for the Counter-Reformation prince in Europe, the Tagalog Barlaan at Josaphat labors to imagine the terms and conditions under which Tagalog neophytes would desire Christianity freely. Borja’s answer to this question comes by way of identifying Christianity as freedom from the obligations imposed upon them by pre-Hispanic society. Not surprisingly, however, his text remains silent regarding the “concerns and labor” [pinagkabagabag at pinagkapagalan] that the emancipated commoners face in the friar haciendas.

Pasyon and Indictment in the Court of Public Opinion On a surface level, Gaspar Aquino de Belen’s Mahal na Pasion shares in common with the Philippine translation(s) of the Barlaam and Josaphat legend the promotion of Counter-Reformation spirituality.58 Bienvenido Lumbera notes, for example, how Aquino’s poem follows a “huge family of 58 Aquino de Belen worked as a printer for the Jesuit press for over a decade; and while little is known about the author’s life, Fr. Javellana has ascertained that Aquino de Belen belonged to the native elite or principalía; and was educated in both Spanish and Tagalog (2). It may be guessed that at a certain point he also had aspirations to be ordained a priest, as the standoff between then Archbishop Diego Camacho and the regular orders during this period highlighted the lack of secular priests to fill the mission parishes (see Chapter 1).

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Spanish verse accounts of the Redemption” (50); and Fr. René Javellana has demonstrated the author’s direct and indirect translations of Spanish poet Juan de Padilla’s Retablo de la Vida de Cristo, hecho en verso (1585).59 In the tradition of exempla, both texts allow readers to imagine an experience in order to accept the instruction that arises from it: the verisimilitude of Christ’s washing of his disciples’ feet, for example; or the extensive description of nailing Christ to the cross, follow the theologia affectus of Carthusian mysticism; and echo Jesuit founder Ignatius de Loyola’s own method of conjuring up scenes in the mind’s eye as a form of “spiritual exercise.”60 The primary purpose of Mahal na Pasion, in any case, was neither doctrinal nor pedagogical but devotional. The versif ication of Christ’s death and resurrection appeared as part of a book of prayers or petitions for the dead and dying: these prayers had been written in Spanish by Jesuit Tomás de Villacastín (SJ), although they derived from a Latin text from the Roman Ritual of 1614.61 Aquino de Belen then translated these prayers into Tagalog, in addition to his translation of the versified story of the Passion. These texts were meant to be read aloud as part of a paraliturgical practice called the magpapahesus – the call or injunction to “utter the name of Jesus – a practice recommended by the Roman Ritual as salutary.”62 Fr. René Javellana (SJ) writes: “[Aquino de Belen’s] pasyon, which may have been suggested by the custom of reading the gospel [to the sick and dying], was in verse form. This lent itself to chanting, hence the text fulfilled a dual function: telling the story of Jesus’s Passion (a catechetical function) and preventing the chanting of native songs by providing a substitute (a pastoral function).”63 The poem, which alternates between a narrative retelling of Christ’s passion and death on the one hand, and various lessons [Aral] to be learned from these episodes, prod the listener to consider the actions and reactions 59 Javellana, “Sources of Gaspar Aquino de Belen’s Pasyon,” 310–318. 60 See Roland Barthes, Sade / Fourier / Loyola, 48–52. 61 See Javellana, Casaysayan nang Pasyong Mahal, 9. 62 Ibid., 12; see also Phelan, Hispanization, 82–83. A sixteenth-century Jesuit Carta Anua (1598–1599) records an early version of this practice. Due to the scarcity of missionary priests, the Jesuits organized confraternities to visit the sick and dying for the purpose of consoling them and “helping them to die well” [ayudándoles a bien morir], which would entail enjoining converted Christians to confess, unconverted Christians to accept baptism; and preventing both from turning toward the veneration of their “idols” and the ministers of these rituals in the hour of death (in Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v.2, 117). By the eighteenth century, as Fr. Murillo Velarde attests, Jesuits had applied this practice to other missions, such as Leyte (Murillo Velarde, Historia de la Provincia [segunda parte], 28). 63 Javellana, Casaysayan, 13.

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of the cast of characters around Jesus: to put ourselves in their position, in order to imagine the magnitude of forgiveness, atonement, and liberation dispensed by Christ through his death. As Aquino de Belen writes in the introduction: Ngayon ay tayo,y, matova Pasalamat sa naava Sa tongmobos, namahala Baquit mapabigay pala Siya pang nacatimava (verse 11).

Now, let us be gladdened And give thanks to the grace To the Redeemer, liberator Why was he surrendered If he was the Liberated [timawa] One?

Once again, as in Fr. Borja’s Barlaan at Josaphat, the word for freedom comes from the root word timawa, freedman or commoner, as distinguished from alipin or slave. A closer reading of Aquino de Belen’s portrayal of Christ, however, reveals an emphasis that goes against the narrative of universal emancipation as we see it represented in Fr. Borja’s exemplum. To begin with, Christ himself is identified not as a member of the indentured class of natives, but rather the elite or nobility. At least twice in the text he is addressed as maginoo – first by Judas (verse 138) and secondly by the author (verse 519).64 This identification makes sense strategically: for one thing, we may assume that Aquino de Belen intended his audience of readers to come from the class of native principales, whose access to education and proximity to the religious ministers would have made them literate and would have given them access to a printed text like the Mahal na Pasion. Moreover, Christ’s identity as a principal conforms to the overall emphasis of Aquino de Belen’s retelling of the Passion, which focuses less on Christ’s unique mission as the son of the one and only God and more on the injustice of a virtuous, innocent, and noble man [principal] who was brought down by traitors – in the main also maginoo like himself – and abandoned by his disciples. Finally, the identification of Christ as a noble also adds a dimension of social wrong or injustice to his abjection, as in the following verse describing Christ’s passion in the garden of Gethsemane: 64 Scholars of the nineteenth-century rewriting of Aquino de Belen’s Mahal na pasion, called Pasyong Pilapil or Henesis have shown how in the latter version, it is the Pharisees and persecutors of Christ who are identified as nobles [maginóo]; and Christ who is portrayed as a “man poor and lowly” [tauong duc-ha at hamac na] (see Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution, 16–17; and Javellana, Casaysayan, 11–13). This gives the nineteenth-century work a radical edge.

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Aco nga,y nagpacarucha, at nagpacaimbing lubha, na nagpacababababa, aquing uinaualan bahala ang dilan himbing sa lupa (verse 79)

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It is I who became destitute and severely brought down in stature But in the act of being humbled I paid no attention at all To those in deep slumber on the ground

In the “Aral,” or Lesson to the episode, Aquino de Belen elaborates on this message: Siya ang magdaralita carouahaguinang madla sinacop ca,t, nang di aba, nang icao ay di masira,t, na can di mapacasama. (verse 150)

He is the one who suffered great hardship Through the cowardice of everyone You were brought under [Him], lest you be humiliated So you would not be broken and thus protected from evil.

Yet, while the identification of Christ as a nobleman renders the Mahal na Pasion particularly suitable as an exemplum directed at other members of the native elite, it also complicates, if not entirely overturns, the message that comes out so clearly in Fr. Borja’s Barlaan at Josaphat. In the latter text, Christian salvation entails the emancipation from not only the veneration of ancestral and nature spirits, but more significantly from the hierarchy of native society, which had persevered (albeit in somewhat distorted form) in the protracted, uneven, and precarious settlement of native populations in mission pueblos. By contrast, the Mahal na Pasion relies on both an understanding and acceptance of pre-Hispanic society and hierarchy – its value-system, so to speak – in order to recognize the full weight of the betrayal and injustice committed against Jesus. This leads to a significant divergence of interpretation regarding the ultimate aims or telos of Christianity in the Philippines between the two texts. While Borja stresses the advent of Christianity as a liberation from both sin and the obligation of custom (embodied in Josaphat’s disavowal of his father’s veneration of ancestral spirits), Aquino de Belen portrays Christ’s saving mission wholly within the world of native custom and social hierarchy. Here we have a great maginoo, brought down by other nobles and commoners, after taking on the burden of their sala, sins; which, prior to the Spanish arrival and even afterwards, signified not only moral transgression

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but also quite simply mistake, error, as well as blame or prohibition.65 By choosing to represent Christ in this way, Jesus represents less a break with the customary authority of the datus and maginoos, and more a kind of overarching datu or overlord, who has taken responsibility for their transgressions and assumed all debts: i.e. following a logic entirely in keeping with native customary authority and hierarchy. The lesson [Aral] following Judas’s betrayal of Jesus provides the clearest example of this continuity of native customary authority as the proper frame for understanding the moral transgression of Christ’s death. Here, the author focuses on the twin injustice of Judas defaulting on his debt to Christ; and selling him to his enemies: 162 Cun ito,y pagisipin mo, mol-an sa pono,t sa dolo. dili otang mong totoo? baquin pinagbayad mo, ang may aua nang ganito?

If you pause to think about it From the head to tail Was it not you [Judas] who owed a debt? Why did you seek payment From the merciful One in this way?

163 Yaon baga ang ganti mo sa Panginoon mong ito? na nagpatauad sa iyo nang daraquilang sala mo caauang di sasang-ano.

Is that the way you return The favor of your Lord? He it was who forgave you of all the great sins you committed His mercy being infinite.

166 Cun ducha mang di sapala salat ma,t, ualan di uala, tantong cundi isasanla

Consider the indescribable poverty The dire need, destitution He would have incurred, had [God] not in turn Accepted his pawn / pledge Out of mercy for you?

yaon mang caniyang toca na sa iyo,y, pagcaaua. (Italics added)

The use of the word isasanla in verse 166 is particularly striking. The Tagalog word signif ies “pledge,” although the root word was often used to refer specifically to the practice of pawning land [sanlangbili], which 65 Fr. Juan de Noceda (SJ) and Fr. Pedro de Sanlúcar (SJ), Vocabulario de la lengua tagala, 275. In fact, only once does Aquino de Belen portray divine grace as both total forgiveness of wrongdoing (sala) and complete deliverance subjection in the following phrase: “datapoua,t, cun sa aua,y, laga[na]p / caniyang ibobolalas / ang Gracia, at boong cauas” [Even so, as His Mercy is widespread / He it is that expresses Grace / And complete emancipation] (verse 367). Cauas (sic: kawás) here denotes forgiveness or pardon, as from debt bondage or slavery.

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had become common in the colonial period as a way for natives to borrow loans against their putative landholdings; but with the proviso that the seller had the right to buy back the rights to their land within a determined period of time.66 The language of salvation, in any case, here begins to blur into the insertion of land-tenant relations, the terms of indebtedness and repayment, and the repeated mention of impoverishment and destitution. These cue the reader to an awareness of what may in fact be truly at stake for most natives from the perspective of counter-history: not the mysterious incarnation of God’s Son in the flesh and His death and resurrection for the universal emancipation of a redeemed humanity from the Devil, but rather the desperation of those commoners who had fallen into economic debt and poverty, which facilitated their enslavement or indentureship. The early symptoms of native impoverishment as a hallmark of Spanish rule began of course with the conquest. It is only in the late seventeenth century, however, that depredation acquires something of a systematic form: the dispossession or sale of native lands out of greed, debt, or desperation.67 Nicholas Cushner succinctly described this process: [In the provinces around Manila] Communally owned village lands were divided up by Tagalog principales and sold, with the result that ancient community lands disappeared into large private holdings … As large private estates developed, an increasing number of landless peasants became tenants, sharecroppers, and unsalaried or salaried farm labor, or were set adrift, becoming the vagamundos of Luzon. So numerous were the vagamundos that they required a special category on the royal tribute lists of the seventeenth century.68

How does this detour into the process of land enclosure in the Philippines affect our interpretation of Aquino de Belen’s Mahal na Pasion? Certainly, the author does not seem to have had any intention of criticizing the religious hacenderos: if anything, he emphasizes the need to attend confession, obey the friars, give alms, practice self-flagellation, and to bequeath one’s life possessions to the church (see verses 361–66). Aquino de Belen also seems rather unbothered by the fact that Spanish officials had been denouncing these practices of the religious as opportunities for extortion and exploitation since 66 See Cushner, Landed Estates, 65 and Roth Friar Lands, 100–116. 67 See Roth, Friar Estates, 84. 68 Cushner, Landed Estates, 68.

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the publication of Don Salvador Gómez de Espinosa’s Discurso Parenético in 1657.69 Rather, Aquino de Belen’s main subjects of denunciation and ridicule include the Jews, Pharisees, and most notably other maginoo and former slaves, now commoners, who are guilty of not only betrayal and the disavowal of their indebtedness, but also for ignoring that they come from lowly origins before being ennobled by Christ: Bago,y, icao ang alipin, masama,t, tauong sala rin, cun sino ca ma,t, cun alin, ito,y iyong panimdimi,t, ang catao-an mo,y lupa rin.

Before, you were a slave A bad and sinful person Anyone, whoever you are Should weigh this on their conscience: Even your body came from the earth. (verse 521)

Yet the putative emancipation of slaves into commoner or even elite [maginoo] status; and the social critique of datus and maginoo as coming from lowly origins and losing their moral compass, also testif ies to a crisis of native customs and practices among those who long depended on them for their survival. One can hear a genuine note of anguish at the final death throes of native society in and around Manila, made possible by the enlistment of the native elites themselves to serve as hatchet and backdoor men (and perhaps women) for colonial depredation in its myriad forms: O lahat na maguinoo ano itong gaua ninyo ang maauaing totoo sa anac ninyo,t, sa apo,y, siyang mamasam-it [minamasama] ano?

O all you nobles What is it that you are doing To the one who had true mercy For your children and grandchildren That you have maligned and falsely accused him? (Verse 560)

Social anomie recasts the world akin to the one described by seventeenthcentury indigenous Peruvian writer and artist Felipe Guamán Poma de Ayala: a “world turned upside-down” [mundo al revés], in which ancient ideals of nobility and leadership are debased and hypocrisy proliferates through predatory acts and the purchase of status and prestige:

69 Espinosa, in J.S. Cummins, Friar and Jesuit, 117–203, esp. 156–179; see also Chapter 2.

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Ang iyong calachang loob, pagcaibig mong mabantog, ang puri mo,y, mapatampoc, mataas, mapaimbolog, bago,y, ouod ca,t, alaboc. (verse 652)

You with your inflated pride Your desire for prestige Your honor, elevated to new heights High up there, flying free In fact you are but a worm, just dirt.

Ang iyong pagmamarangal cataoa,y, di palanohan nang damit na pauang hirang guinto, at palahiyasan, nacan batiin ninyo man. (verse 654)

[Along with] your gestures of honor Your body, placed beyond compare Using exquisite clothes and finery adorned with gold, and with jewels For you to praise yourself even further.

Aquino de Belen hammers home the corrosive influence of the money economy and indebtedness in the two stories that frame Christ’s Passion and death: the betrayal of Judas and the attempts of Pontius Pilate and “other nobles” to buy off the soldier Longinus’s testimony of the Resurrection. After Longinus delivers his official statement of Jesus’s empty tomb, the elite promise Longinus “all the gold and silver you desire / A position, even your elevation to the nobility … / however we ask only / This in return; that you shut your mouth / And do not make any noise about it” (verses 972–73).70 Longinus responds by suggesting that they kill him immediately, for he has no intention of assuming any status or honor for his betrayal (verse 978). Pontius Pilate has him beheaded. Longinus’s confrontation with the Jews and nobles, which leads to his martyrdom, gives an unanticipated spin to Aquino de Belen’s work: it suggests that the emphasis of the retelling of the Passion has less to do with conveying the divine resurrection of Christ than it has to do with communicating the corruption of the native elite; the debasement and ramification of debt and credit by agents of the colonial government, the religious, and their lackeys; and a longing for the appearance of a great maginoo capable of setting an example to follow. Such an exemplar would not just liberate natives from the Devil’s tyranny in some endless phantasmagorical spiritual conquest, but also rectify the perversion of the native elite and assume or redeem the debt of the commoners [timawa]. In doing so, the resurrected overlord would, through an act of mercy, restore a collective understanding 70 “aming pangaco sa iyo, / salapi,t, guinton hing-in mo, / oficio,t, pacga guinoo … / datapoua,t, ito lamang / hingi nami iyong tacpa,t, / houag ipamacaingay.”

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of justice and value that had all but disappeared in the mission frontier. This emphasis is pithily captured in Longinus’s last words before dying: “Dios, ay nagpacarucha / God was debased” [verse 977]). The root word here is ducha / dukha, the suffering brought about by poverty and hardship. Could the author be suggesting here that we acknowledge and honor our debts to Jesus Christ as the overarching divine Creditor, insofar as He represents not only the restored customary authority of the datus and maginoo but also the only escape from the poverty and debt fomented by colonial land enclosure, foreign capital, usury, and indebtedness under the friar and Jesuit haciendas?71 Whether or not one accepts this reading does not obscure one of the salient innovations and contributions to the growth of Tagalog literature in the eighteenth century: a poetic language of accusation and indictment, which fills the Aral or Lesson sections of Aquino de Belen’s Mahal na Pasion. Literary scholar and national artist Bienvenido Lumbera deplored these sections as the “weak spots” of the poem, where the poet’s “sensuous visual imagination and unfaltering psychological penetration” (57) give way to pedantic harangues on the impermanence and sinfulness of the world (64). [The author’s] talent, Lumbera concluded, “lay not in abstract thought but in vivifying a dramatic situation with believable characters” (64).72 Yet the homiletic quality of these passages is precisely what allows the author to provoke a sense of outrage, indignation, shame, or regret in the reader: a power that had hitherto been reserved for the religious ministers. Moreover, in the Mahal na Pasion these Aral not only endow readers with the agency to address, expose, denounce, deplore, and indict the injustice of Christ’s death; they solicit this agency by virtue of appearing in a poem that is meant to be read aloud in the absence of a priest and in his place. We owe to Fr. Javellana his insight into this development of paraliturgical traditions like the magpapahesus in the colonial world: “While Aquino de Belen’s pasyon 71 Interestingly, the word ducha [pronounced duk-hâ in Tagalog], which I have translated in verse 166 as poverty originally meant something closer to the Sanskrit or Pali duhkha, which can mean suffering, hardship, unease, distress, discomfort, or anxiety (see Potet, Ancient Beliefs and Customs of the Tagalogs, 272). In the 1754 Vocabulario de la Lengua Tagala, composed by Jesuit fathers Juan de Noceda (SJ) and Pedro Sanlúcar (SJ), the word han-ducà appears as the Tagalog translation of the Spanish word sufrimiento, which indicates a remaining link to the word’s original significance (1860 version: 617). By contrast, Fr. Pedro de San Buenaventura (OFM)’s 1613 Vocabulario already associates ducha almost exclusively with economic hardship; a meaning that Noceda and Sanlúcar’s dictionary repeats under the term docha (see Potet, 272–273; and Noceda and Sanlúcar, 111). 72 Fr. Javellana, by contrast, has shown through his source-criticism of Aquino de Belen’s Passion that the Aral constitute the truly original parts of the author’s text (“Sources of Gaspar Aquino de Belen’s Pasyon,” 321).

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was rooted in the past,” he writes, “his poem took a dramatic turn; for now, the Passion narrative is addressed not to the dying, as was the case with the gospels mentioned by Chirino, but to those present at the deathbed” (13). As Louis Althusser once famously observed, the power of interpellation is intimately tied with the exercise of law or in any case authority: to say “you there!” in speech or writing is to arrest another’s thought or action, transpose that person into the realm of (linguistic) signification, and to hold that person accountable in that realm. It is to invoke and exercise the function of law.73 This is not to say that in practicing the magpapahesus through the reading of the Mahal na Pasion or prayers for the sick and dying, members of religious confraternities were invested with legal authority they did not otherwise possess. Yet these laypeople now possessed an official language or discourse to evaluate and judge each other, as well as those who presided over them. Moreover, the appearance of this discourse reminds the reader how far short the phantasmagorical sphere of Christianity fell in putting an end to the reign of social anomie. This language of arrest, this exhortation to “wake up!” and account for the seemingly universal condition of corruption, does more than encourage the reader or listener to beseech God’s mercy; it reminds us that, for all God’s mercy, He has yet to bring justice to the protracted conquest and its lawless frontier. This power of interpellation becomes almost a characteristic feature of Tagalog poetry throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: from Felipe de Jesus’s dedication to Fr. Antonio de Borja’s translation of the Barlaam and Josaphat legend; to the love poems of José de la Cruz, known as “Huseng Sisiw”; to Francisco Balagtas’s Florante at Laura, not to mention the many authors whose names are lost to us but who were responsible for the Tagalog romances in verse widely read and staged during this period.74

The Last Maginoo and the “Philippinization of Christianity” Historically, the radical implications of Aquino de Belen’s Mahal na Pasion would have to wait until the nineteenth century to manifest themselves in the full-blown millenarian aspirations of Apolinario de la Cruz during the 1841 Tayabas rebellion and afterward. Reynaldo Ileto’s pathbreaking book Pasyon and Revolution brilliantly demonstrated the versification of 73 See Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and other Essays, 121–176. 74 For examples, see Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry, 66–82.

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the Passion of Christ as generative of an “idiom of political protest” suited to the peculiar nature of Spanish colonialism and the persistence of native custom in the Philippines. The historical continuity of this idiom, Ileto contended, would allow us to trace the Pasyon narrative in the discourses and writings of Philippine popular revolt throughout the nineteenth and even twentieth centuries. Seen in the context of the eighteenth century, however, Borja’s Barlaan at Josaphat and Aquino de Belen’s Mahal na Pasion represent two examples of religious literature that reveal a crossroads for the future of the mission in the Philippines and Asia. Until the very end of their tenure on the colonial frontier, the Jesuits balanced their zeal to disabuse and “liberate” their proselytes from the tyranny of the Devil, with a pragmatic assessment of the limits of the mission as frontier institution. This seventeenth-century spirit, so contrary to the belligerent personality of sixteenth-century Jesuit Fr. Alonso Sánchez (see Chapter 1), was best captured in Jesuit provincial Fr. Pedro Murillo Velarde’s advice to new and inexperienced religious ministers. In Murillo Velarde’s opinion, ministers needed to exercise missionary prudence: particularly when it came to the infringement or attempted penetration of a native world. As he would warn his confreres: [Ministers should] direct the Indians in the government of their pueblo but leave them to govern it … [to] prevent sins, but not games and licit pastimes, because in this way we prevent [the growth of] other, illicit ones. Stop drunken revelries; but do not prohibit them entirely from drinking any wine … Let the customs of the pueblos continue as long as they do not create disturbances; because innovations lead to shifts in temper, and above all else one should flee from any innovation in prayer and matters pertaining to the church and its form of administration.75

Contrary to this wisdom, both Borja’s Barlaan at Jospahat and Aquino de Belen’s Mahal na Pasyon insist on poking the bear of native custom. The explicit addressee of the native principalía in both texts gives a specific historical focus to the theology and pastoral politics of the religious Orders 75 Cited in Sinibaldo de Mas, Informe sobre el estado de las Islas Filipinas en 1842, v.2: Estado Eclesiástico, 39–40. “[Que] dirija á los indios en el gobierno de su pueblo, pero déjelos á ellos que lo gobiernan … impida los pecados, pero no los juegos y diversiones lícitas, pues con esto se estorbarán otras ilícitas. Quite las borracheras; pero no les prohíba á todos del todo el vino … Deje correr las costumbres de los pueblos cuando no tienen graves inconvenientes; porque las novedades alternan los humores y mas que en nada ha de huir de innovar en el rezo y cosas pertenecientes á la iglesia y modo de administrar.”

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in this period, whose members found themselves wrestling with their old antagonists – the Crown and the official Church. This renewed confrontation was taking place, moreover, at a time when land enclosure, the money economy, colonial bureaucracy, and interior commerce, were realizing the same “desengaño,” demystification, or disenchantment in material terms that the religious corporations had preached in theological / demonological, or quite simply symbolic terms. In such a context, the clarifications and additions to the Christian tradition as represented in these works would allow colonial subjects to think about Christianity in a new way: i.e. as a message of hope, agency, and even resistance. For one thing, the “emancipation” that the religious had announced as voices crying in the proverbial desert had finally come about: for what else does the dispossession of individual and communal lands, the deracination and vagrancy of former native inhabitants, and the erosion of kinship networks and community solidarity from ancient times signify but liberation and “freedom” [sariling kalooban] in the sense of alienation and social atomization? If it seems incredible that Fr. Borja and his confreres appeared oblivious to the advent of systemic poverty in the friar lands, it may well be that they understood the historical conjuncture after all. Did their propaganda of universal emancipation through divine salvation perhaps dramatize their dim or even unconscious recognition that the hell about which they regularly preached had become for many commoners (and even some disfranchised native elite) in the Tagalog lowlands a reality? Like Borja, Aquino de Belen attempts to describe the ambiguous liberation of native subjects by Christ, with particular attention to the crisis of the native elite; yet in terms wholly within the framework of native social hierarchy. The author recounts the story of an exemplary maginoo’s assumption of all debts; his fall from the betrayal of his fellow principales; his disfranchisement, destitution, and debasement [pagpapa-rucha (dukhà)]; and the promise of his impending return. The ensuing restoration of Jesus as a kind of last, great maginoo – and with it, the restoration of hierarchy according to native custom – is one that baptized and unbaptized natives alike would have embraced, insofar as it guaranteed the basis of social order in a space defined by legal and social anomie. The visions of emancipation proffered by these texts reflect a persistent question about the status and transformation of native custom, particularly the nature of social hierarchy, in the colonial period. It leaves us with the question that scholars continue to debate today: did the existence of Philippine slavery as native custom represent a moral transgression against the Christian theme of universal salvation; or was it a misnomer for what

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William Henry Scott characterized as “a far-reaching and complex system of economic dependency,” quite distinct from the notion of chattel slavery practiced in the New World?76 In either case, it is in such moments that we see the crooked paths that co-invention or co-fabrication of Philippine Christianity would take. Until and unless the theological vision of Christian liberation could connect with something useful in the daily hazards and tragedies that accompanied the everyday experience of colonial rule, it would remain abstract, distant, ultimately pointless. On a larger level, the idea that the Christianization of native subjects would take place at the historical conjuncture of capitalist penetration during the eighteenth century might not itself be surprising. Kojin Karatani’s radical reframing of world history raises two important points that might help to explain why. First, he argues that neither the state nor religious missionaries can achieve the (complete) dissolution of clan-based communities like the barangay or banwa / bayan on the colonial frontier. Rather, it is money, or money-based economy, that gives freedom a concrete dimension, for better and for worse. “On the one hand,” Karatani writes, “money freed individuals from the constraining bonds of the clan community”: Individuals, who until then were constrained by either bilateral (reciprocal) relations or ruler-subordinate hierarchies, now come into relation with one another through exchanges (contracts) mediated by money … (thereby) lessen[ing] the need to coerce others through magic or force; one could now coerce them through contracts entered into by mutual consent. In that sense, the disenchantment that Weber describes first became possible through the money economy.77

On the other hand (and secondly), the “liberation” of individuals through contractual relations and money also accelerated the accumulation of land, the circulation of commodities, and the commodif ication of “free” labor, which led to the polarizing disparities between wealth and poverty: disparities that the state (or colonial government) could barely even begin to address by means of the colonial subsidy [Sp. Situado] and tribute receipts.78 These two factors constituted the preconditions for the emergence of “universal [i.e. world] religion” like Christianity in 76 Scott, Slavery in the Spanish Philippines, 17; and Anthony Reid, “‘Closed’ and ‘Open’ Slave Systems in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia,” 1462–1485. 77 Kojin Karatani, The Structure of World History, 134. 78 See Alonso Álvarez, “La eficiencia,” 201.

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the days of the Roman Empire (Karatani, 135). They also facilitated the accelerated settlement of natives and their conversion to Christianity in the eighteenth century. Could one say, provisionally, that colonial subjects like Aquino de Belen began to internalize Christian monotheism when the symbolic or demonological undeception of the spirit world through spiritual conquest aligned with the material conditions of disenchantment, i.e. under what Alonso Álvarez identified as the “efficiency of empire?” The privatization of land under the (predominantly friar and Jesuit) haciendas and concomitant advent of rent, the penetration of the money economy through colonial bureaucracy and interior commerce, and the creation of a landless peasantry, together signified more than just the prostitution of the native elite: these factors also accelerated the dissolution of familial ties as well as common ties of solidarity between members of the same community (bayan or barangay). Moreover, colonial capitalism also eroded the division between the “three worlds” that constituted the life of the colonial subject: the pueblo, the doctrina, and the native world, still largely governed by the remnants of ancient custom. When the desperation of systemic poverty and debt in the provinces began to fuse with the rampant fraud and corruption of the city; when kinship and regional ties had given way to the universal sign of exchange (i.e. money) and the relentless demand for tribute and labor; in short, when colonial subjects needed a causal explanation for native penury under the mission system and friar haciendas, God arrived. Not surprisingly, His advent in the Philippines resembles in at least some respects the events of the Protestant Reformation: the appearance of a text or writing, in the vernacular language, which encoded the Law in a way that could be easily transcribed, deciphered, and disseminated by Tagalog-speaking people to and for other Tagalog-speaking peoples. Such was the publication of Aquino de Belen’s Mahal na Pasion. How did a gospel of spiritual conquest and colonial surveillance become a gospel of hope? In reading the structure of native hierarchy into the story of the Passion and Resurrection, readers of Aquino de Belen discover a way to imagine the abolition of debt, the reversal of the process of destitution and despoliation, an end to the hypocrisy of both native principalía and Spanish authority, and the restoration or return of a king, queen, lord, or lady. They do so, moreover, in a historical context in which the ancient role of native datu and maginoo is becoming increasingly obsolete; and in which the abstractions of missionary spirituality like the Carthusian theologia affectus and Jesuit probabilismo (also known as Molinism) play no meaningful role in the election of native leaders to collect tribute and conscript labor

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as cabezas de barangay and gobernadorcillos.79 Such an explanation of what the “Philippinization of Christianity” means, in any case, may help to understand how the major revolts against Spanish rule that took place in the eighteenth century – the Daghohoy rebellion in Bohol (1744–1829), the friar lands rebellion in the Tagalog provinces (1744–1745), the Palaris revolt in Pangasinan (1762–1765), and the Silang revolt in Ilocos (1762–1763), despite at times taking on a radical anticlerical position, no longer challenged the Christian religion as the widely accepted faith or religion.80 Moreover, the abundant literature of native romances that emerged in this period, called awits and koridos in Tagalog, trafficked in the dreams of noble saviors and their immense powers: Bernardo del Carpio, the Twelve Peers of France, Juan Teñoso, Gonzalo de Córdoba (see Chapter 7).81 On the level of the native imagination, they form a bridge between the last so-called “King of the Tagalogs” [rey de los Tagalos] Pedro Ladia, who claimed to be the descendant of Rajah Matanda (who surrendered to the Spaniards in 1571) during the 1643 revolt in Malolos; and the nineteenth-century “king of the Tagalogs” Apolinario de la Cruz, who led the 1841 Tayabas rebellion.82 These narratives also offered a competing vision to the cults of saints, which the religious Orders aggressively promoted to uproot the popular memory of heroes and replace it with an official memory of Roman martyrs. Aquino de Belen’s Mahal na Pasion was reprinted at least four times, with its fifth printing in 1760. Its republication throughout the eighteenth century only begins to attest to its spread: by the middle of the eighteenth century, European travelers and religious chroniclers alike reported the transcription and circulation of Aquino de Belen’s work, as well as the “errors” that began to proliferate in succeeding, anonymous versions of the text published outside religious supervision.83 In the “corrected” version of the versified Passion story, under the ecclesiastical approval of native 79 On the relationship of the Barlaam at Josaphat tradition to Molinism, see Blanco, in Ivonne del Valle et al., Iberian Empires, 303–329. 80 Renato Constantino, The Philippines: A Past Revisited (Pre-Spanish-1941), 101. Constantino also observes that the revolts of the eighteenth century can be distinguished from those of the seventeenth by their explicit class character, i.e. as a direct response to emergence of land-tenant relations, money economy, and landless peasant labor: see 105. 81 For an insightful analysis of the twilight world in which these romances blend with popular beliefs and folklore, see Ileto, “Bernardo Carpio: Awit and Revolution,” in Filipinos and Their Revolution, 1–28. 82 Fr. Gaspar de San Agustín (OSA) records a brief account of the 1643 Pedro Ladia uprising: see San Agustín, Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas … Parte II, 484. On the Tayabas rebellion see Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution, 29–74. 83 See Javellana, Casaysayan, 7–9.

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secular priest Fr. Mariano Pilapil in 1814, we see the addition of numerous biblical and historical episodes (from the creation of Adam and Eve to the discovery of the Holy Cross in the fourth century CE by Roman Empress and Christian saint Helena, mother of Constantine), as well as a significant revision of Christ’s identity. In the nineteenth-century Pasyon approved by Pilapil, Christ is no longer a nobleman, but a poor and common person or tao, as He is in the Gospels.84 As for the native elite or maginoo, they are entirely on the side of the Pharisees.

Bibliography Aduarte, Diego, et al. Historia de la provincia del santo Rosario de Filipinas, Japón y China de la sagrada Orden de Predicadores. Madrid, Spain: Gascon u.a., 1693. Alemany, Vicente. Tercera parte de la vida del gran Tacaño [ó sea la continuación de la Vida del buscon, llamado Don Pablos] Obra inédita publicada con prólogo y notas de W.E. Retana. Manila, Philippines: (n.p.), 1922. Almond, Philip. “The Buddha of Christendom: A review of ‘The Legend of Barlaam and Josaphat,’” Religious Studies 23 (1987). 391–406. Alonso Álvarez, Luis. “La ef iciencia del imperio en las Filipinas coloniales, 1698–1820,” Investigación Económica 58:223 (January-March 1998). 197–232. Alonso Álvarez, Luis. “Los señores del Barangay,” in Menegus Bornemann, Margarita, and Aguirre Salvador, Rodolfo, eds. Cacicazgo en Nueva España y Filipinas. Mexico City, Mexico: Plaza y Valdés, 2005. Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London, UK: New Left Books, 1971. Anderson, Eric. “The Encomienda in Early Philippine Colonial History,” Asian Studies 14:2 (1976). 25–36. Aquino de Belen, Gaspar, and René B. Javellana. Mahal na passion ni Jesu Christong Panginoon natin na tola. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1990. Barthes, Roland. Sade / Fourier / Loyola. Trans. Richard Miller. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1974. Blanco, John D. “Barlaam and Josaphat in Early Modern Spain and the Colonial Philippines. Spiritual Exercises of Freedom at the Center and Periphery,” in Valle, Ivonne del, More, Anna, and O’Toole, Rachel Sarah, eds. Iberian Empires and the Roots of Globalization. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2020. 303–329. 84 See Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution, 15–17.

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Blanco, John D. Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009. Borja, Fr. Antonio de. Barlaan at Josaphat. Edited by Virgilio S. Almario. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2003. Cañizares, Patricia. “La Historia de los dos soldados de Cristo, Barlaam y Josafat traducida por Juan de Arce Solorenzo (Madrid 1608),” Cuadro Filológico Clásico (Estudios Latinos), 19 (2000). 259–272. “Carta de la Audiencia de Manila sobre enseñanza del castellano a los indios.” AGI FILIPINAS, 26, R. 6, N. 24. Certeau, Michel de. “El espacio del deseo,” in Alfaro, Alonso, ed. Artes de México, 70 (Revista Libro: “Arte y espiritualidad Jesuitas: Principio y fundamento”) (2004). 38–47. Coello de la Rosa, Alexandre. “Pasquines, libelos y corrupción en las Filipinas: los conflictos jurisdiccionales entre el arzobispo de Manila, fray Felipe Pardo y la Compañía de Jesús, 1677–1689,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review, (Spring 2013). 113–145. Colin, Fr. Francisco (SJ) and Pastells, Fr. Pablo (SJ). Labor Evangélica, Ministerios Apostólicos De Los Obreros De La Compañía De Jesús, Fundación, Y Progressos De Su Provincia En Las Islas Filipinas. Madrid, Spain: Joseph Fernandez de Buendía, 1900. First published 1663. Corpuz, Onofre D. The Roots of the Filipino Nation. 2 v. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: University of the Philippines Press, 2005. Constantino, Renato. The Philippines: A Past Revisited. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Tala Pub. Services, 1975. Costa, Fr. Horacio de (SJ), ed. Readings in Philippine History. Manila, Philippines: Bookmark, 1992. Cummins, J.S. Jesuit and Friar in the Spanish Expansion to the East. London, UK: Variorum Reprints, 1986. Cushner, Fr. Nicholas (SJ). Landed Estates in the Colonial Philippines. Monograph Series No. 20. New Haven, CT: Yale University Southeast Asia Studies, 1976. Dehergne, Joseph (SJ) and Roman, Malek. “Catéchismes et Catéchèse des Jésuites de Chine de 1584 à 1800,” Monumenta Serica 47 (1999). 397–478. Echeverría, Bolívar. La modernidad de lo barroco. Mexico City, Mexico: Ediciones Era, 2000. Foss, Michael. The Founding of the Jesuits, 1540. London, UK: Hamilton, 1969. Galende, Pedro. Angels in Stone: Architecture of Augustinian Churches in the Philippines. Manila, Philippines: G.A. Formoso Pub., 1987. Gerona, Danilo. “Text and Politics: Transactions of power in the early provincial Philippines,” Asian Studies 34 (1998). 15–77.

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Guillermo, Ramon; Paluga, Myfel Joseph D.; Potet, Jean-Paul; Soriano, Maricor; and Totanes, Vernon. 3 Baybayin Studies. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: University of the Philippines Press, 2017. Ileto, Reynaldo Clemeña. Filipinos and Their Revolution: Event, Discourse, and Historiography. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998. Ileto. Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Ateneo University Press, 1997. Javellana, Fr. René B. (SJ). Casaysayan Nang Pasiong Mahal Ni Jesucristong Pan︢g︣inoon Natin: Na Sucat Ipag-alab Nang Puso Nang Sinomang Babasa. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1988. Javellana, Fr. René B. (SJ). “Sources of Gaspar Aquino de Belen’s Pasyon,” Philippine Studies 32:3 (1984). 305–321. Javellana, Fr. René B. (SJ). Weaving Cultures: The Invention of Colonial Art and Culture in the Philippines, 1565–1850. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2017. Karatani, Kōjin, and Michael K. Bourdaghs. The Structure of World History: From Modes of Productionto Modes of Exchange. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Lee Junker, Laura. Raiding, Trading, Feasting: The Political Economy of Philippine Chiefdoms. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 1999. López, Donald, and Peggy McCracken. In Search of the Christian Buddha: How an Asian Sage Became a Medieval Saint. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Co., Inc., 2014. Loyola, St. Ignatius de. Ejercicios espirituales de San Ignacio de Loyola. Centro Loyola Canarias. Web. https://centroloyolacanarias.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/ ejercicios-texto-original.pdf. Last accessed November 17, 2022. Lumbera, Bienvenido. Tagalog Poetry, 1570–1898: Tradition and Influences in its Development. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1986. Marx, Karl. Capital. A Critique of Political Economy (v.1). Web: https://www.marxists. org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/Capital-Volume-I.pdf. Last accessed September 22, 2021. Mas, Sinibaldo de. Informe sobre el estado de las islas Filipinas en 1842: Escrito por el autor del Aristodemo, del Sistema musical de la lengua castellana etc. 2v. Madrid [N.p].: I. Sancha, 1843. Morga, Antonio de. Sucesos de las islas Filipinas, ed. José Rizal. Manila, Philippines: National Historical Institute, 1971. Murillo Velarde, Pedro. Historia de la Provincia de Philipinas de la Compañia de Jesus. : Segunda parte, que comprehende los progresos de esta provincia desde el año de 1616, hasta el de 1716. Con las licencias necesarias en Manila: En la

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Imprenta de la Compañia de Iesus, por D. Nicolas de la Cruz Bagay, 1749. Internet Archive, http://archive.org/details/historiadelaprov00muri. Last accessed 17 November 2022. Newson, Linda. Conquest and Pestilence in Early Spanish Philippines. Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, 2009. Noceda, Fr. Juan de (SJ) and Sanlúcar, Fr. Pedro de (SJ’s) Vocabulario de la lengua tagala. Manila: Reimpreso de Ramírez y Giraudier, 1860. “Orden para enseñanza y promoción al orden sacro de Indios.” AGI FILIPINAS, 331, l.7, F.227R (22 August 1677). Palanco, Fernando. “The Taglog Revolts of 1745 According to Spanish Primary Sources,” Philippine Studies 58:1–2 (June 2010). 45–77. Phelan, John Leddy. The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565–1700. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967. Polanyi, Karl. Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2001. Originally published in 1944. Poostma, Anton. “The Laguna Copperplate Inscription: Text and Commentary,” Philippine Studies 40:2 (April–June, 1992). 182–203. Potet, Jean-Paul. Ancient Beliefs and Customs of the Tagalogs. Morrisville, NC: Lulu.com, 2014. Rafael, Vicente L. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Reid, Anthony. “‘Closed’ and ‘Open’ Slave Systems in Pre-Colonial Southeast Asia,” in Critical Readings on Global Slavery. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 2017. 1462–1485. Robertson, James Alexander, and James Alfred LeRoy. Bibliography of the Philippine Islands: Printed and Manuscript, Preceded by a Descriptive Account of the Most Important Archives and Collections Containing Philippina. New York, NY: Kraus Reprint, 1970. Roth, Dennis Morrow. The Friar Estates of the Philippines. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 1977. San Agustin, Fr. Gaspar de (OSA) et al. Conquistas de las islas Filipinas: la temporal, por las armas del señor don Phelipe Segundo el Prudente; y la espiritval, por los religiosos del Orden de nuestro padre San Augustin. Parte II que a beneficio de los materiales que dejó recopilados … Valladolid, Spain: L.N. de Gaviria, 1890. Santa Cruz, Fr. Balthasar de (OP). Verdad nada amarga hermosa bondad: honestta, vtil, y deleitable, grata, y moral historia de la rara vida de los famosos y singvlares Sanctos Barlaan y Iosaphat, segvn la escrivió en sv idioma griego el gloriosso doctor, y Padre de la Iglefia S. Iuan Damafceno: y la paffo al Latino del Docttiffimo Iacobo Biblio: de donde la expones en lengua Caftellana a fus Regnicolas el minimo de los Predicadores de la Prouincia del Sancto Rofario de las Iflas Philippinas Fr.

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Baltafar de Sancta Cruz Comiffario del Sancto Oficio de Manila....con las licencias necessarias impresso en Manila en el Collegio de Sancto Thomas de Aquino Por el Capitan D. Gafpar de los Reyes Impreffor de la Vniuerfidad. 1692. Santiago, Luciano P. R. The Hidden Light: The First Filipino Priests. Manila, Philippines: New Day Publishers, 1987. Sarduy, Severo. Obras completas III (Ensayos). Mexico City, Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2022. Schumacher, John N. Growth and Decline: Essays on Philippine Church History. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 2011. Schumacher, John N. Readings in Philippine Church History. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Loyola School of Theology, Ateneo de Manila University, 1979. Scott, William Henry. Barangay: Sixteenth-Century Philippine Culture and Society. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1994. Scott, William Henry. Slavery in the Spanish Philippines. Manila, Philippines: De la Salle University Press, 1991. Seijas, Tatiana. Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2014.

7

Colonial Racism and the Moro-Moro As Dueling Proxies of Law They are our customs: they are the customs of our parents … they are the customs of many Filipinos and if you deprive us of that … sir! For the love of God! Do not offend us. — Francisco de Paula Entrala, Sin título (1881)

Abstract: This chapter concerns the dual articulation of colonial racism and native custom in the period of the mission’s decadence. Beginning with a famous letter written by Fr. Gaspar de San Agustín about the nature and character of the Indian, I argue that San Agustín’s pessimism foregrounds the insurmountable obstacles to the successful resettlement, conversion, and acculturation of the subject population. Juxtaposed to colonial racism is the emergence of another, phantom discourse, referred to as native custom [ugalí]. For native principales who witnessed the erosion of their privileges as well as the dissolution of their communities, native custom names a form of legitimacy that, under certain circumstances, may occupy the (absent) place of law more effectively than religious authority. Keywords: racism, secularization, native customs [ugalí], fiestas, moromoro, jester [pusong].

In 1720, former Augustinian attorney general [Procurador general] and chronicler of the Augustinian mission in the Philippines Fr. Gaspar de San Agustín (OSA) wrote what many Philippine scholars would recognize as the most infamous work in the history of Philippine letters. The original title reads: “Letter by Fr. Gaspar de San Agustín to His Friend in Spain Who Inquires After the Nature, Genius / Temperament of the Native Indians of These Philippine Islands [“Carta de Fr. Gafpar de San Agustín a un Amigo fuyo en España que le pregunta el natural i genio de los Indios naturales de

Blanco, J.D., Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463725880_ch7

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eftas Islas Philipinas,” which I will henceforth cite as “Letter”]. The addressee remains somewhat of a mystery: an addendum to the letter by Jesuit priest Fr. Pedro Murillo Velarde (SJ), dated 1738, has led at least one scholar to believe that the letter was destined to him.1 Its publication did not take place until 1756, where it appeared in slightly abbreviated from in the Jesuit historian Fr. Juan José Delgado’s Sacred-Profane General Political and Natural History of the Philippines [Historia general sacro-profana, política y natural de las islas del poniente llamadas Filipinas]. Along with its publication Fr. Delgado included a lengthy rebuttal of most of San Agustín’s opinions. One can see why. As one can readily guess from the title of San Agustín’s letter, it expresses a sentiment that religious ministers had hitherto never dared to voice in public because of its scandalous implications: one steeped in racism and cynicism about the future of the mission, yet widely shared by both religious and (later) secular authorities.2 As I will argue, the San Agustín letter expresses the unraveling of spiritual conquest as the ruling metaphor of the mission as frontier institution; and religious authority as a proxy for law. This chapter concerns the dual articulation of colonial racism and native custom in the period of the mission’s decadence, when the encroachment of colonial bureaucracy, land enclosure, land-tenant relations, and the money economy together contributed to not only the stalled emergence of what Phelan called “Hispanization”; but also the subordination of the regular clergy to the colonial government. Fr. Gaspar de San Agustín’s pessimistic vision may be considered the emergence of a larger consensus among religious ministers concerning the challenges of the mission as frontier institution; and the anticipation of the new role that secular, and particularly native Indian priests were to play in the provinces.3 He expresses this pessimism by foregrounding not the power of divine grace nor the enthusiasm of natives to receive the 1 Fr. Murillo Velarde came to the Philippines in 1723, which would have placed him in Spain at the time Fr. San Agustín wrote the letter. The relationship between these two important figures (Murillo Velarde also served as the provincial of his Order in the Philippines) remains obscure. See Luis Díaz de la Guardia y López, “Datos para una biografía del jurista Pedro Murillo Velarde y Bravo,” Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Serie IV, Historia Moderna, v. 14 (2001), 407–471; and Jacques Lafaye, “Virtudes y Vicios del Indio Oriental y el Indio Occidental,” 211. 2 Parts of the letter were republished in Sinibaldo de Mas’s two-volume Report on the Philippines in 1842 [Informe sobre las Islas Filipinas en 1842]. A third, secret part of this report expressed Mas’s frank opinions on the prospects of the colony’s future under Spain. After the publication of Mas’s book, Fr. San Agustín’s letter was routinely invoked to oppose the ordination of native priests and the secularization of parishes administered by the regular clergy. 3 See Santiago, The Hidden Light, 31–50.

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Gospel, but rather the nature [genio] of the Indian physique and character, which place insurmountable obstacles from the outset to the successful resettlement, conversion, and acculturation of the subject population. In this respect, San Agustín not only follows a trajectory of thought that would culminate in the scientific racism of the nineteenth century; he also prepares a formal argument, hitherto voiced as mere opinions of disgruntled ministers, against the ordination of native priests, the secularization of parishes, and the teaching of Castilian to mission towns. Later writers would use this argument as the blueprint for arguments against the cultural Hispanization of the native Indians. Of equal importance to the articulation of colonial racism by the Augustinian official, however, is the emergence of another, phantom discourse, which appears in Fr. San Agustín’s work in inchoate form. One would be hard pressed to identify an author of this discourse, frequently invoked by increasingly unruly colonial subjects, as native custom, which the Tagalogs called ugalí [sometimes spelled ogalí]. Originally used to refer simply to the body of traditions and uses that survived the Spanish conquest, the word and concept here seem to take on new connotations in the eighteenth century. For friars like San Agustín, native custom becomes linked to the Devil in the rhetoric of spiritual conquest, as well as, increasingly, political subversion. As a consequence, its extirpation ceases to be primarily a question of religious orthodoxy; and more a question of public safety, welfare, and civic obligation. For native principales who are witnessing the erosion of their privileges as well as the dissolution of their communities, however, native custom names a form of legitimacy that, under certain circumstances, may occupy the (absent) place of law more effectively than religious authority. Tracing the genealogy of this conflict over the vernacularization of the concept of custom will provide us with the key to a development we see increasingly represented in the rise of popular Tagalog literature and theater of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That was the simultaneous reinvention of native custom or tradition as a formal defense against “Hispanization”; and the shared recognition among the regular clergy and native leaders alike of invention (or reinvention) as a specifically colonial custom. The reinterpretation of custom and (re)invention in this period, I conclude, reflect a cultural praxis – a practice and pragmatics – of freedom for colonial subjects under Spanish rule. 4 To recall Antonio Gramsci’s reflection on praxis: “The philosophy of praxis is consciousness full of contradictions in which the philosopher himself, understood both individually and as an 4

See Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antoio Gramsci, 322–343.

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entire social group, does not merely grasp the contradictions, but posits [themselves] as an element of the contradictions and elevates this element to a principle of knowledge and therefore of action” (Selections from the Prison Notebooks 747. Italics added). While not, on the surface, openly revolutionary or incendiary, the praxis of “custom” gave native resentment and endemic resistance to the mission a new expression; and provided contestations to Spanish rule with an explanatory framework that could be passed from generation to generation. In the same way that the versified Tagalog Passion provided a “political idiom” for anti-colonial sentiment, so too did the popular translations of romances (called awits and koridos) as well as their dramatizations called komedya (after the Spanish comedia) supply a language for inheritance, justice, submission, and emancipation: threatening to supplant the Christian imaginary.5

Towards a New Hierarchy: Race If the transplantation of Christianity to the Philippines involved the translation of the emancipatory message embedded in the Gospel into a vernacular language based on native society – one that, however eroded, persisted in altered form on the colonial frontier and within the colonial bureaucracy – it also necessitated a support structure for that translation to be effective. Such support would entail the authorized interpretation and administration of that message by religious ministers as the official agents of the Christian religion. This was at least one idea behind Archbishop Camacho’s determination to promote the ordination of native priests for the secular clergy in 1700.6 The Archbishop had in mind priests drawn from the native elite class, whose proximity to colonial institutions had historically given them greater access to education within the colonial administration.7 The politics behind the obstruction and ultimate failure of Archbishop Camacho’s initiative remain a matter of debate. Before the native seminary 5 See Nicanor Tiongson, Komedya, 2–35. 6 See Chapter 2. Spaniards and Spanish-American creoles pursuing a vocation in the priesthood quickly recognized not only the animosity of the regular clergy to the official authority of the bishops, but also the material rewards and vocational benefits that accrued from joining the religious Orders instead of the official Church. The Crown’s prohibition (in 1577) of the ordination of native priests remained for the most part intact, even despite the attempt of the Third Council of Mexico to relax its prohibition, until the eighteenth century. See Santiago, The Hidden Light. 7 See “Informe de Sr. Camacho a SM sobre el modo más ajustado de administración de las Islas en caso de que los regulares se resistan a la visita (October 3, 1704)” (UST Archives).

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could be established, Camacho was transferred to the province of Guadalajara (in New Spain); and the succeeding Archbishop Francisco de la Cuesta all but assured that his predecessor’s plans would not come to fruition. Cuesta was particularly critical of the first batch of native candidates for the priesthood promoted by Camacho, which he described in the following manner: I found them so inept that, due to their inability, I was unable to succeed in nominating even the most advanced among them (to my great dismay) for the sacristy … the majority exhibit such bad customs [Sp. malas costumbres] and so little upbringing and civil behavior [policía] that, even after being educated among Spaniards, they remain incomprehensible in civil matters because of their natural rude behavior, and even after being ordained they retain among them the same bearing they had when they went naked and barefoot among one another.8

Was Cuesta exaggerating? These candidates all came from the native elite, received the best education (as it were) available under the religious Orders. One can read Cuesta’s impression that native priests had barely learned how not to “[go] about among themselves naked and barefoot, treating one another with such indecency and lack of dignity” as either the author’s gross exaggeration, a willful justification for blocking the growth of a native clergy, or a pithy admission of the mission’s staggering failures to Hispanize the populace after one hundred and fifty years of resettlement campaigns. In any case, Cuesta’s arguments foreshadow San Agustín’s own: not to mention the rhetoric increasingly employed by certain Spaniards opposed to colonial reform in the nineteenth century. Cuesta himself would follow his opinion of native incapacity with his revocation of Archbishop Camacho’s initiative to promote the formation of the native secular clergy; thus reestablishing the colonial divide between Spaniards and non-Spaniards as the basis of entrance into the religious profession. Article V under the new statutes of the seminary reads: “Those 8 [(L)os hallé tan inhábiles que a el más aventajado de ellos (con grande desconsuelo mío) por su incapacidad no le pude dar lugar en una nómina para una sacristía de que lo excluyeron por indigno los examinadores sinodales … la mayor parte son de malas costumbres y de tan poca crianza y policía que son, aun después de educados entre españoles, por su natural rudeza, en lo político incomunicables y después de ordenados conservan entre los suyos aquel mesmo porte que cuando andaban entre ellos desnudos y descalzos tratándose con tanta indecencia e indignidad que son el desprecio y chiste de los españoles]. Cuesta, in Olachea Labayen, “Incidencias políticas en la cuestión del clero indígena en Filipinas,” 167. For a similar critique launched by the Recollects in 1697, see “Carta de la Audiencia de Manila sobre enseñanza del castellano a los indios.”

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[seminarians] to be admitted must specifically be the sons of Spaniards or at least a Spanish father and mestiza mother, or on the other hand what they commonly call quadroons, who have three parts Spanish blood and one part Indian, not to mention that they are not descended from Jews, Muslims, slaves, or official penitents of the Holy Office.”9 Cuesta’s retreat and reversion to the politics of limpieza de sangre – the criterion of religion and race as the basis of colonial hierarchy, particularly the caste system [sistema de castas] in New Spain – not only delayed Archbishop Camacho’s plan for another seventy years, but also provided the example of the explicit racism in colonial policy that missionaries like Fr. San Agustín would later follow.10 It is to San Agustín we credit the f irst, and certainly one of clearest and most comprehensive documents of colonial racism: an ideology that became ever more pronounced with the departure of the Jesuits and the gradual incorporation of the religious Orders into the machinery of the colonial bureaucracy.11 San Agustín’s “Letter” appears on the surface to concern itself with a description of the native Indian to be found in the Philippines. It soon becomes apparent, however, that beneath the author’s musings lies an urgency to convey to the reader what and Indian is not and never could be – i.e. Spanish or “Hispanic.” The letter begins by comparing the “Asiatic Indian” to the inhabitants of “Monopantos”: a fictional island invented by Golden Age writer and statesman Francisco de Quevedo in an early anti-Semitic libel that later inspired the famous nineteenth-century “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.”12 San Agustín proceeds to ascribe what he considers to be the Indians’ phlegmatic (“cold and wet”) temperament to the influence of the moon. This influence makes them “inconstant, malicious, mistrustful, somnambulant, lazy, slow, familiar with going about in rivers, oceans, and lakes, and being fond of fishing, and … being primarily ichthyophages, lacking spirit, due to their coldness, disinclined to labor.”13 From his blanket assessment of Indian’s nature, San Agustín moves to an 9 Cited in Rubio Merino, 427–432. For the connection between Spanish anti-Semitism and colonial racism, best expressed in the “caste system” [sistema de casta] in Mexico – a set of racial categories and the corresponding hierarchy of social status accorded to each division – see María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 142–170. 10 See Damon Woods, “Racial Exclusion in the Mendicant Orders: From Spain to the Philippines,” in Myth of the Barangay, 1–28; and Luciano Santiago, The Hidden Light, 1–22. 11 See John Blanco, Frontier Constitutions, 64–94. 12 See Fr. Delgado, Historia sacro-profana, 274; and Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida, El antisemitismo en España, 50–51. Hannah Arendt’s classic Origins of Totalitarianism traces the genealogy of modern racism to its origins in European or Western anti-Semitism. See also María Elena Martínez, Genealogical Fictions, 200–226. 13 Cited in Delgado, Historia sacro-profana, 275.

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evaluation of their customary behavior: Indians, he continues, are ungrateful, untrustworthy, prone to doing things in reverse or contrary fashion; overly curious, uncultured, disrespectful, indiscreet, careless, overly credulous with one another yet incredulous against the word of Spaniards, prideful, ignorant of their past, irrational, envious, suspicious, blasphemous, vain, vengeful, cowardly, lustful, quarrelsome, shallow, obsessed with novelty, dismissive of the past, and subject to drunken revelry [borracheras y combites]. Like animals, Fr. San Agustín concludes, they remain “attentive only to their conservation and comfort if not corrected through [the influence of] reason, respect, or care for reputation … Because they see nothing beyond their immediate good or what their appetite dictates” (289–290).14 Curiously, the political context of San Agustín’s letter only appears in the closing paragraphs: “if, as payment for our sins and theirs [meaning the Indians], God wanted to punish the flourishing Christian regions of these Islands by placing them into the hands of Indians ordained as priests … what abominations would ensue!”15 He bases his judgment on two convictions. The first is his belief in the Indian’s unchangeable nature: “to say that their aforesaid customs and bad habits can be changed is impossible. Sooner would their haughtiness worsen, with their elevation to such a sublime state; as their greed, with the ability to feed on the best of everything; [and] their sloth, given the lack of immediate necessity; and their vanity, with the applause that they would desire, wanting to be served by those they respected and obeyed in a prior state of affairs” (ibid.).16 The second is that a native priest’s race could only inspire contempt in his fellow natives: “What respect will Indians have upon seeing one of their color and race [Sp. nación] … especially considering those who are well-qualified and maybe better than one who came to be a Priest after once being a Bilango [old Tag. bailiff, jailer] or Servant?”17 This second consideration, San Agustín warns, is 14 [atenta sólo a su conservación y comodidad sin corregirlas, por la razón, respeto, o aprecio de la reputación … Porque no miran sino lo que les está bien o les dicta el apetito]. 15 [“Carta” (manuscript, Newberry Library), 28, par. 95]. “Si por nuestros pecados y los suyos, quiere Dios castigar a los florecientes Christiandades de estas Islas, poniéndolas en mano de Indios ordenados de Sacerdotes … qué abominaciones no se siguirán!” Not coincidentally, Fr. Delgado omitted this part of the Letter in his history of the Philippines. 16 Porque decir que se han de mudar de las costumbres y resabios dichos, es imposible. Antes se empeorará su sobervia, con la enaltación a tan sublime estado; su codicia, con el poder la mejor cebar; su pereza con la falta de necesidad; y su vanidad, con el aplauso que han de querer tener, queriendo ser servidos de aquellos, que en otro estado respetarían y obedecerían. 17 Ibid. “Que respecto le han de tener los Indios viendole de su color y nación? Maximè, considerandose tan buenos y mejores quizas que el que llego a ser Cura; en donde no pasaria de Bilango, o Criado?”

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particularly important when uprisings occur, as they frequently did: what happens, he muses aloud, if and when the curate should “enter the dance, being also and Indian and an interested party” [por ser también Indio e interezado] (ibid. 29v [par. 96])? The respect that natives presumably had for the Spanish Ministers, he adds, has played a decisive role in quelling these revolts. Contrast this racial hierarchy, San Agustín contends, to the drunken revelries and banquets held in secret, in which natives would “reaffirm their unity and [the status of their] elites” (29).18 The placement of these considerations at the end of the letter as opposed to the beginning suggests that San Agustín’s goal was not exclusively the prohibition of natives to the priesthood. As he states at the beginning and reiterates at the end of the letter, his goal was to answer the question that was presumably posed by the Jesuit Fr. Murillo Velarde: how would one define the Indian or more literally, what kind of devalued creature or thing is an Indian [“Qué cosa es el Indio?”]?19 The Augustinian provincial knows full well, of course, that his “definition” would extend beyond the question of the ordination of priests, and serve as a kind of referendum to the idea of Hispanization itself. The introduction reveals this aim when he writes: “the difficulty in acquiring knowledge about these Indians does not lie in (the differences among) individuals, but the race (Sp. género); because in knowing one, we know them all without distinction.”20 Towards the conclusion of the letter, he spells out more clearly the implications of his attempt at defining the native Indian: “let us not ask for miracles without necessity,” he writes, “but rather let the Indian be an Indian, and tend to his labor as before.”21 Nineteenth-century writers, from Sinibaldo de Mas to Fr. Miguel Lucio y Bustamante (OFM), would return to this statement repeatedly as a proposed mantra for colonial governance.22 18 The full passage reads: “Pues si sucediere alguna sublevación o motín, que bien se puede amasar y disponer entrando también el Cura en la danza, por ser tambien Indio e interezado? Porque en todas las que ha havido en estas Islas, ha importado mucho el respeto de los Ministros Españoles, la qual huviese sucedido al contrario si fueran Indios? Pues en las frequentes borracheras y combites, a que son tan inclinados, y en que fundan su unidad y principalia, sin duda alguna que habia mucha indecencia, porque havia de ser muy escrupuloso el Cura.” 19 See ibid., 31 [par. 202]. 20 San Agustín, in Delgado, Historia sacro-profana, 274. “la dif icultad del conocimiento de estos indios no está en los individuos, sino en el género; porque conociendo uno, son conocidos todos sin distinción.” 21 San Agustín, “Carta” 30v. [par. 98]. “[N]o hemos de pedir milagros sin necesidad; sino dexar que el Indio sea Indio, y vaia a su labor como antes.” 22 For this theme in Lucio y Bustamante’s novel Si Tandang Basio y Macunat, see Resil Mojares, Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel, 87–90; and Blanco, Frontier Constitutions, 200–209.

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Yet the further implications of San Agustín’s belletristic screed only come into view when we compare the letter (as Jacques Lafaye has done) to a parallel text by Mexican bishop Juan de Palafox, written around 1650, which San Agustín had read and cited.23 Like the Philippines, Lafaye demonstrates, New Spain was also undergoing a fierce battle between the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the official Church under Bishop Palafox and the religious Orders over the jurisdiction of religious and civil authority on the mission frontier (Lafaye, 211). Palafox wrote Book of the Indian’s Virtues [Libro de las Virtudes del Indio] to draw the Crown’s attention to the post-conquest condition of the Amerindian population, which had been besieged by the same tragedies as the Philippine population, yet on an even greater scale. The contrast between Palafox’s intention and San Agustín’s could not be starker. In fact, San Agustín directly criticizes the Bishop of Mexico for painting what he sees as an over-idealistic portrait of the [Mexican] Indian. He further refuses to grant the Indian (Mexican or Philippine) any conscious virtue whatsoever: “the favor they would earn from God by their efforts, they lose for their having been impelled by their nature and custom, because Ab asuetiis non fit passio [What comes from custom that was not made by passion]?”24 These and other statements enact an admission of self-undeception or desengaño by this Augustinian provincial with the entire project of spiritual conquest and its implied goal of Hispanization. San Agustín’s pivot from the native’s salvation to the native’s “temperament and nature” reflects not only the discord between the religious Orders and the official Church with regards to the native ordination of priests, but also a sober admission of the limits of Christianity as both religion and political theology before resistance in the form of native custom. Perhaps not surprisingly, the f irst response and rebuttal to Fr. San Agustín’s letter came from the Jesuit missionary and chronicler, Fr. Juan José Delgado (SJ), who reprinted much of San Agustín’s letter in his Historia sacro-profana, política y natural de las Islas del Poniente llamadas Filipinas.25 Fr. Delgado rebukes San Agustín’s assessment in no uncertain terms, dedicating several chapters to a critique of San Agustín’s tendency towards 23 See “Carta,” 22 (par. 77); and Jacques Lafaye “Virtudes y vicios del Indio Oriental y el Indio Occidental: Un Caso de Fricción Interétnica En Filipinas: Siglo XVII,” 209–222. 24 “Carta,” 22 [par. 77]). “Mas luce su divino ingenio, y su Santa, y buena intención, que consigue el argumento del assumpto … pues en lo que merecieran con Dios voluntarios, desmerecen por traerlo impelidos de su naturaleza, y costumbre: porque Absuetiis non fit passio.” 25 Fr. Juan Francisco de San Antonio’s chronicle of the Franciscan Order (1738) discusses San Agustín’s letter in some detail, which means that the letter had circulated among the religious Orders for some time after the author’s death in 1742: see 141 [par. 413]).

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overgeneralization and oversimplification while also arguing that, contrary to San Agustín’s claims, Christian evangelization has resulted in an overall success. Rather than ascribing the Indian’s shortcomings to their incorrigible nature, Delgado distinguishes between the Indians encountered in cities like the capital of Manila, and those confined to the rural areas largely under the direct influence of the religious Orders. Extolling the rural Indians, he writes: “this latter class is made up of simple and hard-working people, who are not accustomed to the commerce and dealings with Spaniards and guachinangos (Mexican natives), nor the Chinese or mestizos; nor have these Indians learned their vices, ill-dealings, and frauds, but instead live naturally, from their sweat and labor” (Delgado, 271).26 Contrast this to his portrayal of Spanish mestizos: “they are without comparison (the) most vice-ridden, disdainful and haughty, to the degree that no priest would ever be caught in their presence” (268).27 But Delgado saves the worst of his estimation for those Spanish creoles whom the Spaniards call “white Indians”: “among those of this group are found all the characteristics of the Indian and the vices of the Spaniards to a superlative degree; and being as knowledgeable as the natives in customs and language, in mixing with the latter they are the destruction of settlements and ministries … they destroy with their vices all that the ministers have created with their good examples” (ibid.).28 He ends by concurring that San Agustín’s advice to new ministers is nevertheless sound, and exhorts newly arrived priests and missionaries to teach the natives to read, write, and adopt the customs of settled life [policía], while treating them with mercy (322). Delgado’s letter, in sum, aims at discrediting San Agustín’s argument about the “nature” of the natives of the Philippines by pointing to the environmental and economic factors that were in the process of warping native customs beyond recognition – the penetration of Hispanic customs into the interior mission provinces. Rather than resigning oneself to the incorrigibility of native customs, however, Delgado argues that religious ministers and colonial subjects alike would be better served by 26 “esta ultima clase es de gente sencilla y labradores, que no están acostumbrados al comercio y trato con españoles y guachinangos, ni con sangleyes y mestizos, ni ha aprendido sus vicios, malos tratos y fraudes sino que viven a lo natural, de su sudor y trabajo. 27 “son sin comparación mas viciosos, altivos y soberbios, tanto, que ningún ministro se puede averiguar con ellos.” 28 “en ellos se hallan en grado superlativo todas las propiedades del indio y los vicios de los españoles; los cuales como son tan inteligentes en las costumbres y lengua de los naturales, mezclados con ellos, son la destrucción de los pueblos y ministerios … destruyen con sus vicios todo cuanto los ministros edifican con sus buenos ejemplos.”

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understanding how the money economy, interior commerce, and urbanization, all threatened the future of the mission. While historians have characterized the San Agustín-Delgado debate as a contrast between the medieval and “enlightened” approaches to Christianity, I believe the importance of the debate lies elsewhere. San Agustín’s Letter, for one, represents one of the first full-fledged advocacies of racism as a colonial policy: its influence on the nineteenth-century rhetoric of colonial racism is unmistakable. From this perspective, his “medieval” approach was destined to play a “modern” role: the reinforcement of racial segregation as not only a defining feature of the mission frontier provinces under friar administration, but also the future policy of the official Church under the Crown or royal patronage. Compared to this development, Fr. Delgado’s display of empirical observation and understanding of natural history does not occupy a modern or enlightened take on the future of the mission, but rather a backwards look at its original, pastoral vision, where ministers retained their autonomy of control over their native flocks outside Manila. On a deeper level, in fact, one may even argue that Delgado’s reasoned chastisements of San Agustín’s distortions obscure an underlying agreement. Both missionaries, each in their own way, opposed the direction of social change: whether that change implied the ordination of native secular priests or it involved native access to land and resources. Both also arrived at a similar conclusion to the future stability of Spanish rule in the Philippines: it would depend on maintaining a segregated society, with race or the mission frontier serving as the dividing line between rulers and ruled; and the protection of a specifically “Philippine” (that is, perpetually partial or incomplete) Christianity against the Hispanization of the economy and colonial bureaucracy.

Custom [Ugalí], Christian Tradition, and Spanish Law The San Agustín-Delgado debate tells us a great deal about the opinions for the future of the Philippines in the eighteenth century. One may even read both texts as the visible manifestations of the internecine conflicts between the Jesuits and the other monastic Orders. Yet the issue that both San Agustín and Delgado highlight as a problem to be addressed concerns the nature and permanence of native custom: custom as a surviving remnant of pre-Hispanic society; custom as an ever-changing target of Christian censorship; custom as a quasi-legal term in colonial jurisprudence [usos y costumbres], which designated a sphere of native autonomy provided that

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it not violate the laws of the Indies or canon law; and custom as a polemical concept, which designated the limits of Spanish encroachment on the native world. San Agustín references these various aspects of the problem with genuine perplexity, and notwithstanding his own forty years of missionizing efforts in the Philippines: They uphold to an extreme their uses and customs [usos y costumbres], which they call Ogali [sic ugalí], and failing to do so causes notable disgrace, such that they bumble everything for fear of breaking with them; and their weddings and burials involve so many and strange Ceremonies, and abuses, which they have not managed to stop because of their diligence in doing them, because they desire nothing from the Spaniards except their clothes, as well as every bad thing they see [the Spaniards] doing; and it seems that these [native] customs they will never stop doing.29

Missionaries like San Agustín’s confrere Fr. Tomás Ortiz (OSA) considered these ugalí as pernicious remnants of pre-Hispanic society and culture, which missionaries and priests were obliged to uproot.30 What San Agustín reveals in his own identification of ugalí, however, is the danger behind the protection of certain customs that were given limited sanction under the law. Legal scholar Max Deardoff traces the history of usos y costumbres [uses and customs] as a concept in Spanish jurisprudence to the Reconquest, where the sphere of popular custom and tradition constituted “more than a nebulous no-man’s land of legal action; in what would become the Spanish Empire, it was an esteemed and protected sphere of normativity.”31 The 1680 Recopilación de las Leyes de Indias, which attempted to compile the body of existing laws and statues in Spain’s colonies, protected native uses and customs, provided that they “do not contradict our sacred religion, nor the laws [of Spain].”32 This statute, which came originally from a document [cédula] drafted by Charles V in 1555, “provided native norms with an additional level of legitimacy” (ibid.). 29 Son en extremo observadores de sus usos y costumbres, que llaman Ogali, y el faltar a ellos es notable infamia, y assí por no quebrantarlos, atropellan con todo; y en sus bodas, y entierros son muchas y raras las Ceremonias, y abusos, que tienen los quales no se han podidio quitar por diligencias que han hecho, porque ellos no quieren del Español sino lo trage, y todo lo malo, que ven en ellos; y estas costumbres, le parece que jamás se quitarán (cited in Delgado, 287). 30 See Fr. Tomás Ortiz (OSA), Práctica del Ministerio, 11 [n. 32]. 31 See “Republics, Their Customs, and the Law of the King,” 164. 32 Ibid., 167–168.

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While not directly opposed to the missionary project of acculturation to Christian tradition and settlement, the jurisdiction of native customs nevertheless presented an obstacle to the religious ministers. We saw how, for example, the preservation of privileges among the native elite, particularly the institution of debt-slavery, placed them in opposition to Christian discourses of conversion as the highest form of liberation. The legal sanction of native custom constituted an enduring source of frustration against the encroachment of the religious on the native world: complicating their efforts to reform native custom in any systematic fashion. While the regular clergy also focused on extirpating what they perceived to be idolatry, they were often forced to acknowledge their inability to enforce the prohibition of various practices concerning courtship (bigaycaya, panhimuyat), funeral rites (tibao), the adoration of nature spirits (simbá, “worship” and pag-aanito), ritual feasts (pandót), adivination (bilao), and so forth.33 Yet an additional, unprecedented factor that Frs. San Agustín and Delgado faced in the eighteenth century was the ability of native custom to change in response or resistance to the demands of Spanish rule. In fact, even though Frs. Juan de Noceda (SJ) and Pedro de Sanlúcar (SJ)’s 1754 dictionary defines ogalí to mean primarily our understanding of the word custom [costumbre], they also list one of its meanings as “to imitate in customs” [imitar en costumbres] (Vocabulario 212). To claim a certain practice as “customary” then, might just as well mean a practice that one has become accustomed to, as well as an inherited practice or tradition. This duality of custom becomes significant when native Christian neophytes begin to develop “customs” that defy or transgress the pastoral power of the religious. Let us examine a few examples. From the beginning of the mission pueblo, one of the most effective means religious ministers had at their disposal for discovering either the persistence of practices that the religious deemed “idolatrous” or the spread of errors and abuses of religious orthodoxy, was the sacrament of confession. Baptized children were the first to tell the ministers about the secret lives of their parents; and priests were able to mediate relationships among members of the mission parish in discreet and timely ways. Yet, from the early eighteenth century, priests like Archbishop Camacho observed the coalescence of native resistance to the priest’s efforts 33 For these and other customs, see P. Santa Ines, Crónica del P. Santa Inés, 57–65; Juan de Plasencia, in BRPI v. 7, 164–186; and Ortiz, Práctica del ministerio, 11–15. An excellent essay on the perseverance of these customs in the mission provinces is Bruce Cruikshank, “Autonomous Filipinos: How Colonial Subjects Carved Out Realms of Self-Driven Freedom While Formally Subject to Spanish Imperial Rule and Exactions, 1565–1898,” 57–66.

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to extract confessions from his flock, which natives themselves would reinforce among one another by labeling each other “loose-lipped” or tattlers [mabibig]. Fr. San Agustín’s Letter lamented the degree to which this practice, which began as an improvised resistance to missionary surveillance, had become something of a custom unto itself: They practice another remarkable policy [política] that the infernal Maccabee Satan has taught them, and which is as good for their bodies as it is bad for their souls. And that is how rigorously they observe the [practice of] covering up their crimes and ill deeds for one another, ensuring that no excess reaches the attention of the father minister, alcalde, or Spaniard, and this they keep with a singular secrecy, even when there exists enmity among them to the point of murder … and thus the greatest crime that one can commit among them is telling the priest or alcalde what is happening in the town, [an act] they call mabibig, and it is something that will lead to an entire town uprising against the culprit.34

Clearly, natives had begun responding and adapting to colonial rule by developing social mores and norms against it; and enforcing them outside the boundaries of both civil and canon law. Fr. Polo’s 1771 account of this resistance, which the Tagalog natives alternately called Bibigan [tattling / blabbing], [A]tapang sombong (sic) [strong accusation], and Maninirang puri [reputation destroyer], responded to the priest’s intervention into the life of the community, through sacraments like confession, by inoculating themselves against it.35 In addition to inventing “policies” of resisting Spanish encroachment on their sphere of autonomy, natives also developed “errors” of adapting to Spanish demands through the selective appropriation of Spanish customs as native ones. Regarding the native mimicry of Spanish ways, Fr. San Agustín wrote: “They are quite disposed to imitating the Spaniard in all bad things … and being repulsed by imitating the good things found in a Spaniard’s dealings and behavior, the good upbringing of his children, because in all other matters of masquerade [farándula] and drunkenness in their wedding ceremonies and burials, the tyranny of some over others, they keep doing exactly what they learned from their ancestors, and thus unite the vices of the Indian and of the Spaniards.”36 San Agustín’s focus on “imitating the 34 San Agustín, in Delgado, Histora sacro-profana, 284: italics added. 35 See Fr. Eusebio Polo [OSA], in Ángel Pérez, comp., Relaciones agustinianas, 287. 36 San Agustín, in Delgado, Historia sacro-profana, 280.

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Spaniard in all bad things,” however, stops short of understanding why a pantomime of Spanish customs might serve natives in the first place. While the desire for abstract “Hispanization” might be one, San Agustín’s confrere Fr. Ortiz shows how, in the case of the tibao or funeral rites, the adoption of Spanish Christian traditions also served as a strategy for masking older native customs – much in the same way that the literature of spiritual conquest had formerly masked the absence of law. “The Indians believe,” Fr. Ortiz wrote, “that they will see in their houses the souls of the departed, who visit the people who live there or attend the banquet, on the third day of their death … All to attend the tibao ceremony, which they cover up, and hide by saying that they are meeting in the house of the deceased to pray the Rosary for him.37 Fr. Ortiz warned priests to prevent any kin or friends of the deceased from visiting said person’s house, after the burial, “especially not on the third day” (ibid.). Franciscan chronicler Fr. Juan Francisco de San Antonio (OFM), added in his description of the tibao custom that it included a lavish banquet for the guests, who would “waste the rest of the day recounting and singing the great deeds of the deceased.”38 In this case, their adoption of the devotional practice of praying the Rosary disguised the performance of a pre-Christian observance. Still other “customs” concerned the appropriation of Christian custom to reflect a non-Christian belief whose origin may well be entirely lost. No practice better reflects this kind of “abuse” or “error” than the native custom of berating and even whipping images of the patron saints and the Virgin Mary over the terms and conditions of their vows and / or the question of their fulfillment. Fr. San Agustín’s 1701 “Letter” identifies this practice as pag-hihinauakit [sic: paghihinanakit], “making [someone] suffer,” among Tagalogs: “[Natives] are very tempted towards the sin of blasphemy because of their natural wretchedness … it is quite common that they complain to God, [a practice] which they call Paghihinauaquit (sic), because he doesn’t give them this or that, health or riches, as he does with other creatures, and they say nonsensical things that cause scandal.”39 The root word of paghihinanaquit 37 Fr. Tomás Ortiz (OSA), Práctica del ministerio, 12 [par. 33]. Given this belief it is not surprising that many natives found the doctrine of the Resurrection so underwhelming. 38 San Antonio, 153 [par. 443]. 39 “Carta,” in Delgado, Historia sacro-profana, 283. “Son muy tentados del pecado de blasfemia por causa de su ruín natural, su soberbia y presunción; y así es muy ordinario el quejarse de Dios, que ellos llaman Paghihinauaquit, porque no les da esto, o lo otro, salud y riqueza, como hace con otras criaturas, diciendo palabras disparatadas que causan horror a quien no supiere nace de grande falta de entendimiento y consideración y muy lejos de ser capaces de conformarse con la voluntad divina.”

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is sakit, illness or injury: the word denotes the act of making (someone or something) ill or aggrieved, presumably by scolding or by attacking. The assumption behind this practice, of course, is that even holy images or santos were as beholden to their worshippers as the latter were to the santo. In Augustinian priest Fr. Eusebio Polo (OSA)’s letter to Archbishop Don Basilio Sancho de Santa Justa y Rufina in 1771, Fr. Polo narrates the story of a famous gambler in cockfighting, who would buy candles to place before the altar of a saint: praying novenas and promising greater devotion if he only encountered greater fortune. When he lost a match, “he became choleric, and rabid in the presence of the Saint, upon whom he heaped sacrilegious contempt with blasphemies spewed by his filthy mouth.”40 The proliferation of the shadowy realm of native custom seems to have coincided with the overall decadence of the mission pueblos in the eighteenth century. Fr. Polo deplores the market of saints’ images in Manila, which allowed natives to buy and set up their own shrines and altars. He describes these shrines as being unkempt and dirty, with many images in a state of disrepair (Polo, 275). Peddlers of false indulgences, illegal licenses, and “superstitious prayers,” not to mention fraudulent confraternities, all found a place in the market and money economy (272). And pilgrimages to the ever-new shrines and miraculous sites became a constant disturbance throughout the year. In fact, Polo believed many of these pilgrims to be motivated not by sincere devotion, but for “various, twisted ends” [los más son llevados de varios, y torcidos fines] (275). With these crowds came even newer and bigger outdoor markets, full of buyers and profit-seekers; as well as cockfighting gamblers, card players, dart games, and prostitution – an economy in the most profane sense (275 and 276–278). While one may argue that the adulteration of paraliturgical practices by markets, gambling, prostitution, fraud, and contraband, proliferated everywhere Christianity was preached, the Augustinians’ accounts illustrate the simultaneous reinforcement of the shadow efficacy of native custom, which coalesced around the notion of a jurisdiction that possessed legal sanction. This sanction constituted a bulwark against even the religious, whose authority was defined by the ambiguous limits of its reach. In pitting the de facto acknowledgment of native custom against the acculturating designs of Christian tradition, friars and Jesuits emphasized the necessity of distinguishing between the two for the purpose of separating them completely. Because Christianity on the colonial frontier occupied the place 40 See Fr. Polo, in Ángel Pérez, comp., Relaciones Agustinianas de las razas del norte de Luzon: coleccionadas, 276.

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of the law, its adulteration by native custom could not but affect the very nature of authority and law themselves. Indeed, it is notable that in this same letter where San Agustín protests the interpretation of ugalí as usos y costumbres, he also bemoans the increasing recourse natives have to an emerging market of litigation, which involves the employment of lettered natives [letrados] and hiring of witnesses to allege and incriminate colonial officials. Natives, to the priest’s outrage, had begun to invoke and use the law. San Agustín concludes: “The artifice and diabolical skill of incriminating is incommensurate with its veracity and it is known that they are particularly inspired by the father of Discord, Satan.”41

Fiestas and cockfights Perhaps no example better shows the dialectical relationship between pre-Hispanic custom and the corruption of Christian traditions in the mission areas than the historical development of the Philippine fiesta and its paraliturgical practices. John Phelan described the festive pageantry of the Church as a way of attracting natives to the policy of resettlement: “Since most Filipinos could not be coerced into the new villages, they had to be enticed. And the principal inducement was the colorful ritual of the Church.”42 Yet his explanation of the “fiesta system” and the accompanying practice of forming confraternities to organize these events clearly exposes his bias toward reading colonial history as a history of “Spanish / Christian aims” and passive, native responses: The fiesta system and the founding of sodalities … reached out to embrace the whole scattered population of the parish … The parishioners flocked to the cabecera villages for these occasions. Not only did the fiestas provide a splendid opportunity to indoctrinate the Filipinos by the performance of religious rituals, but they also afforded the participants a welcome holiday from the drudgery of toil. The religious processions, dances, music, and theatrical presentations of the fiestas gave the Filipinos a needed outlet for their natural gregariousness. Sacred and profane blended together (Phelan 73).

“The fiesta system reached out … The parishioners flocked … the fiestas provided … [and] also afforded … fiestas gave the Filipinos an outlet.” While 41 San Agustín, in Delgado, 286. 42 John L. Phelan, Hispanization of the Philippines, 47.

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such a portrait conforms all too well to the evolutionist character of Phelan’s Hispanization thesis, it conveniently omits and defers a consideration of two crucial characteristics: a) the role of social gatherings and religious rituals like the tibao, simba, pandót, and bilao, which the regular clergy tried but unsuccessfully sought to absorb into Christian traditions like the fiesta; b) the active role played by missionaries in not only “giving Filipinos a needed outlet,” but preserving the external aspects of native customs and traditions under the sponsorship of the Church at these festivals. Foregrounding these two considerations results in a very different view of the Philippine fiesta: less a “system” and more an expedient, piecemeal strategy to absorb native contributions to the Christian imaginary, while recognizing the challenge of imposing religious intolerance on a skeptical and recalcitrant audience. As an early study on what anthropologist Donn Hart called the “Rural Philippine Fiesta Complex” makes clear, the periodic congregation of the pueblo provided mixed opportunities for social prestige among native elites, political patronage and spectacle, new alliances through the expression of hospitality and reciprocity, and the enhancement of a sense of local identity. These activities became indiscriminately entangled with the aggregation of the Church’s wealth, the circulation of currency, religious indoctrination, and a popular education in “techniques of democracy.”43 Of course, missionaries understood from very early on the necessity and even desirability of incorporating native customs, provided that these did not openly violate Christian morality (particularly the sin of idolatry) or explicitly foment resistance to Spanish rule. In fact, many extra- or paraliturgical rites clearly reflect this desire. Fr. Murillo Velarde (SJ) enumerates the various activities that the faithful undertake during Holy Week, which the religious regarded with ambivalence but did not prohibit. Indians made small altars in their homes, which they would adorn with printed images and holy statues; they painted Crosses on their arms and wore Rosaries around their necks; they performed flagellations [disciplinas de sangre] as a way of demonstrating their remorse; they incorporated native music in the performance of their instruments and in organized choirs; and decorated the churches with “altarpieces, holy images, jewels encased in silver, lanterns, ornaments, [and] a multitude of lights.”44 While the presence of native 43 Hart, “Preliminary Notes on the Rural Philippine Fiesta Complex,” 39–40. See also Fernandez, “Pompas y Solemnidades,” 425; Nicanor Tiongson, “The Philippine Komedya: History, Indigenization, Revitalization,” 29–38; Isaac Donoso, “The Hispanic Moros y Cristianos and the Philippine Komedya,” 87–120; and Reinhard Wendt, “Philippine Fiesta and Colonial Culture,” 3–23. 44 Fr. Pedro Murillo Velarde (SJ), Historia de la Provincia Filipina, segunda parte, 348–349v.

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elements in these rites has been read as the Church’s generosity in welcoming diverse populations into its fold, the survivance of these elements can also be read as the religious minister’s attempt to win the confidence of a settlement or population he could otherwise barely communicate with. Take, for another example, the introduction of native dances that have become a central feature of religious devotions throughout the archipelago: from the salambao for Santa Clara in Obando (Pampanga province) to the turumba in Paete (Laguna), the subli in Batangas; and the ati-atihan in Kalibo in Panay. 45 In one of the earliest accounts of religious fiestas, which recorded the arrival of holy relics sanctioned by the Church and entrusted to the Jesuits to distribute for the stimulation of Christian piety, the Jesuit priest Fr. Diego Sánchez witnesses “the many kinds of dances and music beyond those performed by the Chinese, Japanese, and natives of this land.”46 His contemporary Fr. Pedro Chirino (SJ) himself remarks upon observing a native dance that it would be worthy of performance in a religious fiesta. 47 Jesuits seemed to waste no time recording the cultural practices associated with native custom, in order to selectively modify them once they fell under religious supervision. The adoption of native dances, which then combined indiscriminately with Spanish folkloric dances like the Spanish fandango, and possibly even the British Morris dance, resulted in the spread of the so-called danzas de moros y cristianos (Moor-Christian dances) throughout both the Philippines and Latin America. 48 In Fr. Murillo Velarde’s account of the restitution of the Virgin of Antipolo to the town in 1748, the author describes the panorama of extra- or paraliturgical celebrations emerging from a diverse set of populations: many of which would later become codified as regional folk dances. Among these he mentions the dramatization of the Mexican Emperor Moctezuma, in which participants wore masks similar to those produced in New Spain. Such masks and masquerades remain popular in certain parts of the Philippines today, 45 For a colorful description of many of these dances and their role in Philippine fiestas, see Alejandro Roces, Fiesta. 46 Cited in Colín-Pastells, Labor evangélica, v.2, 105, n. 1. 47 Fr. Pedro Chirino, Història de la província de Filipines de la Companyia de Jesús, 1581–1606, 269; see also Nikki Briones Carson-Cruz, “From War Dance to Theater of War: Moro-Moro Performances in the Philippines,” 34. 48 This dance or variety of dances once occupied a prominent place in the Philippine fiesta, although traces of it are almost unrecognizable today: see Fr. Nicholas Cushner [SJ], “Las fiestas de ‘Moros y Cristianos’ en las Islas Filipinas,” 520). The Mexican anthropologist Arturo Warman ascribes the ambiguous polysemy of these performances to the fact that they served as vehicles for divergent and oftentimes opposing colonial authorities and their corresponding agendas. See Danza de los moros y cristianos, 68–72 and 91.

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particularly the Moriones festival in Marinduque.49 While the masquerade was in all likelihood itself organized under the Jesuits, the celebration also included a “dance among Blacks” [cafres or “kaffirs,” brought by the Portuguese] … [that] represented Africa: dressed in half-togas, they danced the jig to the beat of the rudimentary jew’s harp, demonstrating the continuity of barbarism in that Country, which they represented in the nakedness of their bodies, the muzzled tongue of the canteen, the rude sound of the jingle bells, and the uncivil gestures in their movements).50 In fact, Murillo Velarde’s earlier, 1734 map of the Philippines portrays this same dance; as well as the pre-Hispanic dance practiced in southern Luzon called comintang (kumintang) (see Figures 15–16). As Sally Ann Ness has observed with regard to the fertility rituals associated with the Holy Child or Santo Niño of Cebu, the absorption of these kinesthetic ritual practices and performances by mission parishes prepared the way for their domestication and codification within a Christian tradition.51 Yet the ongoing rediscovery of pre-Hispanic rites and customs embedded in such dances to this day reflects the degree to which the Christian tradition failed in its attempt to do so. As has been seen time and again throughout Latin America, indigenous people engaged with the Christian fiesta as a relatively unsupervised laboratory of improvised traditions in the process of reinvention and adaptation, just beyond or outside the effective surveillance and censorship of religious authority. The evolutionist framework of Hispanization makes an argument for the selective incorporation and administration of such native customs under the pastoral politics of the mission from the eighteenth century onward. But did this actually happen? The unexpected yet inevitable consequence of concentrating native populations for the purpose of conscripting native labor, for example, was not only exposure to Spanish customs, but more generally the confusion of native customs overall, as well as their increased circulation and adaptation to the growth of interior commerce and the money economy. As Fr. José Delgado pointed out earlier, in addition to the concern with pre-Hispanic religious practices, ministers also had to monitor and censor the introduction of festivities brought to the archipelago from the Spaniards and other foreigners. Archbishop Felipe Pardo’s 1685 report on the hidden “idolatries” of the natives of Santo Thomas, a settlement outside Manila in the province of Laguna 49 See John D. Blanco, “A Mexican Princess in the Tagalog Sultan’s Court,” 6–42. 50 Murillo Velarde, Historia de la Provincia, segunda parte 218v. 51 See Sally Ann Ness, Body, Movement, and Culture, 58–85.

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Figure 15: “Cafres”: detail from Fr. Pedro Murillo Velarde (SJ), Carta Hydrographica y Chorographica de las Islas Filipinas (1734). Copyright public domain.

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). Copyright public domain.

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de Bay, offers a striking testimony of the increased traffic between regions during the late seventeenth century, with the corresponding proliferation of reinvented customs among resettled natives throughout the provinces around Manila. When asked about the spread of “abuses and superstitions” throughout the province, the witness, a certain teacher named [Maestro] Domingo de Perea y Roxas, responded: [the witness has] heard it often said that idolatries and errors persist not only in said pueblo Santo Thomas, but also in other pueblos, because the people from one pueblo and those of the neighboring ones communicate with each other … and know one another’s customs … with the pueblos of Rosario, and Lobo, San Pablo of the highlands, Nagcarlan, the planting fields of Bay and Marigondon there are such errors and similar to those from the pueblo of Maripondon [many] join up with the fugitive and wild Negritos of the highlands to perform their devilry and idolatrous superstitions and that this is quite common.52

This cultural, cross-regional and intra-indigenous traffic, another witness declared, occurred because of the conscription of forced able-bodied labor to haul wood for the Cavite shipyard (near Manila); and the decision of many workers to resettle near Manila. With this new proximity to the world’s entrepôt between Asia and the New World, the exposure of natives traveling back and forth to and from Manila to other “traditions” of a foreign provenance, such as betting and gambling, cards and dice games, prostitution, and of course the regular flouting of Christian morals, was a fait accompli.53 Other practices that may have preceded the Spanish arrival, like cockf ighting, became virtual extra- or paraliturgical institutions. Many of these practices, however discouraged (at least initially) by the regular clergy, became an essential part of Sundays and fiesta days without, however, having anything to do with the expression 52 “Carta de Felipe Pardo sobre idolatrías,” AGI Filipinas, 75, n. 23: carta 8. The original reads: “ha oído decir muchas veces como no solo en dicho pueblo Santo Thomas, más que también en otros pueblos hay algo de dichas idolatrías y errores, porque los de este pueblo y los de los circunvecinos se comunican…y se saben las costumbres de unos pueblos en los otros, y más cuando beben y se emborrachan suelen algunos descubrir lo que en su juicio entero callan y tienen horror de manifiestan aun a los mismo de su nación y que así declara haber oído muchas veces aunque no se acuerda ahora con especialidad y estudio con en los pueblos de Rosario, y Lobo, San Pablo de los montes, Nacanlan, sementeras de Bay y Marigondon hay dichos errores y como los del Pueblo de Maripondon se juntan con los negrillos cimarrones y agrestes del monte a hacer sus Diabluras e idolatras supersticiones y que esto es muy común.” 53 See San Agustín, “Carta,” in Delgado, 278.

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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). Copyright public domain.

of Christian piety. Would we call this the effect of Hispanization or counter-Hispanization? San Agustín’s confrere Fr. Eusebio Polo (OSA) provides a colorful description of how natives routinely violated the Third Commandment (keeping the Sabbath holy) by congregating near the church after mass and on feast days to attend these rather unholy gatherings: [Es] el juego de gallos … un espectáculo tan grande, y de tantos males, que me atrevo a decir del que algunos Pueblos que es universitas iniquitatum … Van llegando también muchos de otros Pueblos … de suerte, que a la una del día … vera V. Sria. Allí un grandísimo Babilónico circo de muchos millares de hombres, que en confusa gritería, espera la victoria de los gallos. A este circulo ciñe otro de muchísimas mujeres tenderas donde unas venden, o otras son vendidas … Por varias partes se encuentra también coimes, fulleros, naipes, y dados … Venden lienzos, paños, seda, etc. Las demás tabaco, buyo, poto, bibinca etc … y con estos cebos, y apetitos pesca el Diablo muchas almas (cited in Ángel Pérez, comp., Relaciones Agustinianas, 278: italics added).

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Cockfighting presents … such a great spectacle, of so many ills, that I daresay that for some pueblos it is a universitas iniquitatum [L. school of iniquity] … People from the surrounding pueblos all come … to the point that, around one o’clock in the afternoon … Your Lordship will see there a rather large Babylonian circle made of many thousands of men, who, in a confusing clamor, await the victor of the cockfight. Around this circle are roped in a multitude of women vendors, where some sell and others are sold … Everywhere one encounters dealers, cardsharps, cards, and dice … [The women] sell pictures, towels, silk, etc. Others sell tobacco, betel-nut, rice cake [Tag. Puto], bibingka [a rice cake made with coconut milk], etc. … and it is with these as bait, and appetites, that the Devil hooks many souls.54

Cockfighting [Tag: sábong] preexisted the arrival of the Spaniards: its practice throughout India and Southeast Asia is quite ancient, and in certain regions (like Java) cockfighting was once tied to a religious ritual function. Its elevation to a popular festive occasion for gambling and drinking on Christian holidays, however, had everything to do with the concentration of populations into large settlements and the corresponding invention and circulation of new “customs” to fill the vacuum of social anomie. While the cult of the town’s patron saint honored and commemorated the Christian side of the feast, the “universitas iniquitatum” of sábong anchored another ensemble of customs and accommodations, if not the custom of accommodation itself, to over two centuries of the mission as frontier institution.

Upstaging the Scene of Spiritual Conquest in Native Theater and Romance [Moro-Moro and Awit] It seems appropriate to dedicate this last section of a chapter on the upstaging of spiritual conquest, with the efflorescence of alternative imaginings of law and society in the Tagalog moro-moro and awit and korido literature. The moro-moro (called linambay in Cebu and sinulog in the Visayas) emerged as 54 Later in the text Fr. Polo writes: “Los muchos robos, y latrocinios, que en todos tiempos y por todas estas Provincias de Tagalos, y Pampanga se hacen, son (por lo común) por causa de los juegos de gallos, naipes, y dados. No es creíble Sr. lo mucho que se envician los Indios en estos juegos” (Relaciones Agustinianas, 282). For a later description of cockfights and the attention they drew, see Fr. Joaquín Martínez de Zuñiga, Estadismo de las islas Filipinas: ó, Mis viajes por este país, 301–304.

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Figure 18: Performance of a moro-moro in Iloilo, Panay (Central Visayas), c. 1895. From Félix Laureano, Recuerdos de Filipinas. Copyright public domain.

a strange hybrid of versified romance and theatrical spectacle. In contrast to the Spanish-style comedia or the dances and mock-battles performed on fiesta days, the moro-moro featured a pantomime of versified romances in Tagalog read aloud. Many of these were derived from the Tagalog translations of Spanish romances in verse, which appeared in either dodecasyllable (awit) or octosyllabic (korido) form. As we will see, these translations and dramatizations oftentimes departed from a faithful rendition of the original, towards an appeal to the interests and concerns of native audiences, both within and outside the boundaries of Christian morality and friar surveillance. Staged performances during f iesta time seem to have been at least partially inspired by the Jesuit promotion of theater and the literary and performing arts in Golden Age Spain during the feast of the Holy Sacrament [Corpus Christi] and other festival days. The earliest documented play to be performed in the Philippines took place in the Jesuit colegio of Cebu in 1598, and was written by a Jesuit priest.55 By 1609, Antonio de Morga testifies that missionary schools, in addition to teaching boys reading, writing, serving 55 For a general history of the roots of Philippine theater, see Retana, Noticias bio-bibliográficas; Nicanor Tiongson, Kasaysayan ng Komedya; Leonicio Cabrero Fernández, “Origenes y desarrollo

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the church, singing, learning instruments, and dancing, also had them “represent religious plays [autos], and comedias in Spanish, and in their language with elegance.”56 From then on mention of colonial plays and other theatrical spectacles appears sporadically throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.57 The popularity of dramatic spectacles seems to have eventually convinced the other religious Orders to participate in their production. Among the lives of Philippine Augustinian missionaries recorded by Fr. Agustín María de Castro in his eighteenth-century Osario venerable (1780), a number of priests were known to have written plays to be performed and poems to be recited by the Christian neophytes in their care: particularly children.58 Yet the overall reticence of the other religious Orders to follow the Jesuit example in promoting theater tells us not only about the internecine rivalry among the Orders; but also and more importantly the regular clergy’s determination to preempt any heterodox interpretations of the Christian imaginary. Citing the example of the Tagalog Pasyon as a text that is to be recited or sung but never performed, Vicente Barrantes insists that religious ministers as a whole would have tended to discourage autos or dramatizations of religious scenes and even the recitation of the versified Passion. “The secret meetings [that take place in the recitation of the Pasyon],” he writes, “tend to occasion the corruption of customs in that one’s fantasy, being focused on a sole object, becomes excessively heightened [se sobre-excita la fantasia demasiadamente] … The nonexistence of any Hispano-Tagalog drama of the Passion … provides the full evidence that Indians were deliberately kept apart from the theater by their religious directors.”59 In this one instance, at least, Barrantes’ claim appears supported by historical evidence. Despite Jesuit enthusiasm for comedia performances del teatro en Filipinas,” 83–96; Isaac Donoso, “The Hispanic Moros y Cristianos and the Philippine Komedya,” Philippine Humanities Review, 11/12 (2009–2010), 87–120. 56 Morga, cited in Bienvenido Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry, 23. 57 Tiongson, Kasaysayan, 9–13. An anonymous pamphlet in 1623, for example, illustrates in great detail the mock battles or escaramuzas that had long been a part of the moros y cristianos festivals in Spain (Toros y cañas en Filipinas en 1623); and which had spread to many parts of Latin America. At the center of festival was a “burlesque joust” involving Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, written as a derivative episode of Cervantes’s novel for the exequys of Spanish king Philip III. See Martínez, “Don Quijote, Manila, 1623: Orden Colonial y Cultura Popular,” 143–159. 58 The contemporary publication of this work is titled Misioneros Agustinos en el Extremo Oriente. 59 Vicente Barrantes, El teatro tagalo, 29–30. Barrantes contests an eyewitness account by Sir John Bowring, who reported a theatrical representation of the Passion of Christ in his Visit to the Philippine Islands.

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alongside other theatrical and literary spectacles – poetry jousts and recitations, dances, musical recitals, and masquerades – beginning in the eighteenth century [1701] Archbishop Don Diego Camacho y Ávila moved to severely limit the performances of “comedias, along with Arthurian legends [artúricas] and exemplary lives.”60 His edict explains why he felt it necessary to ban theatrical performance anywhere outside Manila: Hence (we act) because of the very concurrence of both sexes, in which the Common Enemy (the Devil) never ceases to fan the flames of passion, which burn souls in the infernal fire of Concupiscence, as well as because of the effect that plays (Comedias) and dramas accomplish, given that they represent the very Diabolical art of sowing vengeance, conflict, lasciviousness, and the putting into practice (of) illicit and dishonest ways and means of offending God’s Majesty.61

The Archbishop’s edict tells us a great deal about religious concern over the spread of comedias throughout the mission territories, in and through the limits he imposes on the comedias performed in Manila. First, the Archbishop demands that performances only begin after daybreak, and conclude before nightfall; and that plays confine themselves to “honest” themes “in no way obscene, [or] about love affairs, legal matters, and motives for evil” [de ningún modo obscenas, y de amores, y licitas, e incitativas a mal]. Any city or town outside Manila desiring to perform a play would require the approval of the Archbishop at least two months prior to presentation, under pain of excommunication. Two years following the publication of the edict, Archbishop Camacho had the occasion to prosecute the edict’s first transgressors: a group of Spanish soldiers who performed a satirical skit mocking the religious and various colonial government officials.62 When we examine the Archbishop’s statement in 1701 carefully, it becomes apparent that his immediate concern was addressed to illicit gatherings after 60 “Edicto para prohibir las comedias,” UST Archives Libro 61, Tomo 16. A reproduction of the edict (in handwriting) from the Anales Eclesiásticos de Philippinas, y de la Excelencia de Potestad, que los Ssres. Arzobispos Gozan Como Metropolitanos d’ellas in 1707 appears in Esperanza Bunag Gatbanton, A Heritage of Saints, 39. 61 Ibid.; see also Irving, Colonial Counterpoint, 210–12 and 321 (n. 76). The original Spanish reads: “Así por el concurso mismo de entrambos sexos, en que el enemigo común [el Diablo] no cesa jamás de soplar incentivos, con que abrazar las almas en el fuego infernal de la Cupisencia, como por lo que de semejantes Comedias, y representaciones se origina, ya por ser ellas mismas arte Diabólica de enseñar venganza, duelos, liviandades, y de poner en práctica modos, y medios ilícitos, y deshonestas de ofender la Magestad del Dios.” 62 “Advertencia de censura en obras de teatro,” AGI Filipinas, 332, L. 11 [1705].

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nightfall, which involved “the concurrence of both sexes … souls in the infernal fire of Concupiscence.” But on an even higher level, his concern addresses the way such gatherings had found their symbolic representation and even elevation in the language of courtship, seduction, and adultery promoted in the moro-moro itself. In a language that anticipates Barrantes’s own, the Archbishop indicts native theater for inflaming these passions: he characterized theater as the “diabolical art of sowing vengeance, conflict, lasciviousness, and the putting into practice (of) illicit and dishonest ways and means of offending God’s Majesty.” In so doing, he inadvertently expressed why such plays might be desirable or useful for natives living under Spanish rule. Similar to the marketplace and the cockfight, dramatic spectacles on Christian holidays facilitated opportunities for social interaction in mission towns, where the concentration of populations eroded the structure of pre-Hispanic political authority without, however, reorganizing it under any effective civil one. The moro-moro probably resulted not only from the early influence of comedia in the formation of native confraternitites and paraliturgical practices associated with the fiesta, but also the prohibition of these comedias in the eighteenth century.63 For the pantomime of versified romance did not, strictly speaking, fall under the category of comedia: its enactment therefore did not directly transgress their prohibition. The descriptions of native theater given by French traveler Jean Baptiste Le Gentil (who visited the Philippines in 1767) and Fr. Joaquín Martínez de Zuñiga (OSA) (in 1800), seem to bear this thesis out. Le Gentil remarks that he was impressed by the “singular enthusiasm [among the Tagalogs] for poetry and the representations of Tragedies; one sees them acting, following a read script, as if they were in a theater [“on les voit représenter, en lisant, comme s’ils étoilent sur un Théâtre”]. In Manila, where they understand Spanish well, they have translated and arranged into verse various Spanish pieces in their language.”64 Le Gentil’s remark provides the foundations for later assertions on native komedya: that, unlike Spanish comedia in which actors embody characters, native performances were based on a versified text that would receive approval from the parish priest before being read aloud.65 63 See Blanco, “A Mexican Princess in the Tagalog Sultan’s Court,” 6–42. 64 Guillaume Jean-Baptiste Hyacinthe Le Gentil de la Galaisière, Voyage dans les Mers de L’Inde, v. 2, 131. Ils ont un goût singulier pour les vers & les représentations de Tragédies ; on les voit représenter, en lisant, comme s’ils étoilent sur un Théâtre. A Manille, ou ils entendent tous très-bien le Castilian, ils ont traduit & mis en vers dans leur Langue, des Pièces espagnoles. 65 The distinction between comedia (or komedya) and moro-moro is repeated by Hermenegildo Cruz in his biography of Francisco Baltazar or Balagtas: see Kung sino ang kumatha ng “Florante,” 179 (n.1).

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The requirement of a read script no doubt accounts, at least in part, for the length of the “plays,” which drew the attention and even censure of the religious ministers. By the end of the eighteenth century, some performances would drag on for up to thirteen hours in one day (as one had been reported in 1790). Later “plays” or pantomimes would last anywhere from three to thirty days, three to five hours each day.66 Their origin in metrical romance in the vernacular Tagalog also accounts for why most of these narratives expressed an indifference to the Aristotelian conventions of dramatic representation. Because the subject matter often concerned material culled from chivalrous romances, this tradition became identified as moro-moro, “playacting Moors,” rather than comedia proper. This last point intends to emphasize the development of a performance and literary tradition that developed not at the urging of the Church and religious Orders but rather despite their opposition. The disentanglement of the moro-moro as a native colonial tradition from the Spanish comedia, suggests the loosening grip of religious ministers over the control, sponsorship, and organization of these performances by the eighteenth century. Fr. Gaspar de San Agustín’s famous 1725 “Carta” (see Chapter 6), which remarked on the native fondness for spectacles [comedias y farándulas], clearly expresses a growing unease with the custom by no less than the provincial head of the Order. Curiously but perhaps not coincidentally, San Agustín’s letter remains entirely silent on the role or presence of the parish priest in approving or participating in these spectacles.67 The breakdown of religious control over native theater and performance was further evidenced by the emergence and outsized importance of two figures in these spectacles. The first was the jester, called pusong in Tagalog, who embodied and sanctioned all the native traits Archbishop Camacho as well as San Agustín most deplored in colonial society and / or the native Indian [Indio]. The second was the Moorish warrior princess, whose intrepid character also transgresses every convention in her pursuit of love and marriage to a Christian prince.68 The pusong, in the heyday of their appearance, enacted an extraparaliturgical function to the moro-moro: identified as a jester, their task 66 See Le Gentil, Voyage, v. 2, 131–132. See also Retana, Noticias histórico bibliográficas, 53; Fernández, Palabas, 9. 67 San Agustín, in Delgado, 286. 68 See Tiongson, Kasaysayan ng Komedya, 19–20. A further study would have to investigate the curious parallelism between the Tagalog pusong and the Mexican bufón or viejo who accompanies various danzas de moros y cristianos, and who at times doubles as the dance group’s leader or capitán. See Gertrude Prokosch Kurath, “Mexican Moriscas: A Problem in Dance Acculturation,” 87–106; as well as Max Harris, Aztecs, Moors, and Christians, 10–11.

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consisted in interacting with both the audience and the actors in the staged drama, without belonging or being accountable to either. In doing so, the pusong exhibited a freedom of expression unrestrained by adherence to any script, which would have had to seek approval from the parish priest, if not the ecclesiastical authority of the Archbishopric in Manila.69 This freedom made them at once scandalous and even subversive. As Fr. San Agustín’s “Carta” explained: “[The audience] doesn’t pay attention to anything but the jester [gracioso] who makes a thousand mundane inanities, and every action makes everyone laugh, and the person who would assume this role remains outside the boundaries of discretion, and can freely enter and leave any part [of the play], and make advances [Sp. coger la barba] on the woman in front of the husband, which obliges everyone to laugh, even if they don’t want to.”70 Several decades later, in Fr. Joaquín Martínez de Zuñiga (OSA)’s report on the state of the Philippines in 1800, the author elaborates on the anomalous place of the pusong during the theatrical performance of a moro-moro. Echoing Fr. San Agustín, Fr. Martínez de Zuñiga observes how the jester occupies the center of the audience’s attention without appearing anywhere in the written script.71 He further remarks on the extreme freedom granted to the pusong, which enables this character to ascend the platform at any time and interrupt both the characters onstage and the audience offstage: They go about dressed in an extravagant fashion … [and] bring wine and food, which they take out from time to time making a fuss or frittering so as to make the Indians bend over laughing; certain body contortions, threatening one of the main characters of the play from behind, making gestures of wanting to slap [someone] and other similar inanities, performed by those who specialize in being jesters (graciosos), entertain them to no end, such that many people only go to the play to see these jesters. After the play the jester comes out, speaks to the audience jokingly about the play’s defects, and … relates the anecdotes of various scribblers, criticizes those employed in the service of the pueblo, and everyone laughs, 69 Jesters sometimes did appear in the script of Spanish comedias themselves. But what distinguished the jester in native komedya was not his appearance in the play but his antics outside it. 70 “no ponen atención sino en el gracioso que hace mil boberías materiales, y a cada acción han de dar todos una carcajada, y el que hizo con aceptación este papel queda graduado de discreto, y con licencia de entrar y salir en cualquiera parte, y coger la barba a la mujer, aunque no tenga gana.” San Agustín, cited in Fr. Juan José Delgado (SJ), Historia sacro-profana, 286–287; see also Vicente Barrantes, El teatro tagalo, 38: italics in text. 71 Fr. Joaquín Martínez de Zuñiga (OSA), Estadismo sobre las Islas Filipinas en 1800 pte. 1, 75.

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considering him a blessing from God, even the ones criticized, whether they like it or not (ibid.).72

As figures that simultaneously took on the authority of public expression and freedom from public accountability, the pusong more often than not usurped the audience’s attention by creating a parallel spectacle to the one onstage, which mercilessly satirized the latter. Folklorist and anthropologist Donn Hart has suggested linking the figure of pusong to a very subversive strain of folkloric and perhaps pre-Hispanic native culture.73 While the hypothesis is compelling, it also distracts us from focusing on the specific role of the jester in colonial society. In the aforementioned quotes, the pusong’s role far exceeds the occasional injection of a little levity into an already entertaining spectacle: if San Agustín and Martínez de Zuñiga are to be taken at face value, the pusong’s antics lambast and upend the entire staging of moro-moro, along with the complicity and collusion of the native principalía and lettered or educated natives, in the charade. This critical function inevitably touched on the social or even political critique of mission society in its contradictory aspects or as a whole. As theater and media scholar Nicanor Tiongson has suggested, whatever prototype may have served to inspire the figure of the pusong, this character does not acquire his social function before the development of native theater as a paraliturgical festivity and custom tied to religious holidays and civic celebrations: What, really, is the pusong’s ultimate aim? One may say that the pusong always lays bare or exposes the forces / machinations / institutions / region / personality, which from the perspective of the abject are responsible for destroying or trampling underfoot the personal safety or 72 Van vestidos de un modo extravagante … llevan vino y comida, la que sacan de cuando en cuando y la comen haciendo mil pamemas o monadas que hacen desternillar de risa a los indios; ciertas contorsiones del cuerpo, el amenazar por detrás a una de las principales personas de la comedia, hacer ademan de que le quiere dar una bofetada y otras simplezas semejantes, ejecutadas por personas que tienen ellos por graciosos, los divierten tanto, que muchos sólo van á la comedia por ver á estos graciosos. Acabada la pieza sale el gracioso al último, les habla con bastante chiste de todos sus defectos, y … relata los embustes de los escribanillos, critica á algunas de las personas empleadas en el servicio del pueblo, y todos se ríen que es una bendición de Dios, aun aquellos que son criticados, ó de ganas, ó por disimular. 73 See Donn V. Hart and Harriett E. Hart, “Juan Pusong: The Filipino Trickster Revisited,” 129–162; and Nicanor Tiongson, “Ang Pusong sa Dulang Tagalog: Panimulang Pag-aaral,” in University of the Philippines Center for Integrative and Development Studies Centennial Lecture Series, 305–338.

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security or welfare of the poor, weak, and plebian … Perhaps we must read the aforementioned traits of the pusong in terms of a rejection of the dominant culture: [he is] slow and lazy, haughty but cowardly, drunk and voracious, foul-mouthed, garrulous.74

The pusong is haughty, Tiongson adds, because that is what he has learned from the attitudes of important people; cowardly, because the pusong has no reason or incentive to be brave or industrious in a colonial society based on the absence of law or its enforceability. The pusong addresses the audience directly, because in breaking the imaginary fourth wall between spectacle and spectator, they rail against the didactic tradition of all religious theater, which Tiongson identifies with the “colonial illusion” or colonialism-asillusion [ilusyong kolonyal]. This illusion – the Christian imaginaire – “reveals the emptiness of the ‘lives and fates’ of kings and European rulers that have no basis in the everyday lived reality of the natives.”75 While the jester or pusong lampooned the conventions of staged performances from a position outside native theater or moro-moro, the emergence of the Moorish warrior princess testifies to the questioning and transgression of the “colonial illusion” from within it. Her first appearance in print takes place in arguably the most influential Tagalog metrical romance during the colonial period, Salita at Buhay ng Doce Pares sa Francia na Kampon ng Emperador Carlo Magno Hanggang Ipagkanulo ni Galalon na Nangapatay sa Roncesvalles [Words and Deeds of the Twelve Paladins of France, Followers of Emperor Charlemagne Until They Were Betrayed by Galalon and Killed at Roncesvalles, hereafter referred to as Doce Pares].76 While the exact date of the publication of this romance is obscure, the literary scholar Damiana Eugenio has traced much of the Tagalog version to Juan José López’s 74 Tiongson, “Ang Pusong sa Dulang Tagalog: Panimulang Pag-aaral,” 326–327. “[A]no nga ba ang pinupuntirya ng pusong? … [M]asasabing ang laging sinisipat o inilalantad ng pusong ay ang mga puwersa /uri / institusyon / bansa / tao, na sa pananaw ng nasa ibaba ay nakasisira o nakasisikil sa matiwasay na pamumuhay o kapakanan ng mga mahirap-mahina-magaspang … Sa perspektibong ito ng pagtutuol sa dominanteng kultura marahil dapat basahin ang mga natukoy na nating katangian ng pusong: mabagal at tamad, mayabang pero duwag, lasenggo at matakaw, bastos sa dilang bastos, matabil ang dila.” 75 Ibid., 329. [Pagkat sa bagbubuwal niya ng pader sa pagitan ng gumaganap at ng manonood ay nagagawa niyang paputukin ang ilusyong kolonyal, at naisisiwalat ang kahungkagan ng mga ‘buhay at pakikipagsaplaran’ ng mga hari at reynang Europeo na walang batayan sa realidad ng pang-araw-araw na pamumuhay ng mga katutubo]. 76 In her landmark study, Damiana Eugenio notes that Doce Pares “has been retold in six of the major Philippine languages,” more than any other romance in the Philippines (Awit and Corrido: Philippine Metrical Romances, xviii).

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versifications of various episodes taken from the Historia del Emperador Carlo Magno y de los doce pares de Francia [Story of the Emperor Charlemange and the Twelve Paladins of France] by Nicolás de Piemonte.77 The author, too, remains obscure: while scholars like José Sevilla and Bienvenido Lumbera attribute the work to one of the earliest known Tagalog poets José de la Cruz (also known as “Huseng Sisiw,” or Chick José) (1746–1829), the author’s initials at the end of the poem suggest otherwise.78 The story itself, of course, had been circulating in the Philippines since the late sixteenth century. In Irving Leonard’s study of books that were read and circulated throughout the Americas and the Philippines, he identifies Charlemagne’s Twelve Peers or Paladins (by López and others) to have been among the oldest and most widely circulated texts brought by the original conquerors.79 In fact, Leonard mentions specifically a copy of Piemonte’s Historia de Carlo Magno in a Manila library from the late sixteenth century (Leonard, 228–229). The story of the Twelve Peers as well as other “books of the brave” or chivalry [libros de caballeria] fed the myths of crusade among the conquerors, as well as the rhetoric and imaginative prose of “spiritual conquest” on the colonial frontier. The presence of this text and its incorporation into paraliturgical tradition on a larger level can be further seen in Mexican and Central American danzas de moros y cristianos [dances of Moors and Christians], which are performed during town fiestas.80 Where does the Moorish princess fit into an epic tale of Christian knights? Piemonte’s Spanish prose version of the Twelve Paladins legend narrates the Muslim conquest of Rome under the admiral and leader Balán, who also captures various holy relics of the Passion. Accompanied by his son, the giant Fierabras, Balán proceeds to France to conquer Charlemagne’s kingdom. One of 77 See Eugenio, Awit and Korido, 15–17. 78 The last lines read: “Ito na ang hanga,t, siyang naguing uacas / ang buhay nang Magno at Pares na lahat / cun may caculang̃a,t, uicang hindi tapat / cay T.L.C.G. ibuhos ang tauad” [With this, so ends the story / Of the life of [Charles] the Great and all the Paladins / If any part is lacking or the language untrue / Address your claims to T.L.C.G.]. See Salita at Buhay nang Doce Pares sa Francia campon nang Emperador Carlo Magno, 146. 79 “[T]he chivalric and sentimental novels, which constituted so large a part of the sixteenthcentury reading fare, have left their mark in Spanish America four centuries later … The chivalric tale of greatest longevity in Spanish America was, apparently, the Historia de Carlomagno y los doce pares, of French origin. Its first edition dates from 1525 at least, and references to it by members of conquering and exploring expeditions are reported soon after” (Irving Leonard, Books of the Brave, 329–330). 80 See Arturo Warman, Danzas de los moros y cristianos; Nathan Wachtel, Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes 1530–1570, 33–59; and Yolanda Pino, “La historia de Carlomagno y de los Doce Pares de Francia en Chile,” 1–29.

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Charlemagne’s knights Oliveros manages to defeat Fierabras in battle, leading to the latter’s conversion to Christianity. Yet in the process of trying to escape, Oliveros along with four of his companions are captured and placed in a tower. Luckily, the Peers or Paladins are rescued by Balán’s daughter (and Fierabras’s sister), the Moorish princess Floripes, who reveals that she has fallen in love with one of the Twelve Paladins, Gui de Borgoña, upon seeing him in a tournament.81 While mindful of the general plot of Piemonte and López’s story, the Tagalog “translator” of the Twelve Peers legend takes liberties with the text that end up reorienting the story around Floripes, who becomes perhaps the central character in the story. The Tagalog version, for example, begins with Balan’s trip to Rome accompanied not by Fierabras but rather Floripes, his daughter. It is on this journey that Gui de Borgoña first catches sight of the Moorish princess. Noticing the glitter of the diamond ring on her hand which she rests on the edge of the carriage, he proceeds to lift her ring from her finger by “poking” [sundot] his sword into it, attracting her attention and causing her in turn to fall in love with him: Dulo ng espada ay hindi nalihis ang nasa ng loob nangyaring sinapit, nang sa maramdaman ng sa ganda’y labis dumungaw na bigla nagtama ang titig Dili nagpamalay sa irog na ama ginapos ang puso ng malaking sinta, may simang palaso ang siyang kapara na di maiwasa’t buhay mapapaka

The end of his sword did not go astray and was able to reach right inside, when she felt without a doubt In gazing out his stare pierced her She hardly took notice of her beloved father her heart became chained with a great love, like some feathered arrow it was inescapable and destined to thrive

(Salita at Buhay nang Doce Pares sa Francia, 8 [stanzas 56–57]).

The flood of erotic metaphors to describe this first meeting seems characteristic of the genre, as well as Tagalog poetry during this period. Lumbera’s analysis of the Tagalog poet José de la Cruz (to whom the authorship of the Tagalog Doce Pares has been ascribed), highlights the same metaphors and their erotic undertones.82 Here, the inclusion of this encounter between Floripes and Gui de Borgoña introduces the theme of penetration, 81 Gui de Borgoña (of Bourgogne) was not one of the original Twelve Paladins as recounted in the Chanson de Roland, but rather a nephew of Charlemagne’s and part of the generation of the children of the original Twelve Paladins; all of whom died in the Battle of Roncesvalles. A chanson de geste dedicated to his life was published in the thirteenth century. 82 Bienvenido Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry 1565–1896, 79.

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transforming a language of violence and subjection into one of not spiritual “conquest” or conversion, but desire and seduction. The occasion also redirects the narrative: appearing as it does at the beginning of the romance, it effectively turns the saga of Charlemagne’s exploits against the Muslim Saracens into a love story between Gui de Borgoña and Floripes, which otherwise only appears as a minor theme in the French Fierabras and Piemonte’s Historia de los Doce Pares de Francia. “From these slight allusions,” Damiana Eugenio would write in her landmark study of Philippine colonial romances, “the Philippine poet built, in 49 stanzas … one romantic episode in a work primarily concerned with the series of battles fought by Charlemagne and his peers. He rejects as the occasion for the first meeting [between Gui and Floripes], the commonplace tournament mentioned in the Historia and substitutes for it more romantic circumstances.”83 When Gui is later assigned the task of leading an attack on the Turkish occupation of Rome, he discovers that the commanding general of the defending army is his beloved Floripes – another invented episode that departs from both the French and Spanish renditions. Gui instructs his army not to attack and instead goes out to meet her. When Floripes sees Gui, she gives him a “wounding look” [“tamaang titig”] when she realizes he is leading an attack on Rome.84 Chastened by the thought of his romantic betrayal, Gui throws away his sword, offering her his life: oh bayaning Judit sa rikit mo’t kiyas libo mang gerero’y pawang mabibihag … sa rikit mo’t kiyas ang patay mang puso’y pilit na liliyag kaya ang buhay ko ay handog sa yapak laan ang dibdib ko’t tabak mo’y itarak.

oh warrior-hero Judith in your beauty and bearing are thousands of soldiers captured … in your great beauty and bearing, still am I bound to hold dear your murderous heart So is my life offered up to this fated embrace My breast, to the stab of your cutlass. (ibid., 10–11 [stanzas 75 and 78]).85

83 Damiana Eugenio, Awit and Corrido, 15. 84 “Salita at Buhay nang Doce Pares,” 10. 85 The allusion to Judith is significant here: she is also mentioned in the Pasyon Henesis, the versified Passion and death of Jesus Christ, in comparison with the Virgin Mary. This latter text, which borrowed from a 1704 vernacular translation of the versified Passion from Spanish to Tagalog but also elaborated and embellished it, had formed the basis of a common paraliturgical rite by the end of the eighteenth century called pabasa. See René Javellana, Casaysayan nang Pasyong Mahal ni Jesuchristong Panginoon Natin na Ipag-Alab ng Puso ng Sinomang Babasa Nito.

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The reference to Judith provides an alibi of sorts, for representing Floripes in drag and challenging the gendered and racial hierarchy implicit in the Christian-Moor relationship. As Margarita Stocker’s work on the legend of the biblical heroine Judith shows, Judith’s rescue of Israel from destruction at the hands of the Assyrians provides us with a remarkable analogue to Floripes. Both figures take on the qualities of both sides of the gender divide, thus calling into question the order that allegedly sustains them in their dependence to a patriarchal law and their condition of negativity within it. Their anomalous position within the structure of patriarchy is reinforced by both their material independence and their capacity to transgress the conditions of their violation, captivity or allegiance to the law.86 Gui’s sacrifice pays off: in the Tagalog Doce Pares, as Floripes looks into Gui’s eyes at his moment of surrender, a feeling of “mercy and love enters” into her, causing her to spare him. Once again, the stanza makes use of a sexual innuendo: “nunuwi sa Roma ang puso’y hilahil / parang sinasaka nang sa sinta’y hinggil” [“she went home to Rome, her heart full of grief / as if planted there, as it is in matters of love”] (ibid.). Instead of waging the war of moros and cristianos, Floripes returns to Rome, “her heart made captive by [Gui de] Borgoña” (Salita at Buhay, 11 [stanza 81]). In Eugenio’s estimation, the remainder of the text appears to follow “a faithful metrical rendering of … the Spanish Historia del Emperador Carlo Magno.”87 Yet the opening scenes inserted by the narrator at the beginning of the text, which were in all likelihood intended to help explain a truncated episode of the tale in Spanish, effectively initiate an underlying, fugitive counterplot of the Christian-Moor romance (within the larger frame of Charlemagne and the Twelve Peers). This counterplot, far from concerning itself exclusively with the actual events of capture, liberation, penetration, submission, and conversion in the narrative, proceed by way of metaphors of capture, liberation, penetration, and submission – an amorous discourse whose feverish pitch rivalled the passions of Christian piety. The transposition to metaphor allows the story – if not indeed the conquest itself, spiritual and otherwise – to be read as an innuendo of seduction. The amorous discourse of the Doce Pares was by no means uncommon. Take, for example, the metaphor of “flowering,” or efflorescence, in the Tagalog awit “Historia famosa ni Bernardo Carpio.” The story begins with the seduction of Bernardo’s (future) father Don Sancho of the king’s sister 86 Stocker, Judith, Sexual Warrior: Women and Power in Western Culture, 3–23. According to Stocker, Judith forms the basis of a counter-culture and alternative to “the Oedipal myth, and to all that it signifies about the ordering of Western culture, (23). See also Blanco, “A Mexican Princess,” 26. 87 Eugenio, Awit and Corrido, 15.

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Leonora (Bernardo’s future mother) in a tower. In a scene reminiscent of the bizarre courtship between Gui de Borgoña and Floripes in the Tagalog Doce Pares, Don Sancho woos Leonora by baring his breast and demanding that Leonora either openly proclaim her love for him or kill him on the spot. Upon her surrender and seduction, the poet salaciously gushes: Ito ang mulâ nang pamumucadcad Nang catouatouâ at mababañgong rosas, Baquit caagapay ang signos planetas Sabay na tumubó sa isang macetas Di sucat maturan bañgo,i, di maisip Dalauang bulaclac nang pagcacasanib, Anopa,t, sa loob nang torreng mariquit Humahalimuyac bañgo,i, nagsisiquip

Thus began the blossoming Of the most joyful and perfumed roses Which explains how, along with the signs and planets A seed grew in the flowerpot One can’t even begin to imagine Such immeasurable fragrance [Of] The two flowers, when nested together Even more, from inside the beautiful tower Swelled the perfumed fragrance.88

Immeasurable fragrance? One can only imagine the chortles and catcalls such passages elicited when recited onstage to the audience’s delight. The commandeering of the first part of the Charlemagne cycle by the Tagalog Floripes, and the “Moorish princess” motif more broadly, allowed poets like Huseng Sisiw and “T.L.C.G.” to reframe the gendered character of submission and conformity to Christian piety. Not only is the (Moorish) princess’s conversion reimagined in terms of seduction, but also and paradoxically in terms of masculine valor and leadership. In the Doce Pares saga overall, Floripes’s love for Gui de Borgoña leads her to rescue those Christian Peers captured by her father Balán, as well as journey back to the Christian lands with them to be baptized. Baptism, of course, was a necessary prerequisite to her nuptials with her beloved Christian paladin Gui. Yet, while all of these details follow the Piemonte and López versions of the story cycle, their meaning has completely changed in the Tagalog one. Floripes’ new identity as a commanding officer of the Turkish army foregrounds not only her agency in a patriarchal universe of assigned gender roles, but also her sacrifice to the Christian knight; as well as her negotiation to become (a) Christian on her own terms. Perhaps not coincidentally, this singular role of Floripes in the Tagalog moro-moro parallels that of the Virgin Mary in the Tagalog Pasyon Henesis, in 88 “Historia famosa ni Bernardo Carpio,” in Jovita Ventura Castro, ed., Philippine Metrical Romances, 29 [stanzas 117–18].

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which Mary’s love for her Son pits her against God the Father, implying and dramatizing her coeval participation in the plan of universal salvation.89 In similar fashion, Doce Pares emphasizes Floripes’ conversion to Christianity and marriage to Gui de Borgoña as the successful and forceful imposition of her free will, not as the surrender to or recognition of a higher power. The re-signification of the Moorish princess as a vehicle for artistic experimentation among the early Tagalog romance poets had the paradoxical effect of diminishing to the point of superfluity the stakes behind her conversion to Christianity. For instead of surrendering to Christianity because of the weakness of her will against the force of love, she actively bargains for it: promising in exchange the lives of the Twelve Paladins and the treasure-chest of holy relics that her father had plundered from Rome. This active negotiation on the part of the woman to earn the recognition of the king reappears in another famous awit of the period, Salita at Buhay na Kahabag-habag na Pinagdaanan nang Pitong Infantes de Lara at nang Kaabaabang Kanilang Ama sa Reinong España [The Pitiful Words and Deeds Told of the Seven Princes of Lara and Their Wretched Father in the Kingdom of Spain, hereafter referred to as Siete Infantes].90 In most of the Spanish versions of the epic, Mudarra González is born a bastard: his mother Hismeña is a Moorish noblewoman in the Arab kingdom of southern Spain, but his father was a Christian knight from the north. Mudarra (called Morada Gonzalo in the Tagalog awit) matures and eventually discovers his Christian birthright. He then travels to Christian Spain in search of his father and to avenge the death of his seven (half) brothers. In the Tagalog version, however, Morada Gonzalo goes to Spain for another reason: he not only intends to validate his birthright as a Christian noble through his father, Busto de Lara, but also to ask his father to marry his mother, so that he will be a “legitimate” child instead of a bastard son.91 Busto de Lara agrees on the condition that she is baptized, whereupon Morada returns to the Turkish kingdom to convince his mother Hismeña to become a Christian. Out of a mother’s love for her son, she acquiesces. In order to do so, however, she must escape the Turkish kingdom as a fugitive, which forces her to don a knight’s armor and leave with Morada, yet disguised as a man. When Hismeña’s father, the sultan Almanzor discovers his daughter’s escape, he declares war on the Christians. In the course of the battle between Christians and Moors, Busto de Lara is surrounded and about to die, when 89 See John Blanco, Frontier Constitutions, 115–117. 90 See Eugenio, Awit and Corrido, 359-404. 91 This theme also appears in the Bernardo del Carpio awit, in which Bernardo arranges a marriage between his father’s corpse (disguised to make him seem alive) and his mother, thereby removing the stain of illegitimacy to his rightful name.

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Hismeña dons her armor and fights (presumably against her fellow Moors) “like a fierce lioness” [“leonang mabangis ang siyang kapara”), saving his life from certain death.92 After Almanzor’s defeat, the Turkish emperor is baptized; his daughter Hismeña is converted to Christianity and married to Busto de Lara (Morada’s father); and the couple inherits Hismeña’s father Almanzor’s empire. Finally, Morada inherits both a Christian patriarchal lineage and a legitimate noble birth. To top it all, he becomes heir to the Turkish Empire. Even this hasty sketch of the romance shows a recentering of the romance around Hismeña, the princess mother of the protagonist, similar to the recentering of the Tagalog Doce Pares around the princess Floripes. In both cases, the women protagonists upset the focus on male valor and feats of skill and bravery in order to underline the Moorish princess’ quest for providing legal frameworks for themselves and (in the case of the Tagalog Siete Infantes) their families. Only such a legal framework was capable of guaranteeing the patrimonial rights to the kingdom.93 Both stories, too, dramatize this quest by the Moorish princess donning a suit of armor and assuming the role of warrior. The author of the Tagalog Pitong Infantes de Lara underlines the importance of this transformation, as when Hismeña escapes from her father Almanzor’s kingdom by disguising herself as a man; and confronts her lover Busto de Lara, Morada’s rightful father. The following scene both dramatizes a challenge and a surrender to the Christian prince and the law of patriarchy: Tugon ng prinsesa marangal na konde nagpasasalamat sa dikit mo’t buti ako’y siyang bukod sa ibang babai kaya naparito’y naglako ng puri.

Replied the princess: “Honorable Count I thank you for your radiance and goodness; of all women I am different in coming here to hawk my honor like merchandise.

Sa lagay tang ito ay nagkapalitan lalaki ang siyang may kapanganiban sa mga babai ako’y bukod lamang tumawid ng bundok at naglakbay bayan.

We have exchanged places; the man is the one who should encounter dangers; but of all women I alone am the exception having crossed the mountains and traveled to another kingdom.94

92 Eugenio, Awit and Corrido, 397 [stanzas 416–418]. 93 Southeast Asian historian O.W. Wolters emphasizes the role of cognatic kinship in Southeast Asian societies: see History, Culture and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives, 4–5; for an extrapolation of the implications of Wolters’s arguments, see Carole Crumley, “Remember How to Organize: Heterarchy Across Disciplines,” 35–50; and Joyce White, “Incorporating Heterarchy into Theory on Socio-political Development: The Case from Southeast Asia,” 101–123. 94 Cited in Eugenio, Awit and Corrido, 395 (stanzas 394–395). Interestingly, the word bayan can also simply mean “town” or “community,” which gives Hismeña’s speech an almost parochial ring.

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What kind of interpretations did natives come away with after either listening to the recitation of awits and koridos like the Tagalog Doce Pares and Siete Infantes de Lara; or seeing the dramatization of these romances in native moro-moro; or reading these works themselves in small chapbooks? It is clear, for one thing, that the revision and adaptation of metrical romances like the Doce Pares from Spanish to Tagalog had given way to a new level of innovation and improvisation. What appears on the surface to be the author’s attempt to suture the gaps of the storylines involving two marginal characters of the Doce Pares results in a very different story. In fact, despite the romance treating the archetypal moros y cristianos tale of Charlemagne and Almanzor, it is the Judith-like Princess Floripes who connects the various episodes of conflict and complicity, thereby putting into circulation various motifs of romantic love and gender-crossing that becomes reproducible in the Philippine moro-moro as if these motifs simply derived from Spanish sources. In a sense, they had – in the French and Spanish versions, Floripes is in love with the Christian paladin Gui, and the two eventually do get married. Yet the transformation of this secondary narrative into the central drama stems from the translation of the politics of capture and rescue into the amatory, social, and legal frameworks of marriage, servitude, rightful possession, and inheritance.95 These themes are equally pronounced in the Tagalog Pitong Infantes de Lara. The Moorish princess Hismeña’s demand that Christian prince Busto de Lara recognize her sacrifices upends the trajectory of spiritual conquest by religious conversion. For here, instead of the Moor surrendering herself to the Christian paladin through Christian baptism and marriage, she negotiates (for) it on behalf of herself and her son. While paying lip service to the theme of holy crusade, spiritual conquest and / as Christian conversion, and universal monarchy, the authors of these early vernacular adaptations of metrical romances in Spanish surreptitiously but deliberately inserted subplots, metaphors, and figures of speech that traversed the field of sexual as well as social transgressions in a world organized by the segregation of the metropolis from the mission frontier, Christian from pre-Hispanic values. These improvisations to the Christian-Moor dyad express the same contempt for the “colonial illusion” – colonialism as illusion and the phantasmagoria of law – that the pusong expressed as part of the moro-moro’s dramatization. They also flagrantly challenged Archbishop Camacho’s edict that the themes of these dramatizations should be “in no way obscene, [or] about love affairs, legal matters, and motives for evil.” 95 For a striking portrait of social anomie in this period, see Bruce Cruikshank, “1764 to October 1776: Franciscan View on Conditions in the Provincial Philippines,” 24.

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On a formal level, the appearance of the Moorish warrior princess in literature and the jester in moro-moro appear juxtaposed, with the pusong distracting the audience from the play and the performers drawing the audience back into its entangled plotlines. On a deeper level, however, the two figures shared an intimate complicity, which went beyond the alms they received for their good work. Both reflected the decadence of an imaginary Christian society they and their ancestors had been forced to inhabit. Both also reintroduced the repressed agency of the native catalonan or babaylan in colonial society. While the latter had been banned by religious ministers, who administered the liturgical rites of the colonial, official religion, the pusong and Moorish princess recall the memory of these native female (or gender-crossing) shamans as they presided over the paraliturgical ceremonies of the moro-moro. Their formal isomorphism parallels that of the church and the makeshift theater during religious holidays, which often faced one another across the plaza. As religious ministers strove to arrest the ever-widening gulf between the spiritual conquest in theory and practice, native theater worked toward the “efflorescence” of an alternative imaginary, replete with new expressions of social and cultural agency; and borne on the shoulders of Moorish princesses like Floripes, Flerida, Flora, Flor, Florinda, and Flocerfides in the metrical romances of the late colonial period.96

Native Custom and the Undeceived Indian When Fr. San Agustín set out to answer the question, “What [kind of] thing is the Indian?” [¿Qué cosa es el Indio?], the question could not but return to the questioner(s): who is asking the question? To whom does this question matter, and why? Pursuing this line of inquiry inevitably leads to the question: by what authority does Spanish rule, or Christianity for that matter, interrogate the Indian, as one more phantasmagoria in their dramatic rendition of spiritual conquest? The mission settlement, in any case, had given way to a different kind of economy and society than the one imagined by the friars and Jesuits upon the immediate arrival of the conquistadors. Instead of preparing for the kingdom of God, religious ministers were arguing for a much baser goal: the preservation of their privileges [ fueros] to their respective Orders, for the mere sake of their continuation in a project they no longer directed. 96 These are the names of some of the protagonists in other metrical romances: see Eugenio, Awit and Corrido, passim.

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Native elite or principales, too, seemed to support the autonomy of the mission provinces and friar immunity, but for very different reasons. With the assertion of native custom as a quasi-sphere of jurisdiction outside both Spanish law and Christian morality, Indians became conscious of being, at least in a limited sense, free of both. While many had become separated from the traditions that had guided their grandparents or great-grandparents, they also benefited from the preservation of their languages in the frontier provinces, the preservation of certain practices in the name of paraliturgical celebrations; and, most importantly, the absence of Spaniards in their towns and villages beyond the missionary priest. If we follow the pioneering work of postcolonial thinkers like Frantz Fanon, as well as more recent scholars like Ranajit Guha of the Indian Subaltern Studies group, one might argue that racial division and racism is implicit in every colonial formation from the beginning: whether it concerns the Spanish and Portuguese overseas empires in the sixteenth century or the nineteenth-century colonial states in India, Algiers, Indochine (Vietnam), and the Dutch East Indies.97 The articulation of racism in San Agustín, however, owed itself specifically to the perceived discredit of the friars’ own contribution to the conquest and colonization of the Philippines, up to and including the official Church’s initiative to train natives for the secular priesthood in order to replace the mission parishes administered by the religious Orders. For San Agustín and later colonial writers, racism explained away the Hispanization that never happened. More significantly, it recast the spiritual conquest of resettlement and conversion, so that the main obstacle to both was no longer the Devil but the natives themselves: their nature, their character, and above all else their will. Given that substrate of recalcitrance and refusal, both the expectations and strategies of religious ministers had to change. Counter-Hispanization now had to do more than simply protect natives from the predatory interests of “bad Christians.” It had to prepare natives for a society in which their primary role would be to sustain the “natural” superiority of a foreign, invasive presence. Seen in this way, San Agustín’s critique of the Indian illustrates the genealogy of colonial racism at the threshold that it went from being an implicit premise behind the right of conquest to an explicit argument to determine future colonial policies, up to and including the Special Laws decrees in the nineteenth century.98 Why teach Indians Spanish if, like 97 See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 37–41; and Ranajit Guha, Domination Without Hegemony, 60–94. 98 See Blanco, Frontier Constitutions, 64–66.

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Caliban in Shakespeare’s The Tempest, they would only learn it in order to curse their rulers? Why teach them to read if they would only use letters to interpret laws in their favor? Why teach them the nuances of Christian doctrine, if they would only turn them in favor of the autonomy of native custom in the mission towns? The frontier provinces were already ruled by the expediency of monastic authority: could they sustain the additional expediency of native custom? At the furthest reach of this inquiry, the evolution of Philippine theater and metrical romance illustrates this activity of upstaging the (spiritual) conquest through the multiple restagings and reframings of conquest itself. Not only did this involve the transgression of the boundaries for speaking and participating in Spanish rule; but also the preoccupation and habitation of a set of narratives in which these acts of transgression would “fit” within the sphere of native custom and paraliturgical tradition, i.e. where native autonomy was sanctioned by Spanish law. On the one hand, the jester’s theatrical expression was given full license, unbound by stage or script, to exploit the possibilities of transgression by lampooning the “officially” sanctioned representation onstage, and highlighting its outer limits. On the other hand, the cross-dressing Moorish warrior princess introduced a new, unexpected, and unwelcome protagonist into the phantasmagorias of the Christian imaginary. As an archetype, she references both the female shaman [baylan / catalonan] and the Moro pirate: both of whom unrelentingly eroded the sphere of the mission and appeared by the middle of the eighteenth century to even have the upper hand. More than an archetype, however, the Moorish princess might be said to represent a symptom or signifier of the colonial unconscious. Borrowing from the language of Freudian psychoanalysis to describe the work of dreams, one might characterize her dramatization as a form of “wish fulfillment.” The Moorish princess’s exploits suggest to the audience that the Law (symbolic as well as literal) of Spanish rule, which was ceaselessly announced by Christianity while being perpetually deferred, finally does arrive. Yet it comes about not by the initiative or design of the Crown or the Church but rather that of the subject who stakes a claim to participating in both by right of legal access (i.e. marriage or inheritance) and by virtuous deeds. Such a narrative goes entirely against the Christian scene of conversion as it had been structured around the themes of spiritual conquest, pacification, demonology, undeception, and the unearned gift of divine and omnipotent grace. Whatever else audience members took from the Moorish princess’s conversion to Christianity, they knew she earned and rightfully deserved

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the privileges and benefits that Christianity promised to confer onto her and her present or future children. The stage was set, in any case, for the emergence of the protagonist Florante, in Francisco Baltazar’s nineteenth-century saga Pinagdaanang Buhay ni Florante at ni Laura sa Kahariang Albania. This queer Christian prince would do more than simply claim access to his bride and rightful inheritance; he would unmask and indict the entire spectacle of authority and law on the colonial frontier as a masquerade to hide the hypocrisy and impunity of the lawgivers. Florante’s immortal lines serve as a fitting conclusion to the upstaging of spiritual conquest, towards a reworking of undeception [desengaño] as an instrument of native popular resentment to Spanish rule: Mahiganting Lañgit! Bañgis mo,i, nasaan? Ngayo,i, naniniig sa pagkagulaylay Bago,i, ang bandila nang lalong casam-an Sa Reinong Albania,i, iniuwauagay-uay?

Great Heaven above, where lies your fierce wrath? Unsurpassed as you are now in quiet repose Meantime, is it the flag of utter Evil That now f lutters above the Albanian kingdom?

Sa loob at labás ñg bayan cong sauî caliluha,i, siyang nangyayaring harî cagaliñga,t, bait ay nalulugamî iniinís sa hucay nang dusa,t, pighatî.

Within and outside my ill-fated polity [bayan] Sovereign is none other than Treason itself All value and goodness have sunk in the mire To suffocate in the grave of suffering and sorrow

Ang magandang asal ay ipinupocol Sa laot nang dagat nang cut-ya,t, lingatong …

All noble deeds are cast aside Into the sea depths of contempt and disregard …

Ñguni, ay ang lilo,t, masasamang loob

And yet treachery and wickedness themselves Upon the throne of honor sit And before all those perfidious, of savage deeds There now burns fragrant incense.

Sa trono nang puri ay inilulucloc At sa balang sucab na may asal hayop Mabañgong incienso ang isinusuob.99

99 Balagtas, Francisco. Florante at Laura. May Paunang Salita at mga Paliwanag ni Carlos, Ronquillo (mimeograph). Stanzas 41–44.

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Mas, Sinibaldo de. Informe sobre el estado de las islas Filipinas en 1842: Escrito por el autor del Aristodemo, del Sistema musical de la lengua castellana etc. I. Sancha, 1843. Mas, Sinibaldo de. Informe sobre el estado de las Islas Filipinas en 1842, pte. III: Política Interior. 1843. Mojares, Resil B. Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel: A Generic Study of the Novel Until 1940. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: University of the Philippines Press, 1988. Murillo Velarde, Pedro. Historia de la Provincia de Philipinas de la Compañia de Jesus. : Segunda parte, que comprehende los progresos de esta provincia desde el año de 1616, hasta el de 1716. Con las licencias necesarias en Manila : En la Imprenta de la Compañia de Iesus, por D. Nicolas de la Cruz Bagay, 1749. Internet Archive, http:// archive.org/details/historiadelaprov00muri. Last accessed November 17, 2022. Ness, Sally Ann. Body, Movement, and Culture: Kinesthetic and Visual Symbolism in a Philippine Community. Pittsburgh, PN: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1992. Noceda, Fr. Juan de (SJ) and Sanlúcar, Fr. Pedro de (SJ’s) Vocabulario de la lengua tagala. Manila, Philippines: Reimpreso de Ramírez y Giraudier, 1860. Ortiz, Fr. Tomás. Práctica del ministerio, que siguen los religiosos del Orden de N.P.S. Augstín, en Philippinas. Manila, Philippines, 1713. Pérez, Ángel, comp. Relaciones Agustinianas de las razas del norte de Luzon: coleccionadas. Manila, Philippines: Bureau of public printing, 1904. Phelan, John Leddy. The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1565–1700. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1967. Pino, Yolanda. “La historia de Carlomagno y de los Doce Pares de Francia en Chile,” Folklore Americas 26:2 (December 1966), 1–29. Prokosch Kurath, Gertrude. “Mexican Moriscas: A Problem in Dance Acculturation,” Journal of American Folklore 62:244 (April-June 1949), 87–106. Retana, Wenceslao. Noticias histórico-bibliográficas del teatro en Filipinas desde sus orígenes hasta 1898. Madrid, Spain: Victoriano Suárez, 1909. Roces, Alfredo J. Fiesta. Manila, Philippines: Vera-Reyes, 1980. Rubio Merino, Pedro. Don Diego Camacho Y Avila, Arzobispo de Manila de Guadalajara de Mexico, 1695–1712. Seville, Spain: Escuela de Estudios Hispano Americanos, 1958. Salita at Buhay nang Doce Pares sa Francia campon nang Emperador Carlo Magno hangang sa ipagcanoló ni Galalong mapatay sa Roncesvalles. Manila, Philippines (n.p.): n.d. Copyright Biblioteca Nacional de España. San Agustin, Fr. Gaspar de (OSA). “Carta … a un amigo suyo está en España que le pregunta el natural y genio de los indios naturales de las Islas Filipinas. MS: 4º. Manila 8 de 1725. Es copia,. Fol, 1–40 v : Siguen: pregunta del P. Pedro Murillo de la compañía de Jesús: ¿Quién es el indio?; resumen de dicha carta por dicho P.

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Murillo; descripción en copla de las Yslas Filipinas y de su naturales / por José Azcárate a su amigo Fr, Julián Diaz. San Antonio, Fr. Juan Francisco de (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. Sampaloc, Philippines, 1738. Santa Inés, Fr. Francisco de (OFM). Crónica de la Provincia de San Gregorio Magno de Religiosos Descalzos de N.S.P. San Francisco en las Islas Filipinas, China, Japon, etc. 2v. Biblioteca Historia Filipina. Manila, Philippines: Tipo Litografía de Chofre y Comp., 1892. Santiago, Luciano P.R. The Hidden Light: The First Filipino Priests. Manila, Philippines: New Day Publishers, 1987. Tiongson, Nicanor G. Kasaysayan ng komedya sa Pilipinas, 1766–1982. Manila, Philippines: Integrated Research Center, De La Salle University, 1982. Tiongson, Nicanor G. Komedya. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: University of the Philippines Press, 1999. Tiongson, Nicanor G. “The Philippine Komedya: History, Indigenization, Revitalization,” Philippine Humanities Review 11:1–2 (2010). journals.upd.edu.ph, https:// journals.upd.edu.ph/index.php/phr/article/view/4748. Web. Last accessed November 17, 2022. Tiongson, Nicanor G. “Ang Pusong sa Dulang Tagalog: Panimulang Pag-aaral,” in University of the Philippines Center for Integrative and Development Studies Centennial Lecture Series: Memories, Visions and Scholarship and Other Essays. Abad, Gemino, ed. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: University of the Philippines. Center for Integrative and Development Studies, 2001. 305–338. Toros y cañas en Filipinas en 1623. Fragmento de un manuscrito inédito. Tirada de 25 ejemplares numerados. Barcelona, Spain, 1903. Wachtel, Nathan. Vision of the Vanquished: The Spanish Conquest of Peru through Indian Eyes 1530–1570. Translated by Ben and Siân Reynolds. New York, NY: Barnes & Noble Import Division, Harper and Row Publishers, 1977. Warman, Arturo. La danza de moros y cristianos. Mexico City, Mexico: Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1972. Wendt, Reinhard. “Philippine Fiesta and Colonial Culture,” Philippine Studies 46: 1 (1998). 3–23. White, Joyce C. “Incorporating Heterarchy into Theory on Socio-Political Development: The Case from Southeast Asia,” Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 6:1 (1995). 101–123. Wolters, O.W. History, Culture, and Region in Southeast Asian Perspectives. Ithaca, NY: SEAP Publications, 1999. Woods, Damon L. The Myth of the Barangay and Other Silenced Histories. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: University of the Philippines Press, 2017.



Conclusion: The Promise of Law “Apocalypse Now? That’s Apocalypse Yesterday already!” — Fmr. Congressman Benjamin Cappelman, on the use of Ifugaos to film Apocalypse Now1

Commonwealth vs. Cult in the Conjuration of Law On the outskirts of the town of Dolores, Quezon province, approximately 200 km outside Manila, lies the foot of Mt. Banahaw, a mountain that has been the site of religious pilgrimages as long as the surrounding communities can remember. Unlike most religious pilgrimages in the Philippines, however, these have never received official sanction or promotion by the Church. Despite early attempts by the Franciscans to penetrate the nearby coastal areas of Laguna de Bay, the density of the forests and inaccessibility of the uneven terrain around the mountain in southern Luzon made it a suitable place for unconverted and recently converted Christians to escape their forced settlement in Christianized communities. In one of the more sensational exposés revealed by Dominican priests in the adjacent province of Laguna during the seventeenth century, religious ministers uncovered numerous caves that were being used as native holy places or simbahan [now the Tagalog word for (Christian) church] for the ritual observance and veneration of ancestral spirits or anito. In the former barrio of Santo Tomás, for example, these ritual feasts culminated in the appearance of a giant snake or sawa (reticulated python, which grow up to 21 ft.), who would “speak” with the catalonan or shaman.2

1 Cited in Padmapani Perez and Deirdre McKay, “Apocalypse Yesterday, already – Ifugao extras and the making of Apocalypse Now,” 8. 2 See the 1686–1688 report by Archbishop Felipe Pardo (OP), “Carta … sobre la idolatría de los naturales de la provincia de Zambales, y de los del pueblo de Santo Tomás y otros circunvecinos,” in AGI FILIPINAS, 75, n.23. For a brief description of this document, see Jean-Paul Potet, Ancient Beliefs and Customs of the Tagalogs, 32.

Blanco, J.D., Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press 2023 doi: 10.5117/9789463725880_concl

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The local residents of the towns around Mt. Banahaw refer to the many “holy sites” [puwesto] visited by religious pilgrims and tourists: the act of conducting a visit to these holy sites is pamumuwesto.3 These sites display natural wonders and miraculous signs that reinforce the legend of Mt. Banahaw as a Promised Land or New Jerusalem. 4 In addition to these miraculous signs, however, residents and travelers have established makeshift shrines throughout the area, which vary greatly in terms of the attention they attract and dedication to their upkeep. Some mimic the shrines that Philippine families regularly build in or around our houses, with an image of Christ or the Virgin Mary placed in a niche surrounded by cemented rocks. In others, these same images are placed like sentinels guarding entrances to a cave, or in elevated areas around the Sta. Lucia falls, where they gaze out and down at the surrounding riverbed from boulders streaked with candle wax and surrounded by withered garlands. Seeing these images presiding over their forest home, one can’t help but feel something akin to the experience of awe and perhaps even terror. The open display of these religious images against the surrounding environment appears shocking, but for two very different reasons. On the one hand they provoke scandal: here they stand, randomly grouped together, exposed to the elements, not to mention the fingers and lips of devout pilgrims and the black soot from candles made of animal fat. The sky is their ceiling; some of the images are even broken or chipped. For priests and missionaries, the images’ state of disrepair and negligence may reflect poorly on their caretakers; but on a broader level, their decrepitude reflects poorly on the ability of Christian devotional piety to account for its own artifacts of the imagination. Such, at least, was the impression of Augustinian missionary priest Fr. Andrés de Castro y Amuedo in 1790; who, upon seeing the dilapidated condition of the Taal Church, fell into melancholy and rage at the fallen state of the missions and laxity of Christian piety throughout the mission overseas.5 On the other hand, for pilgrims and tourists who frequent the area – particularly during the month of Holy Week (usually April) – the haunting images perched atop boulders and outcrops may convey a different kind of wonder. For just as scandalous as their exposure to the natural elements is 3 See Rene Somera, “Pamumuwesto of Mount Banahaw,” 436–452. 4 For the popular legends surrounding this belief, see Somera, ibid., 436–437; and Fr. Vicente Marasigan (SJ), A Banahaw Guru, 206–209. 5 Fr. Andrés de Castro (OSA), in Fr Manuel Merino (OSA), “La provincia filipina de Batangas,” 210.

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Figure 19: A makeshift shrine atop outcropping boulders at the foot of the puwesto Sta. Lucia Falls. Images include two statues of the Immaculate Conception and a decapitated Santo Niño (photo courtesy of author).

the exposure of the surrounding environment to the naked sovereignty of their gaze(s); the sudden intimacy of divine immanence that radiates forth from them in the mind of the believer. The illusion of their surveillance from their elevated placement is heightened, of course, by the relative absence of infrastructure surrounding them: if not for their stewardship, the surrounding forest seems to withdraw into its mysterious and largely undomesticated growth, occasioned by signs of human habitation or passage. But regardless of their placement in forest or metropolitan shrine, icons are always unsettling. Just as folk legend sustains the idea that Mt. Banahaw houses the mystic city of Jerusalem in its depths – a city that can only be glimpsed by signs that leak out to the “world above” in the form of a scene or display – so too does the icon as a visible image enrobe the invisible archetype of divinity; commemorating, reenacting, and perhaps even continuing to channel divine presence in human history.6 The Church never took this power lightly: this is why the doctrine of images accounts at least in part for the controversies leading to the East-West Schism in 1054; 6 For an extended meditation on the power of images in colonial New Spain, see William Taylor, Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico Before the Reforma.

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and later, the European wars of religion involving Catholic and Protestant sects in the sixteenth century. The irruption and saturation of divine presence throughout the mountain through these makeshift shrines and their images convey an unruly, even obscene display of spiritual authority. By “obscene,” I emphasize the central technique of this authority – the abolition of distance and perspective.7 This abolition of distance certainly contributed to the intensity of religious experience among the settled populations around the mountain, as witnessed by the proliferation of religious cults in the region over the course of the past century alone (estimated to be around 60 by 1999). 8 This characteristic of spiritual authority conveyed in the religious image introduces the peculiar dynamic established between law, the native subject, and the Christian evangelizing effort on the frontiers of the Spanish empire between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Their potency, as well as the religious authority that sustains it, consisted in the following paradox: without stemming from nor answering to any established legal civil code, authority, ordinance, or policy, these holy sentinels pronounced the existence of dominion, established authority, rule. Through the representation of miracles and apparitions of divine justice in religious literature, these images dispensed reward when merit is due, punished the wicked, guaranteed the oversight of oaths and promises, meted out justice in their breach; even to the point of occasionally speaking, or walking through the regions they inhabit, as a governor might inspect the province(s) under their jurisdiction (see Chapter 5). Their elevated placement on boulders and at the entrance of caves around Mt. Banahaw makes them appear to survey the surrounding landscape and its inhabitants. In narrowing the distance between the celestial and human realms, they also heighten the confusion between the viewer’s inclusion in a society or commonwealth founded on customs, traditions, and laws (which the Spanish designated with the word república [from Latin: res publica]), versus inclusion in a community of believers or followers, as in a cult [Sp. culto]. Yet the coexistence and overlap or homology between commonwealth and cult masks a fundamental difference. While the republic designates some measure of collective and reciprocal acknowledgment, recognition, obligation, and accountability to and from 7 This reading is inspired, in part, by Jean Baudrillard’s use of the term in “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in Hal Foster, ed., The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, 126–133. Baudrillard fails to mention the religious aspect of ecstasy, which the obscenity of communication and information presents in a profane context. 8 See Troy Bernardo, “The Altar of Mt. Banahaw,” web. Last accessed 1 March 2011.

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the law, the cult depends almost entirely on the future promise of a law as it was projected by the mission as a frontier institution. This promise of law, as I have portrayed it, informed both the encipherment of social anomie in the literature of spiritual conquest by the religious Orders, and its numerous stagings in the theater of apparitions, visions, and miracles. It was around such a promise that both Philippine Christianity and native custom were co-invented: the first, with the aid of an imaginary Christian order, whose phantasmagorias always outpaced their explanation and interpretation from the religious ministers; the second, as a response to the rise of colonial racism to rationalize the social anomie of native communities both within and outside the mission settlements. Monastic sovereignty and native custom arose as the twin symptoms to a perpetually deferred or incomplete conquest. Yet in accommodating to the absence of law in the religious provinces, both the religious Orders and their native neophytes also created and developed the means for reproducing their own forms of expediency. At the heart of counter-Hispanization is the perpetual deferral of the law’s arrival through its repeated “conjuration.” In Spanish and English, the verb to conjure [Sp. conjurar] denotes the performance or incantation of a magical formula towards an intended result, which is why it connotes enchantment, witchcraft, deception, or trickery, in its more common usage (as in “to conjure up”). The act of summoning extends to a figurative dimension, in which conjuring (up) is associated with evoking or envisaging something in the imagination, especially for an audience. The Latin etymology of the verb to conjure [L. coniuro], however, best captures the Janus-faced relationship of conjurations to the law. Coniuro denotes an oath or promise made by various individuals to band together as a group, unite, under a shared understanding or purpose – literally, a shared law [ius]. But the act of coniuro, a mutual and reciprocal promise, also connotes a conspiracy or complot against established authority. Why else would subjects under a commonwealth need to band together as a group and swear fealty to one another? This is precisely, however, what the religious Orders effected in the mission provinces: whether they did so under the defense of friar immunity and the terms of Concordia (see Chapter 2); or through the theo-politics of religious conversion (Chapters 4–5); or through the Spanish Christian articulation of colonial racism (Chapter 7). Not surprisingly, the conjuration of law is also how native maginoó and datu – that is, the elite or principales – modeled their relationship to political and religious authority: through the invocation and defense, in other words, of another (an-other) “law” represented by the body of native customs or traditions or ugalí (Chapters

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6–7). Both conjurations found their expression in the literature of spiritual conquest: that corpus of religious chronicles, letters, reports, resolutions, and finally devotional Tagalog literature, that warded off the encroachment of Crown authority by ceaselessly invoking its imminent Second Coming [Parousia]. The result, as we have seen, was not the cultural Hispanization of the Philippines between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, but rather the opposite: the counter-Hispanizing politics of religious ministers, native elite, and their reconstituted communities after the conquest and colonization of the coastal areas of the archipelago. With the repeated staging of the foundation of political authority, expressed in the romances of Christian crusade and Moorish conversion to Christianity, we see a tendency of these stagings to give way to upstagings of the Spanish Empire’s founding myths. The satirization of these myths is clear, in any case, in the figure of the pusong as well as Francisco Baltazar’s Florante at Laura (Chapter 7). Such upstagings freed writers to reimagine the law beyond the rule of kings and queens under the blessings of Divine Providence.

Confabulations of Philippine “Split-Level Christianity” Tension and conflict characterized the relationship between the colonial government and the religious Orders all the way up to the nineteenth century. This tension was exploited by young native and mestizo writers [called ilustrados] of the late nineteenth century. Yet the economic and administrative reforms of the late eighteenth century, beginning with the expulsion of the Jesuits (in 1768) and the administration of Don José Basco y Vargas (1778–1787), also forged a new rapprochement between the “two Majesties.” With the erstwhile Jesuit missions redistributed among the remaining mendicant Orders, the colonial government came to depend ever more heavily on the friars as members of the colonial bureaucracy. The friars (in this case, the Augustinians), in turn, successfully appealed to the Crown, to restore those mission doctrinas that had been seized by Basco’s predecessor, governor-general Don Simón de Anda y Salazar. In fact, one may read the ensuing competition between the religious Orders and the largely native and mestizo secular clergy for control and direction of the mission parishes as reflective of a larger question: the ambivalence of the colonial government to either undertake once and for all the secularization of mission parishes and the full incorporation of the mission territories under Spanish law; or to refunctionalize the

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religious Orders to better serve the transformation of the archipelago into an income-generating colony.9 For the native communities reared in the frontier provinces where Spanish rule was weak, however, the palette of economic reforms advanced by Basco y Vargas produced an equally pronounced ambivalence.10 On the one hand, a market-based economy showed signs of more effectively accomplishing the task that the Crown had originally assigned to the friar and Jesuit Orders – the concentrated settlement of native populations into towns. The accomplishment of this feat would amount to the completion of the conquest and the inauguration of a post-conquest juridical and social order. On the other hand, the new economy also threatened to demolish or reduce to impotence the three main bulwarks protecting colonial subjects from their effective proletarianization – the frontier, the missionary priest, and the custom-bound elite or principalía. Perhaps the emergence of religious literature and theater in Tagalog owes itself to a question that had not been available to Christian neophytes and colonial subjects prior to the eighteenth century: how do we imagine the terms of our final submission and acquiescence to Spanish rule, i.e. without limits, frontiers, or exceptions?11 This question, of course, elicited in turn a more hazardous one for colonial rule: would it be possible to imagine the terms of refusal and defiance to the fact of conquest, given the survival of the frontier province? The latter question persists in contemporary accounts and explanations for a uniquely and peculiarly Philippine Christianity. In 1966, Fr. Jaime Bulatao (SJ) famously gave the name “split-level Christianity” to distinguish the Filipino perspective of sin, guilt, and absolution from what a Lutheran or Calvinist minister from the time of the Reformation might simply identify as the endemic hypocrisy of the universal Church as an institution. Bulatao’s characterization of this “Filipino type” of Christianity describes well the cultural dynamic that developed between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries as I have presented it here. The first characteristic of split-level Christianity, Fr. Bulatao argues, is “the conviction of the f itness [read: efficacy] of each of two objectively inconsistent thought-and-behavior systems” (25). The second is a disavowal of the discrepancy between these two systems, which forecloses from the outset the feeling of hypocrisy 9 See John Blanco, Frontier Constitutions, 64-94. 10 See Renato Constantino, The Philippines. A Past Revisited, 133–149. 11 See Rafael, Contracting Colonialism, 167–209. His interpretation, however, leans on an anthropology of native values that sidesteps the historical conflict between the colonial government and the religious Orders and its development over the course of two centuries.

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or remorse; and an attempt to construct an environment in which the discrepancy does not arise. “Both systems,” he writes, “are left to coexist without disturbance and without guilt.” Finally, the maintenance of this disavowal requires “a need to keep the authority figure at a distance” (ibid.). The latter strategy explains his observation that, while Filipino Christians exhibit a “deep reverence” for priests, and their parish priest above all, they also regard him as a foreigner, an outsider, whom they semiconsciously or unconsciously reject (28). The conditions for the fabrication of “Philippine Christianity” to grow began with the mission as agent of frontierization and the counter-Hispanizing thrust of the mission province. The persistence of the frontier allowed for the coexistence of otherwise competing models of colonial society, based on the divergence of opinion regarding resettlement, the immunity of the religious Orders, the abjuration of pre-Christian ideas of the spirit world, the continued practices of slavery and slave-raiding, and the emergence of custom [ugalí] as an everyday politics of defiance and improvised accommodation to colonial rule. The enduring legacy of social anomie in the aftermath of the conquest also facilitated the hegemony of spiritual conquest as the imaginary matrix that supplanted the law in the name of supplementing it. Interestingly enough, it is instructive to note that Fr. Bulatao’s attempt to foster a genuine dialogue between the two perceived systems led him down a rabbit’s hole of paranormal investigation, astral spirit projection, and ghost sightings.12 But in this respect, at least, he was no different from a lineage of priests and native and mestizo messianic leaders, who took the phantasmagorias of the religious imaginary beyond the boundaries of orthodoxy with the post-colonial future of Christianity at stake.

ReOrient or ReOccident? The case of the Philippines, finally, is instructive to the larger field of Spanish expansion in Latin America precisely because it manifests the furthest development of the frontierizing tendency of the provincial religious Orders throughout the Spanish territories of the New World. As such, it recombines and concentrates not only many of the typical indigenous responses to foreign invasion and rule – resistance, flight, apostasy, desertion, and (eventually) 12 See Paterno Esmaquel II, “Jesuit psychologist Jaime Bulatao: ‘Seer of hearts,’” Rappler, 14 February 2015, web.

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resignation – but also the friar response to their marginalization in New Spain and Peru, where their institutional autonomy was severely curtailed by the ecclesiastical hierarchy of the bishops. The main difference among these regions, it turns out, lay not in the supposed benevolence of the friars, but rather the constantly renegotiated relationship of the frontier provinces and the mission as frontier institution to the hinterlands of the archipelago. In saying this, this work has called into question any neat formulas that attempt to represent the complementary interests of the Crown, Archbishop, and religious Orders towards the abstract goal of Hispanization. As I have contended, counter-Hispanization best describes the activity of the Orders in the mission settlements and towns under their pastoral care until the nineteenth century. Acknowledging the heterogeneity and weakness of divergent interests amongst the institutional powers during the Spanish colonial period recenters monastic sovereignty, and with it the mission as frontier institution, as the main agents of Spanish rule in the lives of most native Filipinos – as opposed to the Manila galleon trade or the century-long wars and conflicts with the Moros and other European powers (predominantly the Portuguese, Dutch, and British). Spiritual conquest as a form of counter-Hispanization also foregrounds the phantasmic character of this agency, inscribed and instituted in quasi-juridical acts (such as the founding of settlements and cults), apparitions and miracles, and finally the birth of Tagalog literature and theater.

Bibliography Baudrillard, Jean. “The Ecstasy of Communication,” in Foster, Hal, ed. The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1983. 126–133. Bernardo, Troy. “The Altar of Mt. Banahaw” (posted October 5, 2001). Web. www. urduja.com/spirit/mtbanahaw.htm. Last accessed March 1, 2011. Carta de Felipe Pardo sobre la idolatría de los naturales de la provincia de Zambales, y de los del pueblo de Santo Tomás y otros circunvecinos,” (1686–1688). AGI FILIPINAS, 75, n. 23. Constantino, Renato. The Philippines: A Past Revisited. Quezon City (Manila): Tala Pub. Services, 1975. Esmaquel II, Paterno. “Jesuit psychologist Jaime Bulatao: ‘Seer of hearts,’” Rappler, Philippines. February 14, 2015. Web: https://www.rappler.com/nation/83939jesuit-jaime-bulatao-psychology/. Accessed August 1, 2022. Marasigan, Fr. Vicente (SJ). A Banahaw Guru: Symbolic Deeds of Agapito Illustrismo. Quezon City (Manila), Philippines: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1985.

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Merino, Manuel (OSA). “La provincia filipina de Batangas vista por un misionero a fines del siglo XVIII,” Missionalia Hispánica 34:100–101 (January-December 1977). 139–248. Perez, Padmapani and McKay, Deirdre. “Apocalypse Yesterday, already – Ifugao extras and the making of Apocalypse Now.” Manuscript (n.d.). Web. https:// www.academia.edu/24432040/Apocalypse_Yesterday_already_Ifugao_extras_and_the_making_of_Apocalypse_Now. Last accessed November 20, 22. Potet, Jean-Paul. Ancient Beliefs and Customs of the Tagalogs. Morrisville, NC: Lulu.com, 2014. Rafael, Vicente L. Contracting Colonialism: Translation and Christian Conversion in Tagalog Society under Early Spanish Rule. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Somera, Rene. “Pamumuwesto of Mount Banahaw,” Philippine Studies 34:4 (1986). 436–452. Taylor, William. Shrines and Miraculous Images: Religious Life in Mexico Before the Reforma. Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2010.

Bibliography Manuscripts and archives Archivo General de Indias, Sevilla (Spain) “Carta de la Audiencia de Manila sobre enseñanza del castellano a los indios,” AGI FILIPINAS, 26, R. 6, N. 24. “Carta de Corcuera quejándose de dominicos y arzobispo” (1636). AGI FILIPINAS, 21, R. 10, N. 44. “Carta de Domingo de Zabalburu sobre comedias y festejos” (1708). AGI FILIPINAS,129, N. 93. “Carta de Corcuera criticando a los religiosos,” AGI FILIPINAS, 21, R. 10, N. 42 (1636). “Carta de Fausto Cruzat sobre los indios mundos,” AGI FILIPINAS,16, R. 1, N. 6. “Carta de Felipe Pardo sobre la idolatría de los naturales de la provincia de Zambales, y de los del pueblo de Santo Tomás y otros circunvecinos,” (1686–1688). AGI FILIPINAS, 75, N. 23. “Carta del gobernador sobre tratos ilícitos de agustinos” (1655). AGI FILIPINAS, 31, N. 35. “Carta de Sebastián Hurtado de Corcuera, gobernador de Filipinas, dando cuenta del proceder de los religiosos de Santo Domingo, San Francisco y San Agustín, que no obedecen a Su Santidad ni acatan las cédulas reales” (1636). AGI FILIPINAS, 21,R.10,N. 42. “Carta…sobre la idolatría de los naturales de la provincia de Zambales, y de los del pueblo de Santo Tomás y otros circunvecinos,” (1686–1688). AGI FILIPINAS, 75, N. 23. “Instruccion a Gomez Perez Das marinas (9 de agosto de 1589),” in “Registro de oficio y partes de la Audiencia de Filipinas,” AGI, FILIPINAS, 339. L. 1. “Orden sobre abrir dos ríos para abastecer Manila.” AGI FILIPINAS 330, L. 4, F.109R-109V. “Orden para enseñanza y promoción al orden sacro de Indios.” AGI FILIPINAS, 331, l.7, F.227R (August 22, 1677). “Orden sobre evitar abusos de misioneros franciscanos.” AGI FILIPINAS, 332, L. 11, F.35V-37R. “Testimonio sobre los indios mundos y vagabundos de Otón y Panay” (1696). AGI FILIPINAS, 71, N. 1.

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Index Acabado, Stephen 17-18 Acapulco-Manila galleon trade 102, 160, 209 Acosta, Fr. José de (SJ) 110, 130-132, 135, 155 adivination [bilao] 136 n.78, 161, 165, 271; see also Philippine spirit-beliefs Aduarte, Fr. Diego de (OP) 115-116, 120, 125-128 Aetas see Philippine indigenous groups Agnus Dei see Christian paraphernalia Agoo, port of [in Pangasinan] 124, 128; see also Pangasinan province Agusan del Sur [in Mindanao island] 164 Aklan see Panay (island); and Visayas [island region] alipin [slave] 220, 238, 241, 245; see also debt-slavery Aguilar, Filomeno 28 Almond, Philip 235 Alonso Álvarez, Luis 218, 252 Althusser, Louis 248 Anda y Salazar, Don Simon de 314 Antipolo (Jesuit mission) see Rizal province, Antipolo mission and Holy Cross of 169-173, 176-179, 181, 184, 193-195 Apo Laki see Philippine spirit-beliefs apostasy, apostates 74, 124 Arechederra, Fray Juan de (OP) 209 ati-atihan [festival in Kalibo, Aklan] see fiestas, fiesta complex autos [religious plays] 284 Avila, Fr. Pedro de (OFM) 227-228 awit [dodecasyllabic verse] see Tagalog literature and metrical romance [awit and korido] 

Bauan (Old) 184; see also Holy Cross of Alitagtag bayan [native land / region] 52, 52 n. 7, 121, 228, 233, 238, 251-253, 261 baylan(a) / babaylan see shamans, shamanism, Philippine baylan / babaylan Belen, Gaspar Aquino de 223-224, 230, 232-233, 239, 241-242, 249 Bencuchillo, Fr. Francisco (OSA), 173, 201-202, 204-209 bibit [mischievous spirit] see Philippine spirit beliefs bilao see adivinations Bicol region 55, 164, 228; see also Luzon (island) Albay province, in 227 Camarines province, in 55, 174 n. 54, 227 Billy, Jacques de 236 Binangonan (Rizal province in Luzon [island]) 73 Binondo (Chinese district in Manila) 94 Bohol (island in Visayas [island region]) 5253, 66, 120-123, 253 Bolinao 80-85, 97-102; see also Zambales province (in Luzon [island]) Bolton, Herbert 105 Borja, Fr. Antonio de (SJ) see Barlaan at Josaphat Brewer, Carolyn 80 n. 3, 98, 121 n. 34, 129 n. 56, 140, 192 Buber, Martin, and I-Thou relationship 208 Bueras, Fr. Juan de (SJ) 119, 154, 158-159, 166 Bulatao, Fr. Jaime (SJ) 315-316 Bustillo Bustamante, Governor Manuel de 97

bad Christians [malos Christianos] 114, 300 bad Spaniards [malos españoles] 114 Bagohin, Doña Maria 205-206 Baltazar (Balagtas), Francisco 302, 314; see also Florante at Laura; and Tagalog literature Balugas see Philippine indigenous groups Bangui (northern Luzon [island]) 180 Bankaw [Leyteño chief or datu] 139 Banuwanhon 163-164; see also Philippine indigenous groups barangay [community] 52, 119, 228, 238, 251; see also bayan Barlaan at Josaphat 223-224, 231-239, 241-242, 248-250 baroque, as ethic 24, 39-42, 109 n.1, 198, 224 n. 20, 237 Barrantes, Vicente 295 Batangas province 68-69; 156-157; 173-176; 198 n. 19; 201, 207, 209, 277; see also Luzon (island)

cabeza de barangay [community headman] 111, 119 n.31, 220, 227 n.29, 228 cabecera [mission center], cabecera-visita complex 112-114, 112 n. 11, 128, 169-170, 177-178, 202, 205-206, 212, 275 Cagayan province (in Luzon [island]) 64, 115, 118, 125 n. 46 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro see (La) vida es sueño Camacho y Ávila, Archbishop Don Diego (OP) 93-97, 219-220, 226 n. 25, 239 n. 58, 262-263, 271-272, 285-287 Camarines province see Bicol region casa de reserva [exemption from official tribute] 225 Casas, Fr. Bartolomé de las (OP) 51, 57, 61, 85, 96, 108 Castro, Fr. Agustín María de (OSA) 67, 118, 176-182, 184, 207, 284 Castro y Amuedo, Fr. Andrés de (OSA) 310

350 

Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines

Catubig see Samar (in Visayas [island region]) Cavite province (in Luzon [island]) 67, 113, 179, 193, 280 Cebu (in Visayas [island region]) 22, 52-55, 66, 73, 113, 152-153, 190, 196-197, 278, 281-282; see also Visayas (island region) Cervantes, Fernando 129-130 China 199 n. 30, 124, 128, 180 and Chinese rites controversy 185, 185 n. 72 and Chinese trade with the Philippines 123-124, 173 n. 51, 193 Chinese immigrants 65, 90, 93, 160, 165, 207 n. 38, 225-226, 268, 277 Chinese mestizos see mestizos Chinese rebellions 68, 207 n. 38 Chirino, Fr. Pedro (SJ) 108, 111, 115-116, 120-123, 128, 138, 169-172, 179, 181, 248, 277 Christianity, Christianization 115, 127-129, 131, 133, 135, 137, 140, 150-153, 155-156, 158, 166, 169-170, 172, 177, 184-185, 190, 192, 208, 211-212, 220, 228, 234-235, 237-239, 242, 248, 250-253, 262, 267, 269, 274, 292, 296-297, 299, 301-302 313, 330 and Christian imaginaire 20-24, 36-38, 113, 185, 198, 290, 301, 313-316; see also baroque and Christian morality 130, 167, 276, 283, 300 and Christian paraphernalia 155, 157-159, 164 and Christian theology 22, 130-136, 237 and the Church 90, 324 and Counter-Reformation spirituality 109 n. 1, 237-239 and cults see cults, devotional and disciplinas de sangre [self-flagellations] 276 and fiestas, fiesta complex 165, 275-277 and religious Orders see religious missions and religious Orders and rhetoric of efficacy [eficacia] of divine grace see efficacy (divine) in the Philippines see Philippine Christianity cimarrones [fugitives] 74, 123 Coleman, Fr. Ambrose (OP) 51 Colín, Fr. Francisco (SJ) 67, 115, 164, 177 College of San José 227 colonial illusion see Christianity, Christianization and Christian imaginaire Combés, Fr. Francisco (SJ) 93 comedia [Spanish drama] 262, 283-289, 294, 298; see also komedya; moro-moro compadrazgo [fictive kinship] 229 Concordia 94-96, 313 conjuration [Coniuro] 108, 142, 149, 313-314 Conquest, Spanish 19, 38 n. 39, 51-57 Corcuera, Sebastián Hurtado de 82-83, 90-92, 174 n. 52

corporal punishment 91-92, 136, 174 Corpuz, O.D. 54 n. 9, 229 Council of Manila see Synod or Council of Manila (1582) counter-Hispanization 30, 96-97, 103, 314-316 Cruikshank, Bruce 72-73, 271 n. 33, 298 n. 95 Cruz, Apolinario de la see Tayabas rebellion (1841) Cruz, Fr. Baltasar de la (OP) 236 Cruz, José de la [Huseng Sisiw] 248, 291, 295 Cruzat y Góngora, General D. Fausto 225, 236 Cuesta, Archbishop Francisco de la 97, 263-264 cults, devotional 125 n. 47, 153, 190-192, 194-198, 282, 309-314 Holy Cross of Alitagtag or Old Bauan 172184, 189, 199, 207-208, 214, 265 Holy Cross of Antipolo 169-172 Our Lady of Caysasay (Virgin of Caysasay) 190, 198-209 Our Lady of Guidance 190-191, 196-198 Our Lady of Peace and Safe Voyage (Virgin of Antipolo) 127 n. 54, 173, 195 (figures 12 and 13), 209-210, 277-278 Our Lady of the Holy Rosary 190 Santo Niño (Holy Child of Cebu) 152-153, 180, 190, 192, 196, 203, 278 Cushner, Fr. Nicholas (SJ) 221 n. 15, 244 customs see Philippine native custom(s) [ugalí] Dagohoy, Francisco and Dagohoy rebellion 253 danzas de moros y cristianos [Christian-Moor dances] 277 n. 48, 284 n. 57, 287 n. 68, 291, 298 Dapitan (in Mindanao [island]) 123, 161 datu [native chief] or nobility see Philippine native elite [principalía] Deardoff, Max 270 debt-slavery or peonage, native 23, 26, 66 n. 34, 220-223, 229-230, 237-238, 250-251, 271 Delgado, Fr. Juan José (SJ) 260, 267-269 Deleuze, Gilles 40, 51 n. 4, 64 n. 30, 122 n. 38 desengaño [undeception] 30, 35, 40, 109 n. 1, 128-135, 140-141, 150, 156-159, 168, 236, 250, 267, 302 devil 23, 30, 34-35, 37, 39, 121-136, 140-143, 155-156, 158, 161-170, 238, 244, 249, 261, 282, 285, 300 Diego, Juan 206 Dios, Fr. Theodoro de la cuadre de (OP) 140 diwata (spirit) see Philippine spirit beliefs, diwata Doce Pares de Francia see Salita at Buhay ng Doce Pares sa Francia na Kampon ng Emperador Carlo Magno Hanggang Ipagkanulo ni Galalon na Nangapatay sa Roncesvalles

351

Index

doctrina [mission parish or town] see mission parish Dolores (Quezon Province) 309-312 domestic labor, forced [tanores] 92; see also forced labor East-West Schism (1054) 311 Echeverría, Bolívar 40-41, 224 n. 20 efficacy (divine) 151-153, 155, 158, 168, 172,183184, 195, 197, 231, 315; see also use-value(s) elite(s), Philippine native see Philippine native elite or principalía encomendero [royal grantee] 25-26, 52-53, 61, 81, 92, 108, 110-114, 155, 174-155, 225, 228-230 encomienda [royal trust] 65-66, 173, 218, 224-230 entrada [military expedition] 52-68, 111, 114, 124, 225, 233 epidemics 30, 55, 134, 137,153-156, 169-173, 184 Espinelli, Fr. Luis (SJ) 210 Eugenio, Damiana 290-291, 293 Fanon, Frantz 300 Fernández de Pardo, Fr. Felipe, Archbishop (OP) 80, 119 n. 32, 278-280, 309 n. 2 fiestas see Christianity, Christianization, and fiestas Florante at Laura 248, 302, 314; see also Tagalog literature forced labor [repartimiento] 20, 32, 42, 65-67, 71, 80, 82, 92, 111, 134; see also domestic labor, forced [tanores] freedmen, freedom 220, 237-241, 250-251, 288-289; see also mahadlika, maharlika; timawa friar estates 219, 225-226, 230, 244, 247 friar lands rebellion 253 frontier institution [mission as] 22, 32, 36, 90, 97, 102, 142, 193, 249, 260, 282, 313, 317 frontierization 22, 97, 103, 111, 120, 185, 193, 316 fueros [religious privileges] 43, 87, 92, 299; see also religious missions and religious Orders, friar immunity Galende, Fr. Pedro (OSA) 219 Gerona, Danilo 56 n. 14, 228 Gibson, Charles 57-58 Ginés de Sepúlveda, Juan 85 gobernadorcillo [native petty governor] 111, 136 n. 78, 220, 228, 253 Goiti, Martín de 52, 173-174, 196 Gómez de Espinosa, D. Salvador 91-92, 98, 226-227, 245 Gloria, Celedonio 182 Gramsci, Antonio 261 guachinangos [native Mexicans] 268 Guadalajara 263 Guamán Poma y Ayala, D. Felipe 82-84, 245 Guattari, Félix 122 n. 38

Guha, Ranajit 300 hacienda [large estate] system 67, 92, 223-226, 230, 238, 244, 247, 252 Hart, Donn 276, 289 Herrera, Fr. Diego de (OSA) 53, 108 Hispanization 18, 21, 24-30, 51, 106, 134, 156, 237, 272, 277, 284, 289, 292, 300, 314 Hispano-Dutch War see Spanish-Dutch War Historia de Carlo Magno see Doce Pares de Francia Huseng Sisiw see Cruz, José de la; and Tagalog literature idolatry 100, 130-132, 135-136, 154-155, 170, 221 n. 16, 271, 276 abuses, as 102, 291 Ileto, Reynaldo 38, 241 n. 64, 248-249 immunitas [religious immunity] see fueros Ilocos province 54, 56, 180, 253; see also Luzon (island) impunity 104 Indios [native subjects] 124, 131, 314 Asiatic Indian 275 Inglés, Fr. Vicente (OFM) 72-73 Inquilino [subleaser] 225-226 Inquisition 97, 140 Intramuros 52, 73, 116, 123, 127-128, 160, n. 27, 169, 174 n. 52; see also Manila Irving, D.R.M. 157 n. 20, 285 n. 61 Islam 123 Javellana, Fr. René (SJ) 218-219, 223 n. 19, 232 n. 46, 239 n. 58, 240, 247 Judith (biblical figure) 293-294, 298 Kaboloan [Pangasinan province] see Pangasinan province King of the Tagalogs 263 Kojin Karatani 261 komedya [Tagalog drama] see Philippine theater Kudarat, Qudarat (sultan) 66, 90, 116-117 n. 25 Ladia, Pedro see King of the Tagalogs ladino [bilingual native] 224, 231 Laguna de Bay (in Luzon [island]) 72, 169, 309 Laguna province (in Luzon [island]) 309 larawan, likhâ [totem] see Philippine spirit beliefs land enclosure see friar estates Lavezaris, Guido de 65 Le Gentil, Jean Baptiste 79, 286 Lee, Christina 151 n. 1, 170 n. 44, 192-193 Leon, Manuel de 226 Leonard, Irving 291 Leyte (island, in Visayas [island region]) 52, 73, 118, 137, 139, 161 Limahong 68 n. 37, 124

352 

Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines

limpieza de sangre [racial purity] 264 linambay [Cebuano spectacle] see Philippine theater, moro-moro Loarca, Miguel de 124 n. 43 Lockhart, James 24 n. 15, 193 López, Fr. Gregorio (SJ) 154 n. 9, 170 n. 44 López, Juan José 290-291 López de Legazpi, Miguel 31-32, 152, 173, 190 n. 2, 196-197 Loyola, Fr. Ignatius de 151, 237, 240 Lucio y Bustamante, Fr. Miguel (OFM) 266 Lumbera, Bienvenido 239-240, 247-248, 291-293 Luzon (island) 17-19, 52, 54-55, 56, 63, 67, 72-73, 80 n. 3, 117-128, 138, 156-157, 164, 169, 173, 175-176, 180, 190, 193, 207, 218, 225-228, 244, 278, 309 Cordillera mountain range, in 17-20, 124, 128 Sierra Madre Mountain Range, in 169 Magellan, Ferdinand 52, 123 n.39, 196 n. 12 maginoó [native chief or headman] see Philippine native elite [principalía] Magos, Alicia 19-20, 29 n. 24 mahadlika, maharlika [Tagalog freedmen] 238; see also debt-slavery or peonage, native; timawa Mahal na Pasion 224, 239-254 Mangyan see Philippine indigenous groups Manila 115, 160-161, 167, 180, 291 and Manila galleon trade 226, 234, 317 Manrique de Lara, Governor Don Sabiniano 210 Maravall, José Antonio 40, 109 n. 1 Marín, Fr. Esteban (OSA) 56 Martínez de Zuñiga, Fr. Joaquín (OSA) 209 n. 40, 282 n. 54, 286-289 Marx, Karl 134 n. 73, 217, 225 n. 23 Masbate (island, in Visayas [island region]) 73 Medina, Fr. Juan de (OSA) 125 n. 46, 173, 173 n. 51, 175 Medrana, Mariana 102 Mesa, Fr. Francisco de (OSA) 139 mestizos (mixed races) 28, 219, 225-226, 268, 314, 316 Malolos, revolt (1643) 253 Mexico 22, 24 n. 15, 25-27, 30-31, 35-36, 35 n. 33, 43, 60, 61, 81, 88, 89 n. 16, 97, 109, 121-122, 136 n. 78, 193, 218, 226, 231 n. 44, 263-264, 264 n. 9, 267, 277-278, 311 n. 6, 317 Mindanao (island) region 65-66, 90, 93, 117 n. 25, 123, 126 n. 49, 161, 164 Mindoro (island) 102, 119, 123, 154; see also Visayas region mission parish [doctrina] 21, 23, 36, 80-85, 88, 93-94, 98-102, 108, 114, 179, 220, 223, 229, 239, 252, 314

mission pueblo [cabecera] 73, 114, 128, 152-159, 172-173, 177, 229, 249,252, 271, 276 forced labor, in see forced labor [repartimiento] Moctezuma [Mexican Emperor] 121-122, 277 monachocracy [monastic sovereignty or monk-rule] 22-23, 84, 88-97, 141, 148, 301, 313, 317 Mondzain, Marie-José 194-196 Montoya, Don Gaspar 101 Moorish warrior princess 287, 290-299, 301 Moreno, Fr. Sebastian (OSA) 73 Morga, Antonio de 50, 64-65, 283-284 Moriones festival [in Marinduque island] 278 moro-moro see Philippine theater Mt. Banahaw, in Dolores, Quezon province (in Luzon [island]) 309-312 Mozo, Fr. Francisco (OSA) 72 Murillo Velarde, Fr. Pedro (SJ) 160, 174 n. 52, 209-211, 240 n. 62, 249, 260, 260 n. 1, 266, 276-278 Navarrete, Fr Domingo Fernández (OP) 118, 185 native customs see Philippine native customs [ugalí] nayon [unincorporated mission settlement] see visita nepantla [in-between] 155 n. 12 Ness, Sally Ann 278 New Laws of Charles V 32 n. 27, 110 New Spain see Mexico Newson, Linda 55-56, 66-67 Nuchera, Patricio Hidalgo 65-66 Nuestra Señora de Caysasay see cults, devotional, Our Lady of Caysasay Nuestra Señora de Guía [Our Lady of Guidance] see cults, devotional, Our Lady of Guidance Nuestra Señora de la Paz y Buen Viage [Our Lady of Peace and Safe Voyage] see cults, devotional, Our Lady of Peace and Safe Voyage Omnímoda [friar powers] 85-88, 90-97 Obando, Juan de 58 Orders, religious see religious missions and religious Orders Ordinances on the Discovery, Population and Pacification of the Indies 32, 58-62, 110 n.4 Ortega, Fr. Francisco de (OSA) 54 Ortiz, Fr. Tomás (OSA) 167, 270, 273 Osario venerable 284 pacification [pacificación] 29-30, 32, 36, 42, 51-54 as discourse 57-65 Padilla, Juan de 231, 240 Pagden, Anthony 33 n. 31, 132

353

Index

Palafox, Juan de (Bishop of Mexico) 267 Palaris revolt 68, 253 Panay (island, in Visayas [island region]) 67 Aklan province, in 140, 165 Central 20 Malonor, in 139-141 Otón, in 139-140, 162-165 Tapar rebellion (1663), in 134, 139, 146 Pangasinan province (in Luzon [island]) 54, 64, 68, 120, 123-128, 221 n. 15, 253 as Kaboloan 123-124 Papal bulls 86-87 Paredes, Oona 141 Parian (Chinese district) 226 Pasyon [Tagalog versification of the Passion] 38 n. 40, 109, 223 n. 19, 239-254, 284, 293 n. 85, 295-296 Paternina, Fray Joseph de (OSA) 97 Patronato Regio [royal patronage of the Church overseas] 85-86, 88-90, 93, 96, 108, 190, 269 pax Hispanica 34, 50, 74 Perea, Domingo de (y Roxas) 280 Phelan, John 24-30, 24 n. 15, 39 n. 43, 51, 53, 103, 112 n. 11, 192, 260, 275-276 Philip II 32, 34, 53, 57-63, 88-89, 190, 197 Philippine Christianity 23, 41, 176, 192, 217, 219, 220, 261, 328, 330, 331 Philippine indigenous groups Aeta 74 Agta 164, 166 Baluga 74 Banwanon 164 Ifugao 19 Igorot 56 Mangyan 119 Panayano (Bukidnon) 19-20 Philippine native customs [ugalí] 23-24, 30, 40-43, 223-224, 237-238, 242-243, 249-250, 260-262, 267, 269-282 [A]tapang sombong [tattling] 272 beso mano [hand-kissing] 210 borracherías [drunken revelry] 265 mabibig [loose-lipped] 272 maganito [ancestral veneration ceremony] 100, 117, 170 magpapahesus [prayers for the dying] 240, 247-248 pabasa [reading of the Passion in verse] 223, 293 n. 85 pag-hihinauakit [reprimanding] 273274 pagsambay [illicit sexual affair] 229 pamumuwesto [visiting holy sites] 310 panata [oath] 210 pasalamat [donations to the Church] 92 punas punas [touching the saint] 217 sábong [cockfighting] 274, 280-282, 293 tibao [mourning ceremony] 271-276 passim, 284

Philippine native elite [principalía] 228-230, 232, 235, 245-246, 266, 272, 276, 300, 314, 330 as datu [native chief] or Visayan nobility 42, 52, 122-124, 139, 220, 227-230, 234-252, 313 as maginoo [Tagalog nobility] 52, 220, 227-230, 234-238, 241-242, 245-254 Philippine Revolution (1896) 220 Philippine spirit beliefs anito, anitería [ancestral veneration] 131, 138, 177, 243, 324 Apo Laki [deity] 125, 127-128 bibit [mischievous spirit] 161, 165 diwata [spirit] 127, 137. 152 kapre [ghoul] 171 larawan, likhâ [totem, icon] 132, 135-136, 170 Tigbalang, tikbalang (phantom) 161-169 Philippine theater komedya [Spanish-style drama] 262, 286-287; see also comedia moro-moro (also linambay or sinulog [pantomime] 282-290, 295-299, 312 Pilapil, Fr. Mariano 254 Pilar, Marcelo H. del 22, 84, 86, 141 Pinagdaanang Buhay ni Florante at ni Laura sa Kahariang Albania 302 Pitong Infantes de Lara see Salita at Buhay na Kahabag-habag na Pinagdaanan nang Pitong Infantes de Lara at nang Kaabaabang Kanilang Ama sa Reinong España Plascencia, Fr. Juan de 161 Polanco, Fr. Hector (OP) 35-36 policía [polity, civil order] 32, 115-116, 118, 204, 263,268 political theology 43 n. 47, 210, 267 Polo, Fr. Eusebio (OSA) 274, 281-282 polos y servicios see forced labor [repartimiento] Poma de Ayala, Felipe Guamán 39 n. 43, 82-84 (figures 5-7), 245 Poole, Stafford 87 Pope Adrian VI 87, 90 Pope Leo X 86 principalía see Philippine native elite or principalía pusong [jester] 109 n. 2, 287-290, 298-299, 314 Qudarat (sultan) see Kudarat, Qudarat (sultan) Quevedo, Francisco de 264 Rabasa, José 59-60 racialization 164-166 and racism 260-262, 264, 269, 300, 313 Rada, Fr. Martín de (OSA) 54-55, 62, 108 Rafael, Vicente 27-29, 192 Rajah Matanda 253 Recopilación de las Leyes de Indias 60, 270

354 

Counter-Hispanization in the Colonial Philippines

reducción [forced resettlement] see resettlement, forced religious missions and religious Orders Augustinian (OSA) 32, 68 n. 38, 71-72, 91, 117-118, 141, 162, 174-176, 177-179, 201, 207, 209 Dominican (OP) 118, 123-128, 140-141, 221 n. 16, 309 Franciscan (OFM) 37, 72-73, 124-125, 135 n. 75, 161-162, 227-229 Jesuit (SJ) 99, 112 n. 10, 117-120, 131-132, 166, 169-172, 176, 179; expulsion of (1768), 118, 226 n. 25, 314 Recollect (OAR) 72-73, 80-85, 98-102, 116 and friar immunity 36, 87, 109, 184, 300, 313 religious conversion 28-30, 32, 109-111, 116, 126, 128-136, 141-142, 154, 167-172, 183-185 repartimiento see forced labor resettlement, forced [reducción] 32, 53, 111, 138, 157. Retablo de la Vida de Cristo, hecho en verso 240 Ribandeyra, Fr. Pedro de (SJ) 151 Ricard, Robert 24 n. 15, 31-32 Rizal, Dr. José 26-27, 49-50, 88 Rizal province Antipolo mission, in 138, 158, 162 Taytay mission, in 116, 169,184 Ronquillo de Peñalosa, Gonzalo 65 sábong (cockfighting) see Philippine native customs [ugalí] Salas, Fr. Geronimo de (OSA) 175 Salazar, Fr. Domingo de (OP), Archbishop of Manila 61, 89, 90, 131, 175 Salcedo, Diego de (Governor general) 97 Salcedo, Juan de 52, 124, 196-197 salambao see Chrisitanity, Christianization and fiestas, fiesta complex Salita at Buhay na Kahabag-habag na Pinagdaanan nang Pitong Infantes de Lara at nang Kaabaabang Kanilang Ama sa Reinong España 296-298 Salita at Buhay ng Doce Pares sa Francia na Kampon ng Emperador Carlo Magno Hanggang Ipagkanulo ni Galalon na Nangapatay sa Roncesvalles 263, 290-298, 303, 307; see also Historia de Carlo Magno Samar (in Visayas [island region]) 117, 122, 123 San Agustín, Fr. Gaspar de (OSA) 33-34, 93, 140-141, 156, 162-164, 175-176, 198-202, 205-207, 209, 259-261, 264-273, 287, 299-300 San Antonio, Fr. Juan Francisco de (OFM) 3637, 273 San Buenaventura, Pedro de (OFM) 161-162, 247 n. 71 San Pablo, Fr. Martín de (OAR) 80-81, 98, 102

Sánchez, Fr. Alonso (SJ) 63-64, 108, 131-132, 249 Sánchez, Fr. Diego (SJ) 169, 171, 277 Sande, Francisco de (Governor general) 65 sangley (Chinese trader) 160, 226; see also Chinese trade in the Philippines Sanlúcar, Fr. Pedro de (SJ) 117, 247 n. 71, 271 Santa Cruz, Fr. Baltasar de (OP) 69, 236 Santa Justa y Rufina, Don Basilio Sancho de (Archbishop) 274 Santa Prudencia 197 Santo Niño (Holy Child of Cebu) see cults, devotional, Santo Niño Santos, Fr. Juan (OP), 80-81, 98-102 Sarduy, Severo 224 n. 20 Schumacher, Fr. John (SJ) 218, 219 n. 11, 232 n. 47 Scott, James 18-19, 75 Scott, William Henry 17, 19 n. 6, 115, 227 n. 30, 251 Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de 85 Sepúlveda, Fr. Vicente de (OSA) 175 servicios personales [domestic personal labor] 92; see also domestic labor, forced Sevilla, José 291 shamans, shamanism, Philippine baylan / babaylan [Visayas region], 121-123, 121 n. 34, 132, 134, 136-142, 171, 299, 301 catalonan [Tagalog region] 119, 121, 121 n. 34, 132, 134-135, 136-140, 142, 153, 154 n. 11, 299, 301, 309 Sheridan Prieto, Cecilia 22, 22 n. 11, 97, 103 Siete Infantes de Lara 296-298; see also Salita at Buhay na Kahabag-habag na Pinagdaanan nang Pitong Infantes de Lara Sikatuna [datu] 122 Silang, Diego, Silang revolt 68, 253 simbahan [hallowed place; also church] 135, 204, 309 sitio [outlying mission settlement] see visita Sitoy, T. Valentino 53-54 Situado (royal subsidy) 218, 251 social anomie 20-24, 21 n. 10, 29, 38, 39-42, 59, 66-76, 109, 123, 142, 150,155, 168, 168 n. 42, 176, 193, 211, 245, 248, 250, 298 n. 95, 313, 316 Sola, Fr. Magino (SJ), 210 Spanish creoles 175, 175 n. 57, 262 n. 6 Spanish-Dutch War (or Hispano-Dutch War) (1648) 55, 66, 218 Spiritual Exercises 237, 237 n. 55 St. Ignatius Loyola see Loyola, Fr. Ignatius Stocker, Margarita 294 n. 86 sublî [dance] see Christianity, and Christianization, fiestas, fiesta complex; Philippine native custom(s) Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas 50, 64 Synod or Council of Manila (1582) 61-63, 89-90, 114, 131-132

Index

Taal (in Batangas province, Luzon [island]) 67, 156-157, 172-183, 184, 201-209, 212, 310; see also Luzon region Taal Lake, in 67, 173, 174 n. 52, 183 n. 70 Pansipit River, in 173-174 Tagalog literature 30, 43, 230-231, 247, 261, 314, 317 and dalit [Tagalog verse] 201-209 and metrical romance [awit and korido] 201, 282-283, 290-299, 301-302 and Tagalog poetry 231, 248, 292 Talain, Doña Maria 198 n. 19, 205-206 Tangui, Juana 198 n. 19, 199-201 tanores [domestic service] see domestic labor, forced [tanores] Tapar, Tapar rebellion (1663) 139; see also shamanism Tayabas, Tayabas rebellion (1841) (in Luzon [island]) 248-249, 253 tibao see Philippine native customs [ugalí] Tigbalang, tikbalang (phantom) see Philippine spirit-beliefs timawa [freedman] 228, 247, 255. See also mahadlika, maharlika; debt-slavery or peonage Tiongson, Nicanor 109, 289-290 Tondo province (in Luzon [island]) 123 tribute 20, 32, 42, 52-55, 60-61, 68-72, 80, 89, 92, 110-111, 114, 134, 174, 184, 193, 218, 220, 225-228, 230, 244, 251-252 Trillo, Fr. Félix (OSA) 70-72 tulisan [bandit, highwayman] 56 turumba (festival in Paete, Laguna province, Luzon [island]) see Christianity, and Christianization, fiestas, fiesta complex Twelve Peers of France see Doce Pares de Francia

355 ugalí [customs] see Philippine native customs [ugalí] use-values 41, 134, 134-135 n. 73, 137, 150-151, 168 usos y costumbres [customary law] 269-270, 275 vagamundos [fugitives] 70 n. 42, 244, 250 Valdes, Don Antonio 101 Valladolid debate 85 Vega, Lope de 235 Vera, Santiago de 65 (La) vida es sueño 235, 239 Villacastín, Tomás de (SJ) 231, 240 Virgin Mary 41, 139, 158, 189 n. 1, 192, 194-196, 208, 211, 228, 273, 293 n. 85, 310 Virgin of Antipolo see Our Lady of Peace and Safe Voyage Virgin of Caysasay see Our Lady of Caysasay Virgin of Guadalupe 206 virgin territory 196 Visayas (island region) 20, 52, 66-67, 72-73, 117-118, 120-121, 121 n. 33, 123 n. 39, 139,164, 218, 221; see also Bohol province; Cebu (island); Leyte (island); Mindoro (island); Panay (island); Samar (island) visita [unincorporated mission settlement]; also nayon; sitio 73, 98, 100, 112 n. 11, 114, 118, 139-141, 156-157, 170-171, 177, 183, 202-208; see also cabecera-visita complex  Vitoria, Francisco de 57-58 Weber, Max 133, 251 witches 121, 136 n. 78, 137-141, 139 n. 84, 176; see also shamans, shamanism Zambales (province, in Luzon [island]) 64, 72, 80, 80 n. 2 and 3, 98 Marangley, in 72 Masinglo, in 100 Zamora, Fr. Manuel de (OSA) 178