Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines 9780520943698

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Frontier Constitutions

ASIA PACIFIC MODERN Takashi Fujitani, Series Editor 1. Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times, by Miriam Silverberg 2. Visuality and Identity: Sinophone Articulations across the Pacific, by Shu-mei Shih 3.

The Politics of Gender in Colonial Korea: Education, Labor, and Health, 1910–1945, by Theodore Jun Yoo

4.

Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines, by John D. Blanco

Frontier Constitutions Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines

John D. Blanco

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley . Los Angeles . London

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2009 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Blanco, John D., 1968– Frontier constitutions : Christianity and colonial empire in the nineteenth-century Philippines / John D. Blanco. p. cm. — (Asia Pacific modern ; 4) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 978-0-520-25519-7 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Philippines—Politics and government—19th century. 2. Philippines—Civilization—19th century. 3. Christianity—Philippines—History—19th century. i. Title. ds675.b53 2009 959.9'02—dc22

2008034382

Manufactured in the United States of America 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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09

This book is printed on Natures Book, which contains 30% post-consumer waste and meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48–1992 r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

To Marivi For everything

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When we talk today of the need for some symbol to fuse us into a great people, we seem to forget that all over the country there lies this wealth of a “usable past,” of symbols that have grown through and through the soil of the land and the marrow of its people. . . . But the past can become “usable” only if we be willing to enter into its spirit and to carry there a reasonably hospitable mind. As long as we regard it with hatred, contempt, and indignation, so long will it remain hateful and closed to us. Nick Joaquin, “La Naval de Manila”

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Contents

List of Illustrations Preface Introduction: Political Communities, “Common Sense,” and the Colonial State

xi xiii

1

part 1 . Shibboleths 1. Imperial Christendom and the Colonial State

27

2. Special Laws and States of Exception

64

3. Customs/(Ka)Ugali(an)

95

part 2 . Projects 4. Publics

129

5. Aesthetics

157

6. Values/Norms

184

part 3 . Concatenations 7. Gothic Epilogue: Colonialism and Modernity

229 271

Notes

287

Bibliography

337

Index

359

Illustrations

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

José Honorato Lozano, Francisco de Yriarte (Letras y figuras), ca. 1851 Oikonomia and Mariolatry: The procession of Nuestra Señora de la Esperanza de Macarena Religious procession of Our Lady of Peñafrancia, Naga City, Bicol “El Indio ‘Tasio,’ ” Ilustración Filipina “Indio Filipino,” Ilustración Filipina The cathedral at Manila after the 1880 earthquake Juan Luna, Pacto de sangre [Blood compact], 1884 Michelangelo Caravaggio, The Musicians, ca. 1595

2 121 122 166 170 223 230 245

xi

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Preface

The occasion for investigating colonial culture and society in the Philippines under Spanish rule during the nineteenth century began predictably enough. I was teaching English writing and composition, as well as courses on literature and the humanities, at the University of the Philippines (Diliman) and trying in various ways to creatively illustrate how the critical reflection and analysis of a text, historical event, cultural phenomenon, or artifact could lead to political or social change. In the early 1990s, this faith in dialectics seemed at once necessary and promising. The 1986 “People Power” revolution that had ended fourteen years of dictatorship and state repression under Ferdinand Marcos had failed to deliver on most of its promises for social and economic change—a failure that led to the return of government control to the “traditional” elite politicians belonging to the landowning and industrial class (trapos, an abbreviation that also means “rags” in Spanish and has been incorporated into Tagalog/Filipino), the further proliferation of military and police corruption, the strengthening of private armies in areas outside Manila, the corresponding increase of extralegal violence, the mortgaging of the population for precarious service jobs abroad, and the helplessness of the media (with certain exceptions) to do anything but further justify and abet what was and is widely perceived to be the rule of the wicked. A pithy statement of the times I often heard from friends and family members captures the attitude of many people from different classes and regions: “With [former President] Marcos, at least everyone knew who the criminal was.” xiii

xiv

Preface

Tied to the uncertainty of “identifying the culprit,” however, was the organization of resistance to social anarchy, the building or rebuilding of trust and investment in civil institutions, and, as I saw it in an admittedly romantic, wide-eyed way, the forging of common dreams beyond the threat of religious apocalypse, cocktail socialism, the solicitation of ever more unsupervised foreign investment, or the proliferation of “free-trade” zones. Of course, the sense of this impasse has since been captured by two generations of Philippine cultural critics, from Resil Mojares, Randy David, and Edel Garcellano to Caroline Hau, Neferti Tadiar, Roland Tolentino, Bomen Guillermo, and others, as well as by the brilliant careers of artists as diverse as Joey Ayala, Aureus Solito, Santiago Bose, Jun Cruz Reys, and that erstwhile wonder-band, the Eraserheads. In 1992 the Philippine government had summoned the courage to end the formal residence of the U.S. military on Philippine soil by refusing to extend the U.S.-Philippine agreement allowing the maintenance of U.S. military bases in Angeles City (Clark) and Zambales (Subic Bay). At the same time, however, the end of the Cold War between NATO allies and the Soviet bloc, along with the widely recognized world supremacy of the U.S. military industrial complex (as demonstrated in the1992 war in Kosovo) only reinforced the conviction that there would be no substantive difference between the postcolonial epoch and the colonial one. To complicate matters further, rumors of a post-Jacobin scenario among members of the Left, involving the assassination of former members of the underground resistance to the Marcos dictatorship by fellow comrades, began to circulate. Added to these allegations of communist “purification” initiatives, were various counterallegations that the Philippine military, which has for a long time benefited from the support and tutelage of the U.S. military and CIA, had launched a psy-war propaganda campaign to mask its own “rub-outs” and massacres. One of the frustrating challenges for educators in the humanities and social sciences then, as I remember it, was the impossibility of pegging the confusion and collective bewilderment to stable terms of analysis and evaluation. Of equal importance, however, the devaluation of critique and countercritique to shibboleths of “friend” and “enemy” also obscured the fact that such situations had existed in similar contexts before—notably, toward the end of the nineteenth century as well as the immediate postwar era—and that an understanding of history in a comparative framework would allow teachers and students to anticipate the

Preface

xv

new character of the post-EDSA social confl icts ahead. What better place and time to promote the principles of dialectical materialism in the university, especially for the students who became involved in the new movements for political change and social advocacy? What better moment to make “lessons” of the past for the projection of new “fiveyear plans?” These thoughts, it seemed to me, defi ned the cautious optimism of certain friends and colleagues at the university. I think my students felt a little sorry for me. Perhaps they did so because of my rather willful lack of self-reflexivity—that Western insistence on seeing a felicitous correspondence between my ill-conceived ecumenism for dialectics and the more elementary task of helping students fi nd jobs after college—or even for the larger contradiction of studying the effects of colonial rule in my American English. But in addition to these, there loomed in the background of our best efforts the near irrefutable evidence witnessed everywhere that Might makes right, truth, and justice anytime it wants, with the slightest provocation. In the resulting, always surprising, violence of everyday life, dialectical materialism becomes a wholly academic exercise—“academic” in the most derogatory sense of the word. This pessimism could not but extend throughout the university, from the students to the intelligentsia—the professors and journalists, the poets and playwrights— and this often (but not always) resulted in a dismissive and resentful judgment of the past, a skepticism regarding the value of comparative research or our exposure to new ideas, and a nihilism that ranged from militant iconoclasm and a discourse of the enemy (us vs. them), to vicious self-trivialization with regard to one’s intellectual efforts. To this pessimism, this book was originally conceived as a counterpoint. I set out to describe how a similar counterpoint to an earlier expression of disenchantment with the promises of Western enlightenment rationality and political emancipation arose in the nineteenth century among writers as diverse as Francisco Balagtas, Francisco de Paula Entrala, José Rizal, and Apolinario Mabini, and among artists as different as José Honorato Lozano and Juan Luna. In different ways, these writers and thinkers, and the Spanish empire that they helped to dismantle, prove that critical reflection did and does effect a change in the unequal relationship of forces, economic and social classes, and politicized groups—even individuals. Yet instead of reducing this rich history of the colonial Philippines in the nineteenth century to a small handful of outspoken and posthumously ignored poets and revolutionaries—as they have been portrayed in, say, revolutionary General

xvi

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José Alejandrino’s 1949 La senda del sacrificio (published as The Price of Freedom in English) or Nick Joaquin’s more recent A Question of Heroes (1977)—it seemed to me a necessary task to survey the ground of cultural artifacts and practices from which those difficult, brilliant fruits of a paradoxical colonial consciousness emerged. This amounted to following a different path from that of tracing the history of the novel before Rizal’s Noli me tangere in the way Resil Mojares has done or supplementing René Javellana’s exhaustive source-criticism of the vernacular Tagalog Passion of Christ, the Pasyón. Rather, it entailed the imagination of a dialogue stretching across the long nineteenth century among concerned writers and artists about the future of colonialism and the possibility of a future without it. Of course, to connect the people and events that inspired this book to the book’s actual contents today would be a vain and speculative enterprise. Furthermore, at least in my case, I cannot pretend that the activity of the researcher in the isolation of an office or library cubby approximates anything akin to the work of political leaders and advocates of social democracy in the present. Having said that, it is my hope that readers of this book will take from it something of that joy and optimism I felt and feel whenever my research reminds me that the future is not determined all the way to the end; that violence does not have the last word in the production of truth; that empires and tyrants fall; and that the unfulfi lled longings of the past not only charge the present with the burden of fulfi lling them, but also surprise us with the power to unsettle, take apart, and reinvent our certitudes about the course of the future. I would like to thank the following people who have assisted me in this endeavor: Tak Fujitani, Lisa Yoneyama, Sara Johnson, Fatima El-Tayeb, Danny Widener, Yen Le Espíritu, Nayan Shah, Shelley Streeby, Curtis Marez, Stephanie Smallwood, Jin Lee, Rosemary George, Luis Alvarez, Julio Ramos, Reynaldo Ileto, Oscar Campomanes, Francine Masiello, Lydia Liu, Anthony Cascardi, José David Saldívar, Josep Fradera, Anna More, Luz Mena, Edward Baluyut, Maria Bates, Mike Shire, Cynthia Sowers, Walter Mignolo, Ross Chambers, Lydia Yee, Mars and Thelma Estrada, Nerissa Balce, Neil Garcia, Bienvenido Lumbera, Nicanor Tiongson, Preachy Legasto, Caroline Hau, Vicente Rafael, Luciano Santiago, Fr. Louis David, Christina Hidalgo, Noel Canlas, Edel Garcellano, Virgilio Almario, NVM Gonzalez (deceased), Jerry Araos, Lieba Faier, Christi Merrill, Kim Kono, Anna Parkinson, Jon Solomon, Brett de Bary, Naoki Sakai, Saurabh Dube, Martin

Preface

xvii

Bernal, Nancy Postero, Misha Kokotovic, Jorge Mariscal, Luis Martín-Cabrera, Don Wayne, Heather Fowler, Theo Gonsalvez, Kiko Benitez, Courtney Johnson, Victor Bascara, Grace Hong, Chandan Reddy, Leti Volpp, Gary Colmenar, Nefeti Tadiar, Alda Blanco, Kristen Silva Guesz, Augusto Espíritu, Martin Manalansan, Enrique Bonus, Ipat Luna, Howie Severino, Malou Babilonia, Happy Araneta, Juanita Nacu, Judith Halberstam, Gayatri Gopinath, Denise da Silva, Christina Civantos, Ken Foster, Rhacel Parrenas, Dylan Rodriguez, Ruby Alcantara, Wendell Capili, Patrick Flores, Frances MakilIgnacio, Tessie Ramos, Ruth Mabanglo, Soledad Falabella, Ryusuke Ishikawa, Lulu Torres, Xavier Huetz de Lemps, Lola Elizalde, Roberto Blanco Andrés, Eugenio Matibag, Yoshiko Nagano, Arcadio DíazQuiñones, Amit Nigam, Colleen Chien, Will Tiao, Eugene Pak, and Chung-U Kim. I am particularly grateful to my students Jay Perez, Jimiliz Valiente, Margaret Fajardo, Axel Montepeque, Amanda Solomon, Faye Caronan, Fatima Capinpin, Miguel de la Fuente, Jennifer Ganata, Emma Vicuña, Christine Lucero, Lizelle Festejo, Noel Salunga, Heidi Tuason, Frida Pineda, Ivy Dulay, Karen Uy, Den Quinsay, Lynn Ta, Scott Boehm, Ana Grinberg, Rocío Giraldez-Betrón, Mike Knab, Natalie Spritzer, Andrew Escudero, Magali Arriola-Ranc, Su Chen, and Kimberly Chung. Special thanks go to Lisa Lowe, for intellectual friendship that has significantly contributed to the framing and reframing of this book from the very beginning to the very end; to Benedict Anderson and David Lloyd, who read and exhaustively commented on the strengths and challenges of the project as a whole; to my mother Benita, who helped me with my translations and interpretations of Francisco Balagtas; to my father, Rene, who, in addition to my mother, always showed unconditional love, support, and confidence in me; to my brothers Joel, Jay, and Jerry, for love and a home in New York; to Mercedes Hermogenes, Menchie Ramos, Maribel Gaite, and the Hermogenes clan for a home in Bulacan; to Fr. Jimmy Achacoso and the Blanco clan for direction and guidance in the city; to the Vega clan, especially May, Tess Berner, Dr. Gaudencio Vega, Deia, and their families, who are now my family too; to my daughter, Sofia, for the wonder of it all; and to my wife, Marivi, for everything. Marami pong salamat sa inyong lahat. In addition, I would also like to thank Reed Malcolm, Kalicia Pivirotto, Jacqueline Volin, and Nick Murray, the editors at UC Press.

xviii

Preface

Needless to say, I take full responsibility for any errors of fact or judgment contained in this work. The primary research of this book was conducted in the Newberry Library, Chicago; the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; the Bancroft Library in Berkeley; the Huntington Library in Los Angeles; the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid (Spain); and the Philippine National Library in Manila (the Philippines). To the librarians I owe my deepest gratitude. Much of the drafting of the manuscript took place during a series of short-term grants sponsored by the University of California San Diego and the Center for Humanities at UCSD, and during my one-year tenure (in 2004) as a postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell University Center for the Humanities. Finally, the completion of this book would not have been possible without the unflagging support and encouragement of my colleagues and friends in the Department of Literature at UC San Diego: mil gracias por su apoyo y amistad.

Introduction Political Communities, “Common Sense,” and the Colonial State

A series of reflections on the colonial genre of painting in the Philippines, pioneered by native (Indio) artist José Honorato Lozano in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, introduces this book on the entanglements of Christendom, Western enlightenment, and native tradition during the emergence of the modern colonial state. Identified under the category of Letras y figuras (Letters and figures), each canvas is distinguished at fi rst sight by the presentation of a phrase or name (usually the name of the patron who commissioned the work). On closer inspection, however, it becomes clear that each letter is composed of figures and objects taken from colonial Manila and provincial life in the nineteenth century (see figure 1). The contours of these figures, which the artist partially reveals or effaces in the play of arranging their postures and activities or in the color of their clothes, determine the shape of the letter. As the viewer approaches the painting, the painting itself changes, dissolving into a heterogeneous assortment of native colonial subjects, called Indios by the Spaniards; native-Chinese or Chinese-Spanish mixed-bloods, or mestizos; peninsular Spanish officials; Spanish Creoles born in the archipelago; and European or U.S. merchants. All of them are involved in the daily activities of business, industry, or leisure. Indeed, if one examines each letter closely enough, the form of the letter may disappear entirely, leaving a partial and fragmented close-up of colonial society: a fisherman sitting behind a barrel by the wharf; an old woman clutching her shawl, silently walking by 1

figure 1.

José Honorato Lozano, Francisco de Yriarte (Letras y figuras), ca. 1851

Introduction

3

a hitching post, where a rolled up bamboo mat rests, while behind her two Chinese mestizos intently discuss their past or future plans. Yet the fragile coherence of such a glimpse into a colonial society of figures shatters easily, insofar as any attempt to expand one’s focus to encompass the whole canvas immediately brings the letters back into view, flattening the canvas into a tablet upon which a name is written. The popularity of Lozano’s paintings in the 1850s has been traced to both the formal aspect of innovation they display and the historical moment in which such an innovation became meaningful. On the surface, they immediately evoke the European parlor game of tableaux vivants: a form of charades, in which participants don costumes and arrange themselves in a scene, usually taken from a painting or reference to mythology or a historical event. One biographer notes that the colonial genre of Letras y figuras was inspired by Lozano’s fondness for playing with the telescopes placed on the walls of the colonial city Intramuros: “Fiddling with the lenses of the telescope, he came to understand vividly the principles of linear perspective, including the changing appearance of an object according to its distance from the viewer.”1 Of equal importance is that Lozano’s invention roughly coincided with the 1849 decree on surnames by Captain-General Narciso Clavería, the highest-ranking colonial official in the archipelago at the time. This decree, which Luciano Santiago calls “the single most important catalyst to the Filipino quest for identity in the nineteenth century,” required all colonial subjects to preserve and pass on regular family names to their descendants. Until that time, the only individuals who had preserved their patronymics belonged to wealthy families or families with Spanish blood. For those colonial subjects lacking a surname, Clavería ordered families to choose from a catalog of Spanish names prepared by the government, forbidding the adoption of names that belonged to the hereditary elite or nobility of precolonial times. For Santiago, the possession of the family name introduced a new allegiance to the past for colonial subjects, which until that time had not existed. The possession of a name gave certain members of colonial society the sign of Hispanization formerly reserved for Spaniards, Creoles, or Spanish mestizos. Other colonial subjects with Spanish surnames, however, seized the opportunity to “revert to their original Malay or Chinese patronymics,”2 thus asserting the symbolic value of having been born Chinese or a native of the country. Yet these two approaches to Lozano’s popularity, however insightful, neglect the ideological work that the Letras y figuras genre labors to maintain on an aesthetic level. That is the fantasy of a felicitous

4

Introduction

coexistence between two incommensurable orders of representation— the symbolic and the signifying—as well as the different operations involved in each. According to the fi rst, the viewer apprehends scenes of colonial order that refer to real places and colonial “types” one might expect to encounter in Manila. These people, and their activities, obey a logic or destiny that arises from the world they invoke—a world that is independent of any predetermined signification—and it is only “by chance,” so to speak, that they come to form the recognizable letters of the patron’s name. The second, signifying, operation implies an active rather than passive role for the spectator, who must willfully subordinate the random activities portrayed in the painting into legible script. More broadly speaking, one can see in this fantasy of felicitous correspondence an allegory of Western enlightenment and modernity in a colonial context. This allegory produces at least two narratives, which serve as historiographical frames for the colonial state project. According to one narrative, the dignity and heritage of the name, which may represent the very coherence of Spanish sovereignty in the archipelago, is threatened with dissolution by the content that has “come to light,” so to speak, as the name’s material support. In giving shape to each letter, the figure of the colonial subject at once transgresses and overflows it, gesturing toward a world picture whose composition is utterly foreign to a prearranged order of letters and names. Such a reading dovetails with Marx’s assessment of Western modernity as it became manifest in the social, economic, and political revolutions of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries: “The social revolution of the nineteenth century cannot derive its poetry from the past, but only from the future. It cannot begin with itself, before it has shed all superstitious belief in the past. Earlier revolutions needed to remember previous moments in world history in order to numb themselves with regard to their own content. The revolution of the nineteenth century must let the dead bury the dead in order to arrive at its own content. There, the phrase exceeded the content. Here the content exceeds the phrase.”3 In “exceeding the phrase,” the content (through the agency of the viewer) comes to recognize its existence beyond what Marx elsewhere had considered “all fi xed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions. . . . All that is solid melts into air . . . and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.”4 According to this reading, the letters would represent the unilateral direction of Spanish law and sovereignty, and the figures would represent the

Introduction

5

emergence of productive forces unleashed by capital and industry. Their imagined congruence invites both disbelief and an unsettling premonition that it will not last. Such a reading, however, presupposes a temporal dimension that proceeds from letter to figure, when one can equally argue (and this is the second narrative) that the shift in perspective and temporality actually moves from figure to letter. According to the latter perspective, the proliferation of labor, industry, transport, and urbanization that one sees in Lozano’s scenes of the colonial capital, Manila, leads us not to the emancipation of colonial subjects from the burden of signifying the name, but to their enslavement to it. As Carl Schmitt has argued, the phonetic homology between “name” and nahme, the German root of the word nehmen (to appropriate or seize possession of), reveals an underlying affi nity between naming and claiming. This affi nity accounts for a common observation regarding the importance of naming (or renaming) conquered lands under colonial rule. 5 Reaching down to the level of the most quotidian activities, the name and nomos of colonial rule direct these activities in such a way that the figures can be emptied of the content that ties them to the world that sustains them. They are enciphered, not deciphered: disciplined and governed, brought to a standstill as in a tableau whose arrangement presupposes a perspective or mode of surveillance and intervention outside the panorama that confronts each figure. Lozano’s paintings allow us a glimpse into the Janus-faced character of colonial modernity in the Philippines. Colonial modernity, in Lozano’s work and elsewhere, refers to the structural formation and cultural habitation of an impasse between not only different orders of representation, but also different imperatives facing the colonial state after the breakdown of Spanish imperial hegemony as it had existed from the sixteenth to the middle of the eighteenth centuries.6 In the triangulation of authorities that emerged from this breakdown—the Spanish colonial state, the market of foreign commerce and capital, and the agency of native and mestizo labor and entrepreneurship— colonial modernity designates a field of ideas and practices whereby the action of one would provoke the response and innovation of the other two. Allegorically speaking, either the letter would have to master the figure, or the world “outside” the letter would absorb the figure; or the figure would have to learn to shuttle between two worlds of risk and opportunity, and even play one off against the other. In this endeavor, each figure shares something in common with the viewer. For

6

Introduction

in contemplating the letters/figures, viewers are called upon to consider their dual role in simultaneously “reading” the legibility of the letters that compose the name and suppressing that legibility in order to allow the figures to come to life on their own terms. Which view is “progressive,” and which is “backward?” Which view vouchsafes the continuity and stability of Spanish rule, and which one threatens it?

common sense and the politics of colonial rule This book aims to tell a story and to make an argument about why the story must be told in the way it is told, as well as to outline the implications of this view. The story, as mentioned above, concerns the cultural transformations, adaptations, and innovations of peninsular Spanish colonists and native-born Creole, mestizo (both Chinese and Spanish), and indigenous colonial subjects during the crisis of colonial hegemony in the Philippines between the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the resulting social anomie or normlessness that arose from this crisis in law and politics. The period of this crisis roughly begins with the 1762 British invasion of Manila during the waning years of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) between Britain, France, and Spain and ends with the 1896 Philippine revolution against Spain. As we know, the Seven Years’ War was felt throughout the Americas and Asia as well as the Philippines, which has led certain scholars to call it the first World War. The conflict between Britain and France, with the ancillary subordination of imperial Spain to this conflict, set the stage for the tumultuous revolutions and seizures of power in political regimes throughout Europe as well as the Americas. It also provides a reference point for the accelerated advance of modern industry, technology, and British economic hegemony in Southeast Asia during the nineteenth century.7 In the Philippines, the Seven Years’ War and its aftermath were responsible for what one historian refers to as Spain’s imperial collapse: the loss of (most of) its overseas empire and its attempt to reorganize its remaining possessions (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines) under an administrative system unique to these three colonies, which came to be identified as an attempt to create Special Laws distinct from those of the Iberian Peninsula.8 For other scholars, the Seven Years’ War propelled an ambitious program of state reform in both Spain and its overseas possessions, whose aim was to strengthen the vertical chain of command from the king and his ministers to his subjects through bureaucratic administration, fiscal responsibility, and the stimulation of export agriculture and industry.

Introduction

7

The crisis of colonial hegemony engendered new political and cultural expressions that revealed the exploration, experimentation, and transgression of meanings and values of colonial society. These expressions, in turn, sanctioned the formation of new political communities around the crisis of colonial hegemony. By “political communities,” I mean something different from (although not entirely incompatible with) the patria or patriotic “imagined community” evoked by David Brading, Benedict Anderson, and others.9 Rather, I consider the emergence of contesting public discourses and the publics they invoked, all of which recognized the crisis of colonial hegemony and sought to organize a set of interests around the anticipation of a new colonial order.10 The discourses and fields of debate explored in these pages include Spanish colonial patriotism against foreign invasion; native enterprise as the cornerstone of the colony’s transition to cash-crop agriculture; the limits and rationalization of racial difference in the incorporation of religious authority into the modern colonial bureaucracy; the paradoxical colonial aesthetic of “Filipino beauty”; the articulation of cultural norms in the vernacular Tagalog; and, finally, the racialization of native sentiment. These discourses and fields of debate reflect the fractures within colonial officialdom, the Philippine missionaries and clergy, and the full-blown emergence of Spanish and Chinese mestizo entrepreneurship in the liberalizing economy. What they all had in common was the invocation or perhaps interpellation of a collective public interest in matters pertaining to the administration of the modern Spanish colonial state. This brings me to the argument in the story. In the invocation of political communities with regard to the future of colonial hegemony— the imperial order formed by the temporal and spiritual authorities with the twin objectives of conquest and evangelization from the sixteenth century—and the manifestation of these communities in public debate (through media such as chapbooks, the performing arts, the newspaper and the novel), the colonial state comes to rely on an authority that individual colonial institutions could neither control or successfully channel. That was the authority of common sense in the realms of patriotic sentiment, public opinion, aesthetic reflection, and the articulation of social norms in literature and the novel. Two understandings of “common sense” as an autonomous entity immediately present themselves here. The fi rst derives from Kant’s conception of common sense as an enlightened act of reflective judgment: By the name sensus communis is to be understood the idea of a public sense, i.e., a critical faculty which in its reflective act takes account (a

8

Introduction priori) of the mode of representation of everyone else, in order, as it were, to weigh its judgment with the collective reason of mankind. . . . This is accomplished by weighing the judgment, not so much with actual, as rather with the merely possible, judgments of others, and by putting ourselves in the position of everyone else, as the result of a mere abstraction from the limitations which contingently affect our own estimate.11

In this fi rst instance, Kant’s common sense elevates the individual act of judgment to a realm where it is reflected and refracted in and through the judgment of others. The resulting creation of “common sense” provides an image of a future norm. In terms of Kant’s enlightened enterprise, common sense as sensus communis aesthetically manifests what the categorical imperative of enlightened (Western) humanity will later institute by mandate of universal reason. Patriotic feelings, public opinion, and aesthetic taste all illustrate common sense as a community of sentiment, which paves the road for other forms of social order and collective interest. A second way of approaching the authority of common sense in culture and society comes from Antonio Gramsci, whose understanding of the idea departs from Kant’s in a significant way: “Common sense is not something rigid and stationary, but is in continuous transformation, becoming enriched with scientific notions and philosophical opinions that have entered into common circulation. ‘Common sense’ is the folklore of philosophy and . . . [it] creates the folklore of the future, a relatively rigidified phase of popular knowledge in a given time and place” (italics added).12 In the second instance, Gramsci’s definition captures not the elevation of individuals to an ostensibly enlightened, universal practice of human reason, but the descent, contingency, and vulgarization of supposedly universal “scientific notions and philosophical opinions” as they enter into dialogue, negotiation, or competition with other notions and opinions. If Kant’s notion of common sense highlights the formalizing operation of an enlightened and cosmopolitan humanity, Gramsci’s notion more closely associates common sense with popularization, elsewhere described as “transculturation,” “vernacularization,” and “dialogism.”13 Where Kant’s enlightenment imagines a telos of collective reasoning or rationality and the emergence of a cosmopolitan society, Gramsci’s “common sense” and “popular knowledge” render visible the immanent thresholds and finitude of hegemony, which undergoes radical changes as it folds into and back upon local contexts. It exists in relation to philosophy in the same way that castles, knights, and

Introduction

9

chivalric codes exist in relation to the feudal mode of production—as a record, a veritable museum, of fossilized essays and experiments on our relation to truth, being, becoming, time, and so forth. These two understandings of common sense illustrate the different approaches to colonial rule taken by political communities and their expressions of reason or rationality in the nineteenth century. On the one hand, it was the Kantian community of sentiment that colonial officials and peninsular Spanish writers sought to solicit and provoke as the basis for a new colonial order—a colonial state. The investment of certain writers in public discourse, a nominally “free” press, and the production of a colonial aesthetic reflected the attempt to reconcile the continuity of colonial rule with those economic and political upheavals of the early nineteenth century that appeared incompatible with and inimical to it. For colonial officials, this essentially amounted to a paradox and impasse best captured by diplomatic attaché Sinibaldo de Mas in 1842: “In our love [for liberty],” he wrote, “we fall into an anomaly, for how do we reconcile our endeavor to obtain freedom for ourselves with our desire at the same time to impose sovereign law on remote peoples? Why do we deny to others the benefit we desire for our own native land?”14 This is what brings the Gramscian side of “common sense” into play as at once a tool of hegemony and the emergence of counterhegemonic forces. For in the attempt to anticipate and fashion an overarching rationality, a “reason of State,” that would defi ne and inform the administration and institutions of modern colonial rule, writers also wittingly or unwittingly “folklorized” it, exposing its contradictory logic, stimulating contesting interpretations of that rationality, and exploring the consequences of those divergent interpretations. The colonial state project, in other words, served as a floating signifier. On the one hand, it was interpreted as an apparatus for preempting and appropriating the economic and political forces of agricultural capitalism, constitutional government, and the limited cultivation of a (colonial) civil society, in order to strengthen and develop the security and prosperity of Spanish rule in the archipelago. Yet the colonial administration’s various approaches to obtaining that security and prosperity exceeded the ostensibly desired effect, submitting the claim of state rationality to critique, rebuttal, revision, and defiance. This dynamic appears most evidently in the field of what has come to be identified as a genre of colonial literature: a minor, anomalous literature claimed neither by Spain nor by the Philippines and decried as a

10

Introduction

tool of colonial propaganda or belittled as the prehistory of Philippine national genius. I want to demonstrate this double-sided process in a number of areas by fi rst describing the conception of a modern colonial state under the policymakers of the Bourbon monarchy and the dependence of this state on the production, circulation, and distribution of arguments, fictions, and forms of propaganda. These sought to invent a form of common sense suitable to the consolidation of a late colonial hegemony. To speak in general terms, from the 1760s onward colonial officials had to institute policies reflecting the reality that colonial rule would not be sustained by mandate from heaven or by right of conquest. Rather, Spanish colonial rule in the archipelago had to depend upon a population whose consent to that rule had to be performed along the lines of specific economic, political, and social objectives. In order for this to happen, however, colonial rule had to be made reasonable, universal, public, and publicized—even to the point of demonstrating the rational necessity of its exceptional (i.e., despotic) character. It had to pay more than lip service to a law or universal principle beyond that of sovereign force (which it could not execute) or divine right (which lacked the power of enforcement and furthermore acted as a perpetual fi nancial drain on the Crown). And it had to fashion a colonial civil society whose interests would somehow guarantee the continuity of Spanish rule between imperial Christendom under the Hapsburgs in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and the aggressive approach to colonial reform among the Spanish Bourbon kings (borbones).

common grounds for common sense At fi rst glance, it seems difficult, if not utterly impossible, to fi nd a point of departure for discussing any notion of the “common,” much less of “common sense,” in an archipelago of 7,107 islands, 175 languages, and a long history of migrations, Asian trade patterns, religious conversions to Islam and Christianity, and uneven colonization. This difficulty permeates the basic categories of historical analysis, calling their validity and usefulness into question. Were the Philippines really colonized by Spain? Was there a significant difference between the process of colonization in the sixteenth and the nineteenth centuries? How would the ambiguous status of Spanish colonialism in both its early and modern forms relate to the appearance of nineteenth-century nationalism and the affi rmation of a national culture? While the terms

Introduction

11

colonialism, modernity, and nationalism might serve as general rubrics for plotting the events and transformations of state and society in the Philippines, they also serve to obscure what they promise to illuminate about the culture of colonial modernity.15 Before the eighteenth century, the Spanish monarchy expressed little interest in the Philippines and its inhabitants beyond that of military strategy: the fortified city of Manila known as Intramuros served as the rear-guard outpost of Spanish Christendom in the Pacific.16 To a much lesser degree, the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade that furnished the celestial Empire with Mexican silver and the Americas with Chinese silks and porcelain also held out the prospect of increased commercial activity between Spain and Asia. Beyond these two activities, colonization was reduced to the partial and uneven concentration of the native populace in towns, the project of Christian evangelization, and the siphoning of native resources in monetary tribute, manual labor, and military service (polos y servicios), and payment in kind (vandala) to the colonial government. The unilateral character of imperial laws, along with the virtual impossibility of enforcing them except in the most indirect manner, and, finally, the largely unknown and uncultivated interior of most islands served to hinder rather than facilitate the incorporation of native culture and society into Spanish Christendom. These factors illustrate a central feature of imperial Christendom that the Philippines shared with Spain’s other possessions: a complex hierarchical structure of power involving a chain of command from the king to subaltern official that never worked in practice. By the end of the nineteenth century, the limits of Spanish colonization were cogently expressed in the fact that only the smallest minority in the Philippines spoke Spanish. At the same time, however, familiar Spanish customs, superstitions, names, and institutions pervaded many aspects of Philippine culture and society. Even where they did not, one must still admit the likelihood that three centuries of Spanish colonial rule must have indirectly as well as directly affected migration and settlement patterns, inter-regional confl icts and agreements, language, religion, as well as concepts of territory, the economy, authority, and so forth. How does one reconcile these two divergent perspectives of Philippine historiography? The impasse of making general assessments on the status of colonialism and colonization manifests itself most clearly in a classic work by John Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines: Spanish Aims and Filipino Responses, 1570–1700. Setting out to explore the nature

12

Introduction

and extent of colonial sovereignty in the Philippines under the (admittedly ambiguous) concepts of “Hispanization” and “Christianization,” Phelan fi nds that the terms themselves constantly have to be qualified as “partial,” “indirect,” and “selective” when applied to the Philippine context. The inefficacy of these categories leads him to develop a kind of counterconcept, which he calls “Philippinization.” For Phelan, Philippinization entailed the initiative of native Filipinos in the process of evangelization. “Given the disadvantages under which the Spanish clergy had to operate, their efforts would have proved abortive if the Filipinos had not voluntarily responded to some features of Christianity. . . . In this process of ‘Philippinizing’ Catholicism, the major role belonged to the Filipinos. They showed themselves remarkably selective in stressing and de-emphasizing certain features of Spanish Catholicism” (Phelan, Hispanization of the Philippines, 72). Hispanization, Christianization, and “Philippinization” form a conceptual matrix that allows us to consider the partial nature of Spanish colonization. The main virtue of Phelan’s thesis is that it has allowed scholars to account for vast differences in the social and economic relations established between imperial Christendom and native groups scattered across the archipelago, without relinquishing the thread of congruence that ostensibly bound them to one another. Yet the normative efficacy of these terms as a sign system, a discourse, belies their acknowledged limits as tools of description and analysis. As a consequence, they also limit and predetermine the kinds of questions we are allowed to ask about the character of Spanish colonialism in the Philippines. Indeed, one may go so far as to say that the matrix itself has already supplied us with the range of possible answers.17 Hispanization is at once conceptually self-evident and empirically contradictory; Christianization theoretically reaffi rms Hispanization but historically facilitates the process of Philippinization; and Philippinization at once renders visible the partial nature of Hispanization and guarantees the longevity of Spanish colonialism. In this circular chain, Phelan’s conclusion hermetically seals a self-enclosed analysis of imperial rule in the Philippines: “The paradox is that Spanish success issued from Spanish failure” (Phelan, Hispanization, 158–59; see also chap. 1). The difficulty of fi nding common ground for unearthing the “common sense” (singular or plural) of Philippine history and culture encompasses succeeding generations of Philippine scholars, both nationalist and U.S.-based, who saw the consequences and paradoxes of Phelan’s

Introduction

13

thesis extending to concepts of national culture and socioeconomic modernity/modernization in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Pioneering Philippine scholars as diverse as F. Landa Jocano, William Henry Scott, Prospero Covar, along with the university curriculum organized around the institution of Pilipinolohiya, incorporated the “partial Hispanization” thesis as a central tenet of Philippine cultural nationalism, which affi rmed the continuity of Philippine traditions left intact or uninterrupted by colonial (and, ostensibly, post- or neocolonial) legacies.18 The general thesis of these works was that the West—an abstract term that encompassed Spanish colonization, U.S. imperialism, and the penetration of modern capitalism, as well as a general set of philosophical concepts, values (such as scientific progress and “the Protestant ethic”), and institutions—was extraneous and in fact secondary to the continuous becoming and translatability of a national identity, consciousness, or community. As anthropologist Prospero Covar only recently claimed, “Colonialism is only a temporary detraction, no matter how long and pernicious. It is a temporal setback. Our ancestors have endured. The basic foundation of our culture remains intact.”19 For Covar and other writers preceding him, partial Hispanization became synonymous with ineffective or superficial acculturation, which presumably left untouched a bedrock of core values and beliefs that defi ned indigenous culture. 20 The strategic value of such a claim, particularly given the Philippine postwar national republic’s long-term condition of economic dependency and diplomatic mendicancy, seems obvious. The cultural disavowal of colonialism—Spanish, American, and neocolonial—provides an alternative rationality to the resignation or cooptation of national leaders, for whom history serves to reinforce the status quo. It allows students to read the past as a series of political decisions that inform similar decisions to be made in the present. It projects the possibility of a space outside the realm of compromise and negotiation with the colonial legacy, even when it defi nes this space as the inner sanctum of cultural self and identity. 21 At the same time, however, the literature and historiography of the modern “invention of traditions” force us to regard such claims with suspicion. As Caroline Hau’s remarkable study of official and unofficial nationalisms that arose after the granting of Philippine independence by the United States in 1946 shows, the idea of “tradition” in the production of literature is inseparable from its deployment as modern pedagogy for the formation of national citizen-subjects. Literature thus resembles less a continuity of written and

14

Introduction

oral traditions than an “ethical technology” that produces the terms of hegemonic consent.22

latent versus manifest historicism A different but perhaps equally limited criterion for evaluating the common grounds of common sense in the Philippines emerges when one considers the continuities and changes of Philippine culture and society from what Alfred McCoy identifies as the “slow, uneven, protracted, and largely non-cumulative” integration of the archipelago’s socioeconomic (largely rural and agricultural) base to the world market or “modern world-system” of capitalism. 23 Here, the focus of historical analysis shifts from the deeds and intentions of imperial Spain in the sixteenth century, as well as its progress or decline in the nineteenth, toward an examination of capital’s historical penetration into the Philippines. This shift would allow one to read the history of the Philippines alongside comparable developments in Southeast Asia, if not the world, according to processes of accumulating and realizing the production of surplus in commerce and agriculture; the concentration of land ownership; the alienation and displacement of native peasants from communal and privatized lands; and the roles of technology, urbanization, the local native and Chinese-Spanish mestizo elite, and the colonial state in facilitating the transformation of colonial society, beginning with the second half of the eighteenth century. Some of the immediate consequences of this shift in focus are evident. For example, according to this historiographical frame, the point of reference for understanding those patterns of continuity and change in terms of an aggregate of diverse socioeconomic regions ceases to be imperial Spain and becomes rather the British Empire. 24 For it was largely in the aftermath of the 1762 British invasion and occupation of Manila that the colonial government undertook an extensive project of military and fi scal reforms designed to make the Philippines a selfsustaining colony and Pacific base for Spain’s international network of security and commerce. The three great economic projects launched by or with the assistance of the colonial state in this period—the tobacco and alcohol state monopolies, the Royal Company, and the Economic Society—along with the clearing and cultivation of the interior frontier, all suggest that the Philippines underwent a “historical transition” from serving as a rearguard Spanish frontier outpost to serving as an agricultural settlement, that is, as a colony in the true

Introduction

15

sense. The resulting changes in the socioeconomic base would parallel the emergence of a Spanish and Chinese mestizo class engaged in local commerce and export agriculture; the new aggressive intervention of the modern colonial state in the affairs of religious and local authorities (i.e., the native elite, or principalía); and the gradual opening of Manila and, later, other major ports to foreign trade. It was through the opening of contacts and relations with other European and Asian nations, as well as the United States, that the diverse regions of the Philippines were unevenly synchronized to the processes of commodification and the reification of social relations—the concentration of land ownership, alienated labor, class stratification, and so forth. A second revision that the emphasis on the uneven integration or incorporation of the Philippines into the world market (with its focus on regional histories) has had on the impasses confronted by both the partial Hispanization thesis and the nationalist appropriation of Philippinization has been to challenge the manifest historicism in both. For example, whatever continuities one may discern in the administration of Spanish colonial sovereignty, and whatever nascent patriotism one may discern in the invocation of native tradition in the nineteenth century, one must also acknowledge that the disruptions brought about by the penetration of the world market in the nineteenth century proved to be infertile ground for the cultivation of national sentiment or culture.25 Because each regional history illustrates such a complex interweaving of conflicting goals and interests, no one combination of elements proved to be conclusive in the consolidation of colonial, neocolonial, or progressive political ideologies in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.26 As Alfred McCoy wrote in the introduction of a pioneering work on Philippine regional social histories, “Instead of a village society bound by cultural patterns and political rules, there emerges the image of an intensely dynamic society, or series of societies, that has changed constantly throughout its four centuries of recorded history in response to economic, demographic, and technological stimuli” (McCoy, “Introduction,” 4). The contributions of this historiographical frame, of course, come with their attendant dangers. To begin with, the problem with this image of constant change—discernible only to the regional specialist’s eye and consisting of both major and minor exceptions to every rule—is that it can paradoxically foreclose the possibility of comparative analysis that it was meant to open.27 The emphasis on the uniqueness of each region, its irreducibility to the study of any other region in the Philippines beyond the general acknowledgment that the Philippines underwent, or continues

16

Introduction

to undergo, a broad socioeconomic transformation, raises a particular challenge to the study of Philippine literature and culture: the tendency to reduce all questions of historical continuity and change to local changes in what is perceived to be the socioeconomic “base.”28 This tendency has three immediate consequences. The first is to downplay or underestimate the degree to which the gradual integration of the nineteenth-century socioeconomic “base” with the world market was from the very beginning a project and raison d’être of the “superstructure”—the modern or late Spanish colonial state.29 To put it another way, the “economic, demographic, and technological stimuli” that McCoy mentions, however diverse and divergent, were all tied to not only the articulation of a modern world-system (Wallerstein calls it the “worlding of the world”), but also to Spain’s response to and participation in that articulation in and through the form of a modern colonial state. Unlike the viceroyalties that administered Spain’s possessions from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, the modern colonial state arose from a different understanding of Spain’s present, with its attendant prospects and risks, in a world increasingly drawn into the security and trading network of the European world powers. Its relation to these prospects and risks explains the rationality and direction behind its series of military and fiscal reforms, which redefined the nature and sphere of interests of Spanish colonial rule. And, in contrast to its role in the Philippines’s sister Spanish colonies Cuba and Puerto Rico, the colonial state used a heavy hand in providing the stimulus and directives for the Philippines’s integration into the world market. As chapter 1 shows, the colonial state pioneered the necessary reforms that would grant the existing and emergent native and mestizo elites the necessary agency to benefit from the liberalizing economy. Paradoxically, this autonomy enabled them later to turn against Spanish rule. It was the state that initiated the cultivation of export crops and regional crop specialization, and spurred the displacement, alienation, and relocation of the colonial populace in lands that needed peasant labor.30 The state also redefined the role of the religious missionary orders in accordance with its military and fiscal reforms (see chapter 2) and redirected the policies of censorship to promote a colonial variant of Spanish patriotism, public opinion, and aesthetics (chapters 4–6). To speak of the Philippines’s integration into the world market, then, one must also take into account the Philippines’s integration into a colonial system (Fradera calls it the Spanish “three-colony system”); and consider the contradiction that emerges from the twofold movement between the ostensibly “hegemonic” nature of the modern capitalist world-system,

Introduction

17

which endows its actors with socioeconomic agency, and the emergence of colonial despotism on the imperial frontier.31 In Philippine history, in any case, the designation and relation of “base” to “superstructure” as well as “domination” and “hegemony” have to be preceded by the following question: what exactly constitutes a “colonial state?” How do its operations reflect and elaborate a new understanding of the colonial subject? And how did colonial officials and native writers alike conceptually grasp the complex networks of authority and resistance under colonial rule? Chapters 1–3 focus on this series of questions. On a broader level, by concentrating on writing histories wherein the economy as the “last instance” determines social life, we forget what cultural critic Stuart Hall has elsewhere called the “first” and “middle” instances—those presumably non-socioeconomic forms and expressions of individual and collective behavior that overdetermine the field of interest and action that we designate strictly as “the economy” in decisive ways.32 To take but one example, Reynaldo Ileto’s work Pasyón and Revolution, provides us with a primary point of reference regarding our willful amnesia regarding the so-called first and middle instances of culture and politics in colonial society. In Ileto’s polemic, both historical revisionist and nationalist writers alike insist on portraying the 1896 Philippine revolution and its aftermath as a paradigmatic instance of economic forces and their ideological expressions—agrarian unrest, class stratification, and cynical leadership of the Chinese and Spanish mestizo middle or “middling” classes. In contrast to these, Ileto demonstrated how one might equally examine the events as the cultural transformation of social values derived from native atavism and folk Christianity.33 Ileto’s perspective establishes a critical dialogue with a larger stream of postcolonial scholarship, which includes the work of Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and Edward Said, as well as the Indian historiography of the Subaltern Studies Collective. On the one hand, the macro view that capitalist modernity as a mode of production entered the colonial world according to various circumstances, developed in a particular way, and was synchronized with capitalist development in the metropolis, with the result that it favored the latter at the expense of the former, seems indisputable. At the same time, however, such a narrative is (or ought to be) interrupted at every level and moment in order to create the possibility of documenting the history of strategies, struggles, and approaches to colonial rule and resistance, which exceed the argument concerning the “economy as the last instance.” Gyan Prakash addresses this concern directly when he writes, “Critical history cannot simply document the

18

Introduction

process by which capitalism becomes dominant, for that amounts to repeating the history we seek to displace; instead, criticism must reveal the difference that capitalism either represents as the particular form of its universal existence or sketches only in relation to itself.”34 This brings us to the third consequence of writing history as the history (and supplementary “prehistory”) of capital. While social history succeeds in effectively critiquing the manifest historicism in the Hispanization and corollary Philippinization theses, it also wittingly or unwittingly obscures a latent historicism that predetermines the directions of our research on Philippine culture and society in history. This latent historicism is based on the presupposition of a single historical transition that presumably absorbs and subordinates all others: the one from pre- or noncapitalist relations to capitalist ones. The resulting sublation (the Hegelian concept of Aufhebung comes to mind) of all other ways of producing or reproducing different senses of the common with this one paradoxically remains blind to the facility with which it performs and perpetuates the very notions of “progress” that its authors intended to denounce or dissect. On the one hand, the pathetic inefficiency, the ostensible incompetence of Spanish imperial Christendom, as well as the “invented traditions” of cultural nationalism, are routinely exposed, and the latter are denounced as ideological snares. On the other hand, the homogeneous empty time of capital accumulation and the inevitability of universal human alienation remain curiously untroubled models for analyzing “continuity” and “change” (questionable categories themselves) in Philippine society. 35 Moreover, even when scholars identify and learn to recognize how “progress” has come predominantly to signify evernewer forms of brutalization, dispossession, and disfranchisement of social belonging, our critical, Eurocentric rationality also compels us to regard creative responses to “progress” as selective and strategic uses of backwardness. 36 The impasse of latent historicism and its inherent difficulty in acknowledging the role of culture in imagining and participating in social life, beyond the (questionable) objective among postcolonial populations of achieving a more even integration into the world market, has had a fi nal, perhaps unintended consequence. That has been the relative neglect of the study of literature except as a sociological artifact or ideological artifice of cultural nationalism. Thus, while works like the anonymous Pasyóng Henesis (fi rst published in 1814) routinely serve as illustrations and repositories of social values

Introduction

19

reflected in colonial, folk Catholicism, the particularly modern innovations in the narrative of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection, by contrast, have received little attention. 37 The study of other works, like Fernando Balagtas’s Florante at Laura and José Rizal’s novels, becomes all too easily mired in the pedagogical exercise of debating whether or not Balagtas was a “nationalist,” or whether or not Rizal was “revolutionary.”38 The influence of manifest and latent historicism in complicating the study of colonial literary texts has had the paradoxical effect of rendering them simultaneously transparent, and therefore easily enlisted in the service of ideological claims, even as they remain completely obscure, removed from their contexts and critical dialogues with other writers and cultural practices of the colonial society of which they are a part. This leaves us with little more than a broad consensus that colonial literature, with the exception of two or three luminaries, is largely lacking in originality and genius. On a broader level, however, the invisibility of late colonial culture as a site of modern self- and collective formation, identification or disidentification, and renovation raises a series of questions that this work is meant to address. Is there any room to consider—between the construction and analysis of statistical charts (however valuable) and the pursuit of native informants in ethnographic field research—that writers and artists of the nineteenth century were also concerned with imagining or producing the grounds of their commonness? Would it be possible to examine their participation in and reflections on the contradictions of modern colonial society, without immediately forcing them into preestablished categories of nationalist/non-nationalist, elite/popular (masa), “Manila-centric”/ provincial? Is there room, between the manifest historicism of (partial) Hispanization or Philippinization on the one hand, and the latent historicism of the Philippine transition into the world market on the other, to study the tensions and struggles, the aesthetic elaboration and vernacular folklorization among contesting authorities over the construction of the colonial state, the formation of political communities, and their elaboration of divergent expressions of common sense?

from subaltern speech to the constitution of common sense When we attune our gazes to Lozano’s Letras y figuras, a relatively simple contradiction between letter and figure can yield rather complex reflections on the impasse in the development of colonial rule during

20

Introduction

the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Above all, Lozano’s double claim to be projecting the common sense of colonial modernity as both the elevated act of aesthetic reflection and its “folklorization” advances the modest claim that lies at the basis of this investigation. That claim is that the ambiguous legacy of modernity, either as the advent of a new, universal worldview, the entrance and penetration of capitalism, or a set of philosophical themes inspired by the observable economic and social changes in the archipelago (particularly around Manila), was itself a subject of debate in the literature and cultural production of the nineteenth century. It seems to me that, in addition to mapping these debates and perspectives, the fact that these debates even existed in the colonial context of despotic rule, forced labor, and most notably censorship, merits some attention. What allowed them to exist and proliferate? How did their participants negotiate among the contradictory imperatives and incentives given them by the colonial state, Christianity, and the marginal autonomy of native customs and traditions? How did these institutions, in turn, invest in these perspectives, and to what end? I conclude this introduction with a word about periodization. Josep Fradera’s study of the “long nineteenth century” in Philippine history schematically divides the period between the 1760s and the 1896 Philippine Revolution into three epochs, each of which embodies a different dynamic between the Spanish metropole and its colonies. 39 The fi rst encompasses the period of extensive Bourbon reforms, in which the Spanish monarchy, responding to the breakdown of European mercantilist economic policies in Southeast Asia, initiated a colonial project that combined the revitalization of colonial conquest and urban settlement (reducción) with a series of cameralist-inspired reforms.40 These reforms included the creation of the tobacco and alcohol state monopolies, the establishment of a Royal Trading Company of the Philippines, the reform of the system of native tribute, and the institution of an Economic Society (Real Sociedad de los Amigos del País), which was to cultivate educational projects and disseminate information on the fomentation of agriculture, the stimulation of entrepreneurship, and the administration of government. The second epoch corresponds to the collapse of the Spanish empire and its aftermath, in which the usurpation of Fernando VII by Napoleon’s brother Joseph Bonaparte led to the seesaw struggle between constitutional government and Spanish Bourbon restoration on the Iberian Peninsula for sixty-odd years. The devastating loss of much of

Introduction

21

Spain’s overseas empire in the Latin American wars of independence, however, obscures Spain’s success in balancing the continuity of colonial rule with the administration of reforms throughout its remaining possessions (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines). In this endeavor, the colonial government succeeded in creating and increasing profits for the royal treasury, primarily from the sugar and tobacco industries; clearing uncultivated lands for use in the monopolies, the military centralization of power in the hands of the captain-general; and the subordination of both provincial governors and religious missionary orders to authoritarian control. The cornerstone of relations between Spain and the Philippines in this period was the perpetually deferred promise that the Philippines was to be ruled by Special Laws distinct from those of the Iberian Peninsula but in accordance with the continuity of Spanish imperial authority. This meant that the Philippines could not hold seats in the constitutional elective legislative assembly, the Cortes, and that laws passed in those “provinces” would be passed by nonconstitutional means (see chapter 2). Finally, the opening of the third epoch of the long nineteenth century corresponds to the 1869 opening of the Suez Canal, which facilitated Spain’s access to the Pacific and, more notably, that of the other European powers as well. The Philippines’s acceleration of foreign trade with countries other than Spain, the outbreak of the Ten Years’ War (1868–78) and the Guerra Chiquita (1879) in Cuba, the collapse of the state tobacco monopoly (formally dissolved in 1882), the disenchantment of Creole and mestizo classes with the politics of colonial reform, and the extensive rearticulation of international law in the 1883 Berlin Conference all signified Spain’s weak grip on its remaining colonies. This recognition led to the concession of the rights of representation in the Spanish Assembly, or Cortes, for Cuba and Puerto Rico, although Spain reiterated the necessity of colonial Special Laws in the Philippines. Yet despite these concessions, as well as the abolition of slavery in Cuba and various attempts at educational and administrative reforms in the Philippines in 1879 and 1893 (some of which were never actually carried out), the 1895 Cuban war of independence and the 1896 Philippine revolution signaled the irreparable break that each country had made with the imperial power. While the overall direction of the chapters presented herein roughly follows Fradera’s account, I have chosen to abstract from this chronology a bit by focusing on two axes of investigation, which I believe cut across the diverse changes in a way that allows us to specify the forms

22

Introduction

of consciousness that arose in the nineteenth century. The fi rst axis concerns the central contradiction outlined above: the irreconcilability of colonial reform’s short-term objectives (the commodification, solicitation, and ramification of native consent) with its ultimate ones (the preservation of colonial rule). The second axis of investigation concerns the intersection between colonial state initiatives in the realm of public culture (from religious practices to the newspaper and novel) and the emergence of a field of diverse interests propelled by native and mestizo entrepreneurship, pro-Spanish patriotic sentiment, and folk Catholicism, which sponsored new interventions in the preservation or demise of colonial rule. Part 1 of this book, “Shibboleths,” examines the crisis of Spanish colonial hegemony in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in which peninsular Spanish and Philippine-born writers and colonial officials sought to reconcile the emergence of constitutional government in Spain with the identification of “peculiar circumstances” that warranted Special Laws overseas. Chapter 1 lays the groundwork for understanding these paradoxes by examining the consequences of the British invasion of Manila (in 1762) on the understanding of Philippine history and the future of Spanish sovereignty in the archipelago. From this point onward, colonial officials increasingly see the ultimate preservation of the islands for Spain as resting in the targeting and management of native consent to colonial rule in and through the institutional autonomy of the colonial state (the colonial raison d’état). The second chapter examines this transition from colonial empire to colonial state in terms of the latter’s attempt to absorb, synchronize, and identify with the missionary project of religious evangelization. This attempt, which infringed on the autonomy of the religious orders from the time of the conquest and colonization (their fueros, or privileges), manifested itself in the struggle over the secular transference of parishes that were under the administration of missionary friars to the administration of native secular priests, who were under the control of the archbishopric and the Spanish government rather than the Church papacy in Rome. By analyzing these debates, this chapter traces the manner in which the expediency of religious authority in the archipelago comes to provide the cornerstone of exceptional rule. This occurs in flagrant contradiction to the administration’s own attempt to normalize the power of the religious orders by absorbing them into the colonial bureaucracy. Chapter 3 complements the fi rst two chapters by looking at the organization of colonial society around the coexistence and mutual

Introduction

23

transformation of Spanish Christianity and the autonomy of native tradition (kaugalian). The interdependence between the two has roots that are buried deep within the Christian tradition and its relation to empire, under the concept of the economy, or oikonomia. By examining this concept and its historical unfolding in the Philippines, we see how the flock of native Christians became so agitated by the changes in nineteenth-century colonial society that it begins to produce its own leaders, outside the authority of the Church. The 1841 uprising of Apolinario de la Cruz, or Hermano Pule, as he was known by his followers, provides us with a good example of how the bureaucratization of the religious orders in this period, the simultaneous elevation and disfranchisement of native secular priests, and the legislation of racial dichotomy awaken the latent radical implications of folk Christianity as the transculturation of missionary autonomy and the autonomy of native custom. Part 2 (“Projects”) consists of three chapters, all of which examine the intersection of modern colonial aesthetics and politics in the nineteenth century. Chapter 4 (“Publics”) documents the attempt to rationalize colonial society into the designation of its public and private spheres, with the state as the mediating agent between them. The invocation of patriotism, the solicitation of public opinion, and the fashioning of political identities all express the hybrid constitution of the modern colonial project: on the one hand, to stimulate and regulate the colonial subject’s desire for national belonging; on the other hand, to ward off the deeper implications of patriotism and public opinion in the constitution of colonial modernity. Chapter 5 (“Aesthetics”) examines this hybrid constitution as it manifested itself in the imagination of a colonial Philippine aesthetic: making a claim to the autochthonous originality of the islands, their people, and that people’s customs—a claim that, paradoxically, could only be expressed in terms of the features lacking in nature and native tradition. The dialectical unraveling of this impasse occurs in the production of the colonial novel (chapter 6, “Values”), in which writers set themselves the task of articulating social and cultural norms compatible with or critical of the phantom administration of Special Laws. While some writers saw the study and affirmation of native custom as the bedrock for producing new rationalities for social conformity (Castro) or opposition to the intrusion of metropolitan reforms on the colonial periphery (Lucio y Bustamante), other writers took up the form of the novel and its concern with native custom as a way of questioning the direction and the

24

Introduction

implications of colonial policy. How far would the principle of native consent to colonial rule go? What if this principle ultimately led to the imminent threat of national revolution? Part 3 is entitled “Concatenations” and consists of chapter 7 and the epilogue. In chapter 7 (“Gothic”) I examine how the colonial state’s valuation of native custom and tradition as a way of investigating and ramifying the native subject’s consent to and desire for colonial rule also led to the articulation of counterhistories inimical to the continuity of Spanish colonial sovereignty. Dr. José Rizal’s lifelong preoccupation with history and historical writing provides me with a wealth of examples for analyzing how the escape from the impasses of modern colonialism would entail the dismantling of the modern colonial project as it had been formulated at the end of the eighteenth century. Rizal arrives at this conclusion by exploding the projects of colonial modernity from within: fi rst, by taking the acknowledgment of native will or desire to its fi nal implications (“What do the natives ultimately want?”); and, second, by considering or imagining the life of the colonial subject beyond or in spite of colonial rule. When this occurs, the colonial state loses its primary reason for existence—the solicitation and management of native will—and can only identify itself under the terms of colonial sovereignty.

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Shibboleths

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chapter 1

Imperial Christendom and the Colonial State Cong ibig mog magca utang icao ag mag titinaan cong dica, macapag quintal icao ay maquiquintalan. [If you want to obtain a loan Go and cultivate indigo (ink dye) But if you can’t harvest a quintal You’ll surely be marked (quintal-an), singled out.]

A song transcribed by Augustinian priest Fr. Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga in 1800 opens this chapter, which concerns the contradictory principles and motives behind the colonial state in the Philippines in the nineteenth century and the fictions of native consent, public good, and general culture that served to mitigate those contradictions. This labor song, according to Zúñiga, was passed around on the banks of the Baliwag River, which cuts through Bulacan hinterland, north of Manila, in the late eighteenth and into the nineteenth centuries. Indigo dye was one of the first cash crops, along with tobacco, sugar, and abaca, or hemp, which the colonial government under Don Basco y Vargas (1785) encouraged and helped to fi nance as part of a larger initiative to transform the Philippine economy from being a constant drain on the colonial treasury in Mexico to a self-sustaining and even profitable colonial possession.1 The program of fiscal reform constituted one of the two main projects of the colonial administration from this period onward; the other was military and consisted in the shoring up of Manila’s defenses as well as the subjugation of Muslim sultanates in the southern part of the archipelago to Spanish rule. With these two projects, Spain, under the Bourbon monarchy of Charles III, hoped to fashion an overseas colonial territory under Spanish rule that, for the most part, existed in name only. By securing the Pacific frontier as the rear guard of Spain’s colonies in the Americas, as well as cultivating the colony’s self-sustainability, colonial officials would parallel (if not anticipate) Britain’s 27

28

Shibboleths

approaches to their colonial possessions in India and Southeast Asia, as well as the Netherlands’s approaches to the Dutch Indies. The song in the epigraph pivots around the element of risk in investing in indigo as an agricultural export commodity. This element of risk ties together two otherwise unrelated meanings of the word quintal: the fi rst is Spanish and refers to a hundred-pound unit of weight; the second is the Tagalog verb root that refers to the act of marking. For Zúñiga, “All the humor of the rhyme consists in the double-retort [retruécano] of the word quintal,” in which debtors become “marked” by the same ink they sought to produce as a way of overcoming their perpetual debt to Spanish rule and even rendering a profit (406). The song, or dalit, a poetic form discussed in greater detail in chapter 3, returns us in somewhat elliptical fashion to an important detail of José Honorato Lozano’s Letras y figuras (see figure 1). Most of Lozano’s native colonial subjects are wearing simple, blue, loose shirts and pants made with the same indigo dye that was being produced as an export commodity. In the painting, it is indigo that allows their visibility as figures to serve as the basis of each letter’s legibility: their clothes serve as the “ink” that sustains the letter. Paradoxically, however, their very form of visibility conspires to conceal them. The colonial subjects who fi nd humor in the wit of the Baliwag rhyme express a classic instance of what Gayatri Spivak has called “subaltern speech”: that is, they are “marked,” ciphered, under the terms of perpetual debt to the name as the very condition of their visibility and, by extension, their imagined autonomy in the common space of the painted scene or song in which they live and work together. 2 Can we not see the same logic at work in the Baliwag song? Like Lozano’s letter-figures, the song projects a predicament awaiting native colonial subjects who seek autonomy from the forced tribute and manual labor that has been their burden since the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Philippines. Here, in order to alleviate one form of colonial debt, the nativeturned-entrepreneur seeks emancipation by paradoxically resorting to another. The threat of interpellative violence remains, but it has itself become subject to the fulfi llment of a new task and prospect. At the same time, however, the caesura between the fi rst “If . . . then” and the second—between two expressions of law that signify one’s opportunity and the risk of incurring the exercise of state violence— allows for an instant, a pause, to reflect not only on the opportunity and risk of native entrepreneurship, but also, and more significantly, on the distinction between two economies of debt and redemption that

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inspired the song in the fi rst place. There is the economy of debt based on the principle of imperial sovereignty and Christian conversion, in which the ancient formula protego ergo obligo (I protect therefore obligate [you]) provides the cornerstone of native tribute and forced labor to the rulers.3 Yet there is an economy of debt apart from the fi rst that works in a different manner. To put it simply, this debt is an investment made by the consent of the colonial subject and its placement at the disposal of the law or state. By cultivating indigo, the native entrepreneur stands not only to fulfi ll previous obligations, but even to surpass them. Of course, the dalit expresses skepticism at this prospect. What is important to recognize, however, is that this moment of hesitation between two hypothetical proceedings also reveals how the new form of indentureship and debt unleashed by the cash-crop economy is neither identical to nor continuous with the old. Rather, the link from one economy of debt and redemption to another has to be routed through the subjects’ acquiescence. Their consent, however limited, has become the hinge between two orders of debt and their representation. The rhyme’s insight emblematizes the central theme of this chapter, which concerns the invention of “the colonial state” as the designation of a political rationality whose task it was to transform the absence of organized resistance to Spanish rule into relations of manifest consent: a consent that could be targeted, procured, channeled, and ramified— in a word, governed—by means of measurement, calculation, and investment, that is, knowledge. “Political rationality” here refers to a process by which decision making under colonial rule is ascribed to an ostensibly preexisting criterion, structure, or principle, a criterion that remains inseparable from the specific instances of its invocation or utterance. Friedrich Meinecke has illustrated how the identification of this presumed rationality is what allows a “state” of things to become the target object of “the (modern) State,” as in the sixteenth-century doctrine of raison d’état: Raison d’état is the fundamental principle of national conduct, the State’s fi rst Law of Motion. It tells the statesman what he must do to preserve the health and strength of the State. The State is an organic structure whose full power can only be maintained by allowing it in some way to continue growing; and raison d’état indicates both the path and the goal for such a growth. . . . The choice of path to the goal is restricted by the particular nature of the State and its environment. Strictly speaking, only one path to the goal . . . has to be considered at any one time. For each State at each particular moment there exists one ideal course of action, one ideal raison d’état. (Italics added)4

30

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On one level, it would be easy to demonstrate why the identification of such a political rationality, however specious, appeared in the Philippines from the middle of the eighteenth century. As outlined in the introduction, the 1762 British invasion and occupation of Manila crystallized an entire set of concerns around the precariousness of Spain’s control over its colonial territories, as well as the constant drain on the Crown treasury produced by the administrative costs of the archipelago. Fiscal considerations were further heightened by Spain’s bankruptcy after seven years of war with Britain. Both the insecurity of Spain’s foothold across the Pacific as well as Spain’s economic crisis warranted a plan, a project, capable of addressing these issues as interconnected. At the same time, however, the more difficult question to ask is how the introduction of native consent enters into the calculations of colonial officials. By what mechanisms (discursive and institutional), programs, and strategies would the colonial official and native colonial subject navigate the crisis of the colonial compact? This chapter focuses on the way colonial officials imagined this change and on how these projections of social and economic change presumed a new relationship between rulers and ruled that would provide the foundations of the modern colonial state. My objects of analysis are the two concepts of colony and state that begin to be used in the late eighteenth century to describe the crisis of imperial hegemony in the archipelago and to propose a solution. At stake was a form of legitimacy that would ensure the continuity of Spanish sovereignty, even as it marked a radical break from the authority and order on which that sovereignty was based.

from hapsburg flexibility to bourbon reform In Las Indias no eran colonias (The Indies were not colonies), legal historian Ricardo Levene advanced the controversial argument that, until the late eighteenth century, Spain’s overseas possessions in the Americas, the Caribbean, and the Philippines were not considered satellite colonies of Spain. Rather, their juridical status was more or less equal to that of Spain’s provinces on the Iberian Peninsula. Reflecting upon and responding to the long-term effects of Spain’s “black legend” (leyenda negra) of the Spanish conquest on historical and legal scholarship, Levene argues that Spanish rule over its “dominions” (as opposed to “colonies”) was neither formally nor systematically despotic and exploitative. Compared to Dutch and British colonial systems of the

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time, Levene concludes, the relationship between the Spanish monarchy (and later, nation) and its overseas territories was no different than the relationship of Castilian rule to Catalonia or the Basque Province. His exhaustive survey of documents spanning the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries reveals, among other things, that the literal identification of the Americas and the Philippines as colonial possessions—either for the purposes of settlement or economic exploitation—does not appear until very late in the history of the Spanish empire. Furthermore, the appearance of this new identification played a central role in the rise of political separatism in Latin America. Scholars of the colonial and postcolonial epochs in Latin America have criticized Levene’s thesis.5 His polemic fails to explain, perhaps even to the point of obscuring, how genocidal campaigns, the enslavement of Native Americans, and the African slave trade all presupposed a concept of racial difference and colonial sovereignty in a way that Spanish rule over Basques or Catalonians does not. Above all, Levene’s victory in a debate over juridico-legal terms (“Were the Indies actually referred to as colonies in Spanish laws?”) occurs at the expense of acknowledging the actual experience of the Spanish conquest and its aftermath.6 Yet the significance of Levene’s argument is that it succeeds in raising questions regarding the relationship of the Spanish empire to modernity and the colonial state in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As we know, the fi rst two centuries of Spanish conquest in the Americas and the Philippines did not lead to the constitution of colonies as the word colony is etymologically used, that is, to refer primarily to Spanish settlement and land cultivation. The Philippines, specifically, served primarily as a military outpost that would ostensibly protect Spain’s American dominions from attack via the Pacific and as a prospective base from which to launch the project of Christian religious conversion in Asia. We can also extrapolate from Levene’s thesis that the colonial state in the Philippines could not arise until the Philippines itself became imaginable as a colony. The political organization of frontier Christendom illustrates such an interpretation. From the time of the conquest to the accession of the Bourbon dynasty in Spain, the Spanish Hapsburg monarchs had adopted an extremely loose, flexible administration in the Philippines, if not the Americas in general, which depended on decentered and heterogeneous forms of authority in constant flux and negotiation.7 Herbert Bolton called it a “frontier system,” which was based on the concession that Spain lacked the resources to extend its

32

Shibboleths

authority over the vast territories it had claimed for itself in the sixteenth century.8 The chief manifestation of colonial administration, the Laws of the Indies, not only outlined the basic responsibilities of the colonial subject to king, but also explicitly specified the limits of Spanish sovereignty to interfere with certain privileges (fueros) of the religious and with the “common law” or customary rights (derecho consuetudinal) of the colonial subject. Regarding the former, religious fueros theoretically referred to the rights of the religious orders to administer affairs pertaining to sites of missionary activity as well as the practice of religious duties among converts.9 On a practical level, however, such privileges could encompass a wide spectrum: from burial fees on holy ground to the forced suspension of working days for festivals and to a missionary priest’s exemption from criminal prosecution by the civil authorities. As for the common laws and customs of the colonial subject, these remained in force wherever and whenever they did not contradict the Laws of the Indies and in fact received sanction from colonial authority (see chapter 3). On a theoretical level, these rights and immunities were all integrated into a vertical chain of command, which began with the colonial subject and culminated with the will of the monarch, who stood above the law insofar as the monarch dictated it. In practice, however, the absolute power of the monarch undermined this chain of command and rendered the entire structure weak. The double standard of monarchial authority (its power to at once establish and undermine the chain of command) resulted in its self-cancellation. “In light of these circumstances,” Frank Jay Moreno writes, “it is quite understandable that no one felt the slightest compulsion to obey his superior whenever he did not agree with his commands. The artificial hierarchy of power never functioned in practice” (“Spanish Colonial System,” 316). The resulting impossibility of administrative centralization and monopoly on legitimate violence found its juridical expression in the policy of Se acata pero no se cumple / Obedezco pero no cumplo [One complies with but does not carry out / I obey but do not carry out].10 John Phelan describes this legal measure in the following manner: “The ‘I obey’ clause signifies the recognition by subordinates of the legitimacy of the sovereign power who, if properly informed of all circumstances, would will no wrong. The ‘I do not execute’ clause is the subordinate’s assumption of the responsibility of postponing the execution of an order until the sovereign is informed of those conditions of which he may be ignorant and without a knowledge of which an

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33

injustice may be committed” (“Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial Bureaucracy,” 59). The resulting legal chaos of what Phelan (after Andre Gunder Frank) called the “conflicting standards approach” to colonial rule is what prompted French explorer Jean-François Galaup de la Pérouse to remark in 1787, “For a society so lacking in enlightenment as this, I believe it would be difficult to imagine a system of government more absurd than that which has ruled these colonies for the past two centuries.” [Je crois qu’il serait difficile à la société la plus dénuée de lumières, d’imaginer un système de gouvernement plus absurde que celui qui régit ces colonies depuis deux siècles.]11 Yet, while the Laws of the Indies and the day-to-day practice of adapting or changing Spanish colonial policies at their point of application might lead one to believe that, for the better part of three centuries, the Americas and the Philippines lay in a Hobbesian state of nature, the reality was otherwise. In fact, studies of the Hapsburg approach to imperial rule illustrate that the level of bureaucratic disunity and autonomy, combined with the endless confl icts between the jurisdictions of “spiritual” and “temporal” and “common law” administration, actually contributed as much to the success of Spain’s longevity and continuity in the Americas and the Philippines as to the Spanish monarchy’s limitations. This is what led John Phelan, in his study of the Philippines under the Hapsburg monarchy, to conclude: “The paradox is that Spanish success issued from Spanish failure.”12 The late eighteenth century in the Philippines designates a central theater in which the attempted dismantling of “compromise government” and administrative flexibility in Spain’s administration of its overseas possessions took place. We have already mentioned the 1762–63 British takeover of Manila, which resulted from Spain’s alliance with France during the latter’s Seven Years’ War with Britain and led to the penetration of British commerce in the islands as well as Latin America. While this penetration was minimal in the Philippines during the short term, it revealed the insecurity of Manila from foreign attack. It also underlined the imperial outpost’s exposure to the discontent of the religious orders, the opportunism of the nascent commercial sector (composed primarily of predominantly Chinese and mestizo entrepreneurs), and native resentment to tribute and forced labor. In response to the events of the Seven Years’ War and its aftermath, the Bourbon Crown under Charles III moved to strengthen the bases

34

Shibboleths

of absolute monarchy. His measures included the removal of the Jesuits from the Americas and the Philippines in 1768 as part of a larger initiative to reduce the power of the religious to challenge or influence his decisions in both Spain and its colonies.13 Another was the 1788 Reglamento that abolished restrictions on exterior commerce between Spain and its overseas empire. Taken together, these events provided colonial officials with an opportunity to reconceive the relation of Spain to the Philippines in a way that would reflect Spain’s changing relationship with the rest of Europe. In 1784, the captain-general and governor of the Philippines, Don José Basco y Vargas, began an ambitious plan of reforms that lasted until the late nineteenth century.14 These reforms included the establishment of a government monopoly on the production and sale of tobacco; the formation of a Royal Company of the Philippines, a state-sponsored commercial company modeled after the royal companies established in the British and Dutch Indies; the inauguration of an Economic Society, composed of the principal members of the religious and colonial bureaucracy; and a set of initiatives to cultivate the land beyond subsistence agriculture in order to produce agricultural exports. Most, if not all, of these plans met with shortcomings and eventual failure. Yet Basco y Vargas’s reforms, tied to the aftermath of the British occupation, the sacking of the Jesuits, and the establishment of free trade between Spain and its overseas possessions, give us a picture of Spain’s fi rst systematic efforts to synchronize Philippine commerce to a world market that had shattered Spain’s fragile, imperial network of security and trade.

calculating consent to colonial rule : viana and basco y vargas At the time of the 1762 British invasion of Manila, Francisco Leandro de Viana served as the fiscal attorney or auditor (oídor) of the Philippine Audiencia, a counseling body to the captain-general that was appointed by the Spanish Crown. Viana wrote a series of statements and letters to the king (Carlos III) that centered on ways to increase the revenue produced by the colony, but came to address questions of security, governmental corruption and mismanagement, the power and irresponsibility of the religious missionary orders, and the neglect (or active hindrance) of the teaching of Spanish. Indeed, as Viana’s initial statement to the king expressly illustrates, all the problems that affl ict

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35

the colony have one thing in common—the poverty they produce— which prompts Spain to seriously reconsider its continued presence in the archipelago: There is no greater misfortune in the world than poverty; all have contempt for it, and all regard it with displeasure. . . . If, then, [the colonies] produce nothing; if to maintain them must cost so much that it saps the royal treasury, to the injury of other and more important domains; if for lack of money the honor of the Catholic arms cannot be maintained in these distant regions; if we are exposed to being the plaything of all the nations; if we cannot resist or confront the feeblest enemy who may attack us; and fi nally, if we must endure the ignominy of being discreditably deprived of these faithful vassals, with the loss of all that they have: it is better to anticipate these losses in good time, to abandon or sell these regions, and allow to all free opportunity to make their property secure and take refuge under [our] other dominions. . . . This is the method of saving expenses, and employing those funds for other and more useful purposes, and averting the ignominies to which we are dangerously exposed.15

Viana’s lengthy, conditional statement encodes a new criterion for the continuity of colonial rule, which marks a departure from both the imperial and the missionary endeavors that fi rst inspired the conquest and pacification of the islands. First and foremost, the archipelago must be productive, beyond the expenses it incurs for its maintenance. From the time of the conquest until the middle of the eighteenth century, the Spanish Philippine government had to be subsidized by funds derived from the Crown (through the Viceroyalty of New Spain): a situation bound to aggravate imperial Spain during the centuries of its worst losses to the rival European powers. Yet Viana did not plan to generate funds solely for the purpose of balancing the books. His idea, rather, was to reinvest the income generated from increased revenues to the Crown into infrastructure, public works, health and security: in short, all the operations of good government required to maintain and manage the welfare of the population. “With such receipts in the royal treasury,” he notes, “and with the aforesaid soldiery and their pay, and with navy, artillerymen, and military supplies, what enterprises cannot be taken in these islands? Will this not be the most considerable establishment in all the Indies? Will there be forces that can overcome us? Will the English, who hold their posts and factories with the necessary garrisons, venture again to invade this place?” (pt. 1, chap. 4, par. 3).16 Of equal importance, the consideration of the country’s wealth or poverty must take precedence over the honor of its evangelizing mission.

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From the beginning of his memorandum, Viana is careful to emphasize the necessity of looking at the history and present condition of the Philippines under Spanish rule by fi rst setting to one side the glory of Christian evangelization: “And thus would [our] Commerce be restored, which the Foreigners engage in, since the whole matter consists in taking it by will from them, an idea that shows how premature the abandonment of these Islands would be . . . even laying aside religious motives, which are powerful to the Catholic zeal of the Spaniards” (pt. 1, chap. 2, par. 4);17 “in view of these reflections, every Spaniard will be convinced of the necessity of preserving these islands . . . [even] without the powerful incentive of religion, on account of the great benefit which can result to the monarchy” (pt. 1, chap. 2, par. 14).18 His effective diminution of the Christian evangelical endeavor serves to suspend the narrative of the exploration and conquest that had informed the understanding of Spain’s presence in the Philippines since the sixteenth century. By contrast, Viana seeks a hard-nosed calculation of assignable indices of wealth and poverty, under which the Crown might evaluate the Philippines in terms of an investment. What profit does it yield for the Crown, and what are its possibilities of growth and development, in and through the cultivation of its labor force and its natural wealth? What are its prospects for navigation and commerce? What other markets in Asia does the possession of the islands open up? In a related vein (and this is his second point), the Spanish Crown must take cognizance of and secure itself against the opposition and hostility to Spanish rule in the archipelago arising not only from the predatory interests of other European countries (most prominently the English), but also from the Muslim sultanates, Chinese commerce and piracy, and even the native subjects or Indios themselves (pars. 6–7). This can be contrasted, again, with the vision that guided the exploration and conquest of the Americas and the archipelago in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The latter was predicated on a world that had yet to be redeemed—spiritually but also temporally, in the sense of being complete and enclosed under either the worldwide expansion of imperial administration or (later) the universal codification of international law.19 Juxtaposed to this worldview, Viana sees the preservation or abandonment of the islands as an issue that directly impinges upon the strategic position and tactical maneuvers of rival European powers, whose relation to Spain is defined as a permanent state of potential or actual warfare.20 These conflicts, and particularly Viana’s fear of British encroachment on both the western hemisphere and Pacific Asia, led

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him to warn the king of the numerous disadvantages of abandoning the islands from a military as well as commercial standpoint. More than a colonial outpost, then, the Philippines had to be reconceived in systematically preemptive terms: that is, in ceaseless preparation for a war that was already happening or always about to happen.21 Not coincidentally, the first recommendation he makes for the preservation of the islands is to send punitive expeditions against the Muslim (Moro) sultanates of Jolo and Mindanao so as to prevent future attacks and piracies.22 Finally, Viana’s desire for the government to “allow to all free opportunity to make their property secure and take refuge under other dominions” suggests an obligation of the colonial government, a primitive “social contract” of sorts, that is tied to the government’s permanence in the islands and defi nes its reason for being and its mode of rationality. To put it another way, Spanish rule must enter into a consideration of political expediency that takes on the form of a reason of state (raison d’état or razón del estado) whose ultimate goal is to calculate and secure those conditions for its perpetuity. 23 In this case, Viana identifies Spain’s capacity to promise the property, safety, security, and happiness of the governed as a key strategy for the maintenance of Spanish sovereignty in the islands. 24 Viana’s statement is not meant to be exhaustive. Its call for productivity, preemptive security, and a reason of state, however, expressed a shift in thinking about the relationship of the archipelago to the Spanish metropolis and undertook the constitution of the Philippines as an object of knowledge, administration and management, and military strategy in a field of operations quite different from that of Spain’s imperial maneuvers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. “No one better than Your Excellency,” his opening dedicatory lines to the Superior government in Manila read, “can know the sad constitution of these Philippine Islands, because as their leader you are moved by the universal lack of what is necessary for the Islands’ development” (Demostración, dedicatory preface; italics added). 25 For the fi rst time, the consideration of abandoning the islands entirely forces Spain to clarify the preconditions for the maintenance of its sovereignty overseas. It would have to consider the Philippines not as the completion or fulfi llment of either a divinely sanctioned mission or sovereign right of conquest, but as a project that measured the archipelago’s future prospects against its present expenses and risks. Moreover, this modern colonial program had to be undertaken in a world of rival powers and discontented subjects, whose capacities for consent and dissent had yet

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Shibboleths

to be calculated. 26 Finally, Spain would have to view its relationship with the Philippines not only as a central municipality views its surrounding provinces, but also in the way that rival European powers (particularly the British and Dutch) administered their colonies. The Philippines begins to assume the form, in however imprecise a manner, of a colony—a conception quite alien to the administration of the islands under the missionary orders and the Recopilación de las Leyes de Indias, or Laws of the Indies.27 The identification of the Philippines as a colony affects not only the Philippines, however, but also the character of sovereign authority and the object of knowledge and legislation that, in a sense, justifies the continued presence of Spanish domination in the archipelago. While the appeal to the monarch’s supreme authority appears the same, it has been rerouted through a condition that will overdetermine Spain’s future in the archipelago. That new object of knowledge, legislation, and calculation is the will (voluntad), desire, and consent of the native population for Spanish rule. Viana stumbles onto this new object of legislation and reform in a paradoxical manner. After reviewing several arguments for increasing the native tribute to the colonial government—the mutual obligation of king and subject, the increase of tributes in other colonies, the extreme moderation of the current tribute, the expenses of wars and the maintenance of troops—he briefly considers the counter-argument, based on the largely “peaceful” nature of the conquest: [No han] sido conquistados con Guerras que ocasionasen sus malos procedimientos, para imponerles Tributos grandes, al arbitrio del vencedor, como es justo en tales casos, pues ellos se rindieron de su propia voluntad; y nuestra conquista no fue por habernos dado antecedentes motivos para Guerra, sino por su mayor bien espiritual, y Temporal, por cuya causa deber ser mas moderado el Tributo. (pt. 1, chap. 5, par. 10; italics added) [The natives were not conquered in Wars that would occasion grave consequences on the defeated, such as heavy Tributes, subject to the judgment of the conqueror, which would be just in such cases; instead (the natives) became subjects out of their own will/desire (voluntad); and our Conquest did not arise out of earlier motivations for making War, but out of concern for their greater spiritual, as well as material well-being, for which reason the Tribute ought to be mitigated.]

Viana concludes, however, that such an argument cannot hold to the degree that other Spanish subjects take on the responsibility of sustaining the Philippines because the islanders refuse to do it themselves.

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The consent of the native, in this instance, appears largely as a control mechanism against the unjust or arbitrary demands of the sovereign on his subjects. Abstracted from this context, it becomes clear that native consent and its instantiation or performance in various capacities is the privileged object of colonial reform in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.28 Viana’s memorandum, for instance, occupies itself with this question when he moves from a discussion of the tribute’s lawfulness to the advantages of enriching the colonial government so that it may in turn facilitate the possibilities for the natives’ own enrichment: “If the Indians were willing to apply themselves to a very moderate [amount of] labor, they could pay a larger tribute and [yet] live with more comforts; for there are probably no vassals in all the world who have such capacity and talent for making themselves rich as have the Indians of the Philippines, but nothing comes of this because of their indolence” (pt. 1, chap. 4, par. 14).29 This same logic is at work when Viana goes so far as to suggest that increasing native tributes and more effectively enforcing compulsory labor will benefit not only the colonial government, but the natives as well.30 On the one hand, such an explanation reveals nothing more than the paternalistic attitude of a benvolent master toward his or her vassals. As we will see later, however, the idea that the interests of the colonial administration and of the natives are the same takes on a new meaning when the project of economic and social reform begins to develop. Native consent, far from merely existing as the base condition for expanding Spanish claims to territory and tribute, becomes an object of knowledge and colonial engineering, which aims to discover what elicits it, how to sustain it, and how to trace its ramifications for the procurement of Spain’s perpetuity in the islands. The identification of the Philippines as a self-sustaining agricultural colony and the targeting of native consent as the basis for its future success constitute the two bases of Spanish modern colonial rule. Yet they also anticipate the rise of paradoxes and contradictions in the nature and character of Spanish rule. When one examines Governor and Captain-General José Basco y Vargas’s (1778–1787) reflections on his general economic plan, one gets a glimpse of how the new economic vision would transform both the political order and the relative autonomy of Spanish institutions as well as native customs and traditions. Basco y Vargas explains his plan by invoking the general good of these islands (el bien de estas Islas), the love that all (presumably Spaniards) owe the native land (el amor que deben a la Patria), and

40

Shibboleths

the favorable reception of the public to the plan. Throughout the text, Basco y Vargas emphasizes that these are all in fact the same thing: so, for instance, the good of the islands becomes the “public good,” the “common good,” “the good of all,” and “our common happiness.” Similarly, love for the mother country translates into a desire to improve the state of the Philippines, which is shared by all: “We have skill, love for the mother country, and the desire for our increase equal to theirs” (Recuerdo, par. 27). Yet who constitutes the reference of this “we,” this “our?” At one point, Basco y Vargas describes the inhabitants of the Philippines as the “Citizens of the Islands,” all of whom seek “our common happiness.” It is clear, however, that he refers primarily to Spaniards, either born in Spain or the Philippines (i.e., Creoles); for in the next breath he refers to the native inhabitants as “our industrious fellow vassals” (nuestros industriosos Convasallos). Yet, while “our common good” and “our common happiness” do not appear to include non-Spaniards, the terms do not exclude them, either. Paired with decrees and ordinances passed by Basco y Vargas during the period of his appointment—from his attempt to suppress the abuse of authority and corruption that had led to the dispossession of natives from their land to the opening of free trade to all merchants, regardless of race—it is clear that Basco y Vargas’s notion of a Philippine “Republic” is not concerned with the maintenance of older forms of privilege. Rather, his concern lies with the establishment of an intellectual, enlightened class, closely tied to the colonial bureaucracy, capable of gathering and disseminating knowledge to all interested entrepreneurs as well as enacting legislation suitable for the growth of export agriculture. To this end, the creation of Patriotic Societies (Sociedades Económicas de los Amigos del País) would lead to the study of natural history and its insertion into the calculations of agriculture, industry, and commerce, as well as what he calls “the joy and security of the Public and Private State” (la dicha y seguridad del Estado público, y particular; par. 16). When the “state” of the Philippines becomes an object of knowledge, through the constitution of an enlightened society whose place in the hierarchy of Crown and colonial subject is anomalous, one can begin to speak of a colonial state as the reification of political reason or rationality.

enclosure and occupation: comyn The identification of the Philippines as a Spanish colony and the targeting of native consent as the object of modern colonial policy can

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be traced in the fi fty odd years of reform and initiatives that separate the publication of Viana’s memoranda and that of Tomás de Comyn’s Estado de las islas Filipinas en 1810 (State of the Philippines in 1810; pub. 1820). These reforms included the aggressive pursuit of commercial agriculture, the establishment of various government monopolies, the attempt to place the management of parishes under secular priests rather than members of the missionary orders, the enforcement of the visitation and inspection of the provinces, and the establishment of a Royal Patriotic Society, whose task it was to study ways to increase revenue through agriculture and industry. These clarified the extent to which native consent had to be secured by a colonial “state of the Philippines” and the means of securing it—“state” being understood here not only as a stable condition but one invested with a specific political rationality. The emphasis on the preservation of political and economic stability in the islands becomes all the more poignant when we examine it in light of the tumultuous changes transpiring in Spain. In 1808, two years before the writing of Comyn’s book, Fernando VII was deposed by Napoleon, who set his brother Joseph on the throne amid widespread opposition. The following four years saw a brutal war between French-Turkish forces and the Spanish resistance, which resulted in the drafting of Spain’s fi rst Constitution (1812). Upon his restoration to the throne in 1814, however, Fernando abolished the Constitution and persecuted its authors by imprisonment or exile. His reign was once again challenged in 1820 (the year of the actual publication of Comyn’s Estado de las Islas Filipinas en 1810), when a military coup forced Fernando to accept the constitutional basis of the Spanish monarchy (1820–1823). However, the restoration of autocratic rule succeeded this brief period, aided by France and Britain. After Fernando’s death in 1833, a new cycle of unrest was unleashed by those who supported the restoration of absolute monarchy under Fernando VII’s brother Carlos and opposed the constitutional monarchy of Fernando’s daughter Isabel. These years of revolution and restoration coincided with and to a large degree precipitated the wars of independence in Latin America, and introduced political debates concerning the future of the peninsula to the Philippines. As the general manager of the Philippine Royal Company, a commercial monopoly under the Spanish Crown patterned after the British and Dutch (VOC) East Indies Companies, Comyn was eminently placed to observe the prospects and pitfalls of Spain’s dominion in the

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Philippines. This position may explain why the work was translated into English the year after its publication in Madrid (1821). The translator, William Walton, regards it largely as a critique of Spain’s disregard of the islands, designed “to awaken a spirit of inquiry” that owed itself largely to the 1820 revolution on the peninsula (Comyn, State of the Philippines in 1810, [English], xvii). José Felipe del Pan, by far the most important publicist in the history of the Philippines under Spain, remarks that from the time of its publication, “no important resolution of an economic character, was adopted by the higher powers of the State, pertaining to the Philippines, without fi rst consulting Comyn’s book. . . . Even now, we do not believe it possible to undertake any serious investigation into any branch of administration, without fi rst knowing the antecedents that are laid bare and discussed with the highest standards in this book” (Pan, Islas Filipinas, 7).31 Like his predecessor, Comyn recognizes the need for the government to pursue an aggressive policy of intervention in the management and life of the subject population, far beyond what he regards as the negative or “protective” role Spain had taken since the time of the conquest and pacification of the islands. Again, brief reference to Viana’s recommendations will clarify this conception of colonial modernity as a form of political rationality. The fi rst is the explicit recognition that the Philippines is a colony—specifically, an agricultural colony—and that if it is to be maintained for the Spanish Crown or nation, it must be treated as one. Recall that in Viana’s writings, the identification of the islands as a colony under Spain was almost everywhere absent. Yet from the fi rst sentence of Comyn’s treatise, the dual articulation of “state” and “colony” with all aspects of the population, the question of security, and the prospects of industry and commerce, begins to be posed in a systematic way. What defi nes a colony? In Comyn’s words, it is “a commerce based on the extraction [of wealth], which is what most commonly decides the value and importance of every agricultural colony” (Islas Filipinas, 15) [el comercio de extraccion, que es el que decide por lo comun del valor e importancia de toda colonia agrícola]. For Comyn, the implications of this designation need to be fully measured and exploited in order for any serious, directed reform to take place. In his words, “As long as the government limits itself to exercising a merely protective role [in government], the effects will necessarily be slow. Thus, it is imperative to put into effect measures more powerful than the ordinary ones, and to eschew altogether recourse to general principles that pertain more directly to societies comprised of

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a different fate, or to put it another way, formed by quite different elements” (Islas Filipinas, 38).32 The projected transformation of the government’s “protective” system of rule into a militarily preemptive and agriculturally productive (it is tempting to say “proactive”) one, proceeds in a hybrid manner, which combines new methods of indirect management with older means of coercion and forced obedience codified in law. This hybridism can best be appreciated in Comyn’s greatest point of divergence from his predecessor Viana, concerning the value and investment of the tribute. The increased levy of the native tribute formed the centerpiece of Viana’s proposed reforms: it would eliminate the insular government’s dependence on outside sources for its maintenance and upkeep, open up prospects for improving security and commerce, and draw the natives out of their “sloth,” “indolence,” or indifference to work. By contrast, Comyn begins his report by noting the immense difficulties, if not the utter impossibility, of correctly calculating and exacting tribute: a difficulty that outlines, in blueprint, the challenge to the insular government in the Philippines as a whole (11–15). His criticism of the insular government’s dependence on such an inconstant and incalculable generation of revenue is only furthered by the admission that the exaction of tribute proceeds via a faulty system of collection that engenders corruption and extortion at all levels (136–38). Thus it is, he concludes, that the simplest obligation between the government and the governed has devolved into a complex of “excesses and abuses of authority” (138). Even in cases where such corruption does not exist, the system of exemptions to tribute that evolved over two centuries of Spanish rule increasingly leads the natives to see the tribute as an institutional form of racial preference and discrimination. Comyn proposes four main solutions to the problems caused by the loss of revenue resulting from the cessation of the tribute: the appropriation of unused private lands by the colonial state; their redistribution to settler families for the creation of large estates (haciendas) devoted to commercial agriculture; the return to a system of forced labor (repartimiento); and the reform of the colonial administration (38–41, 143–45). Of course, Viana himself had proposed certain reforms analogous to the spirit of Comyn’s treatise (particularly the proscription of indolence) fifty years earlier.33 Yet the putative effectiveness of this proposed system from its previous manifestation is the (re)appropriation of all unused lands to the Crown (or nation) and the distribution of these lands for commercial agriculture.34 Comyn arrives at this measure in quite a euphemistic way: he first asserts that the first responsibility of the subject (vasallo) is “to

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compensate for the protection that the government dispenses to her or him, and to work together toward the increase in power and wealth of the State” (38).35 This obligation to the colonial state entails the natives’ recognition that even the guarantee of private property takes second place to the public good of the state: “Although at first sight this appears as a direct weakening of the inalienable rights of property, it is wise to keep in mind that individual interest, in some cases, must be sacrificed to the utility of the whole, and that the balance that is used to mete out the good of the State neither is nor can be as accurate as one that is used to weigh gold” (39).36 The compliance of forced labor, in Comyn’s mind, thus increasingly arises not from the colonial subject’s debt to the Crown but from their participation in the good of the State, which has absorbed the colonial subject’s debt and elevated it to the “disposition of the whole.” A second implication of Comyn’s specifically modern colonial solution to the problem of insular government concerns the consequences that must arise from the resettlement of the archipelago into large, landed estates. The aforementioned question of uncultivated lands, which results in the stagnation of agricultural productivity, itself belongs to a larger issue for Comyn that is linked with culture in general—particularly one (or many) faced with a government run by a minority of whites, most of whom reside permanently outside the archipelago and only serve as officials for a few years. To this end, the colonial government has to do a better job at securing the native’s confidence in the due process of law.37 But of equal importance, the government needs to demonstrate and foster, through its early successes with the colonial project, a new culture of capitalism that is based as much on the creation of new needs as it is on their fulfillment. It is in this regard that Comyn calls for “the acceleration of general culture” to be led by those families “faithful to the present reform of ideas and governmental principles” (las familias que fiadas en la actual reforma de ideas y máximas gubernativas): La aceleración de la cultura general; y creciendo las necesidades de los naturales, a la par que vayan comparando y conociendo de cerca las comodidades que resultan de la presencia y propagación del lujo en sus pueblos, es consiguiente que crezca también, entre ellos el ahínco de hacerse con los medios de proporcionarse iguales goces y conveniencias. (37–38; italics added) [The acceleration of general culture; and as the necessities of the natives grow, to the degree that they compare and become familiar with the commodities (or comforts, fr. Sp. comodidades) that arise from the presence and propagation of wealth in their provinces, it follows that their zeal in adopting the means of securing the appropriate luxuries and conveniences will also grow.]

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Again, a quick comparison between Comyn’s plan for colonial settlement by the creation of haciendas and the return to forced labor, on the one hand; and Viana’s earlier call for the reduction of natives into towns and villages, on the other, shows how the seemingly analogous objective regarding the problem of generating revenue for the Spanish Crown (or nation) in fact masks two different conceptions of Spanish rule. This difference enables us to distinguish the emergence of modern colonialism from the early management of an originally flexible administration characteristic of the imperial frontier. For Viana, the administration’s initiative to enforce the reduction of the native population into towns and villages stems from a continuation of the original blueprint of imperial sovereignty: the concerns to bolster security and to better calculate and collect the tribute “owed” to Spain by the population of Christian converts.38 In other words, the consent of the governed in Viana’s memorandum is still closely tied to the dispensation of sovereignty and the vassal’s corresponding rights, which comprise the “protective,” essentially pastoral approach to government that Comyn disparages. Colonial settlement in the latter’s plans, or settlement for the purpose of commercial agricultural production, does not concern itself primarily with either conception. On the contrary, colonial settlement into haciendas displaces the question of sovereignty and the subject’s rights vis-à-vis one another to the common obligation of both to the cultivation of the land. In this way, colonial rule aims to solicit, stimulate, and ramify the consequences of native consent without resorting to direct exaction or disfranchisement between the subject and object of the insular government. Again, Comyn is explicit with regard to this mutual obligation: Who else but the natives can act as cultivators in a country where the number of whites [blancos] is so small? And if, after expressing repugnance for personal service [servicio personal], they still refuse to work for a daily wage, what reason can prevent us from compelling them to contribute by this means to the prosperity of the society of which they are members, in a word, for the public good [la prosperidad de la sociedad de que son miembros, en una palabra, al bien público]? If the soldier uprooted from the bosom of his family, exposes himself to constant danger, continually throwing himself into battle for the salvation of the State, how much is it to ask that the Indio sweats a little and tills the fields to sustain and enrich it? (41; author’s translation)39

The new task of colonial rule thus involves the synchronization of native consent with the stimulation of export agriculture—a task that involves not only a “transition” between economic modes of production, but also a process of acculturation to entrepreneurship,

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investment, remunerated labor, and commodity production (“as the necessities of the natives grow . . . it follows . . . their zeal . . . will also grow”). Elsewhere, Comyn is quite explicit about the stagnation of the colonial economy that results from the all-too-easy satisfaction of the natives’ needs. If the future of Spanish rule was to be assured, the state would have to enforce the lack of a means of subsistence by reorganizing the forces and social relations of economic production.40 That is the reason for the directives to enclose, clear, and cultivate the land; artificially stimulate the presence of a constant labor supply; concentrate the population around the formation of large landed estates; and generate the need for commodities that would accelerate and secure the disposal of a wage-labor force.

governmentality and the colonial world: a derivative discourse? From the analyses of Viana’s and Comyn’s elaboration of a new point of reference for evaluating and transforming the nature and functioning of imperial authority in the archipelago, we can isolate the two new objects of knowledge and self-reflexive critique, as well as their reification into descriptive categories designating the Philippines under Spanish rule: they are colony and state. Their intersection provides us with a working model for the contradictions that colonial officials sought to resolve, even as they inadvertently brought these contradictions into ever-newer forms of social activity and consciousness. On the surface, their works demonstrate that the Philippines comes to need a “state” when it fi rst becomes recognized as a “colony.” Reciprocally, the state’s mandate is to achieve what imperial Christendom for centuries had not thought to do: to make of the Philippines a colony. Achieving these two tasks, however, entailed two transformations in political organization whose effects would be felt in many aspects of colonial culture and society throughout the nineteenth century. The fi rst was the institution of a form of reasoning in colonial policy and administrative practice that was capable of limiting and counteracting the flexible authority or “compromise government” that the Hapsburgs had allowed to proliferate on the colonial frontier. In Europe, this political rationality was known as “reason of state,” raison d’état. The second was the acknowledgment of a new capacity, a new power, whose existence at once secured the prosperity of the state and reproduced its mandate in new spheres of economic, political, and social life: the consent of the

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ruled to be so ruled, that is, by an alien ruling authority. Let us examine each of these transformations. The State The colonial state occupies an ambiguous place in the study of Philippine history and culture for reasons that are easily identified but less easily studied. For one thing, any normative concept of the state itself as a universally recognizable structure or ensemble of institutions—ones that can be historicized and analyzed in a given context—remains a bone of contention among sociologists.41 A common point of departure for examining the state as a normative category of sociological analysis is Weber’s account, which considers the state as a rational structure from the genesis of its many variants. Weber, following a long line of political philosophers from Hobbes to Marx, defi ned the state as “a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory”: it involves “the expropriation of autonomous and ‘private’ bearers of executive power who . . . in their own right possess the means of administration, warfare, and fi nancial organization, as well as politically usable goods of all sorts” (From Max Weber, 77–83). In saying this, Weber attempted to capture two things. On the one hand, the state designated the field of political authority under the central command of the sovereign prince, including the power to make war or peace, the adjudication of punishment or pardon, the right to administer and arbitrate, and other functions. On the other hand, Weber also offered a structural process that could be read in historical terms, that is, one in which the “expropriation of ‘private’ bearers of executive power” corresponds at once to the severe restriction and preemption of civil and religious war by a system of autonomous, formally equal and competing sovereign polities, and to the passage from feudalism to a capitalist economy. Weber’s conception of the state as a normative category or “idealtype” for the purpose of analysis certainly tempers the exuberance of Hegel’s reflections on the modern state.42 It also develops Marx’s otherwise somewhat schematic understanding of the state as a “superstructure” assigned the task of consolidating the division of labor and class society.43 Yet, as we have seen, in both theoretical and practical terms the administration of overseas Spanish imperial sovereignty fails to meet adequately the conditions of even this streamlined criterion of state sovereignty. Not only did the “ideal-type” never exist in

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the colonies prior to the early nineteenth century, but its impossibility was acknowledged, anticipated, and accommodated by the Laws of the Indies themselves, which allowed for plural, coexisting forms of authority to freely negotiate the terms of colonial hegemony on the frontiers of Spanish military, bureaucratic, and ecclesiastical control. Even notwithstanding Spain’s apparent exception to Weber’s criterion, the idea of colonial statehood as a derivation and extension of state sovereignty and its institutions (bureaucracy, military, tax collection, and public works) runs into problems when we consider it in relation to the colonial context of the “modern age” that the state’s birth appears to anchor. In Marx’s account, the concentration and monopoly of violence as the primary function of the modern state in Europe emerged as a way to consolidate bourgeois control: it served as a condition of possibility for the European bourgeoisie’s struggle against feudal structures, which prepared Europe for the economic hegemony of capitalism.44 For Weber and other historians, the state appropriation of executive power was also hegemonic in the sense that it ensured the limitation and preemption of civil war (Hobbes’s Leviathan) and religious war (the Thirty Years’ War in Europe). This resulted in the fi rst pan-European international peace treaty and the origins of modern international law.45 Yet the colonial state as officials of the Spanish Crown and nation imagined it in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was engaged neither in overcoming feudalism in the New World and the Philippines nor with the threat of civil war. In fact, the colonial “variant” of the state oftentimes initiated the creation or intensification of feudal or neofeudaltype arrangements (indentured labor, patron-client relations) rather than annulling or absorbing them.46 Moreover, far from curtailing or mitigating the threat of civil war and widespread diffidence with respect to the political order, the colonial state in certain instances (particularly in Southeast Asia) served to exacerbate group tensions along ethnicracial, religious, and geopolitical lines: tensions that, from time to time, exploded in open conflict.47 The radical disparity between any understanding of the state in the European metropolis and the colonial periphery in the nineteenth century has prompted South Asian scholars like Ranajit Guha and Partha Chatterjee to wonder whether this disparity itself ought not to be the point of departure for critical inquiry into the nature and history of the colonial state and society. For Guha, what makes a colonial state colonial is its fundamental divergence from the metropolitan state’s hegemonic origins. “As an absolute externality,” Guha

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writes, “the colonial state was structured like a despotism, with no mediating depths, no space provided for transactions between the will of the rulers and that of the ruled. . . . As an anachronism, this was in agreement with the paradox of an advanced bourgeois culture regressing from its universalist drive to a compromise with precapitalist particularism under colonial conditions of its own creation.”48 In a similar vein, Chatterjee contends that “the colonial state, we must remember, was not just the agency that brought the modular forms of the modern state to the colonies; it was also an agency that was destined never to fulfi ll the normalizing mission of the modern state because the premise of its power was a rule of colonial difference, namely, the preservation of the alienness of the ruling group.”49 This rule of colonial difference, Chatterjee explains, proved to be a self-sabotaging obstacle to the “modular forms” of statecraft in the colonies, even as it sought to control the exercise of lawful violence in the hands of the ruling group. As long as the exercise of colonial authority remained at bottom the differentiation of an alien ruling group over a native ruled one by force of arms, the former could neither fully answer or account for the charge of tyranny and conquest, nor stimulate the growth of a “civil society” capable of ensuring the continuity of colonial rule. To put it succinctly, the force of right or law never replaces or authoritatively substitutes for the right of force, which on the colonial periphery was never theoretically or practically feasible to begin with. The critique of the state as an entity that conforms to a predetermined criteria of either materialist designations of a “superstructure” or the Weberian assertion of a state’s “ideal-type” leaves us initially without a standard point of reference for evaluating Spain’s project of colonial reform in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. In fact, it radically opens up a historical investigation into our assumptions about modernity and the state in Europe as well as its colonies. Philip Abrams has raised this question of whether “the state,” in fact has any real existence beyond that of an idea: an abstraction that enables us to group together historical processes for comparative analysis and political strategy. 50 By contrast, Abrams wonders at the possibility of investigating seriously the ensemble of institutions, apparatuses, and structures that ostensibly comprise the state, as well as the possibility of studying the state as an idea or, more specifically, an ideology that legitimates domination—yet without believing in the state as an object or apparatus. “The state,” he concluded, “is the unified symbol of an actual disunity” (79).

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Abrams’s insight resonates strongly with the later work of Michel Foucault, who approaches the emergence of the state in a manner opposed to Weberian sociology, yet also distinct from the structuralism of scholars like Carl Schmitt as well as the historical materialism of Western Marxism. Instead of attempting to defi ne a priori the relation and parameters of the concepts of state and sovereignty, and instead of attempting to mark a threshold that distinguishes all “premodern” states and forms of sovereignty from “modern” ones, Foucault foregrounds a surprisingly modest question: How do social actors in a given context—officials, writers, plaintiffs in court proceedings, priests, students, and so forth—fi xate on an idea, project, or even fiction that has come to be identified as “the state,” thereby reifying it as a primary point of reference for political organization, struggle, questions of due process, and the exercise of violence? It would be absurd to say that the ensemble of institutions that we call “the State” begins in the years 1580–1650. . . . What is important—the real, specific, irreducible historical fact that needs to be borne in mind—is at what moment that entity called “the State” begins to enter, is effectively inaugurated, into the reflexive practice of men. The problem is to understand the moment, and under what conditions, in what form the State comes to be a site of planning, programming, development, at the heart of people’s conscious activity; at what moment and under what conditions it [the State] is brought in as a reflexive and concerted strategy, at what moment the State, for all, becomes an object of appeal, desire, longing, dread, rebuff, love, hate. 51

In discussing the state fi rst and foremost as a discursive entity— he calls the state at different moments a “practico-reflexive prism,” a “principle” or “schema of intelligibility,” and a “regulating idea” for the reflection and calculation of all political activity or intervention— Foucault calls attention to the state as both a reified fiction and an event in discourse, whose emergence must be studied at the level at which its writers and theorists identify its presence or absence in political institutions. The starting point, then, is not a predetermined criterion of the state, traditionally associated with the right and exercise of violence, but rather the intersections of “appeal, desire, longing,” and so forth, which constitute a self-reflexive and self-regulating way of calibrating and directing political force, order, and control. In other words, how does one come to project—to propose—a consistent and coherent rationality behind politics as opposed to identifying or claiming to recognize an already existing structure or design? How does this

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“conceptualized community” become reified in social practices that ascribe their authority to the state or claim to resist the state?52 Returning to the memoranda, decrees, and reports of Viana, Basco y Vargas, and Comyn, we see the emergence of this floating signifier, which appears at a glance to work completely in favor of the monarch’s will— the continuity of Spanish imperial sovereignty in the Pacific—yet remains distinct from it and for this reason introduces a new dynamic into the political order. In the short term, the project of colonial reform seems easy enough: strengthen military fortifications; link the natural and human resources of the archipelago to the world market in order to generate revenues; unify and centralize heterogeneous forms of authority at the risk of compromising the authoritarian principles upon which imperial sovereignty is based. In the long run, however, the rerouting of economic and social relations through the state as a “regulating idea” was bound to raise new questions regarding the difference between the rights of royal patronage and raison d’état, or between the governing norm and the allowance for exceptions to the rule, or between the traditional balance of powers (among the colonial bureaucracy, the missionary orders, and Hispanized native tradition) and the influx of new economic forces represented by the emergence of a commercial and Chinese mestizo elite. At what point, for example, will the Spanish Crown or nation be forced to recognize the limits of its juridical omnipotence and submit to forms of authority based on the local calculations of imminent threat (from internal and external dangers) as well as productive capacity? To what degree do the new governing norms or fictions of “society,” “public good,” and “culture,” designate points of reference that are independent of sovereign will and whose criteria of success or failure may in fact give rise to an authority that can critique, challenge, or openly defy that will? The “practico-reflexive prism” called the state thus appears to supplement the authority of imperial Christendom under Spain, even as it begins to erode that authority in the name of furthering it. It is a “dangerous supplement,” which undermines that which it appears to buttress.53 Native Consent It should be clear from the outset that in using the native’s “will” or consent as the basis of Spanish rule in the Philippines, Viana, Basco y Vargas, and Comyn make no claims regarding the historical veracity of popular support for Spanish rule, which could be measured by some semblance of historical criteria. Rather, native will constitutes

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an object of knowledge for the calculation and forecast of Spain’s future in the Philippines. In a similar manner, “society,” “the public good,” and “general culture” all serve as prescriptive, or normative, as opposed to descriptive indices. To put it another way, the naming of these indices serves as “illocutionary” or “(performative) speech-acts,” as linguist J. L. Austin would call them, capable of directing colonial policy through the nomination and articulation of indices referring to an emergent field of knowledge, evaluation, and intervention.54 The invocation of this field of political knowledge and rationality performs a specific function, which is the solicitation, provocation, and direction (the multivalence of the French word conduite, “conduct,” here is particularly apt) of colonial subjects to the degree that the material results of their economic and social activity have become the target-object and responsibility of the colonial administration.55 From the perspective of Viana and Comyn, there was no other way to balance the books of Spain’s future in the Philippines than to endow the colonial administration with an autonomous rationality. In contrast to Spain’s approach to the Philippines’s sister colonies Cuba and Puerto Rico after the Latin American wars of independence, the colonial administration in the Philippines from the beginning could neither rely on the existence of a Creole planter elite class (whose concern for safety tempered any thoughts of political separatism); nor could it rely on the importation and exploitation of African slave labor to address the crisis of colonial hegemony after the British invasion and occupation of Manila in 1762. At the same time, however, it was against Spain’s interests to abandon its Pacific frontier outpost: the shrinking of the world into a small group of interests led by the European powers and their networks of security and trade foreclosed the option of abandoning the islands. Moreover, from a religious perspective, just as native Filipinos were indebted to Spain for guaranteeing their safety, directing their prosperity, and facilitating Christian conversion, the identity of religious and Crown interests during the spread of imperial Christendom bestowed an obligation on both institutions to remain and to maintain a united opposition to the infidel. For these reasons, the colonial administration had to undertake the project of incorporating the Philippines into the world market through the direct stimulation of initiative, entrepreneurship, and investment, as well as the perfection of older methods of forced labor and tribute. Native consent provided a governing fiction and abstract norm around which the colonial administration could develop a blueprint for the preservation and optimal production of wealth in Spain’s overseas Pacific colonial possession.

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Comyn has outlined what this entailed for the native colonial subject: the inscription of lack and need into the fabric of their lives as a way of “filling” the demonstrated need for the colony to become self-sufficient and prosperous.56 As Marx and Engels had pointed out, Adam Smith’s economic system of values and needs—a field created by the accumulation and capitalization of wealth, monetarization, and the alienation of labor—creates new needs that are reproduced and extended even as they are (or appear to be) fulfilled.57 The alienation of private and communal lands from their owners (by legal disfranchisement or debt) and the transference of these lands to large-scale haciendas or plantations organized alternately by the colonial administration and the frontier missions formed the primary basis of this cycle. Through the elaboration of this “general culture,” Comyn and others hoped to shift from older methods of extracting wealth by obligation (i.e., under a “protective” legislation) to the new methods of extracting surplus value without effecting a corresponding change in the continuity of Spanish rule. As we have seen in the case of the state, however, the invocation of “culture” as a fiction of colonial modernity was bound to encounter contradictions and impasses in its own logic (not to mention its practical application). After all, to what degree can one reconcile the direct injunction to labor with a culture that did not directly depend on the circulation and concatenation of commodities? To what degree would the seizure of lands and their redistribution to other private hands be seen to serve “society,” or “the public good?” Finally, to what degree does a colonial “state” remain autonomous from the tumultuous crises of the monarchy and the unsuccessful establishment of the constitution on the peninsula? These questions, and the anomalies they engendered, find their full development and crisis in the chapters that follow. It is clear, in any case, that only with the synchronization of native consent with capitalism does “colonialism” enter the consciousness of Spanish reformers. The condition of modernity in the Philippines lies in its identification as a colony.

colonial culture and the aesthetic production of longing The floating signifier of the colonial state anchors a chain of signification concerning new notions of society, the public good, and general culture as they might be or ought to be, “quilting” them in such a way that, taken together, they appear to manifest an underlying rationality apart from both the rule of conquest and the missionary enterprise.

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At fi rst glance, Comyn’s ideas of society, the public good, and culture, appear as vague gestures designed to mask his real intent, which is the (re-)colonization of the Philippines for Spain’s economic profit. But the identification of Spanish interest with that of the colonial subject opens up a zone of contact and negotiation between Comyn’s colonial idea of culture as the development of native capacities as well as new needs and desires and a more general understanding of culture as the “un-” or “partially Hispanized” material practices that defi ned the semi-autonomous life of the colonial subject. For, just as new needs and demands had to be inserted into “the practice (or practices) of everyday life,” in order to more closely bind them to questions concerning the security, perpetuity, and prosperity of Spanish rule, so too would these practices produce, represent, and aesthetically reflect upon the colonial subject as an agent of will and desire, as well as an object of calculation. This zone of contact can be illustrated at a glance in the rise of cultural institutions in the first half of the nineteenth century, beginning with the publication of religious chapbooks and metrical romances, followed by the Royal Economic Society’s patronage of a school of drawing (in 1822), and the construction of permanent theaters in the suburbs around Manila (Tondo and Arroceros) in the 1830s and in Binondo in the 1840s.58 With the establishment of a school of drawing, portraiture became available not only to government officials, but also to wealthy entrepreneurs who benefited from the growth of export agriculture. In addition, the first comprehensive artistic rendition of colonial subjects in their dress or costume, called tipos del país (after the minor artistic genre in Europe, also called “Heads of the People” or tableaux vivants), began as a collaboration between an Indio textile trader and the fi rst professor at the Academy of Drawing, Damian Domingo. Not only did this artistic genre catalog the fi rst collection of “Filipiniana” costumes, “covering all social classes and major regions of the Islands,” as Domingo asserts, it also contributed to the creation of illustrated albums, which were sold to Europeans interested in investing in Philippine agriculture and industry (Joaquin and Santiago, Nineteenth-Century Manila, 19). This “typification” of colonial subjects as cultural commodities remained a mainstay of nineteenth-century colonial art and literature, from Lozano’s Letras y figuras to the colonial costumbrismo of Spanish journalists and writers (see introduction and chapter 5). In literature, the earliest extant copy of the metrical romance in the vernacular Tagalog appeared in 1815, although the publication of these chapbooks does not seem to have become commonplace until after

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1850.59 Largely inspired or borrowed from medieval epics revived in the Spanish Golden Age, these fantastic tales of chivalry often depicted the wars and love affairs between Christians and Moors.60 Their theatrical counterpart, the kumedya (from Sp., comedia), was staged as early as the seventeenth century and served as the most popular form of entertainment during town fiestas and special occasions. But it may be safe to assert that both the publication of metrical romances, however sporadic and the production of plays in the new theaters in the 1830s endowed the narratives of colonial literature and theater with an autonomy and circulation that neither had ever previously enjoyed. Separated from the state and religious occasions that once sanctioned their existence, such works become cultural commodities for the enjoyment of the burgeoning populations settling in the suburbs of Manila, outside the walls of Intramuros.61 A corollary to this early commoditization of culture as an aesthetic object was the appearance of a new figure on the outskirts of Manila: the professionalized vernacular Tagalog author. Part-time scribes, part-time translators, part-time assistants to a priest or government official, or part-time printers or bookbinders, writers like Huseng Sisiw and Francisco Balagtas (alias Baltazar) benefited from the institution of public theaters and the relaxed grip of censorship throughout and around the constitutional years.62 These are virtually the only two names that have been handed down to us as komedya playwrights and authors of metrical romances in Tagalog during the fi rst appearance of popular secular literature. Yet the different modes of their remuneration tell us something about the changing value of art as a commodity. José de la Cruz was allegedly known as Huseng Sisiw (Chick José) because his price for an original lyric composition was a small chick. By contrast, poet and playwright Francisco Balagtas was regularly and sometimes handsomely paid for his lyrical and theatrical compositions in the 1830s.63 An even more telling difference between the two concerns their respective approaches to the publication of their work. While Huseng Sisiw was a master improviser who dictated to up to five transcribers at a time, he also remained very guarded with his works and in fact expressed an aversion to his friends’ proposal to publish them (Rivera, Huseng Sisiw, 14–19 and passim). In marked contrast, Balagtas’s preface to his famous work Ang Pinagdaanang Buhay ni Florante at ni Laura sa Cahariang Albania [The saga of Florante and Laura in the kingdom of Albania, hereafter referred to as Florante at Laura] (1838), openly proclaims the integrity of the written work as

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an aesthetic object and cultural commodity, explicitly cautioning the reader against tampering with the words in any way: Di co hinihinging pacamahalín mo, tauana,t, dustaín ang abáng tulâ co gauin ang ibigui,t, alpa,i, na sa iyô ay houag mo lamang baguihin ang verso. Cun sa pagbasa mo,i may tulang malabó Bago mo hatulang catcatin at licó Pasuriin muna ang luasa,t, huló At maquiquilalang malinao at wastó. (Stanzas 25–26) [I do not ask you to (ap)praise (me), Laugh, and deride my wretched poem Do as you please, the harp is yours Only do not change the lines. If in your reading there are unclear verses Before you judge them blurred or improper Scrutinize first their north and south And you will know them to be clear and correct.]

While Balagtas employs the lyric-epic form of the metrical romance, he also insists on the integrity of his work as a closed network of signs and resonances—an economy of signification—that will allow for its consideration as an aesthetic object and cultural commodity. The triangulation of the aesthetic object—paintings, drawings, poetry, drama—with the market and the projection of the colonial state as political rationality coincided with a poetic transformation of the Tagalog lyric analogous to the dynamic we have already glimpsed at work in Lozano’s paintings: the constitution of a desiring subject whose agency or consent is solicited, directed, and channeled, while paradoxically remaining her or his own. National artist and cultural critic Bienvenido Lumbera has identified the central manifestations of this shift in his foundational study of literary form in Tagalog poetry. Lumbera’s analysis of Tagalog poet José de la Cruz (1762–1829), or Huseng Sisiw, highlights “the search for poetic diction” that led Cruz away from earlier expressions of secular and religious Tagalog poetry.64 These forms either remained anchored in the native tradition of imagery organized around figures of speech (talinghagà), or became tied to the didactic, explanatory rhetoric of Christian catechism. The elegance and wit of Cruz’s poetry—expressed in double-entendres, intentionally fallacious reasoning, and exaggeration—reflect the urbanity and refi nement of a

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Tagalog audience that had grown up in towns and had received some exposure to formal education and economic advancement (Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry, 82). On a more general level, however, the few extant examples of Huseng Sisiw’s poetry mark the historical moment when poetry and drama fi rst became cultural commodities and a consuming public came to identify itself as consisting of desiring subjects. Not surprisingly, the subject of many of these poems and dramas written by Cruz and others focus, if indirectly, on the very dynamics of power that had become the object of concern in the imagination of the colonial state: the conditions of individual capture or emancipation; the metaphorical conflation and circulation of different kinds of desire associated with different relationships (romantic, economic and religious); and, most notably, the provocation or titillation of the addressee to react to her or his interpellation. In metrical romances like Doce Pares de Francia (Twelve peers of France) and Siete Infantes de Lara (The seven princes of Lara) as well as Cruz’s lyrical poems, scenes of kidnapping and rescue freely enter into metaphorical relation with men’s hearts “chained” (gapus) by love; women are “wounded” (tama) by gazes; and expressions of fidelity serve as bargaining chips (tawad) for absolution or condemnation to death. In the following poem, we can see how desire has become an object of calculation for a poet who is at once consumed by longing and seeks to provoke it in the other: Ano’t ang ganti mong pambayad sa akin, Ang ako’y umasa’t panasanasain, At ilinagak mong sabing nahabilin Sa langit ang awa saka ko na hintin! (Quoted in Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry, 81) [And how have you paid me in return? You urged me to hope and anticipate And then, as collateral, these words: Wait till you get to heaven to receive your boon!]

The marked departure from both native talinghagà, or metaphoric figures of speech, and religious didacticism culminates in what Lumbera and others have called the emergence of “sentimentalism,” characterized by romantic exaggeration; the excessive use of rhetorical devices like personification, metonymy, synecdoche, and apostrophe; and the tendency toward poetic abstraction (92).65 Lumbera ascribes this to the Tagalog assimilation of the “courtly love” tradition of medieval poetry. A more likely point of reference would be the baroque reception of Petrarchism in the pastorals of Garcilaso de la Vega

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and Luis de Góngora, as well as in the plays of Pedro Calderón de la Barca.66 For it is in these works that the theme of free will, as Golden Age scholar Anthony Cascardi describes it, becomes “the inscrutable and ultimately unrepresentable object of baroque persuasion and control. Indeed, all the more overt and explicit mechanisms of ‘control’— whether in religious oratory, meditative practice, or catechesis—are directed toward this elusive faculty.”67 In either case, it is clear that in the poetry of Francisco Balagtas the rhetorical tendencies that Lumbera has noted elsewhere have reached a threshold of indistinction between different forms of metaphorical language. This threshold will enable a poetic discourse of consent and calculation, organized around an economy of signification that features the author-as-reader, the lost/regained beloved, and the act of interpretation as the elements of aesthetic reflection and reification. The appearance and insertion of the Petrarchan beloved as a floating signifier in Tagalog literature, specifically the genre of the metrical romance, was carefully restricted by the missionary orders prior to the nineteenth century: they owned most of the printing presses in the archipelago, and their publication of Tagalog poetry served a primarily pedagogical function. It is easy to see why: the expression of desire that neither arises from nor fi nds fulfillment in Christian spiritual love threatens to destabilize the very moral order that the colonial metrical romance sought to buttress. Not surprisingly, in the Tagalog poetry of Christian conversion and catechism cited by Lumbera, the beloved is always God (27–48). In marked contrast to the poetry of Christian mysticism, the development of metrical romances as published literature in the nineteenth century characteristically featured long and drawn-out passionate monologues between lovers, which are nowhere to be found in their ostensibly original Spanish sources.68 In the Tagalog adaptation of the Twelve Peers of France legend (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 Peers of France, followers of Emperor Charlemagne until they were betrayed by Galalon and killed at Roncesvalles]), one of the earliest and perhaps the most popular metrical romance of the nineteenth century, the anonymous author inserts forty-nine stanzas describing the seduction of Moorish princess Floripes by Christian prince Gui de Borgoña, full of sexual innuendoes of surrender and penetration.69 Out of love for Gui, Floripes fi nds herself compelled to rescue the Christian

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crusaders from death, consolidate the alliance between Alexandria and France, and surrender the holy relics in the possession of the Turks.70 Francisco Balagtas’s Florante at Laura goes even further in this direction, to the point of rendering the plot (largely told in retrospective monologue) entirely secondary to a series of prefaces that frame the metrical romance and create an intersubjective triad between the writer, the reader, and the absent beloved, which interpellates the reader as a desiring subject.71 In the opening dedicatory preface to Balagtas’s masterpiece, the narrator situates himself between the past that he reads from the present with longing, and the present as an anticipated past in which the future reader will one day read his completed work.72 Let us reread the oft-quoted fi rst stanza of Balagtas’s preface, dedicated to “Celia” (a homonym for the Spanish sello, a stamp or mark): Cong pag saulang cong basahin sa isip Ang nangacaraang arao ng pag-ibig, May mahahaguilap cayang natititic Liban na cay Celiang namugad sa dibdib? (“Kay Selya,” stanza 1) [Leafing through my memory to read the days of love gone by, What letters do my groping hands seize But those of “Celia” nesting in my heart?]

Readers and critics of Balagtas’s poem have felt compelled to identify the source of the author’s nostalgic love: the initials M. A. R. that designate the woman to whom the poem is addressed ostensibly refer to two of Balagtas’s sweethearts, Maria Asuncion Rivera and Magdalena Ana Ramos. Such a reading, however, forecloses the ocean (mar) of signification on which the author has set the reader adrift. If we read the text as a constant play on words and names, Selya, the beloved, is the reader, whose “stamp” of approval or critical reflection identifies her with the actual reader of the poem. As in the Petrarchan sonnets dedicated to the absent beloved Laura, or their Spanish counterpart in the sonnets of Garcilaso de la Vega, the allegorical free play of substitution brings the author, reader, and beloved into a shared space wherein each becomes identified with the other.73 On one level, Celia is the beloved whom the narrator pursues in and through the act of reading. Reading his thoughts, the poet gives the name Celia to a lost age, a period (I am tempted to say “state”) he longs to recover, a presence he longs to enjoy once again. At the same time, however, in reflecting upon her absence, he proceeds to disseminate and

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insert that absence into every aspect of his existence—much as commodity culture seeks to rationalize and ramify absence and lack in Comyn, or the state project rationalizes and ramifies the threat of insecurity and poverty in Viana. The narrator sees and fetishizes the absence of his beloved everywhere—from her portrait to the old haunts of their courtship, where he “traces in that happy place / the imprint of your feet upon the rocks” [binabakas ko rin sa masayang dongan / yapak ng paa mo sa batong tuntungan] (“Kay Selya,” stanza 10). As the narrator grieves over the loss of his beloved, Selya’s role as a stamp or imprint to be studied in his memory gives way to her anticipated return as the future reader who will read, in turn, the narrator’s absence through the poem he has dedicated to her: Cung casadlakan man ng pula’t pag-ayop Tubo co,i, daquila sa puhunang pagod, Kung binabasa mo,i, isa mang himutok Ay alalahanin yaring naghahandog. (“Kay Selya,” stanza 19) [Should it be received with insults and scorn, Still, the profit from my labor would be great, If, as you (Selya) read it, just one sigh Brings to mind the one who offers it.]

What bridges the memorialized Selya-as-text and the anticipated Selya-as-reader (and, one might say, the narrator as the subject of the statement or narrative and the narrator as the subject of enunciation) is of course the actual reader of the poem—you. Balagtas makes explicit the agency of the reader in facilitating the fulfillment of his fantasy— the reciprocal correspondence of Selya’s longing with his own—in his second dedicatory preface, to the reader: Salamat sa iyo, O nananasang irog Kung halagahan mo itong aking pagod, Ang tula ma’i, bukal ng bait na kapos, Pakikinabangan ng ibig tumarok. (“Sa babasa,” stanza 1) [Thanks be to you, O beloved reader For treasuring this labor of mine This poem, be it a fount of lesser virtue Still holds a great reward for the one desirous to plumb its depths.]

Under the sign of Selya—a feminine mark (sello) that redeems or recompenses the narrator’s grief and the reader’s labor of interpretation— Balagtas compels the reader to see her or his desire as an agency that transforms the act of reading into that of writing; and, in doing so, to

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evaluate the text as an object of aesthetic reflection and value. In the act of reading, the reader at once occupies the place of the writer (who reads) and holds that place for the anticipated, beloved reader/writer, Selya. This baroque theater of agency introduces the reader to a hall of mirrors, wherein the drama that unfolds aims to envelop and involve the spectator as a participant in the drama itself. This constant solicitation of the reader’s emotional reaction is reflected in the unrestrained use of poetic devices like personification and apostrophe, which Lumbera has noted as a characteristic feature of nineteenth-century Tagalog poetry. “The folk talinghagà [metaphoric image],” Lumbera writes, “revolved around a single image and could therefore function as a unifier of sensations and ideas within a stanza. Once it was jettisoned or suppressed, the result was the chaotic imagery that Retana noted. . . . Another effect, equally deleterious, was the tendency towards abstractness as brought about principally by personification, and towards exaggerated emotionality as encouraged by the apostrophe” (136; italics added). With the repeated invocation of you, in which apostrophe abandons the objects of sensuous experience to be found in the native talinghagà in favor of addressing abstract concepts, absent people, and memories, the reader is invited, cajoled, impugned, and otherwise compelled to lend her or his presence to the drama at hand: to turn the narrative into an “event,” to insert the reader into what Jonathan Culler calls “the temporality of writing.”74 Accepting the fiction of being in the same world as the narrator or even Florante “frees” us to experience the characters’ plights as pale reflections of our own. Conversely, it allows the narrator to further demand the production and performance of our involvement. Such an injunction appears in the following passage, when Florante faints against a tree to which he is tied. The narrator breaks into his narration, and cries, Dîco na masabi,t, lúhâ co,i, nanatác, na-uumid yaring dilang nañguñgusap, pusòco,i, nanglalambot sa malaquing habág sa ca-aua-auang quinocob ng hirap. ¡Sinong dî mahapis na may caramdaman sa lagay ng gapús na calaumbay-lumbay, lipus ñg pighati sacá tinutunghán sa lamán at butó niya, ang hihimáy!75 [I can’t speak anymore, my tears are falling, this speaking tongue has been struck dumb, for the poor (Florante) wracked by suffering.

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Shibboleths What feeling person would not suffer at the sight of him bound, beside himself in sorrow, full of sadness and before long It will tear apart his flesh and bones!]

Balagtas makes a direct appeal to the reader to manifest her or his investment in the text, much as a priest exhorts his parishioners to identify with the suffering Christ.76 The difference between Florante and Christ, of course, is that our investment in the former belongs to the selfreflexive practice of reading Balagtas’s text and evaluating its virtue as a manufactured event, that is, an aesthetic object and cultural commodity. Conversely, the solicitation of the reader’s emotional investment in the story becomes an object of calculation: How can it be directed, managed, or led to an underlying rationality? In Florante at Laura, questions of familial obligation, ancestral patrimony, religious conversion, and political alliance all intersect in the search for this underlying rationality capable of guaranteeing a new ethic to restore the collapsing moral order. For Florante, it is the acceptance of Aladin, his religious enemy, as his rescuer, protector, and friend. For the Muslim prince, it is the (surprisingly Christian) doctrine of natural law, which moves Aladin to save Florante despite their religious enmity. Both characters are forced to act in an anomalous fashion, insofar as they fi nd themselves in a situation characterized by anomie. Florante weeps, Aladin sympathizes with Christians (and also weeps). But in conformity with the logic of metaphor, in which the true essence of a thing is conveyed by its concealment under an avowedly incongruous representation, the emancipation of Florante and Aladin from their prescribed roles and their encounter with one another in the wilderness allow them to reflect on their pasts critically as the result of their investments and project their fates as the conscious result of their individual agency. This could only happen in a society where political authority had come to depend upon the very forces over which it sought to exercise force. The emergence of Balagtas’s fame as a poet and playwright, not to mention Huseng Sisiw, alone signifies a change in the understanding of native vernacular poetry and the role it promises to play in a commodified culture. Far from being an activity limited to small, private gatherings or the hosting of town fiestas and official events, such poetry and the legendary existence of Huseng Sisiw and Balagtas betoken the emergence of literature and theater production as a profession: a form of remunerated labor for the production of a new commodity—culture. The task of “culture” under colonial modernity

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was to organize crowds around the reflection on the new constitution of their social relations, which were informed by the production and ordering of new needs and desires. Supported by the building of theaters in the 1830s, as well as the increasing private ownership of printing presses, and complemented by the Royal Economic Society’s initiatives to start a school of painting, the emergence of native poets, artists, and playwrights shows the production and elaboration of a society capable of disseminating, reflecting on, and multiplying the implications of native consent for colonial rule. To reiterate, one can hardly see the liberalization of the economy and the emergence of commodity culture as any more or less “emancipating” than the colonial hegemony forged by frontier imperial rule— with its flexible administration and its rule of expediency. Yet, while the leap from one economy of debt to another may not guarantee the native’s emancipation from imperial sovereignty, it does illustrate that at least the native folk recognized a transformation at work in the principles and objectives of Spanish Christendom, which was bound to have profound effects on the life and labor of the colonized. Mere obligation or indebtedness to the sovereign authority no longer sufficed as an organizational principle behind colonial rule: Spanish authority had to be the object of desire, made manifest in economic initiative, political expressions of patriotism, and the growth of a colonial civil society. And no form of knowledge about the subjects ruled could remain isolated from the ceaseless task of (re)directing them, anticipating and acting upon their habits, traditions, behavior, creating an environment wherein their pursuit of individual welfare would coincide with that of the colonial state—in short, from colonial governance. Knowingly or unknowingly, natives had become constituent members of the authority that appeared to preside over them. Consciously or unconsciously, they had become subjects of desire and the calculation of that desire’s capacities.

chapter 2

Special Laws and States of Exception Si aquí manda su tropa el Rey, se vayan los Indios al monte, pero si yo cierro las puertas de la Iglesia los tengo todos a mis pies en veinticuatro horas. [If the king sends troops here, the natives will flee to the mountains; but if I shut the church doors, I will have them all at my feet in twenty-four hours.] Anonymous Spanish friar in the Philippines, ca. 1822

In examining the writings of colonial officials in the late eighteenth century, one cannot but feel compelled by the strength of their reasons for the ambitious program of administrative and economic reform. Indeed, on a larger level, historians tend to see Bourbon reform, particularly under the administration of Carlos III, as consisting of eminently pragmatic changes to the complex and often self-contradictory mandates of what others have called “conflicting standards,” “flexible authority,” or “compromise government” overseas, not to mention on the Iberian Peninsula itself (see chapter 1). Yet, paradoxically, the “common sense” pragmatism of Bourbon reform led colonial officials in the Americas to undermine the very state security they sought. In Latin America, the suspension of privileges (fueros) traditionally possessed by the regular clergy (i.e., by the missionary orders); the discrimination against Creoles seeking jobs in the expanding colonial bureaucracy; the systematization of tribute collection and forced labor (repartimiento); and the restriction of authority formerly granted to provincial mayors or alcalde mayores together laid the grounds for Creole and popular resentment in Mexico and Latin America. The resulting wars of independence (1809–1821), however complex and contradictory as a political and social movement, led to the loss of most of Spain’s overseas empire. Important to our consideration of the colonial state project and the targeting of native consent to colonial rule, the wars of independence raised a key question that colonial officials and writers in the Philippines would repeat throughout the nineteenth century: How does the “common sense” of 64

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the colonial state reconcile the theoretically informed pragmatism of its reform project with the expediency of flexible authority on the frontiers of imperial rule? And what are the short- and long-term consequences of this reconciliation for both the colonial state’s raison d’état and the colonial subject’s understanding of that rationality? The two particular manifestations of this question in the Philippines occur in the colonial state’s attempt to grapple with, and ultimately absorb and subordinate, religious or “spiritual” authority in the islands; and in the interpretation and projected institution of the colony’s Special Laws legislation after 1837. These two occurrences are usually portrayed as unrelated events tied to two separate developments in Spanish imperial and colonial policies. One normally associates the first occurrence with the turbulent and ever-changing role of the Church in Spain. The Spanish Bourbon attempt to subordinate the religious orders to the Crown began with the indictment of the Jesuits in Spain for conspiring against the king (in Spain), which led to the expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain and its dominions (beginning in 1767), and extended to the seizure of property owned by the missionary orders, educational reform in universities headed by the religious orders, the curtailment of the Inquisition, and, finally, the separation of the religious orders from the Vatican and their complete subordination to the Crown (and later the nation).1 The second occurrence refers to the legislation initiated by Spain’s 1837 constitutional government after the death of Fernando VII, which affi rmed that “[Spain’s] overseas provinces [Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines], will be governed by Special Laws” (article 2). The report of the commissions proposing this measure summarized their reasons for advocating the policy in the following manner: [Since] our possessions in America and Asia, given their distance from the Peninsula, the nature of their population[s], and the diversity of their material interests, cannot be ruled by the same laws, the commissions have reached a common accord in proposing to the Cortes that they immediately declare in public session that: Given the impossibility of applying the Constitution that has been adopted on the Peninsula and adjacent islands, to the overseas provinces of America and Asia, they will be ruled and administered by special laws, analogous to their respective situation and circumstances, and suited to the procurement of their happiness, and as a consequence no actual Deputies will sit in the Cortes for said provinces. 2

The administration of Special Laws ostensibly served to “protect” the colonies from the radical political upheavals taking place in Spain

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throughout the nineteenth century by instituting a form of law and government recognized as autonomous and separate from the metropolis. The decree also referred to “peculiar circumstances” obtaining in the colonies, which excluded the application of law extended to the Spanish metropolis. These peculiar circumstances, in addition to the distance and “nature” of the overseas populations, included most notably the institution of slavery in the Caribbean and the vested interest of Creole landowners in preserving this institution. Less studied has been the interpretation and application of this form of exceptionalism in the Philippines. While political histories of Spanish overseas policies and unfinished projects—the legislation establishing the Special Laws, it must be noted, was never enacted, leaving Spain’s colonies in a juridical limbo for half a century—may explain each of these developments, I would like to focus on their intersection insofar as it demonstrates the confrontation, and reciprocal accommodation between two orders of colonial authority and representation, each of which promoted its own form of “common sense.” My aim is to show how the Spanish Crown’s attempted absorption of religious authority into the sphere of its administration and the colonial state’s interpretation of “peculiar circumstances” demanding Special Laws in the Philippines belong to one and the same history of articulating and securing a modern (i.e., post-Hapsburg) form of colonial hegemony in the Philippines. Our line of investigation is encoded in the epigraph to this chapter: “If the king sends troops here,” an anonymous friar boasts to English traveler Henry Piddington before 1822, “the natives will flee to the mountains; but if I shut the church doors, I will have them all at my feet in twenty-four hours.” The pastor’s authority over his flock, positioned midway between the city (locus of Spanish officialdom) and the mountains, and affi rmed midway between the 1768 expulsion of the Jesuits from Spain’s possessions and their return to the islands in 1859, emblematizes the contradictory aims and strategies of the colonial state vis-à-vis the political and social upheavals transpiring in Spain. It is in this context that colonial officials were forced to ask, To what degree must the colonial state under Spanish Bourbon reform recognize, assume responsibility for, and even promote the flexible authority and relative autonomy of religious authority on the colonial frontier—the very authority that reform-minded ministers sought to subordinate to the principle of monarchial absolutism? How can the political rationality of the colonial state preserve its underlying

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coherence? How would the result of this challenge affect or engage with the life and labor of the colonial subject?

the power of the pastorate The Respublica Christiana In chapter 1, we touched briefly on the maintenance of religious privileges (fueros), which designated a sphere of law and authority specific to the missionary orders, the administration of their parishes, and “spiritual” matters relating to their flock of baptized Christians. Given the small number of Spaniards in the archipelago and their concentration around the fortified section of Manila (Intramuros), it often occurred that the missionary priest, Spanish landowners, and the town or provincial mayor (alcalde mayor) were the only figures of Spanish authority outside the city. From the early days of the Spanish conquest and colonization, then, the friars were either encouraged or compelled by default to take on a series of tasks otherwise charged to the temporal authorities. Yet in assuming the burden of attending to the material as well as spiritual needs of those Christianized populations concentrated in town settlements (reducción), friars also acquired a stature that overflowed the ideal division between temporal and spiritual authority. In the words of eighteenth-century French explorer Monsieur PierreMarie François de Pagès: An alcalde [mayor], without the assistance of a single bayonet, rules over ten thousand Indians, who dislike him, it is true, as much as the natives of Java can hate the Dutch; but still they remain in unshaken allegiance to the Spaniards, a problem which can only be explained by the sameness of religion which subsists between the Philippine isles and the mother country; but more especially, I suspect, from the influence of the monks or parochial clergy, who have greater influence in maintaining good order among the natives than even the terror of an armed force. 3

Significantly, Pagès’s statement captures the central aspect of clerical power in the archipelago by distinguishing it from questions of religious belief or orthodoxy: it is the friar’s “influence in maintaining good order among the natives.” An understanding of this “good order” will help us to understand the challenges confronting the colonial state’s attempt to appropriate and absorb the spiritual administration of the missionary orders into its rationality: the production and ramification of native consent to colonial rule.

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What did this form of colonial social organization in the doctrina or mission entail, particularly in those areas where the arm of colonial officialdom was weak? In attempting to trace a genealogy of political rationality inherent in the rise of modern states, Michel Foucault outlined a series of points of departure for understanding the specificity of what he called the “pastoral modality of power.”4 This modality concerned the relationship of a shepherd or pastor to his flock—and, by extension, the relation of the missionary priest to his parish. The shepherd or pastor “gathers together . . . dispersed individuals” and ensures their salvation under the management and guidance of his leadership. This leadership entails both knowledge of the means to secure their welfare and knowledge of each member of the flock (300–303). By returning to the literature of the Church and monastic fathers, Foucault fi nds a series of recurring themes, which anticipate the way pastoral power will make its way into both the metropolitan and colonial states. These are (1) an economy of salvation, which consists in “a complex exchange and circulation of sins and merits” for which the shepherd is held accountable; (2) obedience as both a virtue and “an end in itself” or “permanent state”; (3) an “individualizing knowledge,” which apprehends or interpellates each member of the flock in terms of her or his relationship to the flock as a whole, and which proceeds primarily through the practices of confession and the examination of conscience; (4) mortification as the renunciation of this world in order to reach the afterlife (308–11).5 Returning to the reflections of eighteenth-century scientist JeanFrançois de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse in 1797, one can see how these aspects of pastoral power were still manifest in the daily life of the parishes or doctrinas: “The native peoples were divided into parishes, and subjected to practices that are at once the most painstaking [minutieuses] and the most extravagant: every fault, every sin, is punished by the lashes of a whip; any failing to attend prayers or mass results in a fi ne, and the punishment, administered to men and women alike, takes place at the door of the church by order of the curate” (Jean-François de Galaup, Voyage, 196; italics added).6 What is unique about this manifestation of pastoral power on the colonial frontier, however, is that the order of every doctrina or parish existed in relative isolation from all the others and, more significantly, that the maintenance of this order depended as much on the doctrina’s relative distance and autonomy from imperial law as on the forces of Spanish might. In chapter 1, we saw how this distance

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and autonomy contributed to the success Spanish hegemony overseas (alternately called “frontier system,” “compromise government,” or the “colonial compact”). The defense of this autonomy was expressed in theological terms, through the defense of papal superiority to the rule of monarchs. On a practical level, religious exemption from the jurisdiction of the Crown (Sp., fuero), as well as protection from physical harm or persecution (canon privilege) facilitated Christian conversion, which in turn paved the way for Crown rule. Yet on a theological level, from the time of the conquest, the exemption of religious authorities from laws under the monarch’s rule and the designation of a sphere of jurisdiction headed by the Vatican reflected the conviction that the monarchy itself was but an instrument of a higher will and that, in cases of emergency or expediency, this higher will had to be upheld by the spiritual power and its direct earthly representatives, not the monarch.7 In the Middle Ages up to the conquest of the Americas and the Philippines, this rationality manifested itself in doctrines like translatio imperii, which endowed the Pope with the right to judge “even temporal matters” in certain circumstances (Gierke, Political Theories, 18 and 41–42). This understanding of the Pope’s ultimate sovereignty over all forms of temporal rule, while increasingly recognized as untenable in the later medieval period, certainly survived in juridical form well into the conquest. It decisively structured the original plan of Spanish government in the Philippines in the form of the 1582 Royal Synod of Manila, which convened the bishops and missionary prelates in a council that laid the foundations of Spanish government in the islands following their immediate conquest and pacification. As one copy of the proceedings of the Synod puts it, “The Captains and Soldiers, the governors and Justices, may not assume more rights than those given them by their King; neither may the King confer on them more rights than he had received from the Pope. The Pope may not confer on them more rights than he has received from Christ, who is the Law and has the Right to give the power to go throughout the world to preach the Gospel.”8 The expediency of religious privilege, ecclesiastical immunity to the monarch’s jurisdiction, and the concomitant designation of a religious sphere of authority and jurisdiction thus always revealed the higher, metaphysical order or reason of all power and legitimacy, which appeared to supplement the temporal power in a political sense but transcended it when and where such power failed to establish itself, including the frontiers of Christendom.9 The papal doctrine of

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“Omnimoda” testified to the ultimate conviction that the politics of sovereignty itself obeyed and reflected a higher order or nomos under the respublica Christiana.10 A third reason for the expediency of religious privileges was institutional, and had to do with the maintenance of discipline and hierarchy within the religious orders, as well as the particular relationships of accountability, obedience, individualized knowledge, and mortification established between the pastor and parishioner. In both instances, the dynamic of pastoral power entailed not the exercise of force behind a law or decree but the maintenance of a permanent, unequal relationship based on the consent of the “governed” to be governed and of a system based on the permanence of that relationship. Exemption from persecution except by their own orders thus allowed the regular clergy to create and preserve social order outside the interpretation and application of laws that might in fact impede it. This was certainly what Augustinian priest Fr. Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga believed in 1800, when he protested the attempt of Crown officials to establish official reviews (Lat., visitatio) of the missions by the archbishopric of Manila under the direction of the king, as well as the Crown’s attempt to replace regular clergy administering parishes on a temporary basis with the secular clergy, drawn largely from the native class: The Regulars were not inclined for [sic] the Bishops to exercise visitatio over them, not because the latter could find anything reprehensible in matters of administration, from the last time the visitatio was staged; but rather because this practice could not be established without upholding with all due formality the right of royal patronage, something that the Regulars had only formerly upheld in such a way as not to seriously affect their government. . . . [Typically, the archbishopric would endow] the secular clergy with a perpetual right to the Parish where he is installed, and from which no religious official can move him without just cause. This perpetuity in the parishes is much opposed to the dependence that is required by the Religious State [estado Religioso], and considering human weakness, it is easy for this to engender something less than subordination in a priest, from an office that requires obedience; . . . the only result is that priests become less subordinate to their Prelates, which does not favor Religion, nor is it useful to these Christian communities. (Italics added)11

Paradoxically, then, Zúñiga here argues that religious expediency served the interests of the Crown better by disregarding the letter of the law. In this respect, the Church provided the exemplary instance in the Philippines wherein the “flexible administration” of Spanish rule, the expediency of ignoring the vertical chain of command beginning with the

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king, and the existence of policies such as “Obedezco pero no cumplo” (see chapter 1) kept contesting authorities in an improvised set of checks and balances beyond the enforcement of decrees and proclamations. From Pastoral to Police Power In adopting an approach to imperial rule based on Crown “control” rather than “compromise,” the administration of Carlos III in the late eighteenth century came to regard religious authority as both a threat to imperial security and a drain on the Crown treasury. Two years before the expulsion of the Jesuits, the fiscal official of the council of Castile, Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, published a treatise attacking the right of the Church to possess or purchase land without express consent of the Crown.12 This document, as well as the indictment of the Jesuits on suspicion of organizing the Esquilache riot in 1766, led the way to half a century of legislation curtailing ecclesiastical privilege, which was accompanied by the seizure of church lands and other measures enacted on the Iberian peninsula. In the Philippines, the attack on the missionary orders in defense of absolute sovereignty came in the aftermath of the 1762 British invasion and occupation of Manila. When the British returned Manila to Spain, colonial official Simón Anda y Salazar accused Archbishop Rojo of conspiring with the British to cede the entire archipelago without approval of the Crown. Both Anda y Salazar and fiscal attorney Francisco Leandro de Viana portrayed the missionary orders as an imperium in imperio, one ruled by their flagrant disregard for the law and their establishment of jurisdiction outside it.13 Against such a threat, the Spanish Crown had to assert its sovereign right. As Viana wrote in 1764, El despotismo de los Ministros Doctrineros es tan absoluto, como que casi son los únicos que mandan en estas Yslas, y que gobiernan a su arbitrio los Pueblos y Provincias, y sin reconocer de V.M., ni obedecer mas leyes y reales ordenes, que las que convienen a sus intereses, y máximas, siendo constante y notorio, que en todo lo demás no obedecen sino a su voluntad, como lo justifica el que no hay ley, ni Cedula, ni ordenanza, que se observe por Los Doctrineros, en los puntos del Real Patronato; en la administración de los Sacramentos a los enfermos; en las Tanorías, y demás cosas en que se interesa la conveniencia; y sobre todo en las escuelas, para la enseñanza del idioma español.14 [The despotism of the ministers of the parishes has reached absolute extremes: it is as if they are almost the only ones who command in these islands; and they govern the villages and provinces according to their own

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Shibboleths rules, without recognizing your Majesty or obeying any laws or royal decrees beyond those which suit their own interests and rules, these being constant and outrageous, and obey no others except when they so desire it, as if justified by the fact that there is no law, affidavit, or Ordinance that these Preachers observe, particularly with regard to the rights of royal patronage, or the administration of Sacraments to the sick, or in the matter of enforced domestic service or any other matter pertaining to their convenience; and above all the question of schools, for the teaching of the Spanish language.]

In Anda y Salazar’s report to the king following the British invasion and occupation of Manila, the author further added that the curacies ran the spiritual administration “with absolute despotism and independence, despoiling the king and officials of the so well-known right that belongs to them.” As a consequence, the friars “surprise the poor Indian, strike him with terror, and make him believe that they are allpowerful, can do everything and that the authority of the king is worth nothing. Thus the king becomes . . . a monarch in partibus, in name alone” (cited in BR, 50:148, 150). The views of Viana and Anda y Salazar, on the whole, tended to conceive religious power in strictly negative terms and very much in conformity with Campomanes’s own assessment of the clergy in Spain. First of all, the friars refused to recognize the right and due process of the bishop’s inquisitorial visitation (visitatio) of the provinces, which would allow the bishop to “relieve” the regular clergy from the administration of parishes, and replace them with secular clergy drawn primarily from the native and mestizo castes.15 From a legal standpoint, the missionaries administered the parishes only by default and ad interim, until such a time that the parishes could be fi lled by secular clergy under the Philippine bishopric: “The spiritual administration belongs by right to the secular clergy, and the regulars possess it precariously ad nutum Regis propter inopiam clericorum in principio [at the pleasure of the king, owing to the lack of the clergy in the beginning].”16 Second, the missionary orders drained the royal treasury without producing any corresponding economic benefits. As Campomanes had already shown, friar lands only served to generate income for the religious orders. Moreover, the administration of parishes by missionary priests often seemed to lead to the unjust and illegal extraction of wealth from the natives. Church opulence thus added insult to injury with regard to the impoverished Crown treasury, which continued to fund the expenses of the religious while the religious, in return, made no direct fi nancial contribution to the Crown.17

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Third, the friars refused or lacked the means to teach or enforce the teaching of Spanish to the natives. The resulting ignorance of Spanish among the natives rendered communication between natives and Spaniards impossible, thus obstructing the development of Spanish trade and entrepreneurship in the provinces. Moreover, it forced those Spaniards who did brave the cultural divide to establish trade relations in the provinces to rely exclusively on the priests for their protection and support. Not only were these traders reduced to “utter abjection” by their helplessness before the friars, but they also furthered the interference of religion in secular affairs.18 Finally, when coerced by the government to obey the rule of law, the regular clergy would threaten to withdraw immediately from all parishes under their jurisdiction and to cease all functions they exercised in the maintenance of Spanish dominion.19 Faced with the perpetual shortage of secular priests to replace the vacated parishes in the islands, as well as the sole reliance of the secular clergy on the central government for support (since they belonged to no religious order), the insular government could not afford to risk what would amount to a state of emergency or exception brought about by the regular clergy. 20 In these four main examples, which appear in examples of antifriar literature from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, one can see how the “power of the pastorate” constituted as much a check on the sovereign power and temporal administration as an extension of it. 21 According to the Church’s critics, this check often devolved into instances of actual interference and subversion. Yet to understand the Church’s value to the Crown’s project of imperial reform, one must also consider the power of the pastorate from point of view of the pastors themselves. At stake in this perspective is the legitimacy of the respublica Christiana, which guided the florescence of late medieval thought as well as the expansion of Spain’s empire during the sixteenth century. 22 As the religious saw it, their power (potency would be a more correct term) served a primarily defensive function. Their exemptions from the jurisdiction of the Crown and from bodily harm or persecution were granted to them for their unique role in the conquest and pacification of the archipelago from the very beginning. That role was fi rst of all, to admit natives as members of the respublica Christiana, a political metaphor for Christ’s redeeming message. 23 By the very choice of labels (“republic” as opposed to “monarchy” or “aristocracy”), we can see that such an order had to be based from the beginning on native consent—the

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same force that the state tried to marshal in its project of Bourbon reform. This is because religious conversion to Christianity implies both the initiate’s freedom to choose (or not choose) Christianity and to recognize that freedom as tied to an order or rationality that is primarily theological and only secondarily political. 24 This brings us to the second role of the missionaries, which was to “prepare” natives for Spanish sovereign rule through Christianization. 25 If the colonial world was a frontier society, where the imposition and administration of law constantly encountered its limits under the conditions of expediency, the missionary orders comprised the vanguard of Spain’s “frontier system.” In Schmitt’s understanding of the respublica Christiana, the regular clergy was engaged in the adjudication, measurement, and account of the border between the rule of law and the rule of expediency. 26 According to the theological politics of the conquest, only the Church’s autonomy from the letter of the law allowed the clergy to preserve the spirit of the imperial endeavor. Native consent and the administration of expediency serve as the basis of a quite different revaluation of the clergy in the Philippines, in which they came to be regarded less as a handicap to the Crown and more as a nascent police force.27 In the account of French explorer and scientist Monseiur Pierre Marie François de Pagès (1782), all the elements of a modern conception of the police exist in the form of the pastorate.28 The priest disciplines the natives with a whip, in public; he solicits “the most secret thoughts of the Indians, who seek out their pastors’ counsel regarding their smallest needs and wants” [l’intérieur des ames de ces Indiens, qui vont bonnement consulter leur Curé sur leur moindre différend & dans leurs moindres besoins]; he serves as chief director of public order in peace and war; he fortifies the parish church or fort with artillery; he constructs war canoes, “which he frequently commands in person”; he attends to the appointment and instruction of officers and militia; and he administers the sacraments and enforces the payment of tithes and the obligatory attendance at masses on Sundays and special feast days. Quoique je sois naturellement pue porté pour la sévérité & le pouvoir monastique . . . elles tendaient généralement au bien. Cet ordre me paraissait, quant á la police & au spirituel, le même qu’observaient les Jésuites aux missions du Paraguai; ici cependant les Indiens y trouvaient leur bien réel, & ils travaillaient á leur profit. (Pagès, Voyages autour du monde, 157)29 [However disinclined I am by nature toward monastic severity and power, . . . they tended on the whole to work for the general good. In both police

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and spiritual functions, their order seemed to me to be the same as that observed by the Jesuits in the missions of Paraguay; here, however, the Indians found their real interests, and labored to their profit.]

In a word, missionary work serves to strengthen and unite the temporal interests (intérêts temporels) of the natural inhabitants of the country and their “new Masters” (Pagès, Voyages autour du monde, 200). Pagès’s narrative establishes a conceptual homology between the work of priests and a more modern conception of the police, which was at that time being developed in Europe and the Americas. As Foucault’s more recent study on the genealogy of the modern state shows, the police as a political technology shares a deep affi nity with the form of power exercised by the Church from the early medieval period to the sixteenth century in Europe (and in the Philippines, until the collapse of imperial Spain). Its task is the extension and ramification of what Foucault calls “pastoral” or “individualizing” power.30 Quite akin to the Philippine Jesuits that are the subject of Monsieur Pagès’s reflections, (the) police in Foucault’s study comprises an administrative function that is at the same time “meta-administrative,” in that it “branches out into all the people’s conditions, everything they do or undertake. Its field comprises justice, fi nance, and the army.”31 Like the ecclesiastical institution, the police are also engaged in the task of “salvation,” in a rather literal sense. Foucault cites “health, well-being (that is, sufficient wealth, standard of living), security, protection against accidents.” Not surprisingly, he traces the unity of these functions to Christian pastoralism, which he calls “pastoral power,” and illustrates its transformation in Europe during the sixteenth century.32 The Crown’s ambivalence regarding these two perspectives helps to explain its self-contradictory actions in the latter half of the eighteenth century, as well as the experience of secularization in the Philippines and in Spain’s other dominions. At fi rst, the repeated denunciation of friars’ “despotism,” as well as urgent appeals for the monarchy to establish defi nitively the rights of royal patronage, episcopal visitation, and the curtailment of religious privileges, led the colonial government to transform certain missions and doctrinas into parishes administered by a native secular clergy (1774).33 This move corresponded to similar moves made in both the Iberian Peninsula and New Spain. Two years later, however, this initiative was suspended by recommendation of the archbishop, who complained of the lack of secular priests as well as the inadequate training of the native secular clergy.34 The new Ordinances of Good Government (Ordenanzas del Buen Gobierno), published in

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1768, also reflect self-contradictory mandates, combining laws that would serve to check or limit the friars’ power to accumulate wealth and exploit native labor with initiatives that sought to appropriate and augment such powers for the benefit of the insular government. Even as the government moves to protect the natives against the friars, it also moves to bring their residences closer to the supervision of the church (Ordinance 83, in BR, 50:255–56); increase intercourse and coordination between the priests and other colonial officials; and compel the friars to preach to the natives the obligations of paying the tribute and other indulgences (Ordinance 89, in BR, 50:258–59).35 This governmental appropriation of the pulpit, argues the author of the Ordinances, serves their higher unity: it is “so important for their salvation, so in accordance with the intention of our Catholic monarch, and suitable to the zeal of good ministers of instruction, and of faithful vassals of his Majesty” (Ordinance 89, in BR, 50:258–59). At a time when the future of colonial rule depended on its ability to conceive and promote a set of norms regarding economic policy for agriculture, industry, and trade; foster the colony’s independence from royal subsidies; secure colonial society against foreign invasion and piracy; facilitate the transportation of goods and services; and create incentives to labor—in short, to “governmentalize” its field of operations—it had to undertake the dismantling of the order known as the respublica Christiana without threatening the stability that the old order had guaranteed.

from frontier expediency to juridical exception: bernáldez pizarro and mas The simultaneous devaluation of the respublica Christiana—manifested in the attempted replacement of missions by parishes, and the corresponding replacement of regular clergy by secular priests—and the revaluation of pastoral power as a proto-police force on the colonial frontier presented an impasse in the application of enlightened despotism for the control and direction of native consent. The failure of the proposed transference of the parishes to native secular priests, barely two years (in 1776) after the insular government had initiated the move, led the colonial state to reverse abruptly the trend of secularization that it continued to follow in the rest of Spain’s dominions.36 The protest of the captain-general of the Philippines, Pedro Sarrio (1776–78) against the proposed transference of the parishes from the regular to the secular clergy tells us how the colonial state begins to

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pursue a strategy belonging to its own rationality rather than that of the Crown and its ministers. Sarrio quickly dispenses with the expedient reason for not replacing the missions with native secular priests, which is that the natives lacked the time and adequate preparation for accomplishing such a task. The question of native competence aside, Sarrio argues, La experiencia de más de dos siglos ha enseñado que en todas las guerras, sublevaciones, y alzamientos, han tenido los párrocos regulares la mayor parte en la pacificación de los inquietos. . . . En cada ministerio europeo tiene V. M. una centinela que está en observación de todas las acciones y movimientos de los indios, para dar parte á este gobierno de todo lo que ocurra. Y al contrario . . . si todas las parroquias estuviesen en manos de clérigos indios ó mestizos sangleyes, carecería el gobierno de aquellos conductos por donde con toda seguridad se le comunicasen las luces y noticias necesarias. (Italics in original)37 [The experience of more than two centuries has shown that in all the wars, revolts, and uprisings, the regular clergy have played the greatest role in the pacification of the dissatisfied. . . . In every European ministry your Majesty possesses a sentinel devoted to observing all the actions and movements of the Indios, the better to notify this government of all that occurs. And in contrast . . . if all the parishes were in the hands of native or Chinese mestizo clergy, the government would lack those means (conductos) of sending and receiving the necessary information and dispatches with total security.]

Sarrio’s reflections on the role of Spanish friars differ markedly from the Bourbon policy of secularizing the missions in the Americas, particularly in New Spain, during this period. Like Cuba, in the eyes of the Spanish Crown the Philippines had traditionally served primarily as a military outpost and only secondarily as a source of economic profit or religious crusade. After Manila’s defenses had been breached in 1762, the importance of this role as a military outpost only increased, as is evidenced by the almost exclusive appointment of military officers to the posts of governor and captain-general of the islands in the nineteenth century. As the understanding of the central authority changed, so did the form of promulgating and executing laws. As Josep Fradera has noted elsewhere, in the nineteenth century we see the marked tendency of captains-general to administer the colony by executive decree rather than by the complex dynamic of compromise and negotiation that preceded it.38 In Sarrio’s memorandum, the problems of surveillance and communication unfold along two lines. On the one hand, native and mestizo

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priests cannot be trusted to take charge of parishes simply because they are natives and mestizos, that is, conquered colonial subjects: “[The promotion of natives and mestizos to the rank of priests] does not strip them of their traits as colonized peoples, nor their natural sympathy for their countrymen and peers” (Documentos, 2). [El ser sacerdotes no les desnuda de la calidad de conquistados, ni del afecto natural á sus paisanos é iguales.] He gives various examples in which Spanish priests had succeeded in defusing or at least warning the government about an impending uprising, and he contrasts this to a recent uprising in Bataan, in which two secular priests knew about an upcoming riot but did not report it to the proper authorities (Documentos, 2–3). Related to this insuperable divide, the “white face” (cara blanca) of the Spanish priest, by its very difference, inspires “much more respect and veneration, and renders the natives more docile to the priest’s advice and instructions in temporal as well as spiritual matters [mucho más respeto y veneración, y se rinden más dóciles a sus consejos é instrucciones en lo espiritual y en lo temporal]” (Documentos, 3). Furthermore, Sarrio argues, even if one did admit the excellence of certain native and mestizo priests while recognizing defective, incompetent, or corrupt Spanish missionaries, it was still easier to remove and replace the latter than the former. This had to do in part, of course, with the procedure of appointing and dismissing secular clergy from parishes under their care. As Zúñiga had earlier remarked, the appointment and tenure of friars in missions or parishes designated for the secular clergy was temporary and subject to review and replacement; by contrast, the appointment of a secular clergy member to a given parish, barring exceptional procedures, was meant to be permanent. Even more important for Sarrio, the removal of a bad missionary from a parish did not carry with it the same consequences as the removal of a native cleric, “who has no other means of subsistence [que no tiene otro modo de subsistir]” (Documentos, 3). In the latter instance, removal terminated one’s means of livelihood, and, because the native cleric exemplified the most intelligent, able, and educated of the native and mestizo classes, the implications of such a removal would always tend to extend beyond the justice (or injustice) of any individual case. From Sarrio’s argument, we can derive two long-term consequences for the blueprint of colonial rule in the nineteenth century—the peculiar rationality underlying the seemingly inconsistent and rather “irrational” decisions made by the colonial government in this period. The first is the attempted synchronization of the colonial state’s rationality with the

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identification and formation of a political technology specific to it: the regular clergy or missionary orders. The second is the institution of racial difference as the necessary foundation of this form of government.39 Colonial (Ir)rationality The adoption of the regular clergy as the colonial state’s mode of extending and elaborating its solicitation of native consent is what distinguishes the application of Bourbon reform policy in the Philippines from that in Spain’s other colonies, as well as from colonial state projects undertaken by the British, Dutch, and French in Southeast Asia. In 1769, the Crown ordered the archbishops and prelates in the Americas and the Philippines to begin admitting “up to one-third or one-quarter of Amerindians, mestizo, or Filipino candidates for the priesthood in all existing seminaries, and in those which might be established for the future.”40 As C. R. Boxer makes plain, however, in the Philippines this order was held in check by Captain-General José Basco y Vargas, under the claim that native and mestizo secular priests were not to be trusted and, moreover, that Spanish domination depended on the peninsular Spanish missionaries (Boxer, Church Militant, 22). This led to a reversal of secularization policies, to the point of stripping native and mestizo secular priests of parishes that had been held by nonpeninsular Spaniards even prior to the 1766 secularization decree. On a superficial level, the disfranchisement of the parishes administered by native secular priests between 1768 and 1859 and the replacement of these posts by the missionary orders may seem to indicate merely a strategic shift in the continuity of a general plan. In 1810, Royal Company director Tomás de Comyn acknowledges the inevitability of “friar immobility” with regard to the overall project of church secularization in his sharp rebuke of the attempts to secularize the parishes: No ha podido todavía prescindirse . . . de la autoridad personal que obtienen los párrocos entre sus feligreses; antes bien, el Gobierno se ha visto constantemente precisado á valerse de esta misma, como de instrumento el mas poderoso para captarse el respeto y debida subordinación; por manera, que aunque los párrocos no se hallen en el día autorizados á intervenir de derecho en la administración civil, de hecho vienen á ser ellos los administradores verdaderos (Comyn, Islas Filipinas, 147). [Until now, it has been impossible to avoid dependence upon the personal authority obtained by the parish priests from among the faithful; indeed, the Government has constantly had recourse to this same authority, as the

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Shibboleths most powerful of instruments, for the sake of securing respect and due subordination; so that, although the curates have yet to see the day when they are authorized to legitimately intervene in matters of civil administration, they are in fact and deed the true administrators.]

Comyn’s dismissal of Bourbon policy here, however, reveals a deep, programmatic concern for the synchronization of pastoral power with the modern colonial state. First, he appeals to “the peculiar circumstances of these lands [las peculiares circunstancias de estas tierras]” (150)—a phrase that will be used repeatedly in the argument for colonial Special Laws—as the primary consideration of the colonial state’s deviation from the project of Bourbon reform. “Since the local government, for lack of military force as well as the lack of Europeans, cannot will obedience by its own means, it must call the powerful influence of religion to its aid” (153).41 After acknowledging the expediency of religion, he goes on to emphasize the positive functions to which it has been put to use: “One may marvel at the landscape dotted with spacious churches and convents . . . the regularity of the streets, the pulchritude and even luxury to be seen in the apparel and houses: primary schools in all the towns . . . wide roads being opened, architecturally sound bridges being constructed, and the fulfi llment to the greatest degree of all the guarantees of good Government and police being brought to its prompt conclusion” (150).42 Yet in acknowledging a shift of strategy that would make the spiritual administration “the main cog of this political machine” (la rueda principal de esta máquina política), Comyn must also acknowledge a fundamental and paradoxical dependence upon an order of rule that the colonial state cannot ultimately direct or control: Guárdenseles, pues, sus fueros, tráteseles con decoro, y fíeseles la dirección del indio, y al punto se verán reunidos en torno y apoyo de la autoridad legítima. . . . si el Gobierno, rigiéndose mas por principios de una política ilustrada, ó llamase razón de estado, que por la materialidad del texto literal de la legislación indiana, se resolviera á desprenderse indirectamente de una parte pequeña de su autoridad en favor de aquellos operarios espirituales. (154 and 156; italics added) [Let them, therefore, keep their privileges (Sp. fueros); have them treated with respect, and entrust them with the guidance of the indio, and in the end they will always be found united around in support of legitimate authority. . . . if the Government were ruled more by principles stemming from an enlightened policy, or what is called raison d’état, rather than the literal text (materialidad del texto literal) of our Indies legislation,

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it would resolve to indirectly part with a small share of its authority in favor of those spiritual agents (operarios).]

It is incumbent upon the Philippines’ colonial raison d’état, then, to reconcile the exceptional powers of the regular clergy outside the rule of Crown or colonial state sovereignty (that “small share of [governmental] authority”) with the overall “rationalization” of the colonial state. Yet to what degree has any reconciliation taken place? Theoretically, the state has reconceived the spiritual administration of the regular clergy in its own terms, which will allow it to manipulate religious authority more directly as an apparatus of security as well as the stimulus to a new economy, organized around the production of largescale cash-crop agriculture and mining. In deed and fact, however, the colonial government has merely sanctioned and extended the very expedient power it had arrogated for itself, on the condition that the regular clergy employ and ramify its pastoral functions in the direct service of an inferred colonial raison d’état. From Sarrio and Comyn onwards, the literature of colonial officialdom consistently replays this dynamic through the identification of the future of the Spanish regular clergy in the Philippines with the rule of order and suppression of revolt in the archipelago. A few examples will suffice. In 1822, British explorer Henry Piddington writes, “In the most distant provinces, with no other safeguard than the respect with which he has inspired the Indians, he exercises the most unlimited authority, and administers the whole of the civil and ecclesiastical government, not only of a parish, but often of a whole province. His word is law—his advice is taken on all subjects. No order from the Alcalde, or even the government, is executed without his counsel and approbation” (Piddington, quoted in BR, 51:113). Several years later, in 1827, Manuel Bernáldez Pizarro writes, “It can be safely asserted that the government of his Majesty has in this class of ministers [the Spanish regular clergy] the most powerful force for maintaining that possession in attachment to his sovereignty. . . . The fathers exercise over the Indians a moral force more powerful than even that of the government.”43 Finally, in Sinibaldo de Mas’s 1842 secret report to the king on the conditions in the Philippines, the author writes, “In short, just as a republic is sustained by virtue, and a monarchy by fidelity, this economy, in my view, must be maintained by religion.”44 In these and other instances, the solicitation and direction of native consent by the colonial state

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must accede to the privileges, jurisdiction, and pastoral power of the missionary orders. The theoretical contradiction within the colonial state led to a period of economic growth and political stability. In Spain, Bourbon (and later, constitutional) initiatives such as the expulsion of the Jesuits, the state seizure of Church lands, and the alienation of missionary orders from papal authority in the Vatican led to the deep-seated animosity of the Church in Spain to central government authority and its corresponding identification with a brand of political centralism designed to maintain the status quo. In New Spain (Mexico), many military and political leaders during the Mexican war of independence (1810–21) sprang from the ranks of the native and mestizo secular clergy (as well as a creolized regular clergy).45 In the Philippines, by contrast, the theoretical incoherence of the colonial state depended on the church, its “main cog of the political machine,” to complete the task of achieving political stability and economic integration to agricultural capitalism, which the militarization of central command alone could not achieve. The religious orders were only too willing to comply: as Roberto Blanco Andrés’s incisive study of the Augustinian and other missionary orders in the colonial period shows, religious superiors began to send “detailed reports on the religious, the towns, the baptized population and the tributes collected in the settled populations, all in order to gain favor and benevolence from the Madrid government.” It is with this objective in mind that maps or statistics on the baptized population were instituted and sent with some regularity to the Council of the Indies and to those responsible for the colonial order.46 Genealogies of Modern Colonial Racism At the same time, however, the religious authority never recovered the same kind of autonomy it had enjoyed prior to the 1762 British invasion and occupation of Manila. More significantly, in assuming the responsibilities befitting one of the primary political technologies of the colonial state, it became the colonial state’s means of developing policies of racial segregation and a racial basis for exceptional authoritarian rule.47 Of course, to identify the Church in the Philippines as the locus of the modern deployment of institutional racism is not to say that racism or racial exclusion did not exist prior to the nineteenth century or that the Church was primarily responsible for racist policies. Regarding the

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fi rst issue, as many scholars have argued, the foundational gesture of the Spanish Reconquista and the subsequent expansion and conquest of the Americas was the sovereign institution and enforcement of an absolute, Manichean difference between the conquerors and the conquered, which cut across every sphere of human existence (religious, moral, political, geographical, etc.).48 In the Philippines, this idealized form of enmity was reflected in the centuries-long attempt to conquer the Muslim sultanates in the southern archipelago and to refuse the establishment of commercial relations with them. A second example of racial difference can be derived from the Spanish empire’s failure or refusal to reconcile or rationalize civil and canon law in its dominions with the acceptance of the legitimacy of customary indigenous laws (derecho consuetudinal), provided these did not directly oppose the laws of the Crown and the Church. Such a difference between Spanish and indigenous laws and customs led priests like Gaspar de San Agustín to reflect on the unsuitability of natives for the religious vocation.49 Finally, the occasional mass deportation of Chinese from the archipelago, which at times degenerated into riots and massacres throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, provides a third example of racial differentiation and exclusion for the preservation and stability of overseas imperial rule. In each instance, one might say, imperial rule undertook to preserve and advance its interests, which were expressed in racial terms.50 Yet what is significant about the policy of disfranchising native and Chinese mestizo priests from the directorship of parishes is the degree to which it engendered a larger reflection on the ultimate basis of maintaining Spanish rule in the archipelago that contradicted the principles of constitutional government on the Peninsula and anticipated the promulgation and interpretation of a Special Laws administration by 1837. For example, Bernáldez Pizarro’s memorandum on reforms needed in the Philippines, drafted only a year after the overdue publication (in 1820!) of Tomás de Comyn’s Estado de las islas Filipinas en 1810, extends the concern regarding natives and Chinese mestizos as spiritual pastors to the appointment of natives (as well as Philippineborn Spanish Creoles) to positions of military command, as two symptoms of a larger threat to colonial security: El ejército de las Yslas Filipinas . . . se compone en mucha parte de oficiales Españoles del país y de algunos Americanos y Mestizos cuya índole, inclinaciones y educación, son absolutamente diversas (salva muy rara excepción) de la de los demás oficiales europeos; y por consiguiente existe

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Shibboleths originalmente entre unos y otros, cierta división constante de ánimos, no ya de individuo á individuo, sino de clase á clase. (Bernáldez Pizarro, Dictamen, 2; italics added) [The army of the Filipinas Islands . . . is officered, in great part, by Spaniards of the country, and by some (Spanish-) Americans and mestizos; and the disposition, tendencies, and education of the latter class are (with very rare exceptions) absolutely different from those of the other and European officers; consequently, there exists from the very beginning a certain constant division of sentiment between the two, not only individually but collectively.]

Not surprisingly, the same judgment is applied to the lesser officers occupied by the Indios: Esta es otra de las causas, de que ya se han originado y originarán siempre alzamientos en los cuerpos. . . . El soldado Yndio . . . cuando es colocado en una escala, cualquiera de mando, se llena de orgullo, y aspira con mucho vehemencia á serlo todo, sin salir por eso de su condición de Yndio. (Bernáldez Pizarro, 2) [This is another of the causes, future as well as past, of uprisings in the corps. . . . When the Indio soldier is promoted to a higher rank, he is fi lled with pride, and vehemently desires to be at the head (serlo todo), without changing, for all that, his condition as an Indio.]

Bernáldez Pizarro’s analysis of this insurmountable difference borrows consciously or unconsciously from Sarrio’s. While, on the one hand, mestizo and native officers may be elevated according to the “fitness, military spirit, [and] appreciation of the confidence and honor which the king bestows upon them [aptitud, espíritu militar (y) aprecio á la confianza y honor que el Rey les dispensa]” (leaf 1), Bernáldez Pizarro finds fault with their lack of industry, unsociability with Spanish officers, and, most of all, their tendency to favor parochial or familial interests over “the cause of legitimate government [la causa del gobierno legitimo]” (2). At the same time, however, the introduction of an “absolute difference” between Spanish and non-Spanish officers, in Bernáldez Pizarro’s account, refers to all cases involving positions of authority or status, including most notably the religious ministry, as a matter of colonial policy: “As simple farmers or artisans,” he writes, “[Indios] would have been useful to their families and to the government; but mistakenly raised to the dignity of priests, other interests now move them, and they form a commonwealth apart in the bosom of the provinces.” [Simples labradores ó artistas . . . hubieran sido útiles á sus familias y al

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gobierno; pero elevados por un error á la dignidad de sacerdotes, les agitan ya otros intereses y formar una Republica á parte en el seno de las provincias” (18; italics added)]. Thus, Bernáldez Pizarro believes that only the segregation of races on an institutional level will forestall the social movement toward political separation. Conversely, the recommended diminution of native priests and the corresponding increase of Spanish priests promise to supplement a Spanish sovereignty in crisis until his recommendations for a larger army and more artillery in the islands can be satisfied: La falta de Religiosos Europeos en las Yslas Filipinas para ocupar las cuatro quintas partes, á lo menos, de sus curatos es incompatible con la conservación duradera de aquella colonia. Puede asegurarle que el Gobierno de S.M. tiene en esta clase de ministros el nervio mas poderoso para mantener aquella posesión adiestra á su soberanía. . . . [Ellos] ejercen sobre [los Indios] una fuerza moral mas poderosa que no ejerce el Gobierno mismo. Los Yndios viven en una total separación moral de los Españoles; tienen sus leyes de tradición, sus opiniones y costumbres enteramente desconocidas, para quien ignore su idioma y no esté en continuo trato con ellos. Los Religiosos Europeos son las únicas personas de confianza del Gobierno que á favor de estas circunstancias y con un conocimiento practico é intimo de la índole y pasiones de aquellos naturales, pueden introducirse en su corazón, inclinar su voluntad á lo bueno, ilustrarlos y mantenerlos pacíficos y sumisos y sin esto de nada servirán los Ejércitos mas numerosos. Estos Ministros son los únicos Españoles que conocen la estadística de sus pueblos y los recursos que su localidad ofrece ya para mantener una policía conveniente, ya para fomentar la agricultura y las artes. (Bernáldez Pizarro, 18–19; italics added) [The lack of European religious in the Philippine Islands for the occupation of at the very least four-fi fths of its parishes is incompatible with the lasting preservation of that colony. His Majesty can rest assured that the government has in this class of ministers the most powerful force for maintaining that possession in attachment to his sovereignty. . . . The fathers exercise over the Indians a moral force more powerful than even that of the government. The Indians live in entire moral separation from the Spaniards; they have their own laws of tradition, their own opinions and customs, entirely unknown to anyone who is ignorant of their language or has not continual intercourse with them. The European religious are the only persons in the confidence of the government who by favor of these circumstances, and with a practical and intimate understanding of the nature and inclinations of the natives there, can fi nd a way into their hearts, incline their wills to what is right, enlighten them, and keep them peaceful and submissive; and without this larger armies would be of no avail. These ministers are the only Spanish who understand the statistical facts of their communities and the resources offered by their locality,

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Shibboleths whether that entails the maintenance of an expedient police force, or the cultivation of agriculture and the arts.]

This extensive quotation demonstrates how all the interests framed under the colonial raison d’état persist; but these are, in turn, framed by the necessity of reinforcing and generalizing the dichotomy of the rulers and the ruled primarily through this “moral force more powerful than even that of the government.” The issue, for Bernáldez Pizarro and others, has ceased to be the fashioning of a new, late colonial hegemony, and has become centered instead on the rule of sovereignty between a designated elite and a designated subaltern class. Racial difference has become the colonial government’s very goal, with the religious missionaries as the primary instrument of ensuring it. Diplomatic attaché Sinibaldo de Mas’s secret report to the king on the “interior politics” of the Philippines in 1842 makes explicit the elevation of the exceptional instance of racism, fi rst witnessed in the colonial policy toward native and mestizo secular priests, to the foundation of modern colonial rule itself. Writing two decades after the political separation of most of Latin America from Spanish rule, as well as the aftermath of the 1841 outbreak of sedition in Tayabas (led by the native leader of a Christian confraternity, Apolinario de la Cruz), Mas states from the outset that three measures are imperative for the preservation of the colony. These are the reduction of the Spanish, Philippine-born, Creole population “al menor número posible” (to the least number possible); “people of color must voluntarily pay respect and obedience to the whites” (La gente de color debe prestar voluntariamente respeto y obediencia a la blanca; italics in text); and the complete overhaul of colonial administration, in which the latter comes into its own as a colonial state with its own legislation and legal procedure. While the third objective reiterates many of the criticisms, projects, and impasses noted by Mas’s predecessors—the proyectistas of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—it is the fi rst two that illustrate the reorientation of the colonial project from the solicitation of native consent to the exercise of domination over a racially subjugated population. The virtual impossibility of securing the latter causes Mas to insert a small caveat—this respect and obedience must be secured by consent—but the overall direction of this obedience can be gleaned in his following statement: “It is of the greatest importance to break [the native clergy’s] pride completely, and that in all places and occasions they consider the Spaniard as their superior, not their

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equal.” [Es preciso quebrar enteramente su orgullo, y que en todos lugares y ocasiones consideren al español como señor, no como igual (Mas, Informe secreto, 50).] For the purposes of our study, two aspects of Mas’s argument for the elevation of racism to the rationality of the colonial state deserve attention. The fi rst is the degree to which the colonial state is asked to employ its governmental powers to institute this dichotomy between colonizers and colonized; the second is the articulation of racial segregation around the figure of the Spanish missionary priest. After Mas suggests that the Creole population be significantly reduced (Mas recommends their deportation to Europe, as well as the prohibition of Spanish-native or Chinese intermarriages), he turns his attention to what he believes to be the fundamental modus operandi of a settler colony: the attraction of whites to agriculture. To this end, he suggests the management of racialized groups, calibrated to achieve this goal. Such measures would include exempting Chinese from excessive tribute (the better to stimulate their industry); suspending the ban preventing the un-Christianized mountain peoples (the Aetas and Igorrots) from working on Spanish estates; and forcing Muslim captives from the ongoing campaigns against the sultanates in the South, as well as ordinary incarcerated delinquents, to perform labor (Mas, Informe secreto, 26). It becomes clear from Mas’s analysis, however, that the target-object of the colonial state, properly speaking, is no longer native consent, but the consent and industry of a small minority of white Spanish settlers. “For the white population that remains in the country . . . agriculture offers a prosperous recourse . . . because with an estate not only can one live carefree and independently; one can also set up a huge inheritance for one’s descendants” (Mas, Informe secreto, 24–26). [Para la población blanca que quede en el país . . . la agricultura ofrece un abundante recurso . . . porque con una hacienda no sólo puede vivir con desahogo e independencia, sino también fundar para sus descendientes un pingüe patrimonio.] It is their industry and their capacity to command natives, who “voluntarily” pay obedience and respect to them, which will allow the white settlers to secure their prosperity as well as that of the colonial state. As if to reiterate the demotion of the colonial subject as the agent of colonial modernity, Mas outlines a series of largely disciplinary measures that effectively identify the colonial subject as first and foremost an object of repression. Spaniards and natives must not wear the same style of clothing; natives must salute Spaniards in public, never apply the

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title “Don” to other natives (regardless of status), and never employ libelous language against the government; native infractions against whites should carry an extra penalty; Spaniards should be fined or punished for fraternizing with natives; the right of native assembly should be prohibited, as well as the teaching of Spanish and firearms; native contact with white Europeans should be limited and monitored (Mas, Informe secreto, 54–64). Mas sprinkles these measures with others, whose pettiness makes us smile today.51 In any event, his statement on the danger of education aptly serves as an emblem of these measures, viewed in their entirety, as instruments of brutalization: “Cada paso adelante es un paso atrás” (27). [Every step forward is a step backward.] But if the new target-object of the colonial state is the minority of white settlers, how do the majority of natives figure in the government’s field of operations? Mas at fi rst recommends that this question be left to the Spanish religious, since the colonial state requires nothing more of them than their mute obedience. Es o no cierto que para mantener la España esta colonia bajo su dominio necesita de la influencia de los religiosos sobre sus habitantes? Si es cierto es preciso . . . que los alcaldes y demás empleados sean ruedas de la máquina . . . y, hasta cierto punto, se muevan a su impulso. Mientras los pueblos obedezcan a la voz de los frailes las islas serán españolas, porque los frailes no pueden menos de serlo (Mas, Informe secreto, 44; italics added). [Is it or is it not true that in order for Spain to maintain this colony under its dominion, Spain needs the influence of the religious over the inhabitants? If it is true it is of the utmost importance . . . that the mayors and other employees serve as cogs in the machine . . . and, up to a certain point, move at the (friar’s) bidding. As long as the towns obey the voice of the friars the islands will remain Spanish, because the friars cannot be anything less than that.]

Mas’s emphasis on the “Spanishness” (as opposed to the religious fervor) of the friars substantiates a contemporary observation by Etienne Balibar on the production or projection of racial identity (in this case, Spanish purity) as fictive ethnicity. For Balibar, this imaginary ethnicity traces its roots to ancient origins; yet its field of application is always the perception of the present as defi ned by political crisis, which necessitates a strategic alliance across otherwise opposed groups (politically or economically). 52 In this instance of race formation, Spanish friars cease to be the semi-autonomous remnants of frontier Christendom and become the very emblem of Spanish allegiance. 53

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The displacement of native consent as the target-object of the colonial reason of state and the concomitant synchronization of the colonial state with the pastoral power of the missions to enforce the obedience of the colonial subject can be summed up a word that begins to appear with increasing frequency throughout the nineteenth century: prestige, as in “the prestige of our good name and dominion [el prestigio de nuestro nombre y dominio]” (Mas, Informe secreto, 49) for the preservation of Spanish rule. Elsewhere, Mas refers to prestige as “Spanishness” (españolismo, 20) and Spanish mettle: “carácter española, en el cual deben siempre resplandecer la rectitud, la benevolencia, y la liberalidad [Spanish character, in which must always shine forth rectitude, benevolence, and liberality]” (53). In most instances, Mas speaks of Spanish prestige in negative terms, that is, as that which is being undermined at the expense of stability in the archipelago. Yet his difficulty with articulating prestige in positive terms (i.e., as a causational principle) inheres in his very understanding of the term and its inseparability from both the threat of desprestigio that it opposes and the implied dichotomy between Spanish colonizer and colonial abjection. When called upon to give examples of prestige, Mas deliberately avoids any reference to feudal or neofeudal notions of aristocratic and hereditary nobility and always reverts instead to the examples offered by Philippine religiosity. Regarding the native and Chinese mestizo clergy: “They are inept and prone to vice, and therefore, they do not inspire respect, nor exercise influence, nor are they feared . . . and [the native priest] undermines the prestige of holiness that surrounds the character of the religious” (28). [Son ineptos y viciosos, y por consiguiente, no infunden respeto, ni ejercen influencia, ni son temibles . . . y socava el prestigio de santidad que circunda el carácter del religioso.] The lack of respect that even Spanish secular officials give to the clergy, he adds, “contributes to destroy the prestige of our good name and dominion” (49). The priest’s direct handling of money for marriage and burial fees, “detracts from their prestige [les roba mucho prestigio]” (49). It is from these examples that Mas can extend the character of prestige to the colonial project as a whole. For example, regarding the application of egalitarian principles of justice in the colony: “These are very pure, philanthropic, laudable ideas, but we are not in Spain, and it is crucial to preserve [our] prestige” (53). [Son muy puras, fi latrópicas y laudables, pero no estamos en España, es preciso conservar el prestigio.] Such preservation, he adds, is not

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specific to Spanish colonialism, but common to all colonial projects as a whole. 54 Intendant of the Army and Treasury Juan M. De la Matta, who was presiding during the time Mas was composing his secret report to the Crown, diverges from Mas in many ways: Matta, for one, does not believe that colonial apartheid will resolve social tensions, and his recommendations reflect the conviction that the security of Spanish rule in the Philippines will ultimately arise from the fair and equal treatment of native and Spanish officers alike. Yet, like Mas, Matta concentrates his analysis on the “weakening [of] prestige that gives force to the government. [All things have combined to destroy in Manila] the prestige and moral force that have been hitherto the principle of our domination.”55 Like Mas, Matta also traces the source of this prestige to religion (BR, 52: 96 and 101); and like Mas, Matta demonstrates how the decline of prestige corresponds to social unrest that is motivated and informed primarily by the lack of racial difference and differentiation (101). In Matta’s words, “Without prestige, it will also be impossible for the lesser part to dominate the great whole.” From this he invokes the necessity of “a special law for these islands, analogous and framed with reference to the genius and circumstances of the various peoples inhabiting them, and to their great distance from the mother-country” (103).56

the “special” character of special laws On the surface of things, both the institutional incorporation and empowerment of the missionary orders and the plan to rule the Philippines by Special Laws appeared to Spanish magistrates and colonial officials alike as eminently pragmatic measures to reconcile Spain’s claim to its overseas possessions with the idea that all governmental authority now resided in the nation, whose laws derived from a Constitution. Spanish writers in the metropolis like Joaquín Arimón y Andario saw the project of creating Special Laws for the colonies as the most enlightened extension of liberal government to the colonies. “The affection of the inhabitants in our overseas provinces for the metropolis,” he wrote in 1852, “is the best and most secure guarantee of their eternal conservation.” [La afección de los habitantes de Ultramar á la Metrópoli es la mejor y mas segura garantía de su eterna conservación.]57 At the very least, it enabled the colonial government to carry out the tasks of economic and social reform overseas that it had neither the manpower nor competence to complete. In the interviews conducted

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by the U.S. Philippine Commission with religious officials in 1900, a Franciscan prelate listed the following responsibilities delegated to the typical parish priest: inspector of primary schools, president of various boards and charities, tax inspector, president of board of public works, civil registrar, president of the board of statistics, census taker, licenser, poll watcher, counselor to the municipal board, supervisor of the election of police, censor, member of the provincial board, auditor, and so forth.58 This good friar added the following remark: “Of course the only thing entrusted to [us] was the spiritual welfare of the people, but [we] had to do this other work because asked to do so by the government” (Corpuz, Bureaucracy in the Philippines, 122). At the same time, however, the appeal to a law that was defi ned by its exception from the law obtaining on the peninsula could not but reinforce, further engender, and extend the very “special circumstances” that the government ostensibly intended to surmount. In 1885, representative of the Cortes Manuel Azcárraga considered the administration of Special Laws as akin to a “mini coup-d’etat” (pequeño golpe de Estado) in permanent force overseas, an usurpation of legitimately constituted authority by the legislative Assembly, which threatened to destabilize not only Spain’s remaining overseas territories, but also the integrity of the legislative power in Spain itself. “As an individual of the Liberal Party I must register a protest here,” he remarked in an 1885 session of the Cortes, “because [the administration of Special Laws] constitutes a mini coup d’etat that may presage other greater ones . . . an attack on the conferred faculties of legislative power.”59 In the period between the fi rst Special Laws decree (in 1837) and its restatement in 1869, Azcárraga’s identification of the Special Laws administration as a de facto state of exception obtaining in the archipelago was manifested in the intense militarization of the archipelago. This escalation of military authority included the hypertrophy of the positions of governor and captain-general (held almost exclusively thereafter by military officers invested with extraordinary powers), the establishment of military government (comandancia politico-militar) throughout most parts of the archipelago, the creation of public forces organized around military lines (the Cuerpo de Carabineros de Seguridad Pública, which foreshadowed the transplantation to the archipelago of the Guardia Civil), and the development of policies of deportation for colonial governance.60 Military repression continued all the way up to the end of Spanish rule in the archipelago. To get a sense of the extent of the arbitrary despotism that had been unleashed in the Philippines through

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the promised administration of Special Laws, one need only peruse the police authority granted to the Guardia Civil later in the century: “The Civil Guard not only has the duty to cooperate in the maintenance of public order . . . but also to perform this service by himself in the absence of authority; therefore, all Chiefs, Officers, and troop members of this force are under individual obligation to put down and reprimand whatever disorder or riot occurs in [their] presence, without orders from any civil authority being necessary for taking action” (italics added).61 This lawless form of law enforcement, this obligation to simultaneously interpret disorder and enforce its suppression without any normative criterion of order or due process to authorize the use of force, belongs to a world turned upside-down. It is a world where even liberalminded military officers advocate the centralization of power and command in the person of the captain-general; where spiritual institutions serve a form of temporal rule whose investment in Spanish prestige is quasi-mystical; and where the indefi nite suspension of law coincides with a de facto state of war. Not coincidentally, the argument for preserving the administration of Special Laws for the Philippines after 1869 focused even more strongly on the determining factor of racial difference between the necessary strong hand of the rulers and the simultaneous resistance and indolence of the ruled. When the Cortes convened a Special (!) Committee of Reforms to the Administration and Government of the Philippines in 1869, the decree stated, “Since the indigenous Filipino people still remains in the moral state of primitive infancy, to raise the glass of all liberties high in its honor would surely expose it to a political drunkenness that would upset and disorganize any people saturated with [liberties] without sufficient preparation by means of solid instruction and a long, progressive, and conscious practice of civic virtues that are the central nerve of free peoples.”62 The role of the religious missionary in maintaining this state of exception, rationalized on the basis of racial difference, would be to attend to this “moral state of primitive infancy” through “sufficiently preparing” the natives for “civic virtues.” As a price for the parishes that were returned or granted to the regular clergy, they came to serve as the functionaries, schoolmasters, and quasi-police of whatever government happened to be in power. When the Jesuits returned in 1859, the colonial government transferred Manila’s only primary school at the time (the Escuela Municipal de Manila) to their hands, as a way of providing the cornerstone to the colonial state’s dedication to the “solid

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instruction” promised by the ever-deferred administration of Special Laws.63 At the same time, they were given missions in Mindanao to spread the Gospel, an activity that felicitously (but not fortuitously) coincided with the expansion of Spanish military campaigns against the Muslim sultanates in the south. In the aftermath of the Cavite mutiny of 1872, in which native and mestizo troops led by Spanish peninsular officers seized the Cavite arsenal, Governor and CaptainGeneral Rafael de Izquierdo stressed the need for using the religious orders to buttress the racial order of the colonial state in a secret report: “The only permanent and truly Spanish element that Spain has in this colony is the religious orders. . . . I have earnestly wished day after day that they have greater prestige and influence. . . . It would not only be most unwise and ungrateful, but also foolish to neglect to build up their confidence and render them generous respect. It would mean depriving ourselves of the prestige and influence, and the services that the religious orders, being the true Spaniards that they are, are always prepared to render to the Motherland” (italics added).64 As a fi nal note, one might be content to say that, from a general perspective, the state’s changing attitudes toward the religious orders in the colony throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries roughly followed state-Church relations on the Iberian Peninsula, regardless of the Special Laws that missionaries were called upon to serve. After all, the 1768 removal of the Jesuits from the Americas represented only the beginning of the Bourbon Crown’s initiative to subordinate religious authority once and for all to the absolute monarchy on the Peninsula. The subordination of the religious to the temporal power only intensified during the years that the monarchy was replaced by a constitution in Spain. The Spanish constitutional government in 1820, for example, abolished ecclesiastical immunity and jurisdiction, put all religious orders under the authority of the bishops (i.e., divorcing them from the Papacy and their superiors in the Vatican), and continued the policy of authorizing the seizure of Church lands in order to alleviate fi scal and economic burdens.65 Such policies not only forced the missionary orders in Spain to ally themselves with the forces of absolutism, but also led to the widespread participation of missionary and secular priests in Mexico’s war of independence.66 The reconciliation of the Spanish government with the Vatican (1845), followed by the reestablishment of the missionary orders in Spain (1851) and the eventual return of the Jesuits to the Philippines (1859), roughly coincided with the colonial state’s attack

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on the secular clergy and the return of parishes administered by them to the regular clergy. What I have tried to show is how spectral administration of Special Laws in the colonial world tied these changes in both Spain and its overseas possessions to a rationality in which colonial despotism and racial division represented the two faces of the colonial state’s simultaneous production of and response to the “peculiar” or particular circumstances that gave it legitimacy. In transforming the character of religious authority, the state became transformed by it, allowing the preservation of its privileges and enforcing the suppression of the native and mestizo secular clergy. Reciprocally, in assuming the police tasks of state administration, the Church in the Philippines also accepted and promoted the racial hierarchy inherent in the rationality of Special Laws—the paradoxical elevation of exceptional measures and expediency to the status of law itself, through the symbolic and racial character of Spanish “prestige.” In exchange for their privileges under late colonial rule, pastors abandoned their flocks to the wolves of colonial despotism. They had, in a sense, been converted to the new gospel of the colonial state.

chapter 3

Customs /(Ka)Ugali(an) For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves; Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another. Paul, Epistle to Romans 2:14–15 (King James Version)

In effect, in everything, custom has full power, and deeds prevail over words. To tell the truth, what is a law, if not a custom consigned to writing. Conversely, custom is an unwritten law. In effect, even amongst the grammarians, if by chance they happen to note in a text a discrepancy between a word and the prevailing rule, and seeing that custom is of a different opinion to that which is written down, they cite the tradition, arguing that it is the rule of the rule. Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople, Antirrhetics

In chapters 1 and 2, we saw how the implementation of Bourbon reforms and the later administration of Special Laws illustrate the paradoxical double movement of colonial modernity in the Philippines: toward, on the one hand, the state’s attempted management of native consent to colonial rule and, on the other, toward the investment of the pastorate with the duties and responsibilities of the colonial state, which became a central feature in the establishment of a perpetual state of exception under the administration of Special Laws. This double movement helps to explain why modernity—often understood in the West in terms of a conceptual and institutional break or rupture with the past, as well as the incorporation of that break as a permanent, self-reflexive critique of the present—appears as the very opposite in the colonial context. Whereas Weberian rationalization tends toward the immanent difference, autonomy, and self-reflexive critique of emergent and existing discourses and institutions, the modern colonial state 95

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counterbalances and refolds these tendencies back through the reinforcement of sovereignty by authoritarian rule: its purpose is to preempt the discontinuities between political and economic systems in order to preserve colonial rule. In Eliodoro Robles’s terms, the Spanish monarchy and nation attempt to move beyond the “theoretical” centralization of imperial rule toward the “actual” centralization of the colonial state through the military command of the captain-general, the bureaucratic subordination of the Church, and (after 1837) the perpetually deferred administration of Special Laws. On the level of political economy, this meant the admission, promotion, and elaboration of the most tenuous and volatile element of colonial rule—the consent of the ruled. On an institutional level, the project of colonial governmentality entailed the absorption and subordination of administrative flexibility, expediency, immunitas, and exception (embodied in policies like the cúmplase). In the settling of accounts brought about by imperial bankruptcy, the respublica Christiana, which had maintained the frontier system of colonial rule in the archipelago, would be the fi rst victim. At the same time, however, the attempt to find a balance between coercion and consent, absolute sovereignty and the preservation of fueros, and state and exception appears to leave little room for understanding how colonial subjects themselves saw and responded to the dismantling of the respublica Christiana and their insertion into the representations and dynamics of the late colonial order. If the Spanish Crown—and, intermittently, the Spanish nation—encouraged native entrepreneurship, stimulated political and aesthetic expressions of Spanish patriotism, and sought to reap more effectively the material benefits of Christian conversion and catechism, how did native colonial subjects see themselves within the rationality of colonial modernity? How did they understand and react to the shifts in institutional authority from, say, the administrative flexibility of frontier Christendom to the bureaucratization of pastoral power and the disfranchisement of native secular priests? Approaches to the question of subaltern agency in the project of the colonial state have generally tended to coalesce around the study of folk Christianity in the Philippines. From Phelan’s thesis on the “Philippinization” of Christianity in the early colonial period to pioneering researches by David Sturtevant, Prospero Covar, and Reynaldo Ileto on the messianic, anticolonial religious movements throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and to more recent studies by Vicente Rafael, Consolación Alaras, Fennella Cannell, and Filomeno Aguilar, the study of folk

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Christianity demonstrates that native conversion to Christianity is often tied to the reinterpretation of—and, at times, outright opposition to— the continuity of Spanish rule. In other words, at the very moment that the native’s “unforced” acceptance of Christianity—the main requirement for one’s eligibility to enter Hispanized colonial society—seems to guarantee the native’s subjection to colonial authority, the terms of subordination become a site of divergent interpretations and contestations. Certain writers, basing their analyses on the early anthropological work of Frank Lynch, Mary Hollsteiner, and F. Landa Jocano, have sought to identify pre-Christian “native” values (particularly in the Christianized lowland of Luzon) like utang na loob (debt reciprocity), hiya (shame), and damay (sympathy or compassion) as isomorphic yet far from identical with Christian concepts of grace, sin, and the pastoral flock.1 Other writers have chosen to illustrate how the potential for radical revolt inheres in the subversive teachings of Christianity itself: for did not Christ call for the reversal of values that gave coherence to Hebrew Law and the Roman Empire?2 All seem to agree, however, that the field of practices constituted by Philippine folk Christianity structures the possibilities and limits of the colonial subject’s “common sense” about Spanish colonialism in the archipelago (see the introduction). At the same time, however, it seems to me that the emphasis on either pre-Christian “native values” or the radical potential of the Christian gospel itself, witnessed today in the proliferation of Christian fundamentalisms, tends to neglect or downplay two considerations. The fi rst is the dialectical transformation of pre-Christian culture, Christianity, and Spanish imperial rule, which has to be understood fully as a transcultural rather than accultural or decultural process.3 As noted in the introduction, the “Hispanization” and “Christianization” of the Philippines, with the ancillary thesis on the “Philippinization” of Christianity, ultimately fail to approach and appreciate the way Christianity and native tradition come to inform and reinforce one another on the colonial frontier. The second consideration is the transformation of Philippine state and society in the nineteenth century, which accompanied the crisis of colonial hegemony. On the surface, this crisis appears as an admission of weakness in Spanish imperial authority, which became exposed by rival overseas European powers and the hard-nosed calculation of the colony’s potential worth to the Crown in the eighteenth century. Yet this weakening of Spanish imperial authority allowed for more than simply the “emancipation” and magnification of repressed elements of native and Christian culture, which had ostensibly existed

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in unbroken continuity from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Rather, it changed the roles and duties assigned to both Church and Crown officialdom in the management of colonial society. As this chapter demonstrates, this changing role deleteriously affected the interdependence of Church and native traditions in the nineteenth century, which abetted the open struggle for colonial hegemony. Beginning, then, with the indissolubly hybrid nature of colonial culture and the colonial state’s project to rationalize the Church and establish a new society based on the colonial subject’s (implicit) consent to colonial rule, one can approach the intersection of folk Christianity with modern colonialism in a different way. We can examine this intersection by beginning with the following two questions: What characterized the relationship between the field of native traditions and the administration of Spanish imperial rule prior to the advent of the colonial state, and how did this relationship change in the nineteenth century? Our points of reference for this investigation are a text and a historical event. The text is the anonymously written Tagalog versification of the Passion, death, and resurrection of Christ, published in 1814 under the full title Ang Casaysayan nang Pasiong Mahal ni Jesucristong Panginoon Natin na Sucat Ipag-Alab nang Puso nang Sinomang Babasa (The story of the exemplary Passion of Jesus Christ Our Lord bound to inspire every reader). The poem is also referred to as Pasyóng Henesis for short, because it includes a lyric versification of the book of Genesis; it has also been called Pasyóng Pilapil, after the native secular priest Mariano Pilapil, who officially approved or “censored” the work for publication. The historical event is the 1840 uprising of messianic leader Apolinario de la Cruz, which led to the formation of the Aritao commune in the Luzon province of Tayabas and the massacre of many of its members by Spanish forces. Readers of Reynaldo Ileto’s foundational work Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines, 1840–1910 will recognize these points of reference immediately. In Ileto’s work, the Pasyóng Henesis and the Tayabas rebellion provided the primary text and event for the author’s subaltern history of anticolonial resistance in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Of greater importance to our study, however, Pasyon and Revolution argued for the necessity of reading the historical event as informed and interpreted by those participating in it, according to their own frames of reference (Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution, 8). These included vernacular Tagalog concepts and values as embodied in texts like the Pasyóng Henesis, along with the many oral religious

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traditions that were either inspired by or emerged in the wake of its publication.4 In counterpoint to Ileto’s pioneering thesis, my analysis foregrounds the publication of the Pasyóng Henesis itself as an event that demonstrates the changing relations of semi-autonomous native traditions and the Church with the emergence of the modern colonial state. Seen in this light, the rise of religio-political movements like the Apolinario de la Cruz rebellion and the Guardia de Honor in the nineteenth century may be shown to illustrate not (only) the “emancipation” of suppressed native folk categories for understanding colonial rule and resistance but the transformation and response of folk Christianity to the forced changes in colonial society brought about by the shared complicity between colonial state and Church to safeguard the “moral and material interests” of Spanish authority in the Philippines.

christianity at the crossroads of oikonomia and ugali What characterizes the relationship between the fields of native traditions, Christian evangelization, and the administration of Spanish imperial rule prior to the advent of the modern colonial state, and what changes did this relationship undergo in the nineteenth century? Oftentimes the difficulty of the question stems from the way that it is posed. In the above instance, one commonly takes for granted that “native tradition” in the Philippines refers to a tradition that is also “pre-colonial” and “non-Hispanic.” From this assumption, the investigation and analysis of colonial culture and society becomes a question of distinguishing the ostensibly discrete strands of what is truly “indigenous” from what is truly Spanish, European, or even Occidental and then attempting to trace these strands to their respective prototypical concepts or values. Yet, however one evaluates the merits of this approach, one must also recognize its limits and blind spots. Folk Christianity provides a wealth of examples that reveal the difficulty of isolating the convolutions of the ostensibly “native” with the ostensibly “Spanish” in the creation and preservation of tradition and custom in Philippine culture and society. From the cults of the Santo Niño de Cebu and the Virgin of Guadalupe to the publication of the Pasyóng Henesis, the rise of Christian apocalypticism, and the reception of Freemasonry in the archipelago, custom and tradition entail as much a process of redefinition, translation, adaptation, and innovation as they do a process of reiteration, redundancy, resistance, and conservation.5

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Both lowland Tagalogs and Christian missionaries had terms that corresponded to the dual process of reiteration and innovation in tradition and custom. In 1720, Augustinian priest and historian Gaspar de San Agustín provided an example of the fi rst, which the natives referred to as kaugalian (from the root word ogali, or ugali): Par. 67: 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 traje, y todo lo malo, que ven en ellos; y estas costumbres, le parece que jamás se quitarán.6 [(The natives) are particularly meticulous in observing their traditions and customs, which they call Ogali (sic), and lacking such customs brings exceptional shame, so that in order to fully comply with them (the natives) fall over themselves; many and strange are the ceremonies and abuses they commit at their weddings and funerals, abuses they cannot relinquish in their zeal for them, because they want nothing of the Spaniard except what is external, everything bad that they see in him; and these customs, it seems, will never be relinquished.]

On the surface, San Agustín’s rather dismissive tone regarding the native (ka)ugali(an) corroborates the understanding of native customs and traditions as the stubborn persistence of precolonial culture and society in the face of “the Spaniard” (in this case, the missionary priest): they disregard his presumed attempts to Hispanize and Christianize the indigenous peoples and accept only the superficial and nonexemplary forms of Spanish behavior. Yet Agustín’s complaint also opens the door to a contrapuntal reading of tradition as a process of adoption and innovation rather than resistance and conservation, for what else might these customs be but “everything bad” they see in the Spaniard: the strict observance of pomp and circumstance, the ceremonial rites of imperial sovereignty, and the signs and performance of social hierarchies? It should come as no surprise, in any case, that Agustín’s early critique of native “tradition” as transculturation would fi nd echoes in Vicente Barrantes and Wenceslao Retana’s critique of native theater in the nineteenth century; or in the cultural nationalists’ critique of oral poetic jousts (balagtasan, after the famous poet Francisco Balagtas) in the twentieth. To complicate matters further, Agustín’s letter to the king contradicts the deep awareness among other missionaries and colonial officials,

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from the sixteenth century onward, that the empire and the Church relied primarily on the preservation and cultivation of native traditions as the condition of possibility for Christian conversion and catechism, as well as Spanish sovereignty. To take an example, until the nineteenth century the Laws of the Indies still tacitly accepted local forms of social organization overseas, such as the form of community called barangay (largely organized around kinship relations), as a necessary supplement to the administration of imperial rule. On the level of the day-to-day practice of Christian evangelization and catechism, missionaries understood that they had to lead the prospective convert out of paganism by working within the colonial subject’s frames of reference. This meant, first and foremost, the conversion of indigenous peoples in and through their languages, images, or figures of speech (talinghagâ) and, by extension, through many of their concepts of the universe and the great mysteries: their “cosmovision.”7 Second, this meant the need to cultivate a delicate balance between the enforcement of a violent break with the natives’ past and the preservation of a sense of continuity and coherence in their lives.8 As a voice of moderation, Jesuit priest Pedro Murillo Velarde advised his fellow Jesuits to exercise temperance against excessive intervention in the lives of the natives: “Dirija a los indios en el gobierno de su pueblo, pero déjelos a ellos que lo gobiernen, porque esto de querer mandar es especial de sarna en Filipinas, deje pues, a cada uno que se rasque la que Dios le ha dado; impida los pecados, pero no los juegos y diversiones lícitas, pues con esto se estorbarán otras ilícitas. . . . Saque del indio lo que pudiese, porque quien todo lo quiere todo lo pierde. Si los indios aprenden que sus pecados son irremisibles, muchos se irán al monte; si es muy rígido en el confesionario se pueden temer muchos sacrilegios. . . . Use en sus sermones símiles y egemplos que es lo que perciben. . . . Deje correr las costumbres de los pueblos cuando no tienen graves inconvenientes; porque las novedades alteran los humores. [Assist the Indians in the government of their town, but let them govern (it), because this matter of taking charge remains a particularly strong urge (lit. itch), so let every person scratch the itch that God has given them; prevent sin, but not games and licit diversions, since that will encourage other, illicit ones. . . . Let each (pastor) extirpate from the Indian only what he can, because he who desires everything will lose everything. If the Indians learn that their sins are irredeemable, many will flee to the mountain; if a pastor is too strict in the confessional, many sacrilegious deeds may follow. . . . In sermons, use similes and figures of speech, which is what

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they understand. . . . Leave the customs of the peoples alone as long as they present no serious obstacles (to Christian catechism); because the introduction of novelty alters the disposition.]9 At the other end of the spectrum, we have Franciscan priests such as Fray Domingo Pérez, who had the native children urinate on the secret pagan and “diabolical instruments” of their parents, in the latrines. These and other measures led his parish to kill him, thereby felicitously turning his martyrdom-cum-tyranny back into martyrdom (Schumacher, Readings, 186). Between these two positions, missionaries were charged with the task of finding or creating the appropriate context for the reception of Christianity, even as the Crown and the colonial administration moved ostensibly to secure the conditions that would make such reception plausible. The administrative flexibility of Spain’s empire, which allowed for and at times depended on competing forms of order and authority that belonged to ostensibly non-Hispanic traditions, had a theological correlate in the concept of the Christian economy, or oikonomia. “The economy,” Marie-José Mondzain writes, “is the solution to inconsistency; it is the art of enlightened flexibility” (Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy, 14). While I cannot do justice to the polysemic richness of this concept here, it will suffice to say that the concept of Christian economy reconciles the strict observance of Church doctrine with the expression of Christian faith according to the customs and traditions of the people who claim it as their religion. The concept became central to the iconoclastic/iconophilic controversies over the representation of holy figures such as Christ, the Virgin Mary, and the saints, and helps to explain the paradoxical logic at work in the Church’s acceptance of the use of images and the cult of saints (particularly in the Americas and the Philippines).10 The congruence of kaugalian and oikonomia thus provokes us to imagine tradition as more than the sum of its parts or even the separateness of those parts to begin with. Moreover, it shows how the apparent opposition of the Church to native traditions, or kaugalian, prior to the nineteenth century (as it appears in the work of San Agustín and elsewhere) obscures and even disavows the underlying collaboration and complicity between the Church and the colonial subject in rendering the project of evangelization efficacious. In both praxes of what one might call “native” and “Christian” tradition, the establishment and maintenance of a relationship takes precedence over either the imposition of Spanish law and sovereignty or even the strict enforcement of what one takes to be Christian doctrine. As Mondzain makes clear, “Owing to the economy it was possible to escape condemnation for transgression, because the spirit of

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the law was safe in its circumstantial and practical application [italics added]. Without the economy there was no middle term between akribeia (akribeïa), which designated respect for the inflexible rigor of the law, and its transgression (parabasis). From human nature to miracle, from sin-commitment to the religious mysteries, it would be possible to make the journey without a break” (Image, Icon, Economy, 14). The day-to-day practice of conversion thus necessitated not only tolerance for native custom—which included the application of indigenous knowledge in the maintenance of native society—but also an active participation in mediating between these customs and the law of sovereignty, ultimately for the transformation and redemption of both.11 In other words, the interpenetration of both Church and native attempts to define tradition, outside or beyond obedience to the letter of the law (akribeia), provided an authority and sphere of autonomy for those areas of life that the law either did not reach or could not accommodate. The result was what Anthony Stevens-Arroyo identifies as “a homology between legal and religious conceptualization of tradition; . . . unlike written laws, which are frozen in time, the traditions of nations grow and change as they are practiced, affording them an origin different from positive law” (“The Evolution of Marian Devotionalism,” 68). The isomorphism of kaugalian and oikonomia opens the way for a more nuanced reading of “native” and “Christian” custom and tradition in the colonial period. The result of their transculturation may well turn out to be not a sharp duality between indigenous and foreign ideas and beliefs, but their mutual folding and refolding on the frontiers of Christendom. It is in this context that texts like the Pasyóng Henesis set down in writing the oral versification (dalit) of Christ’s Passion and, in doing so, engendered new readings and practices of folk Christianity in the nineteenth century.

dalit, ladino, pasyón The central verses in the anonymously written Tagalog Pasyón, published in 1814, were actually derived from an earlier one, written by native printer Gaspar Aquino de Belén in 1704. Both built upon a colonial tradition established between missionary priests and native converts—the practice of teaching Christianity through songs and oral poetry, called dalit. This word was used to describe various kinds of oral poetry and song for a wide variety of occasions. Both the 1704 versification of the Passion of Christ by Aquino de Belén and the emergence of the novena

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(pagsisiyam) as early forms of vernacular literature stem from the missionaries’ idiosyncratic adoption of the native dalit, which in turn led to the native’s idiosyncratic adoption of the teachings of Christianity. A brief discussion of the pagsisiyam as the consolidation of colonial tradition will preface and inform our larger analysis of the Pasyón in terms of its understanding of and response to colonial modernity. With the exception of those novenas dedicated to the larger and more universal devotions to the Virgin Mary (like the Immaculate Conception and the Assumption), the pagsisiyam usually contains what Resil Mojares has called a semi-official “foundation narrative” of a town or region: semi-official, insofar as it remains “a variable, shifting narrative in its surface details, a feature familiar in oral traditions as well as indicative of the fact that, even today, [the] foundation narrative . . . has not quite assumed stable, canonical form.”12 Oftentimes, this narrative consists of little more than a brief account of the origins of the devotion, followed by various episodic fragments that chronicle the divine intercession of the revered figure. In many cases, these histories represented “the ‘official’ and often the only available written text on the local patron or image” (Mojares, “Stalking the Virgin,” 141). A series of invocations and prayers to the Virgin Mary or saint precede or succeed the narration of this history: in some instances, the history of the devotion itself appears in versified form, where it can be easily memorized, recited, or sung. The novena exhibits a form of writing whose relationship to Scripture can best be described as partial, selective, and indirect. There are at least two factors that account for this character. One is the economy of Church tradition, which tolerates and cultivates the reinterpretation and extrapolation of its original sources (Scripture, Council, and the writings of the Fathers) in the fields of art, culture, and local tradition. The second is the local community’s demand to render Church tradition accountable and responsive to the language, customs, and traditions of the colonial Christianized subject. To these two, we may add a third: the role of native secular priests in writing and editing religious literature in the vernacular Tagalog. We have already discussed the fi rst at some length: let us consider the latter two. Dalit Both the versification of oral testimonies to a particular devotion and the versification of the Passion, death, and resurrection of Christ belong to a tradition that precedes the conquest: the recitation and transmission

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of historical deeds and events pertaining to a given barangay or community through oral poetry. A seventeenth-century Jesuit chronicler attests to this activity: “In these barbarian chants [the natives] recount the fantastic genealogies and vain deeds of their gods.” [En estos cantares bárbaros cuentan las fabulosos genealogías y vanos hechos de sus dioses.]13 While seventeenth-century priest and chronicler Pedro de Chirino defi nes this poetic practice as pamatbat, later missionaries would subsume this practice under the more general one of versification called dalit (Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry, 32).14 The flexibility and participatory nature of this form—one person would generally recite a narrative in verse, and the rest of the group would reply as in a refrain—led missionaries to incorporate it as a pedagogical instrument of catechism. Yet the dalit absorbed unplanned as well as planned bits of knowledge and information. Chirino records the surprise of a missionary who, after Sunday morning mass, heard the words of his own sermon being chanted by his parish members in the plaza of the town (cited in Mercado, Antipolo, 59). Dominican historian Juan López describes the effort of missionaries to erase from the dalit all traces of pagan antiquity in the following passage: And because those Indios, when they’ve gathered together and done something, like uproot a large stake or rock or rowed in their embarkations, are prone to singing dirty songs, with one intoning [the key and verse] and everyone else continuing the song by responding to each verse, more or less, with everyone singing in time with the work being done; [the parish priest] composed many rhymes in their language [but] addressed to God . . . and introduced these to them on those occasions, thereby making them forget the ancient songs that smelled of their past paganism.15

From this, it can be inferred that the dalit encompassed two distinct but interrelated activities of the colonial Christianized community: the fi rst pedagogical and used by the friars to conduct catechism, and the second used spontaneously by the folk as a mnemonic device, which linked missionary practice with “genealogies and vain deeds” that fell outside the teaching of doctrine. The hybrid form of the pagsisiyam brings these two activities together in the narration of a town’s history in and through the interventions of its patron saint or the miracles of the Virgin Mary. Religious versification of Gospel narratives was of course nothing new: the tradition had existed in Europe since the late medieval period.16 What was new, however, was the felicitous correspondence

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of this literary tradition with the dalit, so as to create between the two traditions a seamless continuity. This helps to explain how, on the one hand, nineteenth-century peninsular Spanish colonial officials and writers like Vicente Barrantes could insist that every prominent expression of Tagalog culture, like poetry and song, derived from Spain, while Philippine writers like Pedro Paterno and José Rizal would contest that such traditions preexisted Spain; and remained relatively unaffected by three centuries of colonial rule.17 Like the colonial genre of painting pioneered by José Honorato Lozano called Letras y figuras (see the introduction), the adjudication of Philippine genius remained suspended between two incommensurable criteria of perception. The publication of Belén’s versification of the Passion in 1704 opened the door to a cultural transformation whose implications are made fully manifest in the nineteenth century: the reciprocal and accelerated transculturation of the oral dalit tradition and the written tradition of religious poetry, sanctioned by the Church and colonial government. Their mutual infi ltration and transformation engendered a colonial Christian practice called pabasa. This was the oral rendition, and improvisation, of the Passion of Christ, predominantly but not exclusively during feasts or holidays. While scholars are unable to ascertain the specific date or period when this practice arose, there seems to be little doubt that it represents an adaptation of the native dalit and that one of its primary sources must have originally been Aquino de Belén’s Pasyón written in 1704 or a similar one. In 1800, Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga gives us an example of the transculturation of Christian and native ideas of tradition in the pabasa: Both men and women are much attached to reading verses. . . . Every night during Lent passing through the streets one can be sure to hear the Pasión de Nuestro Señor Jesucristo recited in verse in many houses. A Franciscan Father [?], seeing this inclination of theirs, put it in verse for them and had it printed. Though it is well done . . . they do not wish to read it but rather other Pasiones, which they have made themselves, full of fables, which they like very much because they emphasize the marvelous. . . . [Despite their harmless nature], many parish priests forbid them to read them, because besides the foolishness which is found in them, the young men and women often make use of the pretext of reading the Passion in order to make love to each other. (Quoted in Schumacher, Readings, 179)

Zúñiga’s passage illustrates two features of the pabasa, the fi rst of which is the calibration of one poetic practice with another, forcing each tradition to enter into a transcultural dialogue. Second,

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and as a consequence of the fi rst, innovations upon one tradition become traditions unto themselves, engendering new social spaces, new “customs” whose relation to Christian dogma is ambiguous or even antithetical. At the same time, such traditions come more fully under the surveillance and pastoral guidance of the Church. The vernacular rendering of the Passion and its success in seizing upon the imagination of the colonial Christian subject thus illustrate the synchronization of two traditions—the concept of economy and the native dalit. Ladino Priest This continuity and transculturation between the two traditions, however, could not occur with the simple appropriation of an oral or literary form. After all, versification required a facility with the language as well as a deep understanding of the custom. Bienvenido Lumbera’s seminal work on Tagalog poetry illustrates how the systematic attempts of missionaries to dictate the terms of language to the natives through their production of grammars, dictionaries, and lexica reflected the missionaries’ attempt to control the offi cial use of the native vernacular tongues as well as Spanish: missionaries became akin to “literary dictators.”18 At the same time however, the attempt to appropriate the dalit for doctrine and pedagogy resulted in works that Lumbera alternately describes as “wretched,” “drab,” “sloppy,” “didactic” and “mediocre” (51)—hardly likely to prove compelling to the natives. It is here that the writings of native speakers and their employment by the missionaries become so crucial to the task of conversion and catechism. These native speakers, who became bilingual in Spanish, were called ladinos by the missionaries. By far the most outstanding example of the cultural transformation of Christian catechism by ladinos in the eighteenth century is Gaspar de Aquino Belén’s 1704 versification of Christ’s Passion and resurrection, Ang Mahal na Pasión ni Jesu Christong P. Natin na Tola (The sacred Passion of Jesus Christ Our Lord in verse), which underwent five printings in the fi rst half of the eighteenth century. Belén served the Jesuit press between 1704 and 1716—a job that required knowledge of both Tagalog and Spanish, as well as familiarity with the Roman alphabet. In the 1720s, Spain began to cultivate the work of ladinos in their acceptance of natives into the University of Santo Tomás for the study of the priesthood as well as law.19 This initiative reflected the

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fi rst attempts by the Archbishopric of Manila to undertake the transference of parishes held by missionaries to secular priests. Given the lack of peninsular Spaniards who came to the archipelago as secular priests—meaning without prior affi liation with a Catholic religious order—the Spanish government made the controversial decision to train natives as secular priests. 20 We saw in chapter 2 that many members of the religious orders staunchly opposed the growth of a native secular clergy. On the one hand, missionary priests like Augustinian chronicler Gaspar de San Agustín based his opposition on his general frustration with the lack of progress in the missions and his contempt for the Indios. 21 At the same time, however, it is equally clear that on another level the Church depended on the work performed by these ladino priests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Evidence of the value of these ladinos emerges in 1748, when Archbishop Martínez organized a congregation of tagalistas, or secular priests who could work in the Tagalog language and disseminate works like novenas to the colonial public. Native or Indio priests like Bernard Saguinsín and Mariano Pilapil, for example, were requested to write the vernacular novenas for the respective parishes of Quiapo and Antipolo, the latter being the largest devotion to the Virgin Mary in the Philippines. 22 Vernacular religious literature and rise of the native secular clergy prepare us to understand the transformation of the Pasyón between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its implications for the politicization of both the native secular clergy and folk messianism under spiritual leader Apolinario de la Cruz in 1840. While the works of Lumbera, Ileto, and Javellana have traversed this field of scholarship, my contribution is to highlight neither the continuity nor discontinuity with the colonial tradition of catechetical poetry per se but to demonstrate how the theme of continuity itself becomes available, perhaps “disposed,” to the articulation of ideology. It is only when this occurs that protest and revolt can begin to take on a truly anticolonial character. What emerges as the greatest paradox of anticolonial movements is that the rupture or break between native Christian tradition and colonial rule stems originally not from a working through of the contradictions brought about by modern colonialism but the ideological development of an other continuity. This other continuity was nothing less than the invention of tradition as a way of reading history, in

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which custom aspires to a legitimate form of authority in and through the Christian economy.

marian depositions While Zúñiga earlier reassured his readers that the innovations made by Indios to the versification of the Gospel were relatively innocent, a letter from a parish priest in 1827 illustrates that such innovations could take a disastrous turn. The parish priest’s complaint to the archdiocese recalls a parishioner who informs him that Judas betrayed Pontius Pilate (instead of Jesus Christ) and that this information came to the parishioner in a pabasa. 23 Such doctrinal errors clearly transgressed the latitude given to the interpretation of Christian tradition and presented the possibility of investing such errors with Church authority. To put it another way, the economy had been sabotaged. In adopting and incorporating the traditions of the colonized for catechetical purposes, missionaries had also contributed to the creation of a conceptual antipode that allowed native custom to adopt and incorporate the traditions of the Church under the same logic of the economy that the Church had used to adopt and incorporate the traditions of the colonial subject. It was in response to this threat that the archdiocese commissioned native secular priest Mariano Pilapil to publish a single, approved, and censored Pasyón that would, in its authenticity, invalidate and prohibit the transcription and oral rendition of any other versification. Pilapil’s instructions, in notably rough Spanish, were printed at the beginning of the Pasyón (even in popular published editions today). They state in no uncertain terms the condition of the natives’ education in matters of faith and the need to obliterate all uncensored versions of the Pasyón (that is, versions not approved for publication by the Church): [I have corrected] the Pasyón [sic] almost entirely, by suppressing words, sentences and even entire lines for the benefit of those who may henceforth read it, lest [sic] there remain even the smallest margin of error in matters of the faith, incoherently scattered pell-mell throughout these Islands, through these booklets passed from hand to hand, town to town, province to province, and through the generations—booklets that, as it turns out, their indiscreet readers have had a hand in making. . . . In consequence of the situation here expressed, it would be fitting at this time to retrieve the aforementioned manuscripts by the respective parishes from which they derive, and for them to be delivered to the fi re. 24

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Paradoxically, Pilapil’s corrected version was itself subject to repeated correction and censorship throughout the nineteenth century, to the point that to this day nobody knows the exact number of corrected versions that led to the text we read today. The corrected and authorized version of the anonymously written Pasyón under the censorship and approval of Pilapil in 1814 illustrates the specific challenge that the oral pabasa had developed in relation to Christian doctrine, as well as the Church’s attempt to surmount this challenge by relying on the very natives whose traditions had given birth to the pabasa in the fi rst place. For one thing, Mariano Pilapil had come from a distinguished clan of native priests, a virtually unheard of distinction even among the native elite. 25 He was commissioned by the archbishopric to write and publish the novena to the Our Lady of Peace and Safe Passage (otherwise known as the Virgin of Antipolo) in Tagalog (Ang Pagsisiyam sa Pagmamahal na Virgen ng Kapayapaan at Mabuting Paglalakbay), the largest in the Philippines at the time, even today. Moreover, on one occasion Pilapil was even asked by the archbishop to serve mass and give the sermon in the Manila Cathedral, the religious center of colonial Christianity itself. While the political content of the sermon may be a subject of open debate, other evidence shows that Pilapil was a clear and outspoken advocate of the rights of the native clergy, which constituted the privileged point of dispersion for Philippine politics in the nineteenth century (see chapter 1). Returning to the Pasyóng Pilapil itself, René Javellana’s source criticism of the poem (among other studies) has traced its sources to Gaspar Aquino de Belén’s 1704 Mahal na Pasión; yet Javellana puzzles over how a supposedly folk-inspired versification of the Gospel could contain so many direct references to the Scripture. 26 As we know, the Bible was not translated or made available to the public until the twentieth century for fear that its interpretation would fall into the wrong hands. Yet this enigma fi nds a relatively easy solution when we consider Zúñiga’s remark above, which would lead one to conclude that at least one (if not more) of the Pasyones that fell into Pilapil’s hands was written by a Spanish priest who perhaps had access to Aquino de Belén’s 1704 Pasyón but may have changed or added to the versification of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection. 27 In fact, Mariano Pilapil himself may have contributed to the writing of the 1814 Pasyón, in spite of the censor’s claim that he had merely corrected those errors in the text that ran contrary to Christian dogma. In either or both cases, however, we are dealing not only with a text that has passed from oral tradition to

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written text and back to oral tradition, but also a written text that has drawn from other written texts: some doctrinal and others apocryphal, some pedagogical and some designed for entertainment purposes, some written by representatives of the Church and some transcribed from dalit that were sung in the plaza or street corner. 28 Having dealt with the significance of Pilapil’s role in censoring the Pasyón, we must now turn to the changes between Gaspar Aquino de Belén’s 1704 Mahal na Pasión and the 1814 Pasyóng Pilapil, and explain these in terms of the autonomy of folk Christian traditions. This analysis will allow us to gauge the implications of colonial Christian culture during the period when the colonial state, the religious orders, and the native secular priesthood entered into a sustained political relationship with one another. As I hope to illustrate, this relationship consisted in nothing more than the separability of claims and counterclaims forwarded by each regarding the economy of native desire—claims that at times confl icted and at times dovetailed with one another. In his analysis of the Pasyóng Pilapil, Javellana meticulously documents the similarities and differences of the 1814 version of the Passion with the 1704 versification by Gaspar Aquino de Belén. In addition to the sacrifice of the highly figurative and metaphorical speech characteristic of the latter in favor of a streamlined, literal, and more orthodox reflection of scripture through verse, other differences include the framing of the Passion narrative by a digest of the Book of Genesis, as well as the apocryphal life of the Virgin Mary and the (postresurrection) story of Empress Helen’s search for the sacred wood of the holy cross; the increased emphasis on Jesus’s divinity as the Son of God; and the intercessory character of the Virgin Mary, who several times tries to ward off Jesus’s redemptive sacrifice by offering herself in His place. These three differences betray the anonymous author’s underlying attempt to consider and explain the Christian story of universal redemption beyond merely illustrating the virtuous individual Christian life. To accomplish this task, the anonymous author frames Aquino de Belén’s original dramatic rendering of the Passion story in terms of eschatology, empire, and the Christian economy. The eschatological frame of Genesis as an anticipation and explanation of Christ’s saving mission reveals a certain shift in emphasis on the part of the writer or writers of various versions of the Pasyón after Belén. Belén’s version was designed to be read at wakes or at the bedsides of the sick and dying, lest the affl icted stray from Christianity. Its emphasis, therefore, fell upon the last days and hours of

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Christ, who imbued the weakness and sinful nature of humanity with redemption through grace and the good works of an upright Christian life. By contrast, the eschatological frame in the 1814 Pasyóng Pilapil, which fi xes and subordinates the dramatic narrative in the larger context of universal sacred-profane history, aims at teaching the basic principles of Christian theology in its historical unfolding. As we have seen earlier, this unfolding transpires through the great reversal of sin that Christ inaugurated in humanity through his incarnation, death, and resurrection. Yet the stakes of this reorientation of Christ’s passion can be read in a strategic as well as dogmatic way. That is, the eschatological frame stabilizes the polysemy of the Passion narrative by expressing the ultimate meaning of Christ’s death and resurrection beyond or in spite of whatever errors or distortions in the actual narrative might arise in the narrative’s transmission. Such a move limits the wayward transmission of the Passion by accounting in advance for these errors, preempting them, as it were, and shepherding them to the text’s fundamental dogma. By imposing and consolidating the theological frame—the redemption of Adam’s sin by Christ, Eve’s temptation, the Virgin Mary’s obedience, and so forth—the Pasyóng Pilapil allows for the absorption and ordering of profane historical events and accidents according to a sacred context. An example of this stabilizing move appears in the postresurrection narrative of the empress Helen, mother of Roman emperor Constantine, who travels to Jerusalem to fi nd the “sacro-madero,” or holy cross, on which Jesus was crucified. It was Constantine, of course, who fi rst sanctioned the Christian religion in the Roman Empire, thus providing a model for Christendom from Constantine’s reign all the way to the Spanish conquest of the New World and the Philippines. In the nineteenth century, the Santacruzan festival in May celebrates Helen’s fi nding of the cross during a holy procession. On the level of theology, the narration of this event lends nothing to catechism regarding Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection. On the level of theological economy, however, Helen’s mission exemplifies the manner in which mundane objects become holy through their contact with Christ’s death and resurrection, yet remain embedded in profane history as traces of the sacred event, shot through with a messianic power that is concentrated in relics, icons, and images. The narration about the sacred wood of the cross serves as an allegory of the economy itself: the crucifi x frames the event of Christ’s sacrifice, yet in participating in the sacred event, it becomes framed by it. The holy wood

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thereby acquires the instrumental power to facilitate the economy of the divine plan as it is made manifest in profane history, without losing its intimate relationship with the mundane. In the Pasyóng Pilapil, this coexistence of sacred and profane history appears in the author’s simultaneous account of the marvelous dispensation of miracles by the holy cross and nails (stanzas 2501–5 and 2514–24) and a surprisingly pedestrian debate over the actual wood of the cross: Nagtalo,t, di nagca isa Loob nang manga bihasa Na di mapag-uari nila Na cun anong calap baga Yaong Cruz na maganda. Anang iba ay Olivo, Palma, anang ibang docto Cipres, ani S. Macario, Ang pinagsiyang totoo Yaon ang cahoy na Cedro. (Stanzas 2508–9, trans. René Javellana) [The wise men debated And were not of one mind since they could not identify from what wood Came that goodly Cross. Some said “Olive, surely.” “Palm,” said other wise men. “Cypress,” said St. Macarios. But it was indeed From the cedar tree.]

It was passages such as these that irritated Zúñiga’s contemporaries, who saw them as contributing to “harmless” and “foolish” legends, which seemed to detract from the narrative and distract the reader. The anonymous writer of the Pasyóng Pilapil, however, apparently understood the inclusion of such details in allegorical terms, in the sense that they demonstrated the participation of the everyday world in the divine comedy of salvation. The process by which the cross that frames Christ is in turn framed by sacred history and thereby commissioned to frame profane history through the dispensation of miracles at once mirrors the theology of Christ’s incarnation (the Word made flesh) and ensures a smooth transition between theology, on the one hand, and the messiness of history, tradition, and custom, on the other. On the level of content, the

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anecdote of the Empress Helen illustrates the synchronicity between the divinely inspired Church and the law of the Roman Empire; on the level of expression, the incorporation of apocryphal and profane sources merely reiterates and strengthens the layman’s understanding of the Incarnation. Another way of safeguarding the integrity of Christian dogma occurs in the Pasyóng Pilapil’s attempt to return the story of Jesus’s passion to a more faithful transcription of Scripture itself, which is reflected in the increased emphasis on Jesus’s divinity by primary reference to the New Testament. Javellana’s analysis shows how the Pasyóng Pilapil’s author reworks stanzas of the earlier Pasyón by Aquino de Belén in order to highlight more clearly Jesus’s foreknowledge and free acceptance of his agony and death. In fact, the emphasis on Jesus’s divinity at the expense of his humanity leads Javellana to consider that the later Pasyón’s portrait of Jesus is docetic; that is, it implies that Christ was not actually human but merely appeared as a human body to his followers. Such a heresy thus claimed Christ’s agony and death to have been a simulacrum, orchestrated by the divinity for the benefit of humans without actually incarnating the divine spirit in the flesh. 29 The Pasyóng Pilapil author’s alleged docetism reflects his (or their) need to remove any chance of misinterpreting Jesus as merely an extraordinary man. Yet it also betrays an attempt to wrest the versification of the Gospel from the inevitable errors of colonial traditions and tie the recitation of the poem more securely to a dependence on Scripture. Javellana notes the abundance of Latin quotations in the text (24), which interrupt the flow of the narrative and introduce the voice of authority in the retelling. Beyond these, the author or authors often quote the dialogue of Christ and the apostles in Latin fi rst, followed by a translation into Tagalog. In the following passage, Jesus instructs three of his apostles in the garden of Gethsemane: Vigilate, ay ang turing Cayo ay magpacaguising, Et orate, manalangin, Ut non, ay carugtong din Intretis intentationem. Cayo,i, nang houag pasucan Nang tucso, t, dilang casaman, Na quinaliligaligan, Caya nga,t, ang catampatan Ay manalangin mataman. (Stanzas 1155–56)

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[Vigilate means we must be alert et orate, pray ut non, words conjoined with Intretis intentiationem In order that temptation and all evil that unsettle you will not come to you, what is fitting Is that you pray fervently.]

Christ’s message here is inseparable from a lesson in translating Latin. The didactic message of this lesson, however, is to remind readers and orators that the poem’s authority derives from Scripture, just as the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice derives from his divinity. Yet if Christ becomes increasingly associated with the authority of Scripture, the Virgin Mary serves as Christ’s counterpoint—a product of the Christian and native colonial tradition. Mary’s role in Pilapil’s Pasyón begins with the apocryphal accounts of her birth (the Protoevangelium of Matthew and the book of James) and ends with a fervent prayer to her compassion and mercy, with the understanding that her requests to Jesus are never denied (stanza 2534). These references to Church tradition are further magnified to encompass a field of imagination where Church and native tradition become increasingly indistinguishable. For the Virgin Mary, the figure of the Christian economy par excellence, not only intercedes on behalf of the faithful who solicit her agency, but in the Pasyóng Pilapil she also attempts to intercede on behalf of her own son, which would effectively negate the entire plan of salvation. This tradition seems to have arisen in late medieval Italy.30 In the Latin passion plays that emerged in this period, the dramatization of the Virgin Mary’s suffering over the anticipated loss of her only son leads her to suggest that she take Christ’s place on the cross. Mary’s offer, while never officially sanctioned by the Church, nevertheless reappears in Aquino de Belén’s 1704 Pasyón, in which Mary tells Jesus: “Iyang Cruz na dala mo / bongso, bitiuina,t, aco, / ang hahalili sa iyo, / ay at aco,y, maguin tauo / matingnan quitang ganito” (line 681: “That cross, which you bear / my child, relinquish it, as I / will take it for you, / for being only human / I cannot bear to see you like this”). Yet the author of the Pasyóng Henesis would take Aquino de Belén’s insight a step further by inventing a personal exchange between Mary and God the Father Himself. In the Pasyóng Pilapil, Mary demands an explanation

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as to why her son must be crucified, but leaves the interview unsatisfied with the Father’s answer (stanzas 974–97).31 Here, a medieval tradition fi nds its way into a colonial text, where it then undergoes further elaboration outside the canonical sources of Church tradition but fully within the economy of Christian culture. Of course, the Father cannot allow Mary’s substitution to happen, which goes against the divine plan as it had been predicted by the prophets of sacred Scripture from the fall of man (stanza 964). What is interesting about the Father’s response, however, is that in order to dissuade Mary from her desire to act as a substitute, He must ask her to make the sacrifice of not sacrificing herself: Maria di co matangap ang inyong pangungusap, hindi nanga malilinsad ang Anac mo,i, maghihirap, tubos sa sala nang lahat. Maria ang iyong tularan; sacrificio ni Abraham nang pag sunod niya lamang sa hiling co,t, calooban, si Issac ay pupugatan. Ito naman ang hiling co at aquing loob sa iyo, nang matimaua ang tauo, at magtiis cang totoo ang mag dusa,i, ang Anac mo. (Quoted in Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry, 184–87)32 [Mary, I can’t grant what you’ve asked me: it is inevitable that your Son should suffer to atone for the sins of all. Mary, let your model be the sacrifice of Abraham who, in complete obedience to My request and will, would have beheaded Issac. This then is my request, and my wish that you do— that mankind be set free, accept your sorrows and let your Son suffer.]

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The anonymous author of the Pasyóng Pilapil is careful to repeat twice that God’s request (hiling) to Mary is also his will (loob). Yet the implication that Mary is taking an active role in “doing God a favor” is evident. It raises the possibility of reading Mary’s agency as only partially eclipsed and subordinated by the will of heaven and tests the limits between divine grace and free will to the point of raising their possible disparity. If we extend this divergence to the different sources of Church authority (Scripture and tradition), we can see how Mary’s challenge allegorically demonstrates how the “crooked ways” of tradition stand juxtaposed to the rectitude of the written word and of law, yet essentially work to accomplish the same end—hence, her obedience. On the one hand, the Pasyóng Pilapil’s emphasis on Christ’s divinity conveys the concept of economy as a mediation of the Divine Plan that is sanctioned in writing, if not the force of law embodied in the figure of the Father Himself. On the other hand, Mary’s human suffering—the many passages describing her tears and agony over her Son’s anticipated death—argues for a “countermediation” of this Divine Plan, explicable wholly in terms of human understanding and compassion, and expressed in a community’s customs and traditions. In the Pasyóng Pilapil, this countermediation reaches the point of openly questioning the economy as it has been conceived in Christ, as opposed to the vertiginous flexibility, accommodation, and mercy of the Virgin Mary. The tendency to view Christ’s saving mission as coercive as well as convincing is perhaps best captured by the root word for the Tagalog translation of salvation in the Pasyón and Church liturgy, sakop, which also means “to conquer or subdue.” In contrast, Mary’s authority derives not from her power to impose salvation but rather to dispose the rectitude of Christian dogma to the crooked paths of local custom and tradition. If Christ’s divinity calls for a return to Scripture, Mary’s compassion calls for its infi nite mediation.

tr adition and autonomy One cannot reduce the Pasyóng Pilapil to either an expression of colonial ideology or the birth of an anticolonial consciousness. Neither can one assume that its status as an anonymously written text indicates its collective authorship by the Indios, who developed a series of enduring traditions around the dalit and pabasa associated with the Pasyón.

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What is clear, however, is that the Pasyón not only represents these traditions, but also reflects on the status of tradition itself through the figures of Christ and Mary. It does this, moreover, during a time when Manila and its neighboring towns were undergoing profound changes in population density. The different approaches to the evaluation of tradition represented by Christ and Mary, while not in and of themselves ideological in the modern sense of the word, can (and I believe do) give rise to ideological elaboration when religion takes on an overtly political character. This is precisely what happened toward the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth centuries, when the native secularization of the parishes became a “wedge issue” that forced both Church and the emergent colonial state to rationalize the terms of their synchronicity or subordination to one another (see chapter 2). The controversy regarding the pabasa, its syncretic accommodation of the native dalit and Spanish religious literature, and the ensuing debates over the Pasyóng Pilapil’s orthodoxy throughout the nineteenth century thus reflected the common interest of the Church and state in controlling the direction and spread of folk Christianity. Native traditions, which had sustained the survival and cultivation of Christianity in the archipelago for the better part of two and a half centuries, had begun to take on a life of their own, spurred by the publication of novenas, the Pasyón, and the expansion of devotional cults like the one in Antipolo. In the 1841 religious uprising led by messianic leader Apolinario de la Cruz, we see the fi rst expression of folk Christianity that grasps the full implications of the Christian economy and its legitimation of native tradition in the constitution of colonial authority. Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution provides us today with the most common point of departure for the intersections between colonialism and modernity insofar as they gave rise to this movement, as well as succeeding ones, from the nineteenth century. Ileto’s gripping account of the Aritao commune, led by Apolinario, narrates the latter’s trajectory from an aspiring young Indio to the priesthood, the frustration of his plans, and the channeling of his charismatic powers of speech toward the organization and growth of a confraternity devoted to Saint Joseph and the Virgin of the Rosary. The growth of this confraternity, which expanded quite rapidly sometime around 1839, culminated in Apolinario’s confrontation with church and civil authorities; the formation of a commune in Aritao, at the foot of

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Mount San Cristobal; and the eventual destruction of the commune by government forces. 33 Through an exhaustive analysis of the confraternity’s rituals and prayers, as well as the letters Apolinario dispatched to the confraternity chapters in the outlying provinces of Tayabas, Laguna, and Batangas (all in the southern region of Luzon, with which Apolinario was quite familiar), Ileto aims to get beyond the dismissal by his fellow historians of these and other social formations as “irrational,” “premodern,” and “proto-political.” In his introduction the author writes, “I have tried to bring to light the masses’ own categories of meaning that shaped their perceptions of events and their participation in them” (8). He develops these “categories of meaning” by looking for patterns and repetitions in Tagalog texts and documents of perceptions of historical events: “When errors proliferate in a patterned manner, . . . when sources are biased in a consistent way, we are in fact offered the opportunity to study the workings of the popular mind” (11). Applying this method to the study of Apolinario’s teachings, he fi nds concepts embedded in words and images like loob (lit. “inside,” often used by missionaries to translate “soul”) and liwanag (light, radiance), which allowed his followers to recognize him as a spiritual leader, notwithstanding the invalidation of his confraternity by church and state offi cials. In the background of Ileto’s meticulous research and analysis, however, lies a greater history in which the status of native tradition, earlier sheltered under the practice of Christian oikonomia and exhibited in practices like the dalit, novena, and pabasa of the late colonial period, became uncertain and even threatening to the church and colonial state. This uncertainty was exacerbated by the concentration of new populations around cities like Manila, Cebu City, and Iloilo City. Indeed, one may go so far as to say that “the popular mind” and “the folk” were themselves inconceivable without these modern changes. Moreover, both the acrimonious struggle over the secularization of the parishes by native priests and the century-long attempt to discipline the unorthodox tendencies of the Pasyón, demonstrate the uneven consequences of the emergent colonial state as the chief expression of colonial modernity in the Philippines. The state’s attempt to absorb the pastoral functions of the church and the church’s attempt to secure its privileges against the encroachment of the state may belong to a history that begins in the sixteenth century, not the late

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eighteenth. But it is only with the project of colonial governmentality that an underlying concord was forged between spiritual and temporal authorities in addressing the threat posed by native “tradition” and its new representatives: the native secular clergy. However harmless it may appear to the casual reader, the accommodation of native traditions under the “economic” fl exibility of the church also lent to them an authority that only increased in visibility with the rise of native secular priests, the publication of novenas and Pasyones, and the growth of populations in the larger towns and cities where native priests were most often appointed. Applying this context to Ileto’s book changes his study of colonialism and modernity in small but significant ways. For one thing, it highlights the rise of “Hermano Pule” (as Apolinario was affectionately called) not only with regard to the resurfacing of ostensibly native Tagalog categories of meaning, but also with regard to the “modern” colonial trajectory that Hermano Pule follows, which allows him to earn the influence he gains among the members of his confraternity. Originally from Tayabas province, Apolinario sees the new opportunities for natives to become secular priests and travels to Manila to attend the university. The secularization controversy (see chapter 2) prevents him from enrolling. Yet he does manage to become a lay preacher affi liated with a confraternity open to Indios in the city, where he begins to meet new Indios from other regions of Luzon who have resettled in the poor suburbs of Manila. As Bernáldez Pizarro has noted, this mass migration of Indios to the cities constituted a grave threat to the pastoral administration of both Church and colonial state in the early years of the nineteenth century: Although the Laws of the Indies seek to insure the peace and good government (both temporal and spiritual) of these peoples by limiting the extension of residences and the number of inhabitants, the lack of attention regarding this pressing matter on the part of both the Philippine Governors and the priests, parishes, and missionaries has given rise to the unmeasured growth of populations, a transgression, which we see established in Filipinas today. These populations, which local authorities cannot hope to govern well, keep alive the seed of inner civil discord, which has resulted from time to time in disturbances and riots, placing the Islands in a very critical situation. (Dictamen, 14–15)34

Bernáldez Pizarro makes frequent reference to the “immense,” “disproportionate,” and “irregular” growth of “that great, ignorant, blind commonfolk” (esa gran plebe ignorante y ciega) that descends upon the

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figure 2. Oikonomia and Mariolatry: The procession of Nuestra Señora de la Esperanza de Macarena. Museo De La Salle (Joey Panlilio collection).

cities, citing this as the chief cause of the riots and uprisings of the nineteenth century. He reacts with particular alarm at the concentration of populations around Manila (commonly called Extramuros): “Within cannon range of Manila’s plaza and even closer than the width of the (Pasig) River, we have allowed 100,000 Indio, mestizo, and Chinese souls to establish themselves; an outside people for the most part, without passport, status, destination, or any other requirement necessary for the policing of the area. Their formidable numbers are threatening Manila with an inevitable coup de main [golpe de mano]” (15).35 Reading Apolinario de la Cruz’s religious leadership against the backdrop of Bernáldez Pizarro’s memorial, we can see how the meanings of “tradition” were becoming at once uprooted from their original locations and relocated in and around the city, even as intraregional migrants sought to establish relations of coherence and continuity with the frontier context of imperial rule. Equally significant and deserving of attention is Hermano Pule’s degree of Tagalog literacy, which allows him to compose letters that he has the leaders of the confraternity’s chapters read to the brethren. This literacy, combined with his discovery and dissemination (in Manila) of a 1645 mystical poem (dalit) written by a missionary priest,

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figure 3. Religious procession of Our Lady of Peñafrancia, Naga City, Bicol

Dalit sa Caluwalhatian sa Langit na Cararatnan ng mga Banal (Dalit to the peace in Heaven that will be attained by the faithful), illustrates how it was possible for Apolinario to become a pastor without ever having been ordained a priest. For, just as the dalit had made possible an understanding of the divine mysteries without any knowledge of written Scripture; just as the vernacular novena had made possible any given local region’s participation in the universal drama of salvation; and just as the Pasyón reinscribed oral traditions as written ones— “a new gospel” so to speak—so too had the safeguards of Christian economy and tradition become unmoored in their adaptation to and adoption of colonial tradition. In Apolinario’s case, what enables him to become a spiritual leader is the authority of a field that emerges outside the rectitude of the law and

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the letter but is in constant negotiation and dialogue with it. This field, which Gaspar de San Agustín had identified under the Tagalog root word ugali, proceeds through the endless, baroque folds of mediation in and through the language and customs of the colonial subject. Far from disappearing in the nineteenth century, this mediatory economy grew with urbanization and the increasing popularity of devotional cults (see figures 2 and 3). Yet as the church came to identify with the colonial state during this same period, this strategy of colonial centralization often had an effect opposite to the anticipated one. For instead of leading to the demise of unorthodox Christian beliefs and practices, it led to their proliferation and entrenchment in late colonial literature. And even as the colonial state compelled the church to proceed in the direction of articulating Christianity in the form of colonial ideology, so too did it force the Church to lose its purchase on the many and varied innovations of the folk, which colonial Christianity had once claimed as its own.

folk christianity between “formalization” and “vernacularization” As we have seen in this chapter, this project of sustaining the continuity of colonial rule under the project of governmentality had its correlate in what Bienvenido Lumbera elsewhere called “the formalization of tradition” in the life of the colonial subject. Lumbera used this concept to discuss the work of late colonial Tagalog poet Francisco Balagtas during the fi rst half of the nineteenth century. But we can extend his insight beyond the study of poetic form and genre to encompass the entire field of cultural and religious practices that were sheltered and cultivated under the solicitude of oikonomia and the invocation of Church traditiones. To this end, the official correction or censorship and sanction of the Pasyón by native secular priest Mariano Pilapil crystallizes a vision of colonial rule that can be reproduced and disseminated for the consumption of the emergent masses of the nineteenth century. These masses, cut adrift from the original traditions forged by the Church under the practice of oikonomia and subject to a new kind of management involving the pastoral power of the colonial state, nevertheless understand and maintain faith in a form of authority distinct from the rectitude of the law and the principle of Crown sovereignty. In contrast to the latter, this authority stems from Mary’s

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crooked ways of compassion, the autonomy of (ka)ugali(an), and the transculturation and invention of new traditions under the tacit permission of the Church. Both ladino poets and native secular priests serve as the main agents of this transculturation. At the time that the missionary work of the religious orders was becoming subsumed by the colonial state in exchange for the preservation of their historical privileges, Tagalistas like Bernardo Saguinsín and Mariano Pilapil labored to highlight the irreducibility of folk traditions, rooted in the language and religious practices of colonial subjects. Their attempt to reconcile the spontaneous emergence of folk Christianity with the preservation of Christian orthodoxy resulted in the reinforcement of certain colonial traditions (like the pabasa, as well as its dramatization in the sinakulo). On a larger level, however, the dissemination and circulation of the Pasyón under the approval of the censor also isolated and magnified certain elements within orthodoxy that complicated and threatened the state’s proposed appropriation of pastoral power. By extension, these elements also make available a disposition toward Christianity that, in certain situations, can be used to question the perpetuity of colonial rule. Like any other subaltern form of resistance, folk Christianity did not provide a blueprint for either modern revolution or antisystemic social movements. 36 However, it did serve as the catalyst for both elite and popular disaffection with colonial rule prior to the 1896 revolution. Following the 1841 religious revolt under Apolinario de la Cruz, Crown official Sinibaldo de Mas reported the widespread attempt of parish priests to ban the pabasa, which, according to Mas, led to all kinds of social disturbances. At around the same time, Archbishop José Segui wrote Captain-General Narciso Clavería, requesting that the practice be banned and the reprinting of the Pasyón suppressed. 37 Church and state had fi nally discovered their point of convergence: the preservation of Spanish rule at the expense of the autonomy hitherto given to the social order and customary rights of the Indios. In 1863, the Crown called for the establishment of schools in every town in the Philippines for the purpose of increasing literacy, teaching the natives Spanish, and eradicating the errors and superstitions conveyed by the long history of non-Western languages, traditions, and dispositions. But the attempt to secure the orthodox hierarchy of languages and curtail the representation of native vernacular languages like Tagalog

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in writing came too late. As we saw in chapter 1, the great Tagalog poet Francisco Balagtas’s epic poem Florante at Laura cogently expresses the elevation of Tagalog to the status of legibility, thus affi rming its adequacy for the creation and expression of political as well as poetic ideas. For the colonial state, the economic, political, and cultural synchronization of its remote Pacific outpost with a view to the establishment of a modern colony had just begun. For writers like Balagtas, the underpinnings of Spanish rule were being eroded by the very forces Spain had sought to harness.

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pa rt 2

Projects

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chapter 4

Publics The slightest attention in the relation between man and the signifi er . . . in the procedures of exegesis changes the whole course of history by modifying the moorings that anchor his being. Jacques Lacan, “Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious”

The targeting of native consent as the basis of colonial rule in the archipelago and the attempt to reconcile this principle with the absorption of religious authority into the colonial state were part of the political rationality of Spain’s colonial policy concerning Special Laws and the political technology specific to it in the Philippines: the missionaries. As chapter 2 has shown, this resulted in a paradox. When the exceptional measures of ensuring colonial rule—that extreme recourse to “despotism in the last instance”—become the basis of the law itself, this reproduces the very arbitrary character of absolute authority that colonial reformers had confronted when working through the implications of the modern colonial state. The theological mission of Spanish rule in the archipelago, which reformers had tried to harness in the service of the modern colonial state, also created an impasse that peninsular Spanish officials could not surmount without ultimately having to confront this paradox. It was at this threshold that the racism implicit in all justifications of conquest and colonization had to become an explicit, systematic element in the project of modern colonialism. Ironically, the agents assigned to this task were the Christian missionary orders, which for centuries upheld a religious doctrine that militated against the dogma of irreducible difference between conquerors and conquered. The fi rst casualties of this dogma were the native secular priests: they were the fi rst colonial subjects who took Christianity’s promise of universal emancipation at face value, and they were relentlessly persecuted for it. 129

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The gulf between politics in Spain and the political rationality of the colonial state only widens during the period that constitutional rule on the Iberian Peninsula was attempting to create the national foundations of republican rule. Following the 1808 French invasion of Spain, in which Fernando VII was deposed by Napoleonic troops and replaced by Napoleon’s brother Joseph, Spanish popular resistance to French rule led to the promulgation of its fi rst Constitution. Despite its revocation at various moments throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the future of constitutional republicanism and the legacy of 1814 became the common denominator of all political struggle in Spain until and including the Spanish Civil War (1936–39).1 Not surprisingly, its episodic triumphs and defeats on the peninsula corresponded to the rise of political agitation in the Philippines, particularly during the periods 1820–23 and 1868–72. It is in these periods that the flexibility of Special Laws, and their cultural manifestations in the articulation of a colonial public sphere come to light. On the one hand, the entrance of foreign trade and investments in 1830 began to transform the economy in significant ways that colonial reformers (e.g., Basco y Vargas) had been anticipating since the 1780s. Economic historians identify the rise of cash-crop agriculture and the organization of labor around the plantation complex as the two chief vectors of this transformation.2 On the other hand, with the increased penetration of free-market capitalism and the opening of new opportunities for generating wealth came the creation of new needs, as foreseen by early writers of the century like Tomás de Comyn (see chapter i). The generation of new needs in turn influenced the organization of social life from the bottom up as well as the top down. “We are at the beginning of a new era,” Fiscal Minister Rafael Díaz y Arenas proudly proclaimed in 1850, one year before the opening of the fi rst Philippine bank.3 Yet while Díaz y Arenas was clearly referring to the economic changes that promised greater prosperity for the colony, he leaves ambiguous the degree to which his report on commerce and shipping would imply the necessity for political and social as well as economic reforms. In the self-proclaimed era of colonial modernity, how would Spanish rule reconcile the suppression of popular dissent to colonial sovereignty with the governmental imperative of soliciting and managing the native consent of the governed? This chapter undertakes an analysis of liberal and constitutional thought in the economic, political, and aesthetic spheres, or more precisely, in their areas of overlap, in the invocation of a pan-Hispanic

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patriotism in the archipelago, the cultivation of public opinion, and the individuation of a new political and cultural identity in the Spanish press—the Filipino. All three manifestations can be traced to the interpenetration of liberal thought and modern colonialism, through which the colonial government sought to advance a civil “public” sphere (consisting of institutions like safeguards for public health, public works, public safety, education and instruction, the newspaper, etc.) as a strategy for economic development and political centralization. Along with this maneuver came an increased production and circulation of knowledge regarding the material wealth of the Philippines in terms of its geography, natural resources, tribute-paying inhabitants, and state of the economy (agriculture, industry, and commerce) by both foreign travelers from countries interested in economically penetrating the region (particularly England and France), as well as Spanish reformers. This knowledge sought to fuse the missionary and conquest objectives in the archipelago through a phrase commonly used throughout the nineteenth century: the protection and advancement of “moral and material interests.” Displaced from the sphere of religious authority, moral interests became tied to the production of wealth. Reciprocally, the production of wealth had to be justified as also promoting the moral uplift or advancement of colonial society. Central to this initiative was the history of the newspaper as the representation or mouthpiece of a projected colonial civil society, capable of discharging both utilitarian and aesthetic functions. “The non-existence of newspapers in Filipinas,” Sinibaldo de Mas wrote in 1841, “creates a very negative impression among the foreigners, who consider them, and with reason, the foremost mark of civilization; and, at the same time, the government is deprived of the advantage of guiding public opinion.”4 “Modern civilization” as an aesthetic ideal came hand in hand with the cultivation of public opinion, however limited. Both served to challenge and correct the shortcomings of the colonial machinery and facilitate the colony’s transition to the world economy, as well as to guard against subversive ideas that would lead to political upheavals or the excessive influence of foreign economies. 5 Yet how far could colonial public opinion go without ultimately questioning the foundations of colonial rule? And at what point would the designation of political and cultural identities ultimately fall outside the control of the discourses and debates that brought them into being?

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colonial rousseau In 1809 news reached the colony that France and Spain were likely to declare war against one another. The Consejo Supremo in Spain urged the captain-general of the archipelago, Don Mariano Fernandez de Folgueras, to convene the Philippine Royal Council (Real Audiencia), to have them recognize the necessary measures to be adopted in the colony in support of Spanish king Fernando VII, and to invite “the authorities, ecclesiastical, civil, and military . . . to a gathering to announce to all what was happening in the Peninsula, and by edict instruct the public” on the events occurring.6 In Folgueras’s official letter to the Junta Central (25 April 1809), composed of members of the three powers (military, religious, and civil), the captain-general appealed to them to make common cause in “encourag[ing] the people in the patriotic feelings that should always be infl amed in them” (AB, 2:169). That same year, a French schooner containing bundles of folded sheets of paper arrived in the province of Batangas, a province south of Manila on the island of Luzon. These sheets contained an exhortation to the government and people of the Philippine Islands to abandon Spain and make common cause with France. In a surprising turn of strategy, Folgueras did not burn them but instead published them. His reasoning, as reflected in his official letter to the Consejo Supremo, was a fear of “the public’s curiosity” as well as their growing “anxiety” over the future of the colony: “Thus it came to pass,” Folgueras writes, “the curiosity ceased, and only energetic and fervent expressions were heard from everyone, condemning the infamous suggestion, perfidy and stratagem with which the governor of the Isle of France attempted to make this government unite with him in the presumption that he took for granted and intended to persuade in his official letter contained in said folder” (AB, 2:170). For historian of journalism Joseph T. Medina, the publication of these papers regarding the Napoleonic war against Spain in the colonies constituted “the first newspaper of the Philippines.”7 According to Medina, unlike the rise of the secular printing press and journalism in Latin America, “the birth of the first newspaper is not due to the requirements of commerce, nor to the literary or scientific spirit, and much less to ideas of independence. It is unquestionably due to the eagerness of the populace to catch at least a glimpse of what was happening in the [Spanish] Peninsula during the critical period it was confronted with

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the French invasion, when there was in the colony an absolute lack of communication with the motherland” (168). Yet a closer reflection of both the event and Folgueras’s response to it shows that this eagerness had, on the contrary, everything to do with the requirements of commerce, science, and literature, if not outright ideas of independence. For, not unlike the economic policies that colonial reform sought to institute in this period, the solicitation of public opinion began with the public admission that the future of Spain in the islands remained, after all, in the hands of the natives. In targeting native consent as the object of the colonial government’s new field of operations, the same information and communication necessary to launch business enterprises, conduct scientific research, and develop public opinion on matters pertaining to the archipelago would have to be made available to a general populace as well as specific social sectors. In this instance, the affirmation of native consent enables Folgueras to call forth a new concept of public duty and obligation—patriotism—that presupposed both a realm of hegemony and an identity of interests between Spain and the Philippines. To this degree, we can read the ostensible “birth” of the Philippine newspaper as the institution of a propaganda campaign against the French invasion “in strict compliance with the fidelity, loyalty, and love that we profess to the royal house of Bourbon.” This campaign, of course, could do no more than “encourage the people in the patriotic feelings that should always be infl amed in them” (AB, 2:169; italics added). Yet this very limitation, which solicits the feeling of patriotism in place of “strict compliance” with laws that signify “fidelity, loyalty, and love,” shows that element of native consent that the captain-general could neither institute nor enforce. In the crisis of the French invasion of Spain, the Philippine colonial government perforce assumes a role quite distinct from the investigation, exemplary action, and exaction of tribute and services from the natives that the government had performed in centuries past. Folgueras is forced to appeal to free action based on an emotion and aesthetic that neither he nor the ecclesiastical, civil, and military powers could extort: it had to be elicited, provoked, encouraged. And the three colonial branches of power, in turn, are forced to make common cause with one another in the attempt to stimulate patriotism—an objective that both subordinated their own tensions with one another regarding their respective fields of jurisdiction and forced them to take on a constitutional role in the development of a reading and thinking public. The contradictions between this new role and the former one

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would to a large degree determine the ambivalent swings between encouraging the spread of public opinion and enforcing censorship in the nineteenth century.8 The ambiguous consequences of patriotic fervor were best exemplified in the awkwardly titled Proclama historial que para animar a los vasallos que el Señor Don Ferdinand VII tiene en Filipinas a que defiendan a su Rey del furor de su falso amigo, Napoleon, Primer Emperador de Franceses (Historic proclamation for inciting the vassals that King Fernando VII has in Filipinas [sic] to defend their king from the rage of his false friend, Napoleon, fi rst emperor of the French; hereafter referred to as Historic Proclamation).9 This pamphlet, penned by a native-born Spaniard or Creole named Don Luis Rodríguez Varela, but who styled himself as The Filipino Count (El Conde Filipino), attempts to rouse a public outcry in the Philippines against the Napoleonic invasion in Spain during Folgueras’s administration. In his introduction, Varela claims to speak “not solely as a Spanish vassal, but as a Filipino Patriot, who speaks with his People, and from within his Native Land, for which an added impetus is necessary” [no solamente como Vasallo, sino como Patriota Filipino, que habla con su Pueblo, y dentro de la misma Patria, para lo qual se necesita un estro particular]” (6). In the main text, however, he invites all inhabitants of the Philippines to consider Spain as their native land. After recounting a history of the Philippines that demonstrates how Spaniards and native-born Filipinos fought side by side across the centuries for the preservation of Spanish rule in the archipelago, Varela turns to a consideration of how the ancient Laws of the Indies guarantee the equal treatment of Spaniards and natives alike, and in certain cases place the protection of natives above that of the conquistadors (16–18). Both points ostensibly serve to inflame the native heart with Spanish patriotism; yet in the process, they educate the natives on the terms of equality they ought to expect from the colonial administration. Varela’s frequent posturing as a quasi-constitutional representative of the country must have caused the authorities some degree of alarm, particularly after the Spanish Constitution was abolished with the restoration of King Fernando VII to the throne in 1814. Varela was arrested in 1815 and sent to Spain in exile on charges of sedition. Yet his pamphlet points to the double valence of Spanish patriotism, which reemerges when the Constitution once again challenges the Spanish monarchy in 1820. In its aftermath, we see the rise of a series of debates and polemics that appeared in print concerning the patriotic loyalty

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of the religious missionary orders. Historian of Philippine journalism Wenceslao E. Retana notes that, while no publications that outwardly opposed the Spanish monarchy appeared in this period, “in contrast, there were various [publications] that contained attacks, some more violent than others, against the friars, mostly for the latter’s indications of intolerance for the liberal regime. Friars and anti-friars traded horrors in public papers.”10 Patriotism had thus grown to be a field of debate capable of calling into question the legitimacy of the ecclesiastical colonial power. Central to the question of patriotism, of course, was the fact that for Spain, beginning in 1812, both the monarchy of Fernando VII and his French usurper Joseph Bonaparte had ceased to represent the sovereign power. In the age of Rousseau, monarchy itself had been demoted by the constitution and government of a new sovereign—the Spanish nation. Let us recall briefly, in Rousseau’s The Social Contract, the redefi nition of sovereignty in which “the act by which a people become a people” comes to take precedence over “the act by which a people submit to a king”: “for that [former] act,” argues Rousseau, “being necessarily antecedent to the other, is the real foundation of society.”11 As we know, in his famous formulation (“Each one of us puts into the community his person and all his powers under the supreme direction of the general will; and as a body, we incorporate every member as an indivisible part of the whole” [61]) Rousseau substitutes the general will for the sovereign power and devalues the monarchy to the status of government.12 While the direct effects of the Spanish Constitution on the Philippines have been debated among historians, a review of its appearance in early public debates reveals that the idea of sovereignty residing in a Spanish nation (as opposed to the monarch) could not but change the character of debates regarding ecclesiastical power and the value of censorship in the colony.13 A controversy that illustrates this change appears in the pages of the 1821 newspaper La Filantropía, concerning the confi scation of printed materials at the Manila customs house on suspicion that copies of Rousseau’s Contrato social (The Social Contract) illegally entered the city under the title Contratos mercantiles [Shipping contracts].14 The anonymous writer bristles: Is it not ridiculous, that in order to bring a few miserable copies of The Social Contract to Manila, Contratos mercantiles has to replace its name on the invoice, when the work in question has been printed in Madrid this past year, and is sold publicly in front of all the authorities of the entire

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Nation? Under what sovereignty do we live: that of Ferdinand the Great [the constitutional monarch] or that of Philip the Escorialite [Philip II]? How much longer must we let ourselves be broken and saddled by the fi rst person that wants to ride us? [¿Hasta cuando nos hemos de dejar enalbardar por el primero que quiera montarnos?] (AB, 3:1502)15

Another writer sarcastically complained that the censorship of allegedly “sick doctrines” like modern medicine, science, and philosophy, in favor of “healthier doctrines” supported by the regular clergy along the lines of “Galen, Averroës, and Avicenna” would not lead to the recovery of the sick individual, but his burial (AB, 3:1504). The clergy began a campaign of its own, accusing the writers and editors of such liberal papers of heresy and libel (AB, 3:507–9). Without the regular clergy or missionary orders, one writes, “would you have produced so many triumphs for Christianity, or so many laurels for the Nation. . . . Did you think that the Filipino People is some settlement of savages, that their ignorance would make them succumb to the force of your disruptive preachings?” (509). What is interesting about these passages is that both the religious and secular powers defend their respective positions by recourse to the idea of a nation: its future health or sickness, the salvation or perdition (moral or material) of its inhabitants. The specific constitution of this nation, however, remains ambiguous: even as rhetoric about the honor and glory of the Spanish Crown began to be supplanted by that of the Spanish nation, and even as the concept of native consent begins to replace those of conquest and sovereignty, the constitution of a “Filipino people” remains suspended between the “modern citizen” and a “settlement of savages.” In either case, “the Filipino People,” while far from being an active identity in the sphere of emergent politics, nevertheless acquires a certain cohesion that the secular and religious use to attack each other and defend themselves from one another. “To the always faithful natives of this country,” the priest defending the regular clergy continues, “you tacitly [apply the terms] thieves; assassins, and insurgents; this insulting decree does not apply to the natives of Filipinas . . . it was only a matter of time before the venom of your pen would poison their eyes” (509). Through repeated invocations of that shadowy nation that both the secular and religious authorities claim to represent, the native becomes a new subject of politics. Yet contrary to solving the dilemma of securing the colonial state’s access to the production of native consent, the colonial transculturation of Rousseau’s social contract only seemed to politicize it.

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the indio as the subject of colonial politics On the surface, it seems predictable that The Social Contract’s belated arrival in the archipelago would fi rst affect the inextricable entanglements between the temporal and spiritual authorities. While in Rousseau’s book the divine right of kings and the unity of religious and secular interests become a single object of attack, in the Philippines social reformers sought to subordinate the spiritual authority to the temporal under the mantle of the modern colonial state, without disturbing the long continuity of colonial sovereignty under centuries of the Spanish monarchy (see chapter 2). It is in this initial struggle, in which both parties increasingly appealed to emergent notions of a public opinion and a national interest, that the Indio fi rst acquires a voice as an interlocutor in colonial politics. The clearest example of this new speaking subject appears in the pages of an anonymously written and published pamphlet entitled El Indio agraviado, one of six periodicals to emerge in 1821. The opening lines of this pamphlet read as follows: Cuando los Indios Filipinos debían esperar el que por haber jurado el Rey la sabia Constitución saliesen de la subyugación, opresión, y esclavitud en que yacen mas de dos siglos y medio, por el despotismo y arbitrariedad de los Españoles, entonces es cuando se les remachan mas los grillos, y aumentan mas sus cadenas para no salir jamás de las prisiones políticas en que se hallan [sic].16 [When the Filipino Indios had to hope that, since the King had [so] sworn in the sagacious Constitution, they would depart from the subjugation, oppression, and slavery where they have lain for more than two and a half centuries, by the despotism and arbitrariness of the Spaniards, that is when the grilles get riveted on them, and their chains increase lest they ever leave the political prisons where they fi nd themselves.]

The authorship of El Indio agraviado will remain perhaps forever in doubt.17 Perhaps its anonymity more effectively directs our attention not to the caste identity of the author, but to the fact that an identification with authorship has taken place. The “Indio” has claimed his right to be an author and represents himself as such on the printed page. He therefore assumes the “author-function” of speaking for or in-the-name-of, as well as the power of speaking against. This power does not come to the Indio by way of ancestral ties to Spanish blood, nor by position of authority in the religious or secular realms, or even (as with the ladino poets in the seventeenth century) as a supplement to the objectives of colonial expansion. Rather, constitutional law brings

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the Indio into a relationship of equivalence with anyone who designates himself or herself (justly or unjustly) as one of “los Españoles.” A double movement has thus transpired, toward the ideologization of the Indio as a locus of speech or place-position outside that of “the Spaniard,” yet both participate equally in the political process of representation in the emergent (and short-lived) public sphere and are equally subject to the law. To put it another way, the division between colonizer and colonized has thus been undercut by a principle of identity or sameness that has made the Indio a speaking subject and has made both baptized natives and Spaniards equally citizens. This double-sameness is illustrated by the fact that the article was published in Spanish, yet the speaking subject does not claim any adherence to grammar, syntax, or stylistics—markers of the written wor(l)d. Again, this is not the fi rst time that an Indio sought legitimacy via Hispanization. Native ladinos and secular priests had been publishing poetry and sermons in Spanish for centuries—some doubtless more deserving of approval or esteem than others. What distinguishes this author from his forbears, however, is that he himself fl aunts this stammering fluency, as the bearer of a lack, without, however, relinquishing his will to power: Tenga [Ud.] la bondad de aumentar su ilimitada paciencia . . . quando lea en este papel mis barbarismos, mi insipidez, mi ineptitud, mi estupidez, mi sequedad, mi escacéz y en fi n mi ignorancia; pues por la falta de luces, conocimientos estudio, y lo mas principal el idioma castellano, no podré hablar con aquella pulcritud, ni elegancia retórica que requiere tan arduo, y delicado stunto [sic]. (193) [May you have the goodness of increasing your unlimited patience . . . when you read on this paper my barbarisms, my insipidity, my ineptitude, my stupidity, my abruptness, my lack and fi nally my ignorance; since from lack of illumination (enlightenment), studied fi elds of knowledge, and most importantly the Castilian tongue, I can’t speak with that pulchritude, nor the rhetorical elegance that such an arduous and delicate matter requires.]

The author assumes all the signs of negativity, yet does not disqualify himself from access to the written word.18 On the contrary, like the mark of Cain, the sign of negativity borne by the subject is what ensures his status in the field of representation. We need only compare the discursive function of the above statement with that of an earlier Spanish writer, Augustinian priest Fray Gaspar de San Agustín, in order to see the new field of signification

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in which the Indio has been located.19 In 1715, Agustín wrote his well-known letter to the king on the state of the missions (popularly known as “Letter On the Filipinos”), in which he railed against the native’s ignorance, capriciousness, lack of industry, and capacity for deception. So harsh was Agustín’s invective against the natives that it remained a popular reference for the missionary orders in their attacks against the native secular clergy throughout the nineteenth century. What is interesting about the argument of El Indio agraviado, however, is not the author’s defense against this disparagement; rather, he takes on and questions the series of arguments that derives from it. In Agustín’s letter, the author’s evaluation of the future prospects of Spanish colonial policy is derived from the Indio’s lack or state of abjection. Agustín thus extends his judgment on the insuffi ciency of native capacity to any prospective post or position in colonial society that would ostensibly be occupied by the Indio—gobernadorcillo, secular priest, principal, or other. By contrast, while the author of El Indio agraviado essentially maintains the truth of Agustín’s descriptions, he puts them to an entirely different use: “If the Indio is ignorant,” the author writes, “no one other than the Spaniards themselves can be blamed, for the reason that after more than two and a half centuries that these Islands are conquered [sic], until now it [sic] remains in its idiocy” (italics added). [Si el Indio és ignorante, nadie tiene la culpa mas que los mismos Españoles, por que después de mas de dos siglos y medio que están conquistadas estas Yslas, hasta ahora permanece aquel en su idiotismo.] He continues as follows: Si los Españoles, y los Ministros de doctrina de los Pueblos, no hubieran quebrantado las repetidísimas ordenes y cedulas reales, en que el Rey manda, particularmente á los doctrineros enseñen y hablen el castellano á los Indios en los Pulpitos, Tribunales y demás, siendo del desagrado de S. M. todo incumplimiento y trasgresión, parece que por rudos y torpes que fuesen, ya hablarían con cultura, pulcritud, y fi nura el castellano, después de doscientos y cincuenta años de roseo y civilización. 20 [If the Spaniards, and the Ministers of doctrine in the Towns, had not broken the oft-repeated orders and royal decrees, in which the King commanded especially the catechists (to) teach and speak Spanish to the Indios at the Pulpits, Courts, and everywhere else, these being to the displeasure of Your Majesty unfulfi lled and transgressed, it seems that however rude and slow they [the Indios] might be, they would already speak Spanish with culture, pulchritude, and fi nesse, after two hundred and fi fty years of perfect happiness and civilization.]

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The subject and predicate of Agustín’s evaluation have been reversed: now, the Indio’s state of abjection is itself derived from an even greater lack of effective Spanish colonial policy. In the case of the Indio’s ignorance, El Indio agraviado accuses Spaniards of mistaking a symptom for a sign: the sign of negativity derives less from an essential trait that determines colonial history than a condition shaped by the history of colonialism. Hence, it is not the Indio that limits the scope and extent of Hispanization, but Hispanization that limits the advancement of the Indio: Bueno és no enseñarles el castellano, dejarles en su idiotismo, no hacer aprecio de sus barbarismos y torpezas, ni corregirlas para que crean que es cosa buena lo que dicen . . . asi les podrémos decir ladrones, y otros mil improperios y maltratos. . . . ¿No és esta la idea que llevaron Vms. desde el principio, para tener boca contra nosotros, como la tienen? Es positivo; yo no sé a donde irá ya el pobre Indio! Si responde su razon, dicen que és retobado, y si no responde és un Caballo. No hay duda que los Espñoles tienen buen estudiado este su sistema fi losofico. . . . De este modo ya se vé que los Indios nunca dejarán de ser malos pero ¡valgame Dios! ¿á donde voy? (199) [It is good not to teach them Spanish, to leave them in their idiocy, not to pay any mind to their barbarisms and awkwardness, nor correct them so that they will think that what they say is fi ne . . . so we will be able to call them thieves, and a thousand other insults and mistreatments. . . . Isn’t that the idea that Your Graces have had since the beginning, to malign us, as you do? You agree; (but) I do not know where the poor Indio will go! If his reason responds, they say that he is talking back, and if he doesn’t respond he’s a Mule. Doubtless the Spaniards have had this studied well, their philosophical system. . . . In this way one sees that the Indios will never stop being bad but good God! Where will I go?]

This argument, rediscovered by national martyr José Rizal in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, aims at least partially to overcome the sign of negativity by fi rst reversing it (“you are also at fault”) and second by generalizing it, thus placing it in the realm of a shared responsibility: “Indio: your graces will tell me: what do you know of abusive egoism . . . as you are the only one who has dared to answer the Spaniard . . . ? To this I respond . . . egoism is (according to what I have seen [sic] on a torn paper, which appeared to be a page of some little book) a system of each person not caring about more than his own convenience, being insensible to the misfortunes of others.” [Indio: me dirá Vms.: ¿qué sabes tu de abuso egoismo . . . que eres el unico que se ha atrevido á contestar al Español . . . ? A esto respondo . . . egoismo es (segun he visto en un papel roto, que al parecer fué

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foxa [sic] de algun librito) un sistema de no cuidar cada uno mas que de su misma conveniencia, siendo insensible á las agenas desgracias” (200–201).] With “paper torn” from “some little book” (an ironic and mutilated source of knowledge, distant from the Holy Book that once held the last word on egoism and amor propio), the anonymous author bases his argument for shared responsibility on a new legitimacy derived from the Constitution. At times this responsibility becomes the basis for a disarming humanism: “The Indio is a man of flesh, he has a rational soul, the image of God, with three powers, five senses, and capable of discerning all things just like a Spaniard” (197). [El Indio és hombre de carne, tiene alma racional, que es la imagen de Dios, con tres potencias, cinco sentidos, y capaz de descernir todas las cosas lo mismo que el Español.]21 At other times it is used to accuse the Spaniard of ignoble motives, and to unmask the illegality of depriving the Indio of any recourse to the law (199). At either extreme, however, the author points out that the Spaniard stands in flagrant violation of “title 9, last chapter” of the Constitution, which states, “As far as possible, under no pretext, however rational it may seem, can any person under ecclesiastical, civil, or military authority, nor any other person of any class or condition, affl ict the Indio in his person” (200). [Con todo rigor que bajo de ningún pretexto por racional que paresca persona alguna constitutida en autoridad eclesiastica, civil, ó militar, ni otra alguna de qualquier clase ó condicion que sea, afl ija al Indio en su persona.] For the author of El Indio agraviado, Spaniards and Indios are cloven to one another: that is, they are simultaneously divided by ideological position in writing and linked by their equal relationship to the same law.

the public opinion of private interest “¿Válgame Dios! ¿A dónde voy?” Works produced by writers such as El Conde Filipino and the aggrieved Indio disappeared after 1823, when a strict policy of censorship in the colony followed the (second) restoration of the monarchy on the Iberian Peninsula. The debates regarding the future of the Spanish nation, however, and the implications of its mere existence for Spain’s colonies like the Philippines, would reappear with increasing frequency as the nineteenth century progressed. If patriotism as an expression of native will—native desire and consent to Spanish government—was to determine the future prospects of the colonial order, at what point would it ultimately usurp or call into question

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colonial rule itself? To what degree was it possible for colonial governmentality to anticipate, contain, or channel the will and initiative of the so-called governed, before the governed began to question their status of subjection and set their own terms of the debate? While overtly censored by the colonial government after 1823, the paradoxical constitution of colonial modernity reemerged as Spain began to orient the archipelago’s economic policies around export agriculture and open trade with other European powers. In 1830, the port of Manila was opened to foreign commerce. 22 With the decline of mercantilist policies such as protectionism (proteccionismo), concomitant with the opening of trade relations with Europe (primarily England and the United States), the consent and initiative of the governed (not to mention an open-door policy to Chinese immigration) was once again called upon in a project to develop the natural resources of the country, organize labor forces for the cultivation of cash crops and cottage industries, aggregate individual interests into sectional ones, and accumulate capital for economic investments. To this end, a royal decree in 1839 allowed for the limited introduction and circulation of books in the islands. Of greater importance, however, were the efforts to foster a newspaper industry, beginning in 1842, and to generate a public opinion that, according the opinion of Sinibaldo de Mas, would help to reinforce colonial rule. From the little evidence that remains of the fi rst dailies and weeklies published in the Philippines between 1842 and the 1874 (along with Wenceslao E. Retana’s exhaustive bibliography of Philippine journalism in the nineteenth century), one may surmise that the modest calls for liberal reforms in the archipelago were most often tied to the expansion of capitalism. The fi rst editorial to appear in the fi rst daily published in the Philippines, La Esperanza, concerns the need to cultivate a “spirit of association” conducive to the accumulation of capital through banks and the formation of private initiatives to develop local industry and commerce. 23 An editorial from the longest-running newspaper of the period, Diario de Manila, argued for the separation of interests in news reportage between the colonial government and the sphere of private interests: to this end, the newspaper detached itself from direct sponsorship by the colonial government, and became a private enterprise. 24 El Pasig, the fi rst periodical that featured articles written in the vernacular languages of the Philippines, did away with editorials entirely in order to focus on instructional articles on the cultivation and harvesting of agricultural cash crops. Finally, a series of

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articles written for El Porvenir Filipino in 1865 combined a critique of government interference in the development of free trade with a call to improve internal communication among the islands and infrastructural projects to connect “all parts of the social body, and give life and animation that it otherwise lacks.”25 The article ends with an exhortation to recall the “axiom of government: salus populi suprema lex est.” The invocation of public opinion was thus a corollary to the cultivation of private interests in the liberalization of the economy. This association between public opinion and the opening of economic interest and investment in the archipelago led to the public advocacy of social reforms. As one half of the equation that constituted the “moral and material” interests of Spanish colonialism in the nineteenth century, the material interests of private enterprise did not immediately warrant the surveillance of censorship, which remained primarily under the province of the religious orders until the end of Spanish rule. Yet the invocation of public opinion raised as many questions as it purported to answer. At one extreme of interpretation, to what degree could one separate the liberalization of the economy and the various reforms that it necessitated from a corresponding “liberalization” of colonial authority and institutions, beginning with censorship and extending to the power of the religious orders over the management of native consent?26 To the degree that economic liberalization made common cause with Spanish and, ultimately, a limited form of indigenous patriotism, at what point would the necessity of certain rights and liberties engender or necessitate others? And at the other extreme of interpretation, did this emergent recourse to public opinion and the circulation of newspapers really introduce a new check and counterpoint to the interests of the colonial regime, and did its calls for political, economic, and social reform reflect a concern for the “health of the people?” After all, to what “people” did the author of the aforementioned editorial refer? And what benefit would these people presumably derive from the penetration of free trade in the archipelago?27 Not unlike Spain’s constitutional project in the early years of the century, the invocation of a public through the affi rmation of public opinion in the early dailies and weeklies of Manila ostensibly brought all classes and ethnic groups in the Philippines together in free association, under the mantle of a voice and authority distinguishable from and critical of the colonial government as well as purely private, sectional interests. The possibility of gathering such a diverse group of conflicting interests into anything even remotely representing a general

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public was of course a fiction: the fact alone that less than 3 percent of the population spoke Spanish underlined the limited scope of such claims. What is important to recognize, however, is not the fictional nature of opinion in the Philippines per se. In Europe itself, the invocation of the “general public” as an authority that constitutes the voice of the governed always involves fiction and a will to power. 28 What is important to recognize is that this fiction presupposes the existence of a constitutional law to which public opinion is addressed. This presupposition alone introduces a new element into the project of colonial governmentality. “Public opinion” raises the stakes of colonial hegemony by putting into play a formally independent authority whose existence serves as a permanent critique of the colonial state issuing from a place outside it and often beyond its control. As Jürgen Habermas has persuasively shown, public opinion has always served to personify concepts such as that of the general will, nation, civil society, or society “in general”; and in doing so, it endows these concepts with an autonomous agency distinct from that of the state, even as it makes a bid for universal claims on the basis of private and sectional interests. This autonomy need not confl ict with that of the state: indeed, Spanish liberals who insisted on the separation of government opinion from public opinion also saw how this separation would ultimately benefit the legitimacy of Spanish rule in the islands. On the one hand, public opinion as the voice of a public sphere could then feasibly render “society” as a sphere and authority capable of giving political legitimacy to the state “from below.” In Habermas’ words: “The bourgeois public sphere arose historically in conjunction with a society separated from the state. The ‘social’ could be constituted as its own sphere to the degree that on the one hand the reproduction of life took on private forms, while on the other hand the private realm as a whole assumed public relevance. . . . In the confl ict over this concern, in which private people soon enough became engaged with the public authority, the bourgeois public sphere attained its political function.”29 In the Philippines, editors like José Felipe del Pan could intuit on a popular level what writers like Kant had already proposed in political philosophy.30 In a word, the political function of public opinion could be harnessed in the service of the state, strengthening obedience to it, insofar as the state ensured the relative autonomy of public opinion. An editorial on the importance of public opinion (which in reality calls for voluntary conscripts for the intensification of preemptive attacks

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against the Muslim sultanates in the southern islands), published in El Oriente in 1876, offers us a general example of this fi rst direction of public opinion: “The Filipino people has brought forth an event worthy of the greatest praise: all classes of society, from the missionary orders to the obscure worker, the powerful businessman to the man of letters, the manual laborer to the artist: each in his respective sphere clearly demonstrates that beneath their breasts beat Spanish hearts, prepared to sacrifice themselves on the altars of the native land, of the general good, whenever it is necessary.”31 “El pueblo filipino,” “todas las clases,” “la patria,” “el bien general”: these phrases sound all too familiar, arising as they do from the constitutional rhetoric of Spanish patriotism and republicanism in the early nineteenth century. In fact, as a further testament to the universality of Spanish patriotism in the archipelago, the editorial openly identifies the Philippines as a province of Spain. Yet in the midst of the author’s liberal rhetoric, he is also careful to demonstrate that the expressions of patriotism and public opinion dovetail with the religious and absolutist foundations of colonial rule. After all, Serrano reasons, the pirate incursions along the coasts do receive support and instructions from the Muslim sultanates, and Spain is committed to a holy war against the infidel, as it has been since the sixteenth century. He is thus able to praise Spanish civilization for having avoided the pitfalls of both scholastic debates and the “excesses of Reform” (los excesos de la Reforma) in modern times, without, however, disavowing the impulses that gave birth to both. At the other end of the hegemonic spectrum, however, the invocation of patriotism, public opinion, and the free press could also lead to a quite different evaluation of the colony and its future prospects. As one Filipino Creole in Spain wrote to another in the Philippines in 1872: La prensa es la palanca con que se consigue remover y echar por tierra los obstáculos que se oponen al progreso de ese atrasado país . . . y lo prueba el que la opinión pública que por tanto tiempo han conseguido tener extraviada los enemigos de dicho progreso, ya va entrando por el buen camino.32 [The press is the lever capable of removing and uprooting those obstacles opposed to the progress of this backward country, . . . as shown by the fact that public opinion, which the enemies of said progress have for so long led astray, is now moving in the proper direction.]

This tendency toward permanent critique reflected a dynamic identified by Habermas as the public sphere’s “inherent dialectic,” in which

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the tendency toward the privatization of social relations (i.e., by contract and capital) would motivate the opposite tendency to render the private realm accountable to “public relevance”: “The democratically revolutionized public sphere that wishes to substitute ‘the real civil society’ for ‘the fictitious civil society of the legislature [or the colonial government]’ thus became in principle a sphere of public deliberation and resolution concerning the direction and administration of every process necessary for the reproduction of society” (Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 127). To put it another way, what distinguishes public opinion as a fiction of constitutional law or as “false consciousness” (in Marx’s terms) is that it is a fiction that constantly opens itself to critique, even attack. This “inherent dialectic” of public opinion deserves some discussion, insofar as it provided the wellspring of inspiration for the generation of native-born students and expatriates who lobbied for colonial reform in Barcelona and Madrid, many of whom eventually joined the anticolonial revolution against Spain. Such inspiration began with the writings of Creole priest Father José Apolinario Burgos that considered the Filipino as a subject of colonial politics.

the filipino as the subject of colonial politics: mas and burgos An enduring source of fascination for historians is the unrecognized moment in the nineteenth century at which the adjective Filipino comes to designate a self-conscious cultural identity that manages either to synthesize or elide the social categories of class, caste, race, and ethnicity, absorbing all of these into a modern vision of a common “region” of birth (i.e., the archipelago under Spanish rule), a shared oppression, and a republican vision. At one extreme, David Routledge fi nds evidence of a transregional, anticlerical, and “modern” self-awareness in the letters written by Diego Silang, leader of the 1762 Ilocano uprising against Spain. At the other extreme, Benedict Anderson has more recently argued that as late as 1887, with the publication of José Rizal’s Noli me tangere, “any widespread ‘Filipino nationalist consciousness’ in the modern sense had not as yet come into existence.”33 Between these two epochs, historians, statesmen, and revolutionaries have tried to pin down a date and to redefi ne or further specify what exactly a “Filipino nationalist consciousness” entails (widespread or regionally anchored, modern or primordial, apocalyptic or normative).

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Yet in trying to focus on “the Filipino,” “Filipino consciousness,” Filipino “identity,” and so forth, we tend to neglect or downplay the situations or instances in which such an entity becomes meaningful (i.e., an object of investment, desire, calculation, and accountability) in colonial discourse. If we agree that it certainly had no widespread, stable, fi xed meaning from one writer to another, the question becomes, What were the preconditions, stakes, and political effects of attempting to publicize, normalize, in short, “fi x” it? The slippery use of the word in the secret report of diplomatic attaché Sinibaldo de Mas in 1843 and in the manifesto of Creole secular priest José Burgos defending the secular clergy against libel allows us to address this question in relation to the conceptualization of a reading public. In chapter 2, we saw how the fi rst of three recommendations of Sinibaldo de Mas’s secret report to the constitutional monarchy (at that time under the regency of military generals Baldomero Espartero and, in 1843, Ramón María Narváez) was the reduction of the Filipino Creole population, often referred to as Filipino Spaniards (españolesfilipinos) in the nineteenth century. 34 It is not difficult to say why: from the moment Napoleon deposed Spain’s king in 1808, the Creoles of Argentina and Mexico, and later Venezuela and Chile, never ceased to plot and hasten the overthrow of Spanish rule in the Americas. As we know, their efforts ended with the formation of the Latin American republics. In 1823, a Mexican Creole serving as the captain of a Filipino Creole regiment, Andrés Novales, plotted to usurp colonial rule in the Philippines, assassinate the captain-general, and proclaim himself emperor. 35 The plot was sparked by the plan of CaptainGeneral Martínez to retire all Creole officers in the Philippines and replace them with a large number of sergeants he had brought with him from Spain. 36 While apparently separate from Mas’s other two major concerns— the proliferation of a native or mestizo secular clergy and the overhaul of colonial administration—the three concerns are in fact one and the same. All three diminish the symbolic force of Spanish rule, which Mas referred to as “Hispanicism” [españolismo], and Spanish prestige, and introduce anomalous identities, constituencies, and loyalties that ultimately complicate the division between rulers and ruled. At what point would the Conde Filipino’s patriotism against the French, for example, turn into a native patriotism against Spain? At what point would a Spanish-speaking Indio claim the right to voice his opinion in the Spanish press? At what point would a native secular priest cease

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to serve as an agent of Hispanization and begin to read Christianity in anticolonial terms? For Mas, the Creole embodied this threat of anomaly. As a Spaniard by birth, the Creole “enjoy[ed] the latter’s rights . . . he has never been in Spain, nor has any friends or personal relations there. He has spent an entire infancy in the Philippines; it is there that he has reveled in childhood games and has had his fi rst loves: there is where all of his friends and companions live, there resides his entire being . . . the Philippines is his native land” (Informe secreto, 17).37 This deep sense of belonging, paired with the Creoles’ total alienation from the native land of their parents or ancestors, led Creoles to view peninsular Spaniards as foreigners. This is all the more true with respect to competition between the two groups for career employment.38 The dilemma of the Filipino Creoles is copiously illustrated throughout the text and Mas’s footnotes. While the peninsular Spanish officials always have the option of returning home if displaced from their posts, the Filipino Creoles have nowhere to turn for employment in positions that grant them the privileges and opportunities they see enjoyed by Spanish colonial officials. But the opposite policy of preferring Croles over Spaniards also causes disturbances. Mas narrates an episode in which Captain-General García Camba (1837–38) appoints two Filipino Creoles to high posts, explaining his controversial decision as proof of non-discrimination between peninsular Spaniards and Filipino Creoles. Yet the appointments quickly lead to widespread rumors that a separatist movement is afoot, and García Camba is relieved of duty.39 Filipino Creoles thus constituted an anomaly with regard to colonial segregation: because of their caste, they could not be excluded from Spanish privilege; yet because of their accident of birth, they could not entirely escape the politics of discrimination. Yet what is most interesting about Mas’s specification of a Filipino Creole caste—to reiterate, an anomalous category characterized by the mutual exclusion of one group from either that of the colonizers or that of the colonized—is the difficulty even he seems to have in maintaining that specificity. In one passage, the differentiation between Filipino Creoles and the Indios or colonial subjects slips almost imperceptibly into a difference between Creole and Indio Filipinos: “[The Creoles] being much less beloved among the natives than the Europeans, . . . it is indeed easy to see how the Government of Filipinas, will end up in the hands of the native Filipinos or perhaps the Chinese mestizos or the mixed races; and that the whites will be dominated by the people

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of color” (Mas, Informe secreto, 24; italics added).40 In another passage, he mistakenly refers to native secular priests as Filipinos: “The skill of the government must consist in keeping [native/native mestizo and Chinese-Spanish mestizos] always separate and against each other, lest they form a mass or common public spirit. . . . Filipinos are more prone to fraternize with mestizos than Spaniards, because, although the former group tyrannizes them, . . . they [also] invite them to eat, treating all alike” (57; italics added).41 One may argue, of course, that Mas’s errors merely reveal his ignorance of the terms that were current in his time. Yet they either wittingly or unwittingly reflect the degree to which this specific, anomalous signifier of the Filipino Creole could easily travel, stand in the place of other groups, other constituencies, other interests. While Mas is at pains to reassure the reader that such a common interest could never occur, his determination to incite hostility and suspicion among Creoles, mestizos, and Indios belies the authority of his own claims. On the one hand, he says with confidence: “The Filipino Creoles [would] never consider making a common cause with the (indigenous) natives, because at present they are the masters, and under other circumstances they would become equals and even subordinates [to the natives].”42 Surrounded by a wealthy mestizo merchant class, as well as the religious orders that excluded them from entering, and confronted, fi nally, with the racial tension fostered by colonialism, Mas concluded that the Creoles had no choice but to identify their destiny with the racial prestige of Spanish sovereignty. On the other hand, even Mas lacked confidence in the ultimate outcome of his strategies. “Out of love,” he writes in the memorable conclusion to his report, “we fall into an anomaly, because how can we reconcile the freedom we attain for ourselves with the desire to impose the law onto remote peoples at the same time? Why deny to others the good that we desire for our own nation? (Informe secreto, 88–89). Even the shrewdest calculations aimed at resolving and reabsorbing the anomalous identities engendered by colonial modernity would only succeed in postponing Spain’s ultimate confrontation with the larger anomaly of colonial rule under its principles of constitutional government. Mas’s analysis leaves us with a puzzling question regarding the transformation of an anomalous group—the Creoles—isolated from both peninsular Spanish and native and mestizo group caste or class interest, into a catalyst for galvanizing diverse sectors of the colonial population.

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A fi nal example, the most important, regarding the use and misuse of Filipino as a political identity, answers this question and concludes this chapter on the solicitation and management of the discourses of patriotism and public opinion in the colonial period. In 1864, two newspapers in Manila published attacks on the largely native, secular clergy in the Philippines. These attacks, written by members of the regular clergy in the Philippines, sought to discredit the increasingly organized protests of the secular clergy against the divestment of their parishes and the reallocation of these parishes to peninsular Spanish members of the missionary orders. As we saw in part one, this divestment and reallocation of parishes was part of a larger project in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to synchronize the political rationality of colonial government with the pastoral power of the missionary orders. The articles focused on the deceased leader of the secular clergy’s protest, Filipino Creole priest Pedro Peláez, openly questioning his loyalty to Spain (and, by extension, the loyalty of Creoles as well as that of the secular clergy), and casting aspersions on the competence of the secular priests he defended. A response to these attacks came in the form of an anonymously published article in Spain, entitled “Manifesto addressed to the Noble Spanish Nation By Loyal Filipinos” (Manifiesto que a la noble nación española dirigen los leales Filipinos; hereafter referred to as the “Manifesto”). The fact that it was published in Spain testifies not only to the continuity of censorship in the archipelago, but also to the (relatively) freer atmosphere of public opinion and debate on the peninsula. The article was simply signed “Los Filipinos,” although the author was later recognized as Creole secular priest Father José Apolonio Burgos.43 Several years later, both the article and other public manifestations of social discontent on the part of the secular clergy became tied to the 1872 mutiny of largely Indio troops and workers assigned to the Cavite arsenal—led, not surprisingly, by a Creole officer and two peninsular Spanish malcontents. Father Burgos, as well as fellow secular priests Jacinto Zamora and Mariano Gomes, were tried for conspiracy, sentenced to death, and executed by garrote. While most scholars of nineteenth-century Philippine history largely agree that Burgos’s involvement in the push for colonial reforms that were tied to the 1872 Cavite mutiny provided the catalyst for both the reactionary turn of the colonial government toward authoritarian rule and the spread of fear and discontent among certain sectors of the colonial elite (not to mention the subaltern classes), differences of

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opinion arise when we examine the particular role of Burgos and the status of Filipino Creoles as a social class. Since the time of Burgos, historians and scholars have debated the importance of the Filipino Creoles in the ferment of social revolution behind the 1896 Philippine revolution against Spain and the 1899 war against the U.S. takeover of the Philippines. The generation of organized resistance to colonial rule following Burgos, from national martyr José Rizal to spokesperson for the revolution Apolinario Mabini, repeatedly and explicitly identified Burgos and the 1872 Cavite Mutiny as the point of departure for understanding their own respective positions on reform and revolution. Such a view becomes obscure, however, when post–World War II historians like Teodoro Agoncillo and writers like Nick Joaquin consider Burgos and the Creoles as part of that educated (ilustrado) social class that survived and even flourished during and after the revolution’s defeat at the hands of the Americans. At one extreme, Agoncillo has attempted to explain the 1896 Philippine revolution as a model case of the “haves” vs. the “have-nots,” which necessarily diminishes to the point of disregarding the importance of disenchantment with Spanish rule among the colonial elite. At the other end of the spectrum, Joaquin tends to view the Filipino Creoles as would-be agents of romantic revolution (following their predecessors in Latin America), who lacked collective unity and a common mandate as spokespeople of the colonial population. Yet, as an analysis of the “Manifesto” will show, the attempt to fi x the specific role or agency of Filipino Creoles as emancipators or leaders of social revolution obscures an equally important genealogy, in which the word Filipino enters the newspaper as a fi ction of colonial governmentality in the same way that public opinion enters colonial society as a fiction of constitutional law. The opening lines read as follows: Enojosa tarea emprendemos al decidirnos á refutar las ridículas calumnias y gratuitas acusaciones de “La Verdad,” que llegó enhoramala á poner en nuestras manos un amigo, se permitió escribir contra los filipinos, en especial contra el Arzobispo y Clero Secular de este país, ventilando la cuestión de Curatos, á cuyo objeto dedica una serie de artículos, que no sin pena leímos [italics added].44 [It is a vexatious task we undertake in resolving to refute the ridiculous calumnies and gratuitous accusations of La Verdad, a newspaper published in the capital (in Manila), which a friend in an evil hour happened to place in our hands. That newspaper undertook to write against the

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Filipinos, in particular against the archbishop and the secular clergy of this country, discussing the question of parishes in a series of articles, the reading of which caused us no little pain.]

“The Filipinos” here refers neither solely to Creole archbishop Pedro Peláez nor to the native and mestizo secular clergy, but to the political situation that brings them under the same identity.45 One may argue here that, since the time of Mas (if not earlier), the term Filipino was no longer tied exclusively to the identification of Creoles: rather, it floated according to the shifting field of colonial politics. On one level, half a century of unrest, rebellion, restoration, and usurpation of the existing Spanish government on the Iberian peninsula had rendered ambiguous the difference between Spanish citizen and colonial subject, just as it had obscured the difference between monarchy and nation. In such an environment, the importance or unimportance of the Creoles and Creole identification changed with the currents of Spain’s politics. On another level, the association between Creoles, mestizos, and natives came to be overdetermined by the exceptional administration of Special Laws, which began with the stigma of absolute difference between colonizer and colonial subject, expressed primarily in racial terms (see chapter 2). While Mas and others clearly recognized the genealogical roots of the Creoles as Spanish, writers also wittingly or unwittingly began to conflate Creoles with mestizos and Indios from the perspective of colonial politics—with regard to the secularization controversy, competition for government and military posts, the segregation of native-born troops from peninsular Spanish ones, and so forth. In fact, peninsular Spanish officials throughout the nineteenth century often complained that the association between Creoles and other locally born inhabitants actually distanced the former from a sense of Spanish patriotism and brought them closer to their mestizo and Indio associates. In 1820, Don Manuel Bernáldez Pizarro observed, “The officer who is a native of the country has all the lax characteristics which the climate induces. . . . Being nearer to the Indian soldiers in their customs and language, [they] make common cause with the latter, and seduce and lead them into their own faction, with a marvelous readiness.”46 This was not only true of Creoles in the military: in his 1858 A Visit to the Philippine Islands, John Bowring observed the tendency of Creoles to wear “the loose and more convenient Indian costume” in the privacy of their homes, and Jean Mallat points out in Les Philippines (1846) that Creoles learn their “gift for imitation” (talent

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d’imitation) from “their daily contact with the natives” (leur contact journalier avec les Indiens).47 Education, customs, language, and climate: these are some of the factors that allowed peninsular Spaniards to consider Creoles not from the perspective of their blood and patrimony, but from the perspective of their associations and the political character that these associations assumed. The attacks on the secular clergy by the missionary orders follow this logic of association consistently. In the opening paragraph of the article to which Burgos’s “Manifesto” responds, the anonymous author claims, “It is commonly said that the Tagalog makes an excellent soldier, a fair corporal, and a bad sergeant . . . being unfit for such a task; so in the same way the Filipino sworn into the service of the altars, is usually good at discharging the mechanical tasks within the Church; but he will never come to excel once he is adorned with the priestly robe.” [Se dice vulgarmente que el tagalo es un escelente Soldado, un regular Cabo, un mal Sargento . . . por ser inepto para ello; pues de la misma manera el Filipino que se consagra al servicio de los altares, suele ser un buen ejecutor en el desempeño de los cargos mecánicos de una Iglesia; pero nunca llega á sobresalir cuando se halla adonado con la investidura Sacerdotal.]48 The analogy serves to illustrate not the difference between Indios and Creoles, but their sameness. What is interesting about Burgos’s response in the “Manifesto” is that, instead of qualifying this conflation, the author further obscures the distinction and eventually exploits it. In one passage he appears cognizant of the difference between the judgment of Creole and native secular priests: “It is just . . . to recognize the merit of the regular clergy,” he admits, “but it is a grave lack of justice to deny it absolutely to the secular clergy, be they what they are, Filipinos or indigenous” (Schumacher, Burgos, 58). [Justo . . . es reconocer el mérito de estos (regulares), pero es una grave falta de justicia el negarlo absolutamente á los Clérigos, sean estos lo que son, fi lipinos ó indígenas.] In this statement, the reader sees a clear distinction between secular priests who are Creoles (filipinos) and those who are Indios (indígenas). In the next paragraph, however, he alerts the reader: “We immediately forewarn the reader against any hope of fi nding in [this “Manifesto”] culture, or elegance in language . . . because what can one expect from the incapacity, ineptitude, and coarseness of the native clergy of Filipinas? (58; trans. slightly modified). [Desde luego prevenimos al lector que no espere hallar en él cultura, ó elegancia en el lenguaje . . . porque;

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¿qué se puede esperar de la incapacidad, de la inaptitud y rudeza de los Clérigos Indígenas de Filipinas?” (59).] In this statement, the distinction between Creoles and Indios is not so certain. “We have been provoked,” Burgos continues, “and we consider it a duty to stand in defense of our race, our class, and our honor” (58; trans. slightly modified). [Hemos sido provocados, y consideramos un deber el salir á la defensa de nuestra raza, de nuestra clase, y de nuestra honra.] Again, a series of ambiguous antecedents to the pronomial “We” confront the reader. Between the categories of race and class, the term Filipino hesitates, wavers, calling ceaselessly for a new network of signs, associations, and references to frame or reterritorialize it. Filipino thus acts as a floating signifier: in existing between terms, it calls for their reconciliation in a concept that precedes both in a political identity that is radically new, yet capable of speaking for generations and centuries past. Following William Henry Scott’s observation, “Filipino patriots began to project the term [Filipino] anachronistically into past centuries. Thus, they identified all Spanish bishops born in the Philippines as native Filipinos, however surprised those bishops would have been to hear themselves referred to as such.”49 Of course, skeptics may invoke the historical context of Burgos’s “Manifesto” to question the intentionality of such ambiguities. After all, one might argue, if Burgos had been at that time the only Creole in the secular clergy, he might have had every reason to be ambiguous about his racial identity: Why would he write a manifesto that so convincingly singled out his authorship? This counter-argument, however, does not necessarily contradict the fi rst: in fact, it only adds to the previous conclusion that, for practical as well as theoretical reasons, Burgos could not write as a Creole. In representing a predominantly native secular clergy, he has to “disidentify” with his own status as a Creole, and write as if he were an Indio: hence, the allusion to “our race,” “nuestra raza.” At the same time, however, he has to find a way to acknowledge and justify the presence of Creoles on the nonwhite side of the secular controversy: hence, “our class” (Sp., nuestra clase). This brings us to the third term in Burgos’s chain of antecedents, “our honor [honra].” Although the word appears initially as a kind of rhetorical flourish or adornment to the previous two assertions (nuestra raza, nuestra clase), honra, “honor” as esteem or virtue, is in fact the only property of the Filipino that Creoles and Indios can be said to share without contradiction. This common property can be illustrated in Burgos’s preference for the word honra over honor. In many cases,

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both words are interchangeable. Yet while the fi rst implies the estimation or calculation of one’s personal character or virtue, the second tends to emphasize the objective status or formal legitimacy of honor insofar as it determines one’s social status. 50 The non-aristocratic possession of honor, Burgos’s argument for the dignity of the secular clergy, thus incorporates a modern distinction that appears at odds with the exceptional system of colonial privilege. This system inhered in the administration of Special Laws and the practice of institutional racism in the struggle between the regular and secular clergy over control of the church parishes. With the dissociation of this “internal” honor from its external manifestations, “the Filipinos” begin to acquire a certain cohesion as a group whose claim for the social status of retaining their church parishes belies a deeper claim to be granted a dignity that defi es status hierarchy in general. 51 The disarticulation of honor as a crucial element in the maintenance of a colonial hierarchy based on Spanish prestige results in its bifurcation into a discredited external manifestation of favor granted to the regular clergy on the one hand and the “inner nobility” of the maligned Filipino on the other. This bifurcation in turn frees a series of tropes relating to the hierarchy of social status, enabling “the Filipinos” to seize and reuse or “reoccupy” those phrases and terms formerly reserved for now anachronistic concepts of nobility.52 The reputation of Pedro Peláez, for example, is defended in the opening paragraph as “la alta dignidad de un príncipe de la Iglesia” (the high dignity of a prince of the Church).53 In a later article in the Madrid newspaper La Discusión, Burgos defends the hidalguia, or noble character, of the secular clergy (Schumacher, Burgos, 166). Both examples reveal a metaphorical use of language necessary to the development of a political rhetoric; yet they also imply the free, aesthetic play of those tropes that the colonial symbolic order had lost in a long process of what Mas had called Spanish desprestigio, or disrepute. These were the very tropes that late colonialism would attempt to appropriate for itself in its reassertion or “reconquest” of peninsular Spanish prestige. The acknowledgment of honor owed to “the Filipinos” amounts to what Hans Blumenberg has identified as a “reversal of the relation of debt.” Here, the infi nite symbolic debt that is owed to Spanish rule—a debt that informs at once the economic basis of colonial tribute and mandatory labor (polos y servicios), the political basis of adjudicating Spanish loyalty to the nation, and the religious basis of sin and redemption—suddenly turns inside out and becomes a question of what Spain

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owes the Filipino people.54 In Burgos’s later writings, this reversal of symbolic debt is clear: “Spain’s greatest glory in these islands consists in its total abandonment to those generous sentiments belonging to the sons of this land.” [La gloria más grande de España en estas Islas consiste en estar abandonada enteramente a estos generosos sentimientos de todos los hijos de este suelo.]55 Another letter, in which he expresses more or less the same sentiment, elaborates as follows: “The peninsular Spaniards residing in this land are very few; they would have no defense were it not for the natives themselves” (144). [Los españoles peninsulares residentes en este suelo son poquísimos; medios de defensa no tendrían si no contasen con los mismos naturales.] In both instances, Spanish civilization has ceded to native hospitality and generosity. At the end of Burgos’s “Manifesto,” when the author asserts the “inalienable rights” (104) of the secular clergy, we can thus understand his appropriation of a constitutional slogan (which has its roots in natural law) on at least two levels. First, it frames the secular controversy in terms of the larger ideological struggle between constitutional and colonial reform, an issue that widened the scope and horizon of an emergent Filipino public opinion by tying the Philippines directly to the political debates in the Spanish press. Second, it publicly opens the Philippines (and the government that administers it) to the judgment and critique of a reading public outside it, thereby blowing open the closed circuit of colonial government ruled by Special Laws. As Burgos himself claims of Peláez, his memory becomes a question of public property (104): by forming an opinion of Peláez’s virtue, the reader not only comes to understand the secular controversy in relation to Spanish history, but also forms a political opinion regarding Spanish colonial policy in general. Finally, in the argument for acknowledging the dignity of the secular clergy, the metaphorization of social status contributes both to the critique of the government’s dangerous tendency toward colonial apartheid and to a countermovement compelled by the restitution of the debt owed by the entirety of Spanish colonial rule.56 Under the secular clergy’s “prince,” Creoles, mestizos, and natives may invoke the principle of their inalienable rights as members of a Spanish nation, whose loyalty and “noble sentiments” transcend their designations of caste, class, and race. The ideological transformation of the secular clergy in Burgos’s hands, then, corresponds to an aesthetic labor of language, in which a vocabulary meant to distinguish levels of social status becomes transformed, transvalued, into a vocabulary that legitimizes the emergence of new political identities.

chapter 5

Aesthetics ¡Ved!, la prensa misma, por más retrógrada que quisiese ser, da también sin quererlo un paso hacia delante. [Look at the press! However backward it wants to be, it involuntarily makes progress.] José Rizal, Noli me tangere

Throughout the nineteenth century, colonial reformers kept returning to the idea that the preservation of Spanish rule in the Philippines depended on a fundamental restructuring of colonial administration, which had to reconcile the solicitation and ramification of native consent to colonial rule with the threat of native and mestizo dissidence. Given that the average term for the highest offi ce in the colonial government, that of captain-general, lasted only six years and that, moreover, many of these appointed governors in the nineteenth century did not complete their service, largely because of the unstable political conditions in Spain itself, colonial reform remained no more than a blueprint. Yet from the early seesaw of Spanish politics following the Napoleonic invasion of Spain in 1808 and particularly after the failure of liberal reforms in the Spanish metropolis in 1837, appointees to the governorship of the Philippines recognized in the (promised) administration of Special Laws the mandate to ensure the preservation and continuity of colonial order irrespective of the conditions or form of government obtaining on the peninsula. In 1848, Governor and Captain-General Narciso Clavería welcomed a great number of exiles deported from Spain with the following words: “Here there exist no political opinions; here, from the moment you set foot on this ground, there are only Spaniards, and you will be treated by me and everyone as unfortunate fellow countrymen, as Spaniards and gentlemen” (italics added).1 157

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This general, abstract “Spaniard and gentleman,” whose distinguishing trait in the colony was that he was stripped of all distinguishing traits that would identify him in Spain, paradoxically (but not coincidentally) appears at the same time that colonial subjects are being assigned identities that had hitherto never existed (see the introduction). In 1849, Clavería set out to assign a patronymic to every native who lacked one, or a consistent one, which would serve “as a base for the country’s statistics, and moreover, [be] conducive to the administration of justice, parochial offices, the charging of imposts and the movement of the population [de base a la estadística del país, y demás, conducente a la administración de justicia, asientos parroquiales, cobranza de impuestos y movimiento de población].”2 The order was accompanied by an official census, which Clavería hoped to use as the basis of measuring population statistics in order to ensure the accuracy of the tribute, regulate forced labor (or its purchase and sale by a third party), examine migration and settlement patterns, and monitor any unauthorized resettlement or delinquency pertaining to the payment of tribute and or forced labor. All colonial subjects lacking a fi xed last name were required to choose one from a list of last names provided by the town mayor (alcalde mayor). Families belonging to the native “elite,” or principalía were allowed to preserve their indigenous names: all other names that did not correspond with traditional Spanish names had to be exchanged for Spanish ones. Clavería’s speech and decrees highlight two peculiarities of society under the aegis of the modern colonial state that are the subject of this chapter. The fi rst is that both the abstract Spanish colonialist and the individualized colonial subject have something in common: their separation from a past of collusion, as well as confl ict, as the ground for the projection of a modern yet at the same time colonial civil society. The second is that the production of knowledge about the colonial population is inseparable from its constitution as a population by the colonial state, which entailed no small degree of invention, improvisation, and fiction. The intersection of these two observations—the projection of a specifically colonial civil society and the forced constitution of the colonial population by the colonial state—manifests itself most prominently in the development of colonial costumbrismo and the novel. When one examines the expansion of print, predominantly through the production of newspapers in the Philippines, beginning with La Esperanza (the fi rst daily newspaper) in 1845, one might legitimately

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call the middle decades of the nineteenth century (with some exaggeration and irony) the “Golden Age” of Philippine journalism and literature in Spanish. A more modest assertion might say that it was in this period, and particularly between 1860 and the 1880s, that a large diversity of newspapers and novels began to be published in Manila, most of the latter featuring news items regarding Philippine settings and inhabitants for the fi rst time. This increased production can be ascribed, on one level, to the initiative of a new generation of Spanish émigrés and colonial bureaucrats, many of them children of the struggles for constitutional republicanism in the metropolis, as well as a generation of exiles who landed in the Philippines in 1848, and who took an active interest in stimulating a newspaper industry. 3 Between 1848 and 1860, only one of five newspapers lasted more than two years, and that was the government-sponsored Boletín Oficial de Filipinas (which José Felipe del Pan edited). Beginning with the Diario de Manila (also edited by Pan) in 1860, however, newspapers began to grow and proliferate, including one translated into various native vernaculars (El Pasig), one produced in Ilocano (El Ilocano), and several devoted to promoting the autonomy of a literary and aesthetic culture in the Philippines. This chapter explores the relationship of the increased production of the newspapers in this period with the literary production of “civil society,” or a public sphere as an aesthetic representation. In previous chapters we have seen how the aesthetic imagination of constitutional government and republican sovereignty comes to play a role in the interpretation and redefi nition of the law and its exception(s), as well as the fashioning of political identities. This chapter, in contrast, illustrates how the fictions of public opinion and civil society were imagined and projected upon an emergent reading public. As the next chapter shows, the novel in particular offered a field of aesthetic creation that allowed writers to conjecture about, pursue, and critique various aspects of modern colonial rule through the figures and constituencies that comprised colonial society: the Indio in his various activities and associations; the Chinese usurer and corner-shop owner; the elite mestizos in the suburbs located just outside the walled section of Manila, Intramuros. Most important of these, of course, was the Spanish colonialist, who often appears as the main protagonist in these novels, and whose ideas of colonial society undergo a transformation (for better or worse) through his experience of living in Spain’s far-flung possession.

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Although the novella, stories, and sketches that I analyze here, published between 1859 and 1882, are diverse and numerous, I focus on the writings of Ricardo de Puga and Federico Casademunt. Both writers were instrumental in stimulating a new genre of journalism in Manila: the “artistic-scientific” or “literary-scientific” review. As a more reflective genre of journalistic literature, less concerned with the reportage of daily or weekly events than with the significance of their novelty—or more precisely, their modernity—the review best illustrates the constitution, contradictions, and compromise of colonial modernity as these dynamics were shaped before and after the 1872 Cavite rebellion. Within this genre, both Puga and Casademunt took seriously their self-appointed task of bringing the fruits of European Enlightenment to the tropics, particularly through the power of the written word. In undertaking the task of comparing what ought to exist in colonial society to the reality that fell short of expectations, each writer felt compelled to offer a diagnosis of that society through representations of contact, encounter, friendship and romance, and fi nally racial difference, which defi ned the relationships between colonizer and colonial subject. Within this larger characterization that sustains these and other Spanish writers in a comparative frame, however, I aim to show that what defined the integrity of this “Filipino” aesthetic sphere among these and other writers was, paradoxically, the admission that such a sphere did not, and could not, exist under colonial conditions. I do not mean by this, however, that these editors, journalists, and novelists openly advocated the abolition of censorship, although many did—or, for that matter, broader colonial reforms or the final institution of Special Laws. In fact, an analysis of these texts illustrates quite the opposite: the writers’ constant appeal to the extra-aesthetic function of the aesthetic object or text (i.e., for openly pedagogical or propagandistic motives) evinces a suspicion of the very form of aesthetic validation or legitimacy that they solicit as the source of their authority. To put it another way, the producers of the first self-proclaimed “Philippine” literature in the archipelago paradoxically defined their project in and through the sabotage and disparagement of their own claims to an original and singular expression of the society in which they lived. The simultaneous appeal to and disavowal of the “peculiar circumstances” under which they lived led to the simultaneous aestheticization and debasement of the colonial native. In the images of Puga’s Ilustración Filipina and Casademunt’s novella “Agapito Macapingan,” both writers restate the contradictions

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of colonial rule that each hoped to transcend or resolve through their appeal to a colonial aesthetic.

illustr ating filipinos In 1859, editor Ricardo de Puga launched an enterprise whose ambitions reached far beyond their actual realization, but which became the reference point for understanding the representation of the Philippines and its inhabitants in aesthetic terms. That was the publication of the fortnightly newspaper Ilustración Filipina, which Puga described in his opening editorial as “an artistic-scientific-literary publication: in other words, a publication in step with the taste [gusto] of the century, in which utility harmonizes with pleasure.”4 The opening editorial commemorates the invention of the printing press as the event that ostensibly transformed all the nations of the world from separate, heterogeneous societies to a “great family of brothers” dedicated to the “perfection of civilization” (1). Unlike other periodicals published in the Philippines at the time, Puga’s Ilustración Filipina distinguishes itself in two respects: fi rst, its subject was not the daily or weekly news, but any and all aspects of colonial society that called for moral or aesthetic speculation; second, the periodical targeted not primarily a reading public but a visual one. With regard to the fi rst, Ilustración Filipina belongs to the tradition of the “moral weeklies” published in Europe from the eighteenth century onward, in which “the public” fi rst came to be regarded as an object of commentary and critique. Commenting on early periodicals published in England by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in the early eighteenth century, Habermas writes, “In the Tatler, the Spectator, and the Guardian the public held up a mirror to itself; it did not yet come to a self-understanding through the detour of a reflection on the works of philosophy and literature, art and science, but through entering itself into “literature” as an object . . . The public that read and debated this sort of thing read and debated about itself” (italics added).5 Similarly, in France, the representation of and cultural reflection on social and cultural types were referred to as tableaux, which eighteenth-century encyclopedist Denis Diderot defined in painting as “the representation of a subject of painting enclosed within a space adorned by the ordinariness of a frame or border,” and in literature as “pertaining to the descriptions of passions, events, and / or natural phenomena that an orator or poet scatters about within his / her composition, in which

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the effect is to amuse, astonish, touch, frighten, or imitate, etc.”6 In Spain, this type of representation was identified as the literary genre of costumbrismo, dominated by the formidable pen of Mariano José de Larra.7 With regard to the second distinction, Puga’s plan for Ilustración Filipina was to provide natives and foreigners alike with a visual encyclopedia of the country and its inhabitants. In Spanish costumbrismo, writers often referred to collections of this kind of periodical literature as “albums.” These descriptions would be complemented by the incorporation of etchings and lithographs, whose quality rivaled even those of the Iberian Peninsula at the time.8 For Puga, both text and image were important for the dual task of aesthetic representation and critique implicit in the words publicidad and ilustración: By means of publicity [publicidad] . . . peoples are united and understand one another; the written word, transmitted among them, exercises the double influence of enlightening them [ilustrarlos] and predisposing their spirits to fraternity and association, and when that written word comes attired in the enchantments of the artist’s burin, rich with local color, its influence is even more direct—in it one captures at once tasty herbs for the intellect, as well as a pleasing object for the eyes; . . . [illustrated publications] familiarize men with the customs and localities of the most distant countries, and gradually present them in a curious album, wherein the wise man, the artist, and the merchant, encounter diversion, instruction, and benefit. (2)9

The play on the word ilustrar as meaning simultaneously “to enlighten” and “to illustrate” is central to the project of aesthetically representing natural landscapes and native customs for an imagined readership that exceeded presumptions of caste, class, or race. For all practical purposes, Ilustración Filipina addressed often-diverse constituencies by achieving “enlightenment” through “illustration,” and vice versa. For in the illustration of native “types,” native readers would feasibly recognize themselves and each other in the representation and thus become “predisposed” to “fraternity and association.” Such a predisposition, for Puga, was central to the completion of the task of civilization. At the other end of the spectrum, the illustration of the colony and its inhabitants served as a quick reference guide for foreign travelers and businessmen. What both had in common was the aesthetic contemplation of the images “for diversion, instruction, and benefit.” In the pages of Ilustración Filipina, colonizer and colonial subject alike would find the basis of their commonness: their “sensus communis” as Kant would say (see the introduction).

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As a literary form, colonial costumbrismo predictably has a great deal in common with the production of costumbrista articles in Spain. For one thing, both sought to defi ne themselves in opposition to outside or “foreign” representations of Spain and the Philippines. Puga criticizes “the inexactitude with which some travelers have described [the Philippines]—travelers who, without taking time to form reasoned judgments, have given credit to generally unfavorable, absurd narrations, all in the name of satisfying their vanity [and] fi lling the pages of their journals with travel impressions” (Puga, “Introducción,” 2).10 Similarly, in Spain, the prologue of a collection of costumbrista articles by Mesonero Romanos (who was, besides Larra, the most well-known Spanish writer associated with the minor literary genre of costumbrismo) also lashes out against the “disfigurement” of Spain’s national customs by foreign writers.11 Spain’s defensiveness can be traced to a number of factors: its humiliating subordination to France and England during the nineteenth century and the failed bourgeois attempts to install a constitutional regime, among others.12 Yet Ilustración Filipina editor Ricardo de Puga’s exhortation takes on a particular urgency when we consider the increased entrance of foreign (particularly British and U.S.) economic interests in the Philippines by 1860.13 Both Spanish and colonial Filipino forms of costumbrismo, then, were reacting to different sets of consequences brought about by the universalization of the state form, economic globalization, and the influx of exiles, travelers, and contraband books into the islands.14 Of equal importance, both Spanish and colonial costumbrismo become meaningful against the backdrop of attempts in both Spain and the Philippines to establish a civil authority and a public sphere autonomous from the ancien régime in Spain and the colonial state in the Philippines (Ucelay de Cal, 68–98).15 In this respect, Spanish and colonial costumbrismo endlessly rehearsed the advent of an authentic literary representation of an autochthonous (Spanish or Filipino) reality, without however claiming to be that literature. Hence its compromised status: like the pictures that accompanied such character “sketches” (bosquejos), the costumbrista article’s value lay in its anticipation of a literature that would complete its sketches in lyric, drama, or the novel. Third, the minor status of costumbrismo reflected the intellectual position of the writers, who often had the unenviable task of representing or announcing an enlightenment that either never came or whose outcome was uncertain. In Spain, this frustration constitutes a veritable

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tradition of aesthetic representation, from Francisco de Goya’s famous series of etchings, Los Caprichos, to the tragic suicide of writer and critic José Mariano de Larra and the failure of chronicler Ramón de Mesonero Romanos to extend his costumbrista articles and scenes into the form of the novel. In the case of the latter two, these writers defi ned the limits of the genre, as well as the liberal project in Spain: the former through a use of satire that became increasingly brooding and enigmatic, and the latter through the careful avoidance of any religious, political, or social views that would adversely affect the “picturesque” and schematic character of his subjects. Each in his own way described the acute failure of the aesthetic to inspire, shape, or participate in a project of consolidating an integral public sphere based on the principles of enlightenment.16 Both also exposed and explored the gulf separating the “enlightened” and “unenlightened” sectors of the imaginary community known as the public sphere, or civil society. Similarly, both satirical and “picturesque” approaches to the portrayal of the colonial tropics characterize the sketches laid out in the pages of Puga’s weekly. What differentiates these from their metropolitan counterparts, however, is the emergence of a racial division between Spanish colonialists and travelers, on the one hand, and native subjects, on the other, which consistently displaces the polarization between “enlightened” and “unenlightened” sectors of the public.17 And far from evaluating the distance between the two as symptomatic of the failed modern project, Spanish liberals like Puga would increasingly see this division as fundamental to modern colonialism’s success. The racism of illustrating Filipino types appears in two general tendencies of the genre, which turn out to be related. The fi rst portrays the native inhabitants as products of the natural landscape surrounding them; the second involves a critique the unfi nished project of Hispanization, which has led to the “partial,” “incomplete,” or “hybridized” acculturation of Spanish and European civilization by the Indio. Let us examine each tendency separately. The Production of the Autochthonous Ricardo de Puga, among others, often portrayed native types against the background of a primitive and Edenic nature. In his essay “Reflections on the Influence of Climate on Literature (Uses and Customs),” Puga adopts a Rousseauian division between temperate and tropical zones in order to describe the beauty of Filipino nature as a privileged frame

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of reference for understanding the typical Indio. This temperate/tropical division, not coincidentally aligned along a west/east axis instead of north/south, assumes a whole series of other binarisms between industry and sloth, prose and poetry, philosophy and physical rapture, originality and imitation.18 “Melancholic and contemplative, Western poetry bathes the soul with its tenderness and kind philosophy . . . even as Eastern [poetry], full of languidness and almost enervated with the perfume of its gardens, relaxes the senses and enraptures them with the opulence and bravery of its enchanting images” (Ilustración Filipina, 2:63).19 It is from this discussion of climate and literature that Puga frames the “typical” Indio: “When we hear [the ‘Eastern’ songs] from the lips of an Indio with that intonation that is peculiar to him, it is like seeing his portrait in daguerreotype . . . the paced meter of his dithyrambs; the unique posture in which he remains seated for whole hours, caressing . . . his rooster . . . so self-absorbed, so distracted . . . that we surmise that he cares not a fig in that instant for his family . . . nor himself” (2:64).20 The association between nature and the native is repeated in other costumbrista articles, some written by Puga himself. In “Rural Scenes of the Country,” Puga claims, “Here, where the vegetation is so spontaneous and original, the customs of these beings, whose understanding and needs reach no further [than] the horizon that forms the chains of their mountains or the giant trees of their forests, cannot be any less spontaneous and original to the highest degree” (Ilustración Filipina, 2:1). The accompanying illustration brings together an amalgam of objects and activities associated with the native and the tropical environment that so excited Puga: a rustic stream bordered by foliage, a canoe bearing fruits and fish, a nipa hut, a tenant farmer plowing the field with his carabao; and, in the background, a volcanic eruption. The staged quality of the illustration renders it susceptible to allegorical reading as well as appreciation of its realism: in it the native is configured as part victim, part cultivator, part beneficiary of a nature half hidden behind the palm fronds that border the scene. In another article describing the same “rustic” native Tasio, the anonymous author goes so far as to compare the native to an agile quadruped, an amphibian, a dog, a bat, and an owl (Ilustración Filipina, 1:2–4). Both articles strive to aestheticize the native in order to strip him of his dignity and reduce him to the animal kingdom (see figure 4). 21 Such an aesthetic had various discursive functions in the imagination of a colonial society that was either on the road to civilization or for various reasons blocked or waylaid from it. First, in contrast

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figure 4. “El Indio ‘Tasio,’ ” Ilustración Filipina, 1: near page 2

to the romantic model of the native and nature as the renunciation of the terror and brutalization of human beings brought about by modernization, the association of the native with nature in fact dehumanizes the native, places him on the same level as that “primitive beauty” awaiting exploitation by the enlightened eye and the masterful hand. For Puga, as well as in the realistic lithographs reproduced in Ilustración Filipina, the beauty of Filipino nature did not exist to be appreciated from a distance, but to be penetrated. In “Crónica del País,” for example, the author repeatedly goads the reader into following him into the depths of nature with the repeated phrases: “Continue; don’t slow

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your pace . . . move ahead without hesitation . . . don’t stop, continue forward . . . and you will find yourselves suddenly on a height that makes you the owners of a wide horizon” (Ilustración Filipina, 1:4). [Seguid; no detengáis la marcha . . . avanzad sin recelo. . . . no os detengáis; continuad la marcha . . . y os veréis colocados de repente en una eminencia que os hace dueños de un horizonte dilatado.] The association between nature and the native facilitated the slippages between exploiting one and the other: both were stigmatized by “an emptiness in them that is impossible for you to fill [un vacío en ellos que os ha sido imposible llenar]” (4). In the case of nature, it is the lack of monuments “on which to write your names”; in the case of the native, it is the lack of history: “Do not bother to investigate the past of that people, do not ask after its beliefs, customs, its origin, since you seek in vain. The first page of their history is written by Miguel López de Legazpi, messenger of Christianity and civilization; but turn your gaze further back and you will find chaos, ignorance, nothing! Filipinas presents a significant exception among countries, which is the lack of history and monuments” (5).22 While Ilustración Filipina benevolently aims to grant the native an aesthetic representation through his idealized harmony with a sublime and unexplored Filipino nature, the idealization itself contained a critique of both as lacking in civilization. In setting out to express “the native” in terms of the nature that brings him or her into being, this nature itself is found to be incomplete, lacking, and thus “predisposed” to a new advent of Spanish civilization. Incomplete “Hispanization” This is where the second tendency of colonial costumbrismo comes into play. If the natives could not ultimately remain identified with a nature that was ultimately defined by or as a lack of civilization, they would have to turn against any inclinations toward the latter; and turn toward a colonial civil society. Here aesthetic colonial costumbrismo gives way to the more practical task of creating colonial subjects, a task that called for the cultivation of public opinion to answer questions such as the following: How will the natives facilitate this transition from nature to civilization? What stops them from making it; and what can the enlightened sector of colonial society do to effect a transition, however compromised? For the colonial costumbrista, most, if not all, of the characters typified in the pages of Ilustración Filipina carry the stigma of hybridity in

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its various manifestations. In the case of “Quica” the seamstress, her “mixed education,” given by her European patrons on the one hand and the other domestic servants on the other, results in a satirical combination of customs and habits: “She learned, then, how to sew and how to deceive; how to be clean in body and indolent in work; she became presumptuous and careless . . . she became, in the end, an exceptional, characteristic being, sui generis, who can completely resemble no other but herself” (Ilustración Filipina, 1:17). 23 In the case of “Ñora Goya,” the midwife, her lack of formal education forces her to “improvise”: “As the coach-drivers, the cooks, and almost all the masters in arts and professions improvise, . . . it truly shocks and moves one to see how the crudest preoccupations lead their tasks to contradict and destroy the goodness of nature” (38). 24 And the quack, or mediquillo, resorts to excessive mimicry of the “European professor” or doctor in demonstrating his authority with a repertoire of stock phrases in Castilian (e.g., “Oh, that’s nothing!” on seeing the sick patient) and fi lling medical prescriptions with mysterious concoctions and herbal medicines like “St. Ignatius oil.” Such hybrid characters are an easy source of satire. Yet they also betray a certain anxiety about the partial recognition of these colonial subjects: they are almost known, but for this reason all the more unknown and possibly treacherous. In the transplantation of “enlightened” categories of identification and recognition to the colonial world, the native Filipino becomes a parody and (in the case of the mediquillo) a threat to the very public sphere of which he is ostensibly a member. 25 What had therefore begun as Puga’s aesthetic project to pair native Filipino types with their “natural environment” quickly devolved into the proliferation of public opinions on the Indio Filipino as an obstacle to civil society, hidden under the guise of aesthetic creation. In this respect, colonial costumbrismo consistently worked against itself: in attempting to differentiate among native Filipino “types” brought into being by either the countryside or the city, it often collapsed into a reiteration of the Indio in general. 26 The buyera is “a living chronicle of the population” (Ilustración Filipina, 1:63); the children analyzed by writer Fr. Martínez grow up to represent “the indigenous race” (2:146); in portraying the native cook, or cocinero, the author declares, “He is neither more nor less than the Indio cook. Let me clarify . . . he is the cooking Indio, because before being a cook he is an Indio” (2:287). [Es ni menos ni mas que el cocinero Indio. Distingo . . . es el Indio cocinero, porque antes que cocinero es Indio.]

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In fact, the “Indio Filipino” as a general costumbrista type appears on the last issue of the publication. The lithograph shows a servant fallen asleep against a stool, holding a shoe in one hand and a brush on the other, with the instruments for polishing shoes strewn about him (figure 5). The brief article that accompanies it reads: Indio Filipino: Despues de lo que hemos dicho y de lo que dice todo el mundo, acerca de la proverbial pereza del indíjena, la adjunta lámina acaba de retratarle perfectamente, y nos hizo recordar los versos de cierto amigo nuestro alusivos al objeto: Aquí Constante Pereza De no hacer nada rendido, Ha inclinado la cabeza Y se ha quedado . . . dormido. (Ilustración Filipina, 2:286) [Indio Filipino: After what we have said and what everyone says about the proverbial laziness of the indigene, the adjoining picture has just portrayed him perfectly, and it recalls to us the verses of a certain friend of ours alluding to our object: Here Constant Laziness For not having fi nished anything Has laid down her head And . . . fallen asleep.]

If Ricardo de Puga sought to paint the native Filipino against the background of an as-yet-unexploited nature, other writers pushed costumbrismo toward satire and a kind of quasi-moral critique, in which the portrayal of native Filipino types collapses into a generalized frustration with the limits of colonial reform. This frustration only grew deeper with the increased penetration of travelers and capitalists into the archipelago and the failure of the colonial government to institute reforms that would allow both Spain and the inhabitants of the Philippines to benefit from this penetration.27 Yet the racist implications of “blaming the victims” of colonial rule as ultimately responsible for the limits of reform belie the imbrications of colonialism and modernity, in which Indios were made responsible for their incomplete Hispanization without, however, possessing any means of determining the character, shape, and direction of that acculturation in any official, social, or political capacity. This double bind reflected the paradoxical nature of the colonial public sphere, in which the discourses of public opinion and civil society enabled the colonialist to see and speak about the native Filipino in ways that

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figure 5. “Indio Filipino,” Ilustración Filipina, 2: near page 286

were necessary to the political rationality of the colonial state. At one level, colonial government merely fought to shore up the original objectives of Spanish colonial sovereignty, “unifying people under one church and one flag.”28 On the other hand, the solicitation of native will, desire, and consent, allowed for and even actively produced new representations of the other’s voice in the plaza, the pulpit, the courts, and the newspapers. One can see these two tendencies reflected in the outer extremes of representing the other in colonial costumbrismo: on

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the one hand, as a diversity of “types” distinguished from one another and categorized by the colonial gaze; and on the other hand, as merely variations of essentially the same typical Indio. In the colonial aesthetic’s dependence on public opinion and articulation of a public sphere, the native’s lack was either constitutive of his identity as a nonSpaniard, or racial other, or reflective of a tropical and overabundant nature that nevertheless remained incomplete and uncivilized.

illustrating spaniards Ilustración Filipina was the fi rst of various publications dedicated to stimulating the “moral and material” interests of the colony in and through the aesthetic review of the Philippine landscape and its inhabitants. While the newspaper itself only lasted two years, similar publications, such as Revista de Filipinas, El Oriente/La Ilustración del Oriente, Revista del Liceo Artístico-Literario de Manila, Revista Filipina, and Manila Alegre, among others, proliferated throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. In these periodicals, the privatized sphere of critical and aesthetic reflection stakes its claims in the realm of public opinion. In this opening onto a dialectical process of representation and analysis, questions such as What is the Indio? inevitably reflected a new kind of question: Who or what is the peninsular Spaniard, and how is he defi ned in relation to his object of aesthetic reflection? This section illustrates how colonial costumbrismo as a hybrid and minor literary form—part folklore, part anthropology, part anecdote, and part enlightened public opinion—began to formulate the kind of fiction or fictions capable of sustaining the contradictions of colonial modernity. Three years after the 1872 Cavite rebellion, there appeared in the “Literature” section of the new Manila fortnightly newspaper Revista de Filipinas a series of episodic narratives on the life of a native, entitled “Agapito Macapingan.” The newspaper, under the editorship of José Felipe del Pan (after he left the Diario de Manila), only lasted two years; Retana, however, judges it to have been one of the most important newspapers to come out of the nineteenth century. 29 Told from the fi rst-person perspective, the pseudo-autobiography of Agapito Macapingan (as well as the entire “Literature” section) was discontinued after the middle of the second year. In fact, only months afterward, the entire newspaper format was scrapped, and Revista de Filipinas became the medium for an encyclopedia that would form the

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basis of a dictionary of commerce for capitalists and Spanish bureaucrats in the archipelago. The narrative of “Agapito Macapingan” unfolds on two levels: in the fi rst, author Federico Casademunt purports to transcribe the life story of his servant, beginning with the family tragedies of the latter’s early childhood. “Agapito Macapingan,” the author states, “does not attempt to be any more than a narration, a tale; what one fi nds in it, I have copied from a native, I have taken from his living voice, I have heard and transmitted it; it is not mine [no pretende ser mas que una narración, un relato; lo que en el se encuentre, lo he copiado del natural, lo he tomado de la viva voz, lo he escuchado y lo transmito: no es mío].”30 After Casademunt’s brief introduction, the rest of the serial is narrated in the fi rst person, from Agapito’s perspective. Let us examine these two levels, beginning with the second level of narrative, which alternately illuminates and obscures some of the issues raised in the fi rst. “I have painted these all-too-naked truths,” Agapito declares, “but can anyone who knows the country and the character of the natives deny them?” (Revista de Filipinas, 1:24).31 According to the voice of Agapito, his testimony responds to a specific need, which is to point out, correct, uproot, and punish certain “beliefs” from which “criminal” practices and the overall failure of institutional forms of justice are derived. To summarize the fi rst part briefly, Agapito is born as the son of Don Flaviano Macapingan, a native cabeza de barangay—that is, an Indio who is granted privileged (principal) status in the colonial hierarchy insofar as he is (or has been) elected by the municipality (barangay) to discharge certain tasks in a field of jurisdiction: the organization of a local militia, the collection of tribute, the conscription of other Indios into either military service or communal labor, the arbitration of small judicial matters, and so forth. 32 Since Agapito’s father cannot read, write, or count, he employs the services of a native member of the militia “Ñor Titong” and a native scribe (significantly named Calahati, literally “divided half” of something), both of whom exploit the father by overestimating the amount of tribute collected by Don Flaviano, thereby extracting their commission for their services, and writing the wrong numerals in his account book. Later, unable to explain to the Spanish administrator (in Spanish) his “miscalculations,” Agapito’s father is forced to pay from his own pocket the amount of tribute that is represented in the account book; failing that, he is sent to prison, and his property is confiscated.

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This first tragedy sets the tone for a number of others that will befall Agapito’s family and himself, inasmuch as they concern the lack of education that they have received as Indios who are nevertheless called to account for themselves before the law. When an accidental fire begins in Agapito’s house (due, he explicitly claims, not to carelessness but to the lack of safety measures in the construction of nipa or bamboo houses as well as the dry summer weather), it burns down the entire block. Don Flaviano is called upon to bear responsibility for the accident, but he escapes before the militia apprehends him (curiously led by “Ñor Titong”) and lives as a fugitive in a distant provincial neighborhood or barrio, where his cousin-in-law (Ciriaco) lives with a woman “without permission of the Church” (Revista de Filipinas, 1:139). After Agapito and his mother spend some months in prison, they join the father. Throughout the narrative, Agapito makes certain observations about the Indio in colonial society: his mistrust and fear of the law, his illiteracy, his exploitation of other Indios who are of a lower status than he in the eyes of the law, his expertise and facility in matters of deception, his tolerance for suffering, and the persistence of towns and villages outside the watchful gaze of the Spanish government in the nineteenth century. One of the salient characteristics of these observations concerns the Indio’s incomplete grasp of the law: “Justice,” Agapito reflects, “is represented in the Indios of my class and in my circumstances with a grim façade, and they do not see in that beautiful figure the maternal protectoress against false accusation but the tyrannical, implacable stepmother, who keeps a cruel and plow-like arm erect.”33 Because of this misinterpretation, the mimicry of colonial government on the level of local government becomes exaggerated to a tyrannical extreme.34 As Agapito tries to probe the reason for the law’s misapplication, the parodic reproduction of the law among the Indios (who lack the knowledge or recognition of the law’s proper functioning and its essential “benevolence” for the maintenance of social relations) becomes a major theme throughout the series. It is reflected in Agapito’s father— an Indio charged with the duties of a governmental post without knowing anything of those duties (Revista de Filipinas, 1:85); in the principal who cheats Agapito’s father (Ñor Titong, who incidentally is also the head of the militia that attempts to arrest Agapito’s father); in the scribe Calahati; and in the common-law relationship between Ciriaco and his wife. Indeed, the law’s bastardization is reflected in the mutilation and parodic quality of the names themselves: Ñor Titong’s title is

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shortened (from “Señor”), and the Tagalog ligature “-ng” is attached to the nickname “Tito.” And Calahati means “half,” signifying not only his duplicity in matters of accounting, but also his essential lack or incapacity to fulfi ll a government function. For Agapito Macapingan (and perhaps for the author, Federico Casademunt), the Indio suffers from partial Hispanization, which condemns him to living perpetually either inside the Hispanized colonial world without grasping its law (or grasping only its right to violence), or outside the law (marriage, responsibility for the conflagration) without having committed any crime. And instead of cultivating “the ties of fraternal equality, of protection and support” based on a common predicament, native Filipinos are given “to the most cruel of tyrannies.” We have seen some of these themes concerning the phenomenon of “partial Hispanization” in the costumbrista articles of Puga’s Ilustración Filipina. What distinguishes the narrative from the latter, however, is the fi rst-person perspective of Agapito: the testimonial and autobiographical voice, at least on the surface, enables the Indio to bypass the problems of speaking in Castilian and speaking as a subaltern before the Spanish colonialist. Moreover, the relationship between seeing and speaking that we saw in the costumbrista articles is here reversed; and instead of the enlightened eye disposing the native body to representation, speaking (for) it, the voice commands the terms of description and analysis. Thus, while the portrayal of colonial types places Casademunt’s narrative in the literary genre of Costumbres filipinas, the autobiographical perspective turns the “illustrative” gaze of the colonial costumbrista into an exploration of social psychology and a critique of colonial institutions. Inhabiting the space of literature, Agapito fi nds a home in the private “I” of subjectivity amidst the forms of institutional alienation in his journey from town to city and to barrio. On one level, at least, the native’s representation can be said to have “completed” the transition from a partial to split subjectivity, reflective of the rational divide between the private and public realms constitutive of a modern civil society. From this point, one would imagine that Agapito Macapingan would be well on his way to a greater awareness of cultivating more “mutual respect and consideration, precisely where the bonds of fraternal equality ought to spring.” Paradoxically, however, immediately following this reflection on the absence of “fraternal equality,” Macapingan concludes that the solution to such a problem would be a benevolent, welleducated master:

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Cuanto más elevada es [entre los amos bien educadas] la posición social, cuanto mas vasta es la esfera de sus conocimientos y mayor la superioridad moral sobre los que les sirven, les rodean ó dependen de ellos, más suave, más dulce, más blando, más tierno, más compasivo, más cariñoso suele ser el trato. (Revista de Filipinas, 2:85) [The more elevated his social position is among the fi rst of those (welleducated people), the more vast his sphere of knowledge, and the greater the moral superiority over those who serve him, those who surround or depend upon (these Spaniards), the easier, sweeter, milder, more tender, compassionate, caring is their treatment.]

This paradox, which betrays the ambivalence of the writer and his treatment of the Indio in “Agapito Macapingan,” is repeated several times throughout the narrative. Agapito is sent to Manila to work for the Spanish priest who also employs the son of Ciriaco (Agapito’s uncle), Brígido; in return, Agapito expects an education in Spanish and Latin. However, Brígido refuses to teach him Spanish and forces him to undertake the most arduous tasks without compensation. When Don Flaviano (Agapito’s father) learns that Agapito has not earned any money during his tutelage with the Spanish priest, he “contracts” him to work as a servant for a native family in San José, a barrio on the outskirts of Manila. There, his new masters beat him and force him to work like a slave. Both events lead Agapito to reflect upon the nature of servitude, but these reflections merely reinforce the need for a return to strict hierarchy between master and servant. “The master must never ever descend from a certain elevated pedestal, if he wants to be served well. To give a servant a prestige that is not always deserved and that depends more upon sympathy than the exact consciousness of his merits, is to undermine that pedestal at the base, exposing the figure who sustains the servant to fall along with him and be stepped on” (Revista de Filipinas, 1:294).35 Strangely, Agapito’s solution to the informal despotism imposed by Indios upon other Indios is a more formal despotism, embodied in the figure of the benevolent master, capable of enforcing the strict observance of a meritocracy—between Indios. This paradox of late colonialism reflects the confused emergence of Agapito’s authority to speak. As a voice delivered to the public, his evaluations regarding the need for benevolent masters would mean nothing without a simultaneous appeal to the principles of knowledge regarding the proper functioning of the law, recognition of what the law entails for the benefit of all people—masters and servants—and equality that underlies the just treatment and compensation of any

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servant by any master, benevolent or evil. Forced to live under the shadow of Spanish institutions that the Indio has failed to internalize, the writer portrays Agapito’s travels as a search for a world in which such institutions actually work for the greater prosperity of the native Filipino. Yet their proper functioning would entail not only a level of administrative or bureaucratic perfection, but also “enlightenment” on the part of the Indio, who would then be capable of negotiating the transition of the colonial system toward a more just yet rigorously centralized and strictly controlled regime. As Agapito himself admits, “An incomplete education, an absolute lack of notions about what it represents in societies, of the true mission in which justice is dispensed, is what leads the Indio to the wayward field which I have indicated” (Revista de Filipinas, 2:27).36 He cannot remain illiterate; yet neither can he be fully enlightened and thereby emancipated. This ambivalence of the narrative, between a call for liberal reforms and a return to the original blueprint of a benevolent political absolutism, returns in the chapter on Agapito’s self-education. Agapito’s education is achieved under adverse conditions: tyrannized by fellow Indio Brígido during the supposed period of his tutelage, Agapito takes a scrap of paper and whatever printed material he has found throughout the day, and in a corner of the kitchen he copies the letters. 37 His task is doubly difficult, for not only does he not know how to read and write in his own language, but he does not know Spanish (Revista de Filipinas, 1:295). Yet his self-tutelage also empowers him in two ways: on one level, his castellano enables him to represent himself before the Spanish amo without the need for someone (i.e., Brígido) to translate for him. This ability severely undermines Brígido’s power as Agapito’s immediate superior, for he can no longer assume to speak for Agapito before their master. Yet the ability to speak for oneself also takes on a symbolic importance. As Agapito explains in his fi rst encounter with the priest, the ability to answer for oneself is intimately tied to education, which among Indios is often considered synonymous with civilization. Thus when Agapito fails in this fi rst encounter to answer the priest, Brígido immediately explains, “Father, he isn’t civilized, he does not yet know how to answer” [No está, Padre, civilizado, todavía no sabe contestar]; and Agapito adds, “With this word we sadly conflate civilization with education” (189). [Con esa palabra confundimos lastimosamente la civilización con la educación.] One would conclude from Agapito’s victory over Brígido that the former would then desire the furtherance of his education. What follows,

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however, is an episode in which Agapito discourages his fellow Indios from learning Latin—an essential requirement for entering the priesthood as well as the professions of law and medicine. When Agapito fails to learn the language, he becomes so discouraged that he falls into a depression, which leads him to oppose the higher education of the native: “For my countrymen, for the Filipinos, like me, who send their children in droves to the colleges of the capital, uprooted by the same impulses under which my mother had seen herself possessed to send me, when the words of Ñor Ciriaco had seduced her” (Revista de Filipinas, 1:369; italics added).38 With the same inverted logic that enabled him to argue for the right to a benevolent master, here Agapito bases his warnings against superior education for the native on the fear that the Indio—or more generally, the Filipino—will lose his sense of individual dignity: “When a man loses the sense of his personal dignity, when he comes to be unaware of his rights among men, . . . he can be taken for useless for the rest of his days” (Revista de Filipinas, 1:368).39 For Agapito, a high school education is more than enough: “During my stay in college, I had received enough intellectual culture to know the horror of my situation. Without that crude education, I would have accepted [my oppression] unconsciously like so many others” (452).40 One of the things that can be concluded from these analyses is that the uncertainty of Agapito’s musings in many ways parallels and reflects the dilemma shared by the earlier writers of the liberal press in Manila. Caught between the liberal legacy of constitutional Spain and the perseverance of a regime of exception and privilege, Casademunt’s elaboration of the character Agapito Macapingan is in many ways, one might argue, the negative side of the author’s own ambivalent identity in the archipelago—alternately liberator and new master. Each attempt on Agapito’s behalf to establish a clear distinction between “them and us” alternately tends toward the reestablishment of a dominant-subaltern relation or the recognition of a collective “we” before the law. Indeed, this paradox is carried to its extreme on the second level of the narrative, wherein the author introduces the character of Agapito Macapingan as his servant and defi nes the nature of the latter’s testimonial: “My servant spoke and I wrote. He explained himself sometimes in Castilian, other times in Tagalog, and other times in neither Castilian nor Tagalog, and I endeavored to obtain in the language of Cervantes what the poor Indio, of brown features, low stature, and with bare feet, was telling me” (Revista de Filipinas, 1:28–29; italics added).41 On the one hand, the Spanish amanuensis recognizes the

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negativity (“ni en castellano ni en tagalo”) of the other and initially seems intent upon redeeming him, giving the other a voice in writing. But understanding that this redemption of the other’s voice would also give the colonial subject a new positivity, Casademunt retracts his gesture in this direction. In the prologue, the author (who plays the role of amanuensis) insists against the colonial subject’s autonomy, whether by testimony or by the space of literature, in his exaggerated apology regarding the story he is about to relate: I am not going to write a novel, much less a tale, nor even an article of novelties among those that the daily papers publish here. Those who expect to fi nd in this work the cohesive plot and well-prepared scenes belonging to the fi rst [genre], the force of imagination and gallantry of language in the second, the sudden effects or the moral or comedic end of the latter, please skip this page and all those in the successive editions of the REVISTA occupied by Agapito Macapingan. I ought not to deceive you: before presenting you with the merchandise I must tell you of its qualities like a trader of good faith. . . . The readers know what exactly it is that keeps them . . . my conscience remains at peace: and now, Agapito Macapingan speaks. (28–29; italics added)42

This passage is striking for at least two reasons. First, the writer’s refusal to give the narration a form leaves Agapito Macapingan in the lurch: even as he is given entrance into the representation of the written word, he is not given a generic form that would enable his representation to be recognized. “The narration,” the author later writes, “may perhaps be disdained for lack of method, lack of order, lack of literary rules . . . with the proper inconstancy of an undeveloped imagination . . . with all those defects in organization, which make it inadmissible as a novel, as a story, and as an article of novelties” (Revista de Filipinas, 1:28–29).43 The text is neither testimony nor novel. Second, there is the writer’s admission that the text is, after all, “merchandise” that he is trying to sell “as a trader of good faith.” Casademunt thus “liberates” Agapito Macapingan from the oral world of informal and corrupt relations, only to deliver his representation to the public market—both literally (as discourse) and materially (the newspaper as commodity). This leads to a fi nal question. We have seen how Casademunt’s partial recognition of that element in the other wherein the struggle between a constitutional notion of justice and recentralization of strictly hierarchical relations is played out; we have also seen how the author’s manipulation of the Indio is forced to a certain degree to depend upon the former notion of justice in order to affi rm the latter. How, then,

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does the peninsular Spaniard reconcile his double-identity, his parallel ambiguity as liberator and new master, in his treatment of the Indio? Is he really only the mirror image of the Indio, caught between opposed legacies of constitutional and centralist Spain, extended to the colony, doomed to live, paradoxically, as Agapito does—a hybrid existence of irreducible difference? Worse still, what is to stop the reader from interpreting the despotic behavior of some Indios toward others as the mere reflection of the actual despotic relation between the peninsular Spaniard and the native-born? In order to answer this question, we need to return to that moment in the text in which the failed or partial recognition of the native by the peninsular Spaniard as a subaltern in need of reform without equality is supplemented by an imaginary recognition by the Indio of the Spaniard (and, through the Spaniard, of himself) on an aesthetic level. This occurs when Agapito first comes into contact with the Spaniard who is later to deliver Agapito from being exploited by an ascendant, middle-class, native family. Agapito stares at “that white Castilian” for a long time: “That white Castilian . . . was a kind of beauty which had impressed my fantasies as a child, and looking at him fascinated, face to face, the way one looks at a picture which the eyes devour” (Revista de Filipinas, 1:616). [Aquel castila blanca . . . era un tipo de belleza que impresionaba mi fantasía de muchacho, y al que miraba embobado, frente á frente, como se mira un cuadro que recocija los ojos.] The sentence, too, introduces another ambiguity, between whether or not Agapito is confronted with another man, “face-to-face,” or whether his gaze is fi xed in “fascinated” contemplation of a picture or painting (cuadro). Between male and female, nominative and literary, human and artistic ideal, Agapito remarks upon the stark differences between himself and the Castilian before him. “Why did the Spaniard have a high nose, with mine flat? Why was the color of his body white and mine brown?” [¿Por qué el español tenía la nariz alta y yo chata? ¿Por qué el color de su cuerpo era blanca y el mío moreno? (616)]. As one would do when regarding an image of beauty, Agapito begins to measure himself against it, to contemplate the Castilian as an image that defines what Agapito is not. In other words, the itemization of Agapito’s own features is performed as a negative contrast to those of the Castilian. The author’s skillful reversal, or perhaps “projection,” of the Castilian’s negativity onto the native turns the tables on any attempt to establish a parallel between the two in terms of their common predicament as subjects that each lack definition, compromised by the contradictions

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brought about in the division between a colonial and constitutional order. For the Castilian’s negativity is redeemed in the aestheticizing gaze of the Indio, who, by granting the former a kind of recognition—the recognition of an ideal, which cannot be translated into a mutual recognition on political or ethical grounds—accepts his own lack of recognition as a necessary relationship between his abject self and an idealized other. This granting of a charismatic aura to the peninsular Spaniard cannot but help raise a smile among us today. Yet it is reiterated at least three times throughout Agapito’s search for a benevolent master. It will suffice to merely quote the last, most poignant illustration of this idealization: “By dint of staring at the Spaniard, I began to familiarize myself with his features, as I would those of a friend, and his proximity spurred me to establish relations with his servants, who were two, and these relations as well as what I knew them to be, just like my contemplation (of the Spaniard), as a result stirred in my soul an irresistible desire to become a servant of the Castilian” (Revista de Filipinas, 1:616; italics added).44 The sheer beauty of “el castila” supplements what is most lacking in the relationship between the Indio/Filipino and Spaniard: recognition. This imagined fraternity in lieu of an actual one in turn gives way to others: the fraternity of the Castilian’s servants, for example, that contrasts with the tyrannical behavior of his native Filipino masters who live across the street. This only further inflames Agapito’s desire to serve the Spaniard. From Agapito’s perspective, the negativity of the other, who cannot be redeemed by recognition, instead fi nds redemption in the beauty of the peninsular Spaniard. His beauty enables Agapito to imagine fraternity aesthetically in fictional terms, however farfetched it might otherwise seem. This “recognition” of the Spaniard is the aesthetic representation of a constitutional order that has not been translated into political terms: he is reinvented as a liberating and liberalizing force, but only in ideal and abstract terms. Yet at the same time, the native Filipino’s role in the theater of Spanish colonialism has changed: for one thing, he has become a little educated, and his stereotypical faults like laziness, dull-wittedness, capacity for deception, and so on, have given way to an analysis of how social forces shape the individual. More important, the Indio/Filipino has become an active participant in the imagination of civil society insofar as he is a reader: his Spanish might be rudimentary, but he does not need it to read the face and manners of “el castila” as a way of understanding his own. This process becomes reciprocal when we take into account the narrator’s interest in recording the voice of his

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servant Agapito Macapingan: the native Filipino as an active participant in the still largely imaginary civil society will guarantee the new liberal Spaniard’s place in the archipelago. This is especially important, given that the Spanish civil administrator, capitalist, or journalist in the Philippines throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century found himself among competing forces of representation—the military and ecclesiastical branches of government on the one hand, and the enigmatic, almost impenetrable world of the Indio’s local government and society on the other.45 Each comes to depend on the other, although the relationship is still unequal. Only days after Agapito has run away from his former master to join the house of that beautiful “castila,” the latter hands Agapito a newspaper and asks him to read a section in the daily news items. After struggling with the Spanish, Agapito comes to understand that the item is about him; that his former masters had reported him to the police, accusing him of having stolen from them. For the fi rst time, Agapito the Indio/Filipino recognizes himself simultaneously in the letter and the law of the colonial regime: he is a fugitive, and his negativity as an outlaw will not be cancelled by his recognition by the law as a good, truthful (albeit not beautiful) subject. Perhaps predictably, Agapito has no recourse but to seek an act of benevolence on the part of his new master—a benevolence that the master is only too happy to give, resulting in Agapito’s transference to the his house and the removal of his name from the newspaper (Revista de Filipinas, 1: 620). Constitutional recognition and absolutist benevolence represented the two extreme courses of political thought for the Spanish citizen and colonialist throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. As “Agapito Macapingan” seems to show, it was perhaps not so much a matter of choosing between the two as of balancing them, seeking a happy medium. Casademunt clearly hints at this interpretation through the name of the servant whose autobiography he creates: macapinggán is a Tagalog word that comes from pinggá, a pole used specifically for balancing pails of water, items of merchandise, and the like. Macapinggán is thus used to designate a water-carrier or street vendor, who balances two burdens. Agapito comes from the word agape, which hearkens back to the Greek word (to which it is etymologically linked) for “friendship” or Platonic love—the love that builds or maintains a community of people. Neither here nor there, our little friend the street vendor Agapito Macapingan confronts the peddler of literary

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merchandise, journalist Frederico Casademunt, each asking the other: am I a suitable reflection for your own divided self?

impasses of colonial aesthetics The contradictions brought about in the project to reconcile the continuity of colonial mastery with the solicitation of native consent account for a curious development in the larger attempt to produce and circulate a “Philippine literature.” In the individuation of the Indio as at once a variety of “types” that reflect an underlying, homogeneous negativity or lack, colonial reformers found themselves more and more compelled to defi ne themselves and their objectives in relation to that lack. Aesthetic sentiment in Casademunt’s novella serves to foster a colonial ideology based on the theme of “partial Hispanization” as the justification for the political rationality of modern colonialism, when it is in fact modern colonial rule that insists on measuring degrees of Hispanization and drawing from this a set of conclusions. Curiously, however, this ideological use of the aesthetic is also what ultimately condemns colonial costumbrismo to historical oblivion. For on the level of literary form, no aesthetic transformation of the genre could occur without also transforming the ideology that divided colonialist and colonial subject in a relationship of master and servant. To put it another way, the impasse of colonial aesthetics as represented in colonial costumbrismo consisted in the foreclosure of any dialectical transformation that might occur between the subject and object of knowledge and power. Such a transformation could only take place in the dialogical form of the novel. This impasse in the genre of course reflects the impasse of Spanish liberalism as a whole, when placed in a colonial context. An observation from Albert Memmi’s pointed critique of “the colonizer who rejects [colonization],” that is, who refuses to relinquish his enlightenment principles in the colonial world, sums up the liberal Spaniard’s dilemma succinctly: “Through a de facto contradiction which he either does not see in himself or refuses to see, [the enlightened liberal] hopes to continue being a European by divine right in a country which would no longer be Europe’s chattel; but this time by the divine right of love and renewed confidence. He would no longer be protected and ruled by his army but by the fraternity of peoples.”46 Memmi’s sardonic tone here acquires an underlying pathos when we consider that many of these liberals who found themselves in the

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Philippines after 1868 were also heirs to a constitutional ideal that never ceased to collapse in Spain itself. Not surprisingly, it was the liberal minority among the small Spanish bourgeoisie who immediately saw the benefits of economic free trade in the Philippines as both an opportunity for individual enterprise and a collective project for the welfare of the colonial population, and who could not but imagine that the native population recognized its own interest as identical with his. After all, the liberals’ forbears in Spain had attempted, and failed, to realize a similar project on the Iberian peninsula. It was the Spanish liberal who recognized the value of a Hispanized, educated, and enlightened reading public. It was the Spanish liberal who understood himself to be in the best position to negotiate the pitfalls of mercantilist policies, the pastoral power of the missionary orders, and the everpresent possibilities of foreign invasion, Muslim piracy, and native revolt. It was the Spanish liberal, fi nally, whose experiences with the twisted paths of republicanism in Europe had taught him to regard both the politico-theological foundations of colonial rule and the ultimate consequences of native consent with suspicion and distrust. With the fate of political revolution and monarchial restoration in Spain still undecided, it was the Spanish liberal, speaking in the voice of a native water carrier in Casademunt’s “Agapito Macapingan,” who bore the task of striking a balance between the contradictory foundations of Spanish colonial modernity.

chapter 6

Values/Norms In order to truly enjoy the value of the rule, the value of regulation, the value of valorization, the rule must be subjected to the test of dispute. It is not just the exception which proves the rule as rule, it is the infraction which provides it with the occasion to be rule by making rules. In this sense the infraction is not the origin of the rule but the origin of regulation. Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological

In many respects, the achievement of prosperity among the colonial state engineers of the late eighteenth century (proyectistas, as they were derisively called later) appeared close at hand throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century. The 1868 opening of the Suez Canal cut the duration of transportation and communication between Spain and the Philippines by half and augured a period of increased and more direct contact between Europe and Asia. On the level of territorial security, the Spanish punitive expeditions to the Muslim sultanates in Mindanao and Jolo had met with overwhelming military success. Inside Luzon, a resurgence of millenarian revolt in the southern Tagalog provinces had been crushed in 1870. The 1872 Cavite rebellion met the same fate, and further allowed Captain-General Izquierdo the opportunity to execute, imprison, or exile various outspoken advocates of colonial reform. Aside from these accomplishments, a comprehensive educational reform was decreed in 1863 that resulted in the building of a normal school for men (1865) as well as a plan to establish primary schools for every town and barrio whose population exceeded five hundred. Of equal importance, the decree ordered the language of instruction to be Spanish. Finally, the colonial reforms issued by Spanish overseas minister Segismundo Moret in 1880 promised to replace an outdated mercantilist-oriented colonial economy with policies of open trade with other Western powers. Regarding these and other likeminded reforms, peninsular Spanish writer Francisco Cañamaque concluded, “This beautiful yet neglected Spanish province will lack nothing 184

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compared to her neighboring British and Dutch colonies.”1 The colonial state, it appeared, had fi nally found its groove. These developments, however, masked an erosion of confidence among elite and popular classes alike in the modern colonial project and its institutions, as well an underlying lack of foresight regarding the ultimate direction of colonial policy. In the case of the tobacco monopoly—the archipelago’s first great experiment in state-run capitalism launched by the Royal Philippine Company during the late eighteenth century—the mismanagement of the industry by corrupt officials and the periodic failure of the state to compensate tobacco laborers for their obligatory cultivation of tobacco led to widespread resentment and a flourishing contraband trade.2 This resentment found expression in newspaper editorials criticizing the colonial state. In the case of colonial politics, Spain’s epoch of revolution and restoration in the second half of the nineteenth century turned a blind eye to the Philippines, in which both the Constitutions of 1869 and 1876 (and between them, the project of the Federal constitution of the First Republic in 1873) maintained the need for Special Laws in the archipelago, without ever writing them. As we have seen repeatedly in earlier chapters, the failure to write these laws paradoxically materialized them in the fullest sense: for what, after all, were Special Laws but the legalization of exceptions to the law?3 Interestingly enough, after the reiteration of the “peculiar conditions” that warranted Special Laws for the Philippines in 1869, the Spanish Cortes adopted a more liberal policy in Cuba and Puerto Rico, whose members were allowed (to however limited a degree) the rights and duties of Spanish citizenship.4 The “peculiar conditions” obtaining in the Philippines referred to two specific ideologies that we have examined in this book: the political technology of the mission and the missionary orders as the key instrument of the colonial state’s raison d’état, and the racialized dichotomy between Spanish colonizer and colonial (Creole, mestizo, Indio, and Chinese) subject. Both ideologies are captured well in the following statement of Captain-General Carlos María de la Torre in 1870, who was otherwise recognized as a liberal leader with republican leanings: The greatest part of the civilization and the growing prosperity that the country has and the legitimate influence that the name of Spain holds in the Philippines are due, lest we forget, to the constant, loyal, patriotic action of the religious orders. The circumstances that are found in them make them indispensable. . . . Examining the matter coldly and carefully, not with modern ideas but with the ideas and criterion of judgment that should rule our policy in the Philippines, it is impossible not

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to decide in favor of preserving the religious orders, of increasing their prestige, of helping them, of making them serve modern civilization . . . of profiting, in a word, by all the good that can be obtained from them. (Italics added)5

The colonial government’s dependence on the church only increased with the passage of educational reforms, which called upon the parish priests of all towns to act as the supervisors of schools, and which allowed the Dominican order to administer the fi rst avowedly secular university, the University of the Philippines.6 This delegation of authority in both cases seems particularly ironic, since many in the religious orders opposed both the teaching of Spanish and the higher education of Indios. Finally, while the suppression of rebellion in 1872 reasserted Spanish sovereignty and punished the alleged perpetrators, it also left a nagging doubt in colonial officials about the success of mixing arguments regarding the rule of the strongest with arguments proposing the collective interest of all to be the highest interest of the colonial state. The suppression, which entailed the hasty and fraudulent accusation and execution of three native-born secular priests (see chapter 4), as well as the exile of prominent Creole and mestizo families for their alleged participation in the event, crystallized this contradiction of simultaneously upholding individual rights in the Spanish metropolis while freely disregarding them overseas.7 Invoking the authoritarian powers of his office, Captain-General Rafael de Izquierdo suppressed the public debate and association around political partisanship, imposed a strict policy of censorship, and designated new powers for the illtrained Civil Guard. In Izquierdo’s words, “The conservation of this rich territory for the Spanish nation depends upon skilled administration, keeping the principle of authority upright, and maintaining the prestige and dignity of Spain’s name.” [De la buena administración, de sostener levantado el principio de autoridad y de mantener el prestigio y la dignidad del nombre español depende la conservación de este rico territorio para la nación española.]8 In moving forward (i.e., on behalf of the constitutional “Spanish nation”), the colonial state was moving paradoxically backward: reinvoking the power of sovereignty as the exceptional means to halt its own pursuit of native enterprise, Spanish patriotism, the “public good” and public opinion, and a Philippine aesthetic. The solicitation of native consent to Spanish rule, which underlies all these initiatives, never failed to raise its spectral double: What if the

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colonial subject did not consent or understood consent in a different way? It is between the scripted answer to this question and the reappearance of the same question in multiple contexts that the novel as literary genre appears, written by native and Spanish priests and officials alike. As the pioneering work of Mikhail Bakhtin has shown, the novel is the technology of “common sense”—in both Kant and Gramsci’s understandings of the idea—par excellence. Its task is to ceaselessly invoke and map out the field of possible identities and positions in modern society (bourgeois or colonial), as well as to imagine the possible outcomes of strategies, negotiations, and confl icts among the people or groups that inhabit them. What remains is the permutation and calculation of fi nite sets and elements, in which levels of dialogue and reflection intersect and multiply, revising or negating “old” values while producing “new” ones.9 From such a schematic understanding, one can already see how the novel held out the promise of imagining the anticipated new (colonial) hegemony arising from a variety of political persuasions and social groups, particularly in and around Manila, all of which had been exposed, to a greater or lesser degree, to the publicized debates on the tobacco monopoly, freedom of the press, Spanish prestige, Christian piety in education, the beauty of SpanishChinese mestizas, and so forth. Yet one of Bakhtin’s many insights was to go beyond this observation of the writer’s stake in society and to demonstrate how the stake itself, wittingly or unwittingly, in turn becomes a subject of dialogue, debate, confl ict, revision, and possible negation: “Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel . . . is another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way. Such speech . . . serves two speakers at the same time and expresses simultaneously two different intentions: the direct intention of the character who is speaking, and the refracted intention of the author. . . . And all the while these two voices are dialogically interrelated, they—as it were—know about each other; . . . it is as if they actually hold a conversation with each other” (The Dialogic Imagination, 324). Each novel, in its own way, demonstrates this self-reflexive tendency and its implications for the portrayal of and participation in (colonial) society in the late nineteenth century. As the modern technology of self-reflexivity, could the novel fashion a solution to the impasse of marrying colonial despotism with the solicitation of native consent?

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Could it do so without ultimately forcing its authors to confront such an impasse as constitutive of their own identities?

novelization and its discontents Philippine literary historiography has taught readers and scholars alike to locate the semi-mythical origins of Philippine literature in the hands of national martyr and patriot José Rizal. This has everything to do, of course, with the scholarship of cultural nationalism after World War II, which saw the present in two ways. The fi rst portrayed the present as the historical becoming of a collective national identity, and the second insisted that such a historical becoming had in fact occurred during the 1896 revolution but had remained suppressed until 1946. Leon Ma. Guerrero’s biography of José Rizal as “the fi rst Filipino” fused these two perspectives, allowing Rizal to serve as both founding father and harbinger of a fully self-conscious and modern Philippine culture.10 As the “fi rst Filipino,” Rizal ostensibly wrote the fi rst “truly Filipino novel.” Subsequent literary histories, in this view, would have to take their cue from Rizal’s work, seeing it as the original inspiration for the responsibility of national literature, which was to consider the Filipino nation from the norm of a specifically Filipino subject and citizen. While later critics recognized the myopia of analyzing the novel and literature from the perspective of an a priori category of identity that was outside the production of both, the difficulty of overcoming such preconceptions persists in studies of the Philippine novel today. In his foundational work, The Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel, Resil Mojares set out to correct this myopia by considering an exhaustive set of writing genres that may have conditioned or influenced the proliferation of the novel in the Philippines during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This consideration allows Mojares to rightfully complicate the common wisdom that the novel was simply a transplanted genre of writing from the West. In contrast, Mojares argues, the transplantation of the novel has to be seen against the backdrop of colonial transculturation as a whole, which illustrates “the creative deformation of folk forms under the impact of a new culture, and concomitantly, the naturalization of foreign forms introduced into native society” (45). Of equal importance, Mojares’s pioneering analysis of these genres in counterpoint shifts the study of the novel away from an overemphasis on the individual genius or avowed patriotism of individual writers, which

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obscure the historical processes that the novel reflects and refracts as a cultural artifact. His analyses of works that fall outside these criteria—the epic, korido (metrical romance), exemplum, and anatomy of conduct— allow him to register the subtle shifts between “religious didacticism and mimetic presentation,” or “representation rather than illustration” (96). These shifts parallel the rise of empiricism as a theory of knowledge, secularization (what Mojares calls “the waning of the Middle Ages”) as a theory of history, and the novel (or perhaps “novelistic discourse”) as their literary expression.11 When confronted with the proliferation of studies that take up the novel as a recognizable literary genre in the last three decades of the nineteenth century, however, Mojares’ analysis reverts from the study of “novelization” and novelistic discourse in colonial literature to the approach his work initially set out to critique—the Ursprung of the uniquely Filipino novel as an a priori subcategory of the novel in general. Perhaps the most widely read novel in nineteenth-century Philippines (albeit restricted to the Tagalog-speaking regions), Ang Pagsusulatan nang Dalauang Binibini na si Urbana at si Feliza na Nagtuturo ng Mabuting Kaugalian (The epistolary correspondence of two young maidens, Urbana and Feliza, in the instruction of good manners [ugali]; hereafter referred to as Urbana at Feliza [1864]), thus becomes identified as a “proto-novel” (78), while novels like Fray Lucio y Bustamante’s Si Tandang Basio Macunat receive consideration as “imperfect narratives and ‘half novels,’ as tentative essays in the novel form” (93). And once again, it falls upon José Rizal’s Noli me tangere and El filibusterismo to mark the moment in which the novel “becomes” Filipino: “With José Rizal, the novel—in the European, 19th century sense of this form—can be said to have fully emerged. . . . [His novels are] the natural culmination of developments in local literature prior to 1887, developments that have for some time been tending toward that synthesis of empirical and fictional impulses which these novels demonstrate” (152). Regardless of how one justifiably authenticates and distinguishes the “truly” Filipino novel from its antecedents or “foreign” counterparts, one can see how such a question effectively buries Mojares’s original insight into the colonial character of Philippine modernity, which necessarily overdetermined the structure and emergence of the novel as a literary genre. For the emergence of novelistic tendencies in nineteenth-century literature reveal neither a gradual development of the novel as a genre nor the origin (in the sense of Ursprung) of a

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fully “naturalized” literary expression specific to a cultural identity. In contrast to both, the appearance of novelistic discourse in this period evidences a deep uncertainty regarding the ability of literary expression to represent truth and to reinforce or negate values in narrative. As we will see, this uncertainty reflected and refracted the awareness of a structural impasse in the imagination of colonial society. Here, the prospect of modernizing colonial sovereignty conflicted with a calculation of the dangers inherent in soliciting and attempting to manage the participation of colonial subjects participation in their individual and collective welfare.

from ugali (k augalian) to k apwa (pakikipagk apwa-tao): modesto de castro The charge of inauthenticity leveled by Mojares and other critics regarding the appearance of the novel in the Philippines to a large degree derives from a long-standing theory in literary studies of the western European novel. This theory associates the novel with the secularization of knowledge (the rise of empiricism), the questioning of Church authority, the rise of the middle class, and (in the case of the Romantic novel) political emancipation from dynastic authority. One cannot, of course, collapse the differences among theories of the novel—for example, Ian Watt’s thesis on realism and the rise of the middle class in England; Georg Lukács’s reflections on disenchantment and the triumph of the ironic mode in the novel; or Mikhail Bakhtin’s theories of dialogism, heteroglossia, and the carnivalesque—without some degree of violence. Yet to speak in the broadest terms, which would allow these theories to speak to the Philippine context, we may say that they share a certain emancipatory character—one that reflects the ambiguous concept of “secularization” itself. In its very formlessness, the novel marks a break with all “premodern” (or, in any case, “pre-novel”) sets of literary forms in Spain and England—forms that received their authority from past or traditional usage and were ostensibly based on a naive and ahistorical worldview characterized by totality and completion. Of equal importance, the novel reflects—and allows its characters to reflect upon—a “modern” society that is ceaselessly, self-reflexively unmade and remade by its constituent members and by an ever-changing present. For Lukács, “the irony of the novel is the self-correction of the world’s fragility: inadequate relations can transform themselves into a fanciful yet well-ordered round of misunderstandings and cross-purposes . . . within which things appear

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as isolated and yet connected, as full of value and yet totally devoid of it, as abstract fragments and as concrete autonomous life” (Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 75). For Bakhtin, the “dialogical imagination” forces all ideas and ideologies to submit themselves to critique and argumentation, experimentation and revision.12 In marked contrast to these signposts, the colonial novel as analyzed by Mojares and others seems to constitute the very antithesis of the novel as a genre. Works like Urbana at Feliza and Si Tandang Basio Macunat were written by priests (the fi rst by a native secular priest, and the second by a Franciscan friar) who promoted Christian piety and unquestioning obedience to higher authority. The conservatism of their message mirrors the extremely partial and selective employment of features commonly associated with the novel. Thus, while Urbana at Feliza consists of an epistolary correspondence between two sisters, one of whom has moved to the city for higher studies, the letters that comprise the novel only give the reader the barest sense of the characters’ psychology or the social milieu in which they exist. Instead of providing such details, Urbana relentlessly and rather unself-reflexively catalogs instructions for social, domestic, and religious behavior, from the proper way to laugh at dinner parties to the avoidance of losing one’s virginity before marriage. Similarly, the bulk of Si Tandang Basio Macunat consists of a long contra-exemplum, presented in the form of an epistle that Tandang Basio has received from his father and which he reads aloud to the novel’s narrator, a traveling priest. The letter itself relates a tale about a family who decided to send their son Prospero to study in the city (Manila), against the advice of Prospero’s sister as well as that of the parish priest. The son falls into various forms of delinquency and contracts debts and fines for misdemeanors that his family is forced to pay. The amazing blindness of Prospero’s parents, whose visions of their child’s success lead them to ignore his profligacy, leads them to absorb his debts and send him right back to the city for another round of moral laxity. The accumulation of debts eventually brings about the immiseration and death of the entire family: for his part, Prospero dies serving time in a penal colony. The novel ends with Tandang Basio swearing to the narrator, that he (Tandang Basio) would never abjure the simple customs of colonial native Christian life for the vanity of caste mobility through higher education (Lucio y Bustamante, Si Tandang Basio Macunat, 117). For the reader in search of Bakhtinian dialogism or simply a “realistic” treatment of provincial life, Si Tandang Basio Macunat disappoints

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and frustrates: it reduces the dialogue between Tandang Basio and the traveling priest to a bare minimum, with Tandang Basio reading his father’s letter to the priest over the course of several evenings, and the priest graciously agreeing to listen. At times, the priest prompts Tandang Basio to reiterate his conviction regarding the vanity of rural native aspirations to higher professions, which can only be obtained through higher education. Playing the devil’s advocate, the priest expresses doubt about various points of Tandang Basio’s conclusions, at one point accusing Tandang Basio of generalizing the urban corruption of native customs (115). For these reasons, Mojares regards Si Tandang Basio Macunat as a religious exemplum disguising itself as a novel, just as Urbana at Feliza embellishes an anatomy of conduct with novelistic features. Yet the demystification of a thoroughly conservative and traditionalist stance on colonial Christianity masquerading under the ostensibly emancipatory, or at least anomalous, genre form of the novel raises the question of why such a stance had to adopt novelistic features in the fi rst place. If it is true that sections of Modesto de Castro’s Urbana at Feliza, read aloud, could serve in the place of religious sermons and that nineteenth-century priests did indeed use the novel in this way, why did Castro bother to arrange the letters in such a way that they constituted a narrative at all? How does one explain the lush description of the family garden in Feliza’s fi rst letter to Urbana—a kind of Eden where Feliza conjures up Urbana’s image in a fantasy of innocent play? Why does Feliza exist as a source of writing at all, not to mention other figures who contribute letters to the correspondence between the two sisters? One can ask the same questions of Si Tandang Basio Macunat: the novel begins with the reading of one letter, written by a father to a son who has since become a father in his own right. Yet midway through the novel, it turns out that this letter itself contains other letters, written by Prospero, his sister Felicitas (“Pili”), and his mother, Kabesang Anggi.13 In paradoxical fashion, the closer the narrative comes to the status of an exemplum—an objective symbolized by the frequent reference to following or falling astray from the “straight path” (matuwid na daan)—the more the narrative divides and ramifies into diverging and crooked paths. These paths, which move in a direction opposite to that of the exemplum, demand the close scrutiny of what is said and its comparison to the hidden, “deep” meaning of Prospero’s betrayal. Why go through all that trouble to convey a relatively simple warning?

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The answer becomes clear when we consider that the appearance of the novel, in Europe as well as the Philippines, not only testified to the release of potentially emancipatory forces in these societies—political and religious, but also economic and social—but it also reflected the attempt to submit these forces to new norms and regulations. Michael McKeon’s Origins of the English Novel, in particular, examines the novel’s “dialectical constitution” in England and Europe as the product of seesawing tendencies to read the decline or overthrow of aristocratic values according to two extremes. What is important in McKeon’s analysis for our study is that only one of these tendencies accounts for the progressive valence of secularization, disenchantment, empiricism, individualism, meritocracy, and so forth as they are represented in the novel. The other tendency, no less “novel” than the fi rst, takes these same points of departure but brings them toward entirely different conclusions. Thus, instead of writing under the assumption that an empirical approach to nature and reality led to a more authoritative, “realistic” reflection of the world, a novelist could equally criticize empiricism for generating ever-new deceptions, ever-new “partial” apprehensions of the whole, which turn out later to be misleading or false. Or instead of accepting the bourgeois individualist’s critique of the arbitrary injustice inherent in aristocratic values (like the purity of blood-lines as a measure of status), the conservative or traditionalist author might countercritique the value of meritocracy by emphasizing the lack of accountability in the anonymous individual. Regarding both the question of representing truth in narrative and the question of stabilizing class or caste relations, the novel can thus either explore the prospects brought about by the crisis of generic and social categories, or it can caution against and preempt the unleashing of new forces and possibilities. The author’s relationship to both extremes is often unclear. As McKeon forcefully argues, given the dialectical constitution of the novel, each position regarding generic or social categories presumes or implies the possibility of its other. In either case, however, the novel develops a form by the same process, that is, by representing social forces, as well as their utopian and dystopian potentialities, in contact, complicity, or struggle with one another: a “world picture” in Heidegger’s words, that measures the threshold of their equilibrium. The “birth of the novel,” like the birth of the clinic, the prison, and the normal school in the West, testifies to both the growth of new capacities and the intensified articulation of power relations.14

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Turning to the novelistic details of Urbana at Feliza, we fi nd that the world portrayed in this epistolary novel is akin to that portrayed by José Honorato Lozano’s Letras y figuras (see the introduction): static, uniform, and undisturbed from a distance, but tumultuous and chaotic upon closer inspection. To begin with, Feliza’s introductory reverie in the fi rst letter is greeted with the fi rst of Urbana’s seemingly endless reminders: Why didn’t you tell me how our parents are getting along (13)? Urbana then recalls why she was sent from Paombong (their home village) to the city to study and how, upon arriving, she was made to remember the cardinal responsibilities she learned as a child: to serve and love God, to care and be responsible for her own person, and to be mindful of her social relations with others. The word Urbana uses for the latter is pakikipagkapwa-tao, whose root word, kapwa, roughly translates as “kindred” or “fellow-being.”15 A similarly rough translation of pakikipagkapwa-tao would be: “reciprocal or shared personhood in and through the personhood of another”; or perhaps more simply, “shared inner self” or “social fellowship.” Finally, Urbana ends her fi rst response to Feliza by telling her that she has run out of time for letter writing and must begin her studies promptly. These reminders together constitute an outside space against which the epistolary correspondence between Urbana and Feliza and the normative value of pakikipagkapwa-tao constitute themselves. With Urbana’s transplantation to the city, the Edenic past of Urbana and Feliza’s childhood in Paombong has been disrupted. Similarly, the teachings of the parish priest have given way to the teachings of Doña Prudencia, Urbana’s schoolmistress. And the whimsical games that once structured the relationship and speech of the two sisters must, in turn, give way to the exchange of letters and succinct instructions on how to regulate and render coherent the examination of every aspect of one’s quotidian existence—and how to act accordingly. The (necessarily) incomplete conception of this outside space motivates the epistolary correspondence between the two sisters, which attempts to answer the question of how to live beyond the shadow of the church walls or the ever-present vigilance of parents and religious pastors. In the introduction to the novel, Castro emphasizes the moral foundations of the particular “knowledge” (Tag., dunong) he aims to impart in his novel of manners: Ang dunong na nagtuturo sa tao ng pagharap sa kanyang kapwa, ay bunga ng pag-ibig sa kapwa-tao: ang pag-ibig sa kapwa-tao, ay bunga ng pagibig sa Diyos, kaya ang naibig sa Diyos ay marunong makipagkapwa-tao,

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sapagkat batid na ang dunong na ito ay puno at mula ng magandang kaasalang kinalulugdan ng Diyos. (3) [The knowledge that teaches people how to deal with one another (kapwa), arises from the love of one’s fellow-person (kapwa-tao): the love for one’s fellow-being arises from one’s love for God, which means that loving God means knowing how to engage in social fellowship [makipagkapwa-tao], as reflected in the fact that this knowledge originates and is made meaningful by the good deeds pleasing to God.]

All manners and customs (ugali or kaugalian), insofar as they pertain to the act of pakikipagkapwa-tao or social fellowship, thus also presumably derive from Christian morality. Castro sutures the relationship between morality and manners with metaphors that apply to both. Take, for example, the idea of cleanliness (kalinisan). Urbana writes: “The orderly arrangement and cleanliness of one’s habits reflects the cleanliness of one’s soul” [Ang kahusayan at kalinisan sa asal ay salamin ng kalinisan ng kaluluwa (65).] This metaphor goes back to the early colonial politics of translating sin and redemption: here, however, it becomes tied to “orderly arrangement” (kahusayan), which includes the most mundane aspects of hygiene and domestic order. Later in the text, when Urbana’s confessor writes to Feliza about the value of virginity, he likens a virgin to a rose whose “cleanliness” remains intact because it protects itself with thorns (135). Similarly, a woman should “deliver her cleanliness from the dangers that threaten it [ipinagtangkakal ang kanyang kalinisan sa panganib na ikasisira]” (137), through prayer and determination. Yet, against the grain of Castro’s own avowed intention, Urbana’s letters also strive to show that the consideration and consequences of one’s actions, as well as the actions of others, belong not only to the moral order of divine judgment and salvation, but also, and perhaps more strongly, to the ethical order of virtue and vice in the disenchanted world of the novel. On the one hand, in the introduction to Urbana at Feliza, Castro highlights the moral dimension of pakikipagkapwa-tao in no uncertain terms: Ngunit kung inyong bayaan [ang karunungang makipagkapwa-tao] . . . ay kapilitang ipagsusulit ninyo sa Diyos, at pagdating ng panahon na sila’y pagitna sa mundo, sa masamang uring sa kanila’y mamasdan, dalamhati ang inyong pupulutin, kayo ang sisisihin ng tao, at palibhasa’y bunga ng inyong kapabayaan. (5) [But if you disregard (the understanding of social fellowship), . . . you will be forced to account to God, and when the time comes that (sinners)

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are in Purgatory, and their evil ways are laid bare, then will suffering descend upon you, you will be blamed by people, and this will be the fruit of your disregard.]

On the other hand, Urbana traces the consequences of such actions largely in the secular realm, that is, according to the logic of institutions and social norms of expectation. If she leaves her utensils dirty in the convent where she studies, for instance, the schoolmistress punishes her (21); if students reveal ignorance of Christian doctrine, this ignorance reflects poorly on their parents and prevents them from participating in class (15); indeed, any instance of ignorance regarding the manners of social fellowship results in a kind of public shame (71). From these minor forms of chastisement, Castro ratchets the stakes to a higher level as the narrative proceeds: an entire chapter is devoted to drunkenness, in which Urbana stresses not only the sinfulness of alcohol, but also the harm it causes the body, which is like a disease (103–5).16 Much of the latter half of the work is dedicated to managing the treacherous path of marital engagement (curiously called pag-lagay sa Estado, “placed in State”). At the beginning of this section, Feliza worries over the prospect of being “orphaned and alone in a world full of danger [ulilang-ulila at mapapag-isa sa gitna ng mundong puno ng panganib].” Yet the path of engagement, an intermediate state between the recognition of desire between two people and the official recognition of that desire by the church and colonial state, may lead to dangers of a different kind. Speaking against the custom of allowing an engaged couple to be left alone in a room to converse, Urbana’s confessor writes, “If a young woman has secret [unchaperoned] dealings with a young man, can this not be compared to a doe being pursued by a dog, who will not relent until he sinks his teeth into her and kills her?” (129). [Kung ang isang dalaga ay makikipag-usap nang lihim sa baguntao, saan kaya natin maipaghahalimbawa kundi sa libay sa usa, na hinahabol ng aso, na di tutugutan hanggang di abutang makagat at mapatay?] Here, the threat of losing one’s honor or virginity becomes indistinguishable from being victimized by violence. In a fi nal example, the Paombong priest in the novel explains to Feliza and her fiancée Amadeo that the consequence of adultery is excommunication: this entails the refusal of all holy sacraments, the prohibition of all Christians against speaking to the excommunicated member, and the refusal of burial on holy ground (161). Each

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example—the dangers of alcohol to one’s health, the danger of men to a woman’s safety, and the danger of social death in the eyes of the Christian community—demonstrates that Urbana’s instruction is concerned not primarily with the moral teachings of Christianity. Rather, Urbana is led to an understanding of ethical choices and their consequences in a world no longer under the pastoral sway of the parish priest. It is for this reason that Castro consistently refers to social fellowship or pakikipagkapwa-tao not in terms of morality, but as a form of knowledge (dunong or karunungan). Two main characteristics distinguish this form of knowledge, which ostensibly prepares the young student for higher education and enlightened society but in many ways preempts, wards off, the very values that higher education aims to impart. First of all, pakikipagkapwatao, derived from the root kapwa (fellow being) serves as a regulating norm—Virgilio Enriquez calls it a “superordinate value,” in the sense that it appears to encompass and inform all other so-called “Philippine values.”17 Enriquez has argued that this all-encompassing character of kapwa testifies to its ancient, indigenous, or precolonial origins: it is a meta-value from which all other values derive. By contrast, however, Castro’s text makes a compelling case for arguing the precise opposite. That is, the invocation of kapwa as a regulating norm allows its agent (Castro, Urbana, but also any anonymous subject) to preserve or transform, that is, modernize, all native customs or traditions (kaugalian, from the root word ugali) in the name of “native custom” itself. Pakikipagkapwa-tao thus authorizes the eradication of “bad customs” (the aforementioned example of leaving a young woman unchaperoned comes to mind). It also authorizes the introduction of foreign customs—the use of eating utensils, for example, which Urbana claims to be a practice of “all the nations in Europe [and] the Americans”—to replace them (71). As a “valuing value,” the categorical emptiness of “social fellowship” allows it to seize upon other traditions, as well as the values they imply, and to obliterate or reorient them so as to calibrate tradition with both Church teachings and the norms of governmentality (e.g., public health, civil order, domestic tranquility) and its institutions (in this instance, the school). The second characteristic is tied to the fi rst and concerns pakikipagkapwa-tao’s field of application. As we have seen in earlier chapters, the political rationality of the colonial state begins with the premise that the continuity of Spanish sovereignty paradoxically depends upon the solicitation and ramification of native consent with regard to all

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spheres of economic and social life. The generation of colonial wealth ultimately depends upon the entrepreneurship of the archipelago’s inhabitants; the defense of the archipelago against foreign invasion ultimately depends upon the native’s Spanish patriotism; the authority of native speech ultimately depends upon its dissemination in the newspaper; and so forth. The authority of pakikipagkapwa-tao as a regulating social norm derives from the same logic. It arises from neither Holy Scripture nor the Laws of the Indies, but from the constitutive understanding (karunungan) and enforcement of expected social behavior by “those who know” and who, in knowing, distinguish themselves and their families or communities from those who do not know. “The ones who understand social fellowship,” writes Castro, “are welcomed everywhere, as recognized representatives of one wellstudied in virtue. In their companionship or conversation with an equal, one may distinguish those who understand social fellowship from those who do not; those who express exemplary behavior from those who act in uncouth ways; those of loyal sentiments from the traitors; those of studied virtue from the uneducated” (55).18 Castro here responds to a social crisis that occurred in the transition from province to city: in the rise of a mestizo elite, the devaluation of native government in favor of the colonial state, and the dislocation and migration of populations seeking labor, social status becomes ambiguous. In Castro’s text, social fellowship offers a criterion for reestablishing status, but one that demands constant surveillance and evaluation by the population of itself: “Learning social fellowship allows one to steer clear of those actions, deeds, and words that appear repugnant in the eyes of others” (101).19 Taken together, the normative function of pakikipagkapwa-tao and its solicitation of the reader’s complicity (a central characteristic of the epistolary novel) in enforcing and reinforcing its authority tell us a great deal about the “novelization” of colonial life in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Urbana at Feliza testifies to the emergence and consciousness of a space that exists outside all concepts of a contained or moral universe. This was a neutral, impersonal world where the fear of eternal damnation or the hope of Paradise no longer secured the conditions of obedience and the administration of colonial society, and where new institutions like the normal school and the primary school introduced a form of knowledge that threatened the values of Christian piety with complete indifference. For a priest like Modesto de Castro, these changes descended from the metropolis

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without explanation or consideration of the “peculiar circumstances” of colonial society. In doing so, these reforms interrupted the continuity of native tradition and the respublica Christiana alike and forced both to realign themselves in relation to the transplantation of new norms and institutions. A sympathetic reading of Castro’s novel that takes into consideration his position as a native priest who spent much of his life moving from province (Paombong, Bulacan) to Manila and back to province (Naic, Cavite), might claim that Castro sought to illustrate the identity of vernacular Tagalog tradition and Christian morality in the interest of protecting both against being obliterated or rendered obsolete by the colonial metropolis and by Spanish reform. 20 What is interesting about Castro’s attempt to negotiate the upheavals of provincial life is that his response cannot help but take the very representation of modernity, the novel, as the primary vehicle for developing the counterknowledge of pakikipagkapwa-tao. By “counterknowledge,” I mean knowledge associated with the rise of the urban school (Urbana’s convent school in Manila) but at the same time set apart from and threatened by it. On the one hand, “social fellowship” promises to restore Christian piety where it is threatened with devaluation, just as it promises to restore vernacular tradition where the teaching of Spanish threatens to compromise that tradition’s autonomy in the province. On the other hand, pakikipagkapwa-tao concerns itself less with Christianity—or, for that matter, the preservation of native custom and tradition—than it does with forging a modern apparatus capable of conceptually synchronizing the pastoral power of Spain’s frontier colonial system with the modern project of Bourbon and post-Bourbon reform. The novel form allows its author to painstakingly map out the myriad possibilities of unsupervised and anonymous action in the ambiguous zone between city and province, in order to better bind these to a norm that will direct the enforcement of conformity and provide for its maintenance through popular surveillance. 21 This dialogical “contact zone,” where beliefs and convictions were tested, challenged, reversed, or transformed, represented for Castro the omnipresence of danger (panganib).22 It was in such a contact zone that the institutionalization of education, along with the impersonal “truths” of colonial capitalism and the transculturation of political ideologies originating in the metropolis all served to propel the disarticulation of native desire, Christian piety, and colonial sovereignty. And only the

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selective self-dismantling of native tradition, or (ka)ugali(an)—emblematized in the “superordinate” virtue of pakikipagkapwa-tao and the cultivation of reciprocal and shared self-surveillance—offered the hope of preserving what the new norms and institutions (above all, the Normal school and the reform of primary education) threatened to destroy.

from k apwa to k atwir an: lucio y bustamante The strategic use of social fellowship (pakikipagkapwa-tao) as a governing fiction, a regulating norm, of colonial society becomes fully manifest when we examine its deployment in Franciscan priest Fray Miguel Lucio y Bustamante’s Si Tandang Basio Macunat. On the surface, one may surmise that Lucio y Bustamante takes up the novel form as a way of evaluating the prospects and pitfalls of colonial modernity for the same reasons as native priest Modesto de Castro. In the former as well as the latter, we see novelistic discourse taking as its subject the anomalous space between city and province, where all values must undergo the dialectical trial of skepticism, reversal, and restoration or transformation. Both writers also express a concern with the blurring of social divisions and castes, which leads the provincial student Prospero to aspire beyond his “proper place,” that is, behind a plow; and which leads Prospero’s parents, who belong to the native elite or principalía, to aspire beyond their status as Indios and field laborers. Quite predictably, the contesting claims over the value of higher education in Manila and the contesting claims over the dissolution or reinforcement of caste society are linked by the value and status of native customs (kaugalian) and their superordinate crystallization in social fellowship (pakikipagkapwa-tao). Lucio y Bustamante differs from Castro, however, in his attempt to assert an underlying reason (katuwiran, which etymologically translates as “uprightness” or “rectitude,” from the root word tuwid, straight) behind native custom, which cannot be traced to Christian morality, as it can in the case of Urbana at Feliza. In Lucio y Bustamante’s novel, unlike Castro’s, the authority of native reason stems not from the formal education of an urban, Christian convent school but from the provincial native’s direct experience with and evaluation of the modern institution of educational reform: that is, it arises outside all institutions and norms beyond that of colonial segregation in general. As we will see, this shift in the construction of a social norm also shifts the role of the priest as agent of the norm’s maintenance and enforcement. In Castro’s Urbana at Feliza,

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the power to interpret and enforce pakikipagkapwa-tao is “democratized” or disseminated to the public through the invention of a Christian pedagogy. Urbana and Feliza’s understanding of social fellowship comes by way of Urbana’s schoolmistress, her confessor, and the parish priest of Paombong, whose interests in the education of the girls remains an unquestioned premise. By contrast, the understanding and appraisal of native customs and social fellowship in Si Tandang Basio Macunat comes about in an entirely different fashion. Here, in the dialogic matrix of conversation, epistolary correspondence, and juridical summons, every actor expresses an interest or ideology (however credible), and the norm of reason (katuwiran) that underpins native custom (kaugalian) and social fellowship (pakikipagkapwa-tao) grows organically from their discussion, debate, and involvement with colonial authority. The name of the main character, Tanda(ng) Basio Macunat, encases and emblematizes the two central confl icts in the novel. The fi rst word means “Elder,” a term that denotes communal respect and reverence but carries no official weight or authority. The novel begins with a treatment of this very ambiguity. The narrator, a traveling priest, disturbs Tandang Basio’s comfortable status as an elder in the town of Tanay (in Rizal, formerly, Morong, province), by telling him that if only he knew a little Spanish—which would have doubtless required either a remarkable schoolmaster or Tandang Basio’s journey to Manila to receive his education—he would qualify for an official government position. Tandang Basio’s indignation at this remark introduces the book-length polemic regarding, on the one hand, the status of knowledge learned in the urban school and, on the other, the instability of caste division between Spaniard, mestizo, and Indio in the attempted rapprochement of city and province. As we have seen in earlier chapters, this dynamic was witnessed throughout the Tagalog region, as well as in other port cities in the archipelago (like Cebu City and Iloilo) during the nineteenth century. As discussed in the previous section, a large part of the text unfolds in the manner of an exemplum: this consists of a long letter that Tandang Basio reads, written by his father. The letter relates the sad fate of a native elite or principalía family, headed by the district “chief,” Kabesang Dales, and his wife, Kabesang Anggi. Their misfortunes arise from their decision to send their son Prospero to school in the city. The vanity that leads Prospero’s parents to look beyond their estate and to see in higher education an opportunity for Prospero to consolidate and further their own status, also blinds them to their son’s moral disintegration in

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Manila. Because his parents ignore the advice of the parish priest, who warns against the corrupting influence of the city and the tendency of students to study “evil customs [masasamang ugali]” (31), and the misgivings of Prospero’s sister, Felicitas or “Pili,” Prospero’s disintegration seems a fait accompli from the very beginning. Yet what renders this exemplum “novel,” or at least different from the exemplum as a genre of religious literature, is the narrative presentation of Prospero’s undoing and the way this presentation determines the character of the reader’s judgment regarding the stakes and dangers inherent in late colonial society. This narrative presentation, which appears in roughly the middle of the text, consists of a series of letters exchanged between Prospero, his sister, and his mother, Kabesang Anggi. For reasons never explained, these letters somehow fell into the hands of Tandang Basio’s father, who has written the entire story down as a letter to Tandang Basio. This is the letter that Tandang Basio reads to the traveling priest, who in turn writes it all down as a narrative to present to the reader. Akin to a series of Chinese boxes, this confusing arrangement of information blurs the different levels of speaker and subject: the parish priest of Tanay views urban education in a way that appears identical to the views of Tandang Basio and his father; and Kabesang Dales’s assumptions about higher education seem remarkably close to the narrator’s. Yet this confusion plays a constitutive role in the solicitation of agreement by the narrator and, by extension, the author, Miguel Lucio y Bustamante. For one thing, multiple levels of the text force the reader to suspend the interests and subject-positions that render the speech or writing of one the speech or writing of another and to focus exclusively on the presentation of evidence for Prospero’s moral corruption. On a deeper level, it invites readers subsequently to thread, concatenate, and relay their conclusions regarding the presentation of evidence through the voices of the different characters, evaluating their competence and their invested interest in and through the readers’ own evaluation of Prospero’s betrayal. In what does this evidence consist? Prospero’s fi rst letter to Pili describes the myriad possibilities and forms of freedom he discovers in the city. He fraternizes with students who come from different regions (one from Paco and one from Bulacan), and his regard for them eclipses that for his own sister: “Pagmasdan mo kami ay tila kami mga tunay na magkakapatid” (45). [If you see us you would probably say we are true brothers.] After classes Prospero wanders through the streets and

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sometimes attends parties. His naïve amazement at the variety of people and commodities available in Manila never ceases. It leads him, however, to look down on his life and native customs in the province: Dito sa Maynila’y naririto ang civilizacion. Ngayo’y nakikilala ko na ang ating mga ugali diyan sa ating bayan ay malayong-malayo sa mga ugali ng taong civilizado. Kaya ang pananamit, ang pangungusap, ang pakikipagkapwa-tao, ang mga kilos, at ang iba’t iba pang asal ng mga tagarito’y malayong-malyo sa nakikita nati’t inaasal diyan sa kanitang bayan. (45–47) [It is here in Manila that civilization resides. Now I know that our customs (ugali) there in our province could not be more different from the customs of civilized people. That’s why the form of dress, the speech, social fellowship (pakikipagkapwa-tao), the habits, and all the other doings of the people here couldn’t be more different from the ways we see their in our province.]

Prospero’s contempt for the province, laced with imported Spanish words that highlight his elevated understanding and participation in Hispanic life, lays out a challenge to the fragile social norms of provincial life fashioned by works like Modesto de Castro’s Urbana at Feliza. In contrast, Prospero presents an other set of customs, an other form of social fellowship, by which colonial life must thenceforth be measured. The confl ictive nature of this comparison becomes even clearer in Prospero’s second letter to his sister, where he crows, “My reasoning [katwiran] and my habits [kaugalian] are different now than before because only now have my views been enlightened, which were once unclear. . . . I’m telling you that I am the one who speaks with reason and you without” (59). 23 These bold statements, which receive a warm and enthusiastic response from Prospero’s parents, also force the reader to confront two different claims to custom, social fellowship, and native reason. Yet what is interesting about Prospero’s demystification is that his callousness literally begs for further skepticism, further demystification, to the point that his “enlightenment” is unmasked as an aberration of the “true customs” practiced in the province. In this instance, the more demystified and analytical approach to Prospero’s testament comes not from the urbane and educated student, but the provincial priest of Tanay, who provides the antidote to Prospero’s claims: Itong sulat na ito ng kapatid mong si Prospero ay kung basahin nang paimbabaw, o basahin kaya ng mga hindi nakakaalam ng mga ugali ninyong mag-ama at magkapatid, o basahin baga ng mga hindi nakapagmasid ng mga Tagalog . . . ay siguradong siguradong sasabihin nila na

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itong sulat na ito’y marikit at matino. . . . Datapwat kung sa kanita ay iba na ang kahulugan. (51; italics added) [This letter from your brother Prospero, if read superficially, or read by those who are not knowledgeable in the customs (ugali) of your parents and siblings, or even read by those who have not observed Tagalog ways . . . would lead these people to say that the letter is beautiful and sensible. . . . However for us it means something different.]

The reader cannot but share the priest’s skepticism by the time he reads Prospero’s third letter: in it, Prospero is obviously lying about the pursuit and direction of his studies, as well as his abandonment of responsible behavior. When we link this presentation of evidence—Prospero’s letters as a testimony of his innocence or guilt, as well as a polemic on the uprightness and reason of the customs of the city—with the larger narrative, we can see that it serves three functions in the novelization of colonial life. First, it interpellates the reader as the one who must ultimately evaluate the case. Here, the text invites (or provokes) the reader to adopt a skeptical approach to Prospero’s claims—a paradoxical moment, without a doubt, since Prospero’s education in Manila corresponds with his skeptical devaluation of the provincial alliance between native customs and Christian morality. Seen from a distance, Lucio y Bustamante’s strategic adoption of the novel form serves the same constitutive logic that propels colonial modernity: get the natives to enforce the consequences of colonial sovereignty; get them to maintain the separation between Spanish constitutionalism and Philippine expediency, or between urban anonymity and provincial pastoral accountability; get them to maintain the equilibrium of caste society. Through the novel form, Lucio y Bustamante solicits readers to use their own powers of deduction and reason to conclude against the opportunities offered to the Indio through education, entrepreneurship, and the emergence of professions like medicine, law, and pharmacy (not to mention the priesthood). Colonial scholars are familiar, of course, with Tandang Basio’s controversial conclusion to the novel: “Let the king preside over his kingdom; the carpenter take care of his chisel and woodshaver; the father and mother serve their children; and the Indios care for their water buffaloes” (117). [Ang hari ay mangasiwa sa kanyang pinaghaharian; ang anluwagi ay maghasa nang maghasa ng kanyang mga pait at katam; ang ama’t ina ay mag-alila sa kanilang mga anak; at ang mga Indio, ay mag-alaga ng kanilang kalabaw.] Yet what gives this statement authority is Tandang Basio’s earlier claim: “With all due

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respect, please do not suspect the intentions behind what I say beyond the clearest truths that have been witnessed by my eyes and heard by my ears” (115; italics added). [Hindi po paghihinala ng loob ko itong aking sinasabi kundi mga katotohanang maliwanag na maliwanag na siyang nakikita ng aking mata at naririnig ng aking tainga.] In other words, what leads Tandang Basio to a conservative and traditionalist stance is neither his Christian faith nor his unquestioning loyalty to the sovereign, but his methodical skepticism on the basis of his (and, through him, the reader’s) experience. Second, the skepticism that guides the reader to a reactionary view of higher education in Manila also constitutes an underlying principle of behavior—a social norm—by which Prospero (and, through Prospero, the Indio) may be evaluated. This principle, which allows one to distinguish “good” customs from “bad” ones and the provincial expression of social fellowship (pakikipagkapwa-tao) from the urban, is katuwiran. At times Lucio y Bustamante uses the root word (tuwid, meaning “straight” or “upright”) in a colloquial manner: “[Prospero] was straying from the straight path [matuwid na daan], or rather, where he ought to have gone he went instead to the swamp or quicksand” (49). 24 Yet this colloquial usage only masks the novel’s underlying operation, which is to elevate this concept to a principle by which the Indio may judge himself and his fellow being (kapwa-tao) against the grain of emerging urban institutions. At the beginning of the novel, Tandang Basio expresses his interest in speaking to the traveling priest-narrator “so that you may know if I have reason [katwiran] or not, and also you will know to contradict me when I am mistaken” (21). 25 Here, as well as elsewhere, katuwiran designates the underlying principle behind the judgment of values. Prospero’s parents fail to heed the “reasonable/upright advice” (matutuwid na hatol) of the parish priest, and lose their wealth, honor, and lives in the process (115). At the end of the novel, the traveling priest-narrator praises Tandang Basio’s “upright conclusions” (matutuwid na katwiran), for deciding not to send any of his children to school beyond primary education. The phrase is redundant—matutuwid na katwiran can be literally translated as “upright uprightness,” “reasonable reasonings,” or “conclusive conclusions”—for the reason that its redundancy reveals the author’s attempt to elevate a vernacular word and concept to the status of a norm to be applied against contesting forms of rationality. Third, and fi nally, the colonial priest’s role consists in the application of the criterion of katuwiran to the evaluation of Tagalog

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customs and social practices, but in a way quite different from the priest’s role in the determination of pakikipagkapwa-tao, “social fellowship,” which we saw in Urbana at Feliza. In the latter text, the figure of the priest prepared native readers for their exposure to an alien world of institutions and norms by cultivating and instituting a colonial Christian ethic as a guide. In Castro’s Urbana at Feliza, the virtue pakikipagkapwa-tao defi ned a form of self-regulation and self-surveillance designed to strengthen the rapprochement of Christianity and native tradition in the face of modern change. In order to educate Urbana and Feliza in these matters, Castro’s priest served in the capacity of a schoolmaster, who delegates the rule as a kind of anticipation and preemption of other rules and ways of life that the Manila student will come to learn. No such task is given to the priest in Lucio y Bustamante’s Si Tandang Basio Macunat, because the rule supposedly already exists. If there is an “emancipatory” aspect to the novelization of colonial life in Lucio y Bustamante’s work, it lies in the admission that neither God nor the priest exercise fi nal authority in the customs, traditions, desires, intentions, and motivations of the Indio: if an authority exists, it must lie in the customs themselves. Katuwiran emerges as a criterion of evaluating and privileging native customs from a perspective within the language and customs themselves. Given the a priori existence of native values as an adequate reference for responding to the challenge of colonial modernity, the priest’s task becomes secondary: he is simply to listen to the voices of the native other and to recognize in them the elements that would allow for a synthesis and elevation of these voices to the level of an ethical norm. As the narrator remarks concerning his conversations with Tandang Basio, “We discussed the different customs of the Tagalogs, and I was happy to fi nd nothing reprehensible in what I heard [of] his elementary reason [katwiran] and responses to all the matters we discussed” (5). 26 Later in the text the parish priest of Tanay reinforces this point: educational reform in the city may promise knowledge, he explains to Kabesang Dales, but why complicate matters when the essential understanding and truth of Christian doctrine and social fellowship are already there (31–33)? Yet this demotion of the priest to second voice in the narrative obscures his new agency, which builds upon his earlier roles as shepherd of the flock or as colonial bureaucrat. Lucio y Bustamante makes of him the enforcer and watchdog of native customs, elevated to the level of ethical norms. Unlike the idealistic reformist, the colonial bureaucrat,

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or even the native principalía, the priest spends the better part of his existence getting to know and adapt to native customs, with the intent of selectively intervening in their continuity, transformation, or elimination according to his ideas of a Christian life. The Tanay parish priest in Lucio y Bustamante’s novel provides the following example. After advising Kabesang Dales not to send his son Prospero to the city to study, the priest adds: “Don’t belittle my judgment or advice to you: it isn’t inspired by some sudden caprice but my long and sincere observation of your customs [ugali] and social fellowship [pakikipagkapwa-tao]” (35). 27 In fact, Lucio y Bustamante describes this parish priest earlier in the text this way: “The pastor here in our town . . . although Spanish, was virtually a native Tagalog speaker. And since he had spent so much time in the Tagalog regions, he understood all our Indio ways and customs” (29). 28 Thus we see the contrast between the role of the priest in Urbana at Feliza and his role in Si Tandang Basio Macunat. The priest in Castro’s Urbana at Feliza takes on the modern role of schoolmaster, in the sense that he transforms Christian morality into nonreligious (i.e., secular) ethical norms. By contrast, Lucio y Bustamante’s priest abandons this pedagogical post in order to satisfy two objectives: to enable his flock to articulate the very lesson they have been compelled to learn from within the Tagalog language and to act as that flock’s “constitutional” representative, that is, as someone who can read and interpret their customs and traditions before the law. Kaugalian, pakikipagkapwa-tao, and katuwiran thus may appear at fi rst sight as ancient, native, perhaps even “precolonial” or “preChristian” values: that is certainly how they are portrayed in the postcolonial scholarship of Sikolohiyang Pilipino and the academic offshoots of cultural nationalism in the 1970s. Nevertheless, the study of nineteenth-century colonial novels, however “partial” or “incomplete” their forms appear in relation to the novels of José Rizal and the birth of the Tagalog novel at the turn of the century, demonstrates that these native values were conceived in a thoroughly modern way. Only this explains how a literary genre like the novel, most often associated with the emancipatory, constitutional, and self-reflexive knowledges and institutions of European modernity, could at the same time produce the paranoid and misogynistic imagination of Urbana at Feliza or the masochistic suffering and sacrifice of Prospero’s family in Si Tandang Basio Macunat—all to prove that the Indio did not want or need too much formal education. In the pathologies expressed and

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documented by both, the self-contradictory norms of native behavior in late colonial society are born. As the following chapter shows in greater detail, such norms, once asserted, became available to (re)interpretation and strategic occupation by anticolonial as well as colonialist writers. For now, suffice it to say that in the above instances the ambivalent relationship of the colonial novel in Tagalog to the (potentially) emancipatory implications of the novel as a genre—the suspension of any truth not subject to verification by the senses, the dialogical creation of ethical norms in the absence of unquestionable morals—reflected the attempt of writers like Castro and Lucio y Bustamante to evaluate the consequences of colonial modernity from a position outside the center of institutional reform. Contrary to the unsympathetic reception these works have received as (at worst) examples of “friar rule” in the Philippines or (at best) as proto-novels that anticipate the emergence of a more perfected novel form, Castro and Lucio y Bustamante’s works recognize the complexity and compromises involved in the project to solicit and ramify the production of native desire and coordinate it with the smooth continuity of colonial rule. Colonial rationality, religious expediency, and native custom constituted the triumvirate of positive forces that propelled the rise of the novel in the late nineteenth century (see chapters 1–3). Yet the intersection of these forces often led to the articulation of contradictory attitudes and ideologies that, instead of reconciling the perpetual maladjustment between colonial despotism and the art of good government, further sharpened and elevated them to the level of novelistic discourse.29 The general thesis sketched by McKeon in his study of the rise of the English novel thus also applies to the novelization of Philippine colonial life: both attest to the destabilization of generic and social categories (the anatomy of conduct and religious exemplum in the former case; the ambiguity of caste status in the latter), which presented new ways of approaching questions of truth and virtue as well as accompanying dangers. In both, the dialectical poles of “naive empiricism” and “absolute skepticism” map out opposed tendencies responding to the destabilization of generic and social categories of modernity. And in both, empiricism as a new way of truth-making and the ethical challenge to the unquestioned rigidity of hierarchical society find themselves countered and contradicted by the perceived threat of radical change and the imperative to neutralize this threat through the production of new norms. The social conservatism and antagonism (implicit in the case of Castro; explicit in Lucio y Bustamante) to the institution of educational

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reform easily deceive the reader into underestimating the production of new forces that these novels attempt to harness. Seething beneath the letter and law of colonial reform, the old alliance between Christian pastoralism and native tradition had to develop and administer new approaches to the city, the school, urban migration, and capitalist penetration of the interior.

colonial pharmakon: cañamaque and entr ala This double valence of the novel—the novel as carnival and the novel as norm—helps to explain how and why the fi rst attempts to write a self-consciously “Filipino novel” or novela de costumbres were themselves a response to the crisis of colonial hegemony and the contradictions of the political rationality of the colonial state that emerged in the wake of the imperial collapse. In chapter 5, we saw how the literary hybrid genre of colonial costumbrismo encapsulated an impasse in the production of colonial society, in which the attempt to represent and critique the customs and traditions of the Indio inevitably led to either the production of stereotypes or the self-reflection and analysis of the Spanish colonialist. Literary projects that set out to substantiate the aesthetic dignity of the Philippines as an object of reflection had to sabotage their own efforts lest this dignity be translated in political terms. The novela de costumbres picks up where the impasses of colonial costumbrismo left off, just as the reinvocation of the need for Special Laws by Izquierdo (in 1872) and the project of enlightened liberal reforms (in 1880) pick up where the impasses of the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century proyectistas fell silent.30 In contrast to the works of Castro and Lucio y Bustamante, peninsular Spanish writers took their point of departure not from religious literature but from this Spanish and colonial costumbrismo, as well as, perhaps, from the late colonial novel in Cuba. Both literary traditions are instructive in situating the debates regarding the future of colonial modernity in the Philippines throughout the 1880s, as witnessed, for example, in Francisco de Paula Entrala’s book-length polemic, Olvidos de Filipinas (1881), against Francisco Cañamaque’s Recuerdos de Filipinas. Cosas, casos, y usos de aquellas islas: Vistos, oidos, tocados y contados (1877–79). In the tradition of peninsular Spanish costumbrista writing, the difficulty of developing a novel out of costumbrista articles, types, sketches, and scenes—brief portraits of the Spanish people or countryside—is well known.31 Spanish costumbrismo’s

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obsession with capturing “pure” (castizo) Spanish customs, memorializing a past that had no present or future, and creating generic types that erased rather than highlighted individuality and singularity all militated against the transformation of the genre into the form of the novel (Montesinos, Costumbrismo y novela, 129; see also chapter 5). In the case of the Cuban antislavery novels of the nineteenth century, some of which were no doubt read by peninsular Spanish authors of the Sexenio revolution, the progressive ideology of slave emancipation that inspired the Cuban novela de costumbres found itself confronted and defeated at every turn by the fear of a black uprising. This fear makes itself manifest in Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s Sab (1841) and Cirilio Villaverde’s seminal Cecilia Valdés; o, la loma del ángel (1882). The authors of both novels rigorously engineer the plots in ways that manage to avoid the resolution or culmination of the social conflicts they represent.32 From a generic standpoint, one can easily understand how peninsular Spanish writers who attempted to write a “Filipino novel” or novela de costumbres inherited these or similar conceptual impasses. On the one hand, the historical time that marked the advent of the novel in Europe, in which human beings took charge of their own self-assertion or self-determination in a universe abandoned by God, had not “happened” yet in colonies like Cuba and the Philippines—or rather, it was not recognized by the intellectual elite. On the other hand, the linking of colonial society to this historical time was evident everywhere. From the opening of Manila ports to free trade in 1834, the commercialization of agriculture, the migration of large populations to the extramural subdivisions of Manila, and the emergence of an intermediary class of Hispanized Chinese mestizos to the educational reform decrees and the rise of the newspaper industry, the mutual isolation of city and countryside had given way to their contact, conflict, and attempted synchronization. And yet, the attempted rapprochement between city and countryside did not occur in a vacuum: it informed and was informed by the parallel attempt to resolve the contradictions arising from the narrowing distance between Spanish metropolis and colonial outpost. As we saw earlier in Sinibaldo de Mas’ secret report to the king in 1842, the everincreasing number of colonial administration officials appointed to the Philippines, who often professed a liberal or progressive persuasion, brought with them either a relative or complete ignorance of the land of their destination (see chapter 4). This ignorance was compounded

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by ideas regarding the backwardness of the religious clergy, as well as the universal right to constitutional representation, due process of law, and civil liberties (Costa, Readings in Philippine History, 152). With the opening of the Suez Canal in 1868 and the administration of republican-minded Captain-General Carlos María de la Torre (1868– 72), the attempt to align Spanish policies in the colonies with those in the metropolis could not but raise inevitable questions: How far could colonial reform go, short of collapsing the enforced difference between liberal Spain and the Philippines’ administration of Special Laws and legislation? In many ways, the novels produced by Francisco Cañamaque and Francisco de Paula Entrala in 1880–81 mirrored the two extreme attitudes one could take to this impasse. The novels were written during or in the aftermath of an exchange of writings between the two authors, which disputed the right and competence of the former (Cañamaque) to evaluate the level of enlightened consciousness, the moral uprightness, and the degree of “civilization” ascribable to the native colonial subject. The debate itself began with Cañamaque’s Recuerdos de Filipinas, in which the narrator traveled to the province of Zambales and spent eleven months visiting various towns and cities, after which he wrote Recuerdos de Filipinas as a “moral physiognomy” of the Philippines (quoted in Entrala, Olvidos de Filipinas, 43). Cañamaque’s authority to make pronouncements on the state of the colony, from his own account, derived from his direct witnessing of the backward state of affairs, the accumulated effects of Spanish bureaucratic incompetence and corruption, and a firsthand account of suffering the indolence of the Indio.33 Entrala’s Olvidos de Filipinas, a somewhat meandering rebuttal of Cañamaque’s criticisms, nevertheless succeeds in casting aspersions on the authority of the latter’s strategy of employing naive empiricism in the service of distorting an accurate picture of native customs. How well, after all, did Cañamaque really understand the Philippines? How well did he presumably understand the Indios, without speaking a word of their language and lacking any conception of their customs and traditions? How well, fi nally, did he understand his fellow peninsular Spaniards in the colony, who had resided in the archipelago for years prior to Cañamaque’s short visit and remained there long after Cañamaque had departed? But you are deceived, my esteemed Cañamaque! It is not that Spaniards, mestizos, and Indios would protest . . . what you call truths; it is that they are outraged that your works do not contain any; it is thus that, as

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in the question of reforms, which you at times speak of with conviction but which you in fact treat superficially, so too in the question of customs that you ridicule and exaggerate, it is you who are detestable . . . it is, that here one knows this country, something which is not really possible from [Spain], however enlightened a speaker or writer like yourself may be. (Entrala, Olvidos, 47)

Cañamaque’s defense of his knowledge appears in a collection of short works on the Philippines, including a novella he pompously titled “La novela de Filipinas: Candelario” (The novel of the Philippines: Candelario). In the novella, the author endeavors to substantiate a number of points he makes in an essay just preceding it on proposed reforms for the archipelago. Some of these proposed reforms—the stimulation of private property, the “harmonization” of religious and material interests, and the suppression of Indio priests—date back to the proyectistas of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Yet Cañamaque’s zeal for the teaching of Spanish in public education as well as the (limited) allowance of civil liberties, including the cultivation of the press and the relaxation of censorship, illustrates at once his political background as a child of the Sexenio revolution and his complete ignorance of the contradiction between these objectives and the Church’s approach to the continuity of colonial rule. “La novela de Filipinas” attempts to demonstrate the most controversial point he believes to have made in his essay, which is his support, as a liberal Spanish patriot, for the Church as a colonial institution. “I am perhaps the only liberal writer,” he boasts, “who fi rmly sustains that only the friars . . . conserve those provinces [the Philippines] for Spain. . . . For now, they are necessary . . . [and we must] unite them to the administration in a way that they offer the most effective support for the new life I propose . . . for their good, the good of the Indios, and the good of the Spanish metropolis” (Cañamaque, “La novela de Filipinas,”60–62). Once again, this boast reveals Cañamaque’s fundamental ignorance of colonial politics. The novella, written in a sparse prose style that Cañamaque avowedly derived from Emile Zola and the naturalist novel in Europe, tells the simple story of a priest who discovers a twelve-year-old orphan, whom he decides to call Candelario, and instructs the orphan to serve him in exchange for upbringing and education. At the end of the novella, the priest dies before Candelario (who is now twenty-six) and his fi ancée receive the sacrament of holy matrimony. But instead of settling in the town, the couple flees to the mountains to live the

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life of remontados, natives who for various reasons have fled and shunned their residence in colonial Christian society. One sees in Cañamaque’s novella both the strength and weakness of Spanish and Philippine costumbrismo. The schematic arrangement of the plot, the detailed yet anonymous descriptions of the tributary and mountains bordering the town of “A.,” and the conscious effort to identify the dialogue and situations in the novel as “typical,” or generic, reveal the constant relapse of the novel form into a costumbrista sketch or typical scene. Every description of Candelario’s words and actions leads to or derives from the narrator’s description of an Indio “in general”: the plot, too, strives to tie, through synecdoche, the priest Fray Mariano’s attempt to “civilize” Candelario with the overall attitude of colonial benevolence expressed in the theory and practice of Spain’s Special Laws. Fray Mariano’s care of Candelario combines the teachings of a Christian life with education in domestic and social responsibility, teaching the child the meaning of industry and obedience, as well as the value of money and private property, to the point that Christian morals and social values become identified. Candelario’s “normalization” is best represented by the initial encounter between priest and orphan: when the priest asks his name, he replies: “Sinibaldo Olalla,” although his father called him “Casildo” and his mother called him “Candelaria.” The priest responds: “From today you will be called what your mother called you, with the following variation [of the name] from female to male, okay? You are henceforth named Candelario” (95).34 By renaming the child, Fray Mariano at once erases the confusion of Sinibaldo Olalla’s past and supplants it with a “corrected” version (which significantly derives from the nickname given by the mother). Cañamaque’s claim to have written the paradigmatic “Philippine novel” in Spanish displays a rather unsurprising thematic continuity with the Tagalog novel in this period. Candelario also displays the conservative tendency of Spanish and colonial costumbrismo. The author admits as much at the end of his novella, when he writes, “In the Philippines . . . there exist none of those terrifying, earthshaking, hair-raising elements that exist in certain European novels” (118).35 Like those of his predecessors, Cañamaque’s novelistic attempt ends in an ironic admission of its impossibility. At the same time, however, the boldness of the author’s claim, however compromised, reveals an impulse in Cañamaque’s writing that marks a departure from costumbrismo. That was the author’s rather

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un-ironic or naive conviction that his ability to write the “Philippine” novel stemmed from a knowledge of Philippine nature and native custom arising from a realm completely outside and independent of both. Insofar as the scientific analysis of nature and the other provided universal norms that could be applied to specific instances, naturalism allowed Cañamaque to analyze and evaluate the colonial world according to a criterion entirely imported from Europe and applied uncompromisingly to the Philippine instance. We see this attempt in the author’s frequent recourse to naturalism and quasi-scientific theory to provide an underlying reason for Candelario’s quixotic actions and confused beliefs, including his desire to escape to the mountains and his fundamental incomprehension of money. In describing Candelario, the anonymous narrator resorts to quasi-natural science: “[The Indios] do not possess . . . in their brains that quantity of understanding as other races [do], which is doubtless why they discern little or nothing at all of the depths that the misery and anguish of life leaves open to our speech” (75).36 A little further on, the author adds: “It is a fact among phrenologists that a depression in the facial angle of one’s physiognomy corresponds to a moral and intellectual depression. This is a clear fact in the case of the Malayan Indio, as clear as day, a fact that admits no rebuttal” (76).37 This new way of establishing norms of behavior and action appears so commonly in the novel because the empirical method presumes a partial and incomplete grasp of nature and society, whose reality must be tested and contested by some method of creating and developing totalizing statements. As Cañamaque’s novella illustrates, this potentially emancipatory idea was quickly used in the service of racist and somewhat cynical remarks on the future of colonial society. On a surface level, one might read in Cañamaque’s novella his earlier argument on the need for the religious orders to normalize the aberrant behavior and tendencies of the Indio: his laziness, his animosity toward paying colonial tribute, his ignorance of civilized ways. On a deeper level, however, the norm of native behavior is already inextricably anchored in the native’s very nature, analyzable in the fields of phrenology and comparative physical anthropology. Candelario’s decision to leave colonial Christian society for the savage life of the mountains appears tragic only from the perspective of the liberal reformist working in the archipelago; from the perspective of the student of natural science, however, Candelario’s destiny merely fulfi lls the laws that determine his identity.

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What is important to recognize in Cañamaque’s approach, however, is that while his social conservatism parallels that of the earlier works by Castro and Lucio y Bustamante, the locus of authority from which this conservatism springs is entirely different. It arises from the metropolis and boasts a fundamental ignorance of native customs, a constitutive ignorance, necessary for the performance and legitimacy of the kind of analysis Cañamaque aspires to do. In Candelario’s world, neither priest nor bata (child) determines his own fate or that of the other: both submit to the anonymous, impersonal science of the metropolis, whose universal application can map the “moral physiognomy” of an entire archipelago and the capacities of its inhabitants without regard for their intentions or will, and link this physiognomy with policies and recommendations from Madrid. Entrala’s response to this attitude also appears in the form of a novel, which was published a year before his death, and offers what might be considered the most sophisticated and nuanced response to the novelization of colonial life in the nineteenth-century Philippines. Like Cañamaque, José Felipe del Pan, Ricardo de Puga, Federico Casademunt, and other writers we have studied (see chapter 5), Entrala was profoundly affected by the 1868 Spanish revolution and the heritage of republicanism. One of his earlier works, written before his emigration to the Philippines, explicitly called for Cuban representation in the Spanish Cortes and the unconditional abolition of slavery on the universal principles of natural law.38 More important, however, Entrala’s contribution to the literature of the period is unique, insofar as he was one of the few peninsular Spaniards whose career came to depend entirely on the future of the newspaper industry in Manila. Aside from editing, publishing, or writing for newspapers such as Diario de Manila, El Porvenir Filipino, España en Oceania, and La Ilustración del Oriente throughout the decades preceding the 1896 Philippine revolution, he also published several novels, as well as the aforementioned book-length polemic against fellow Spanish writer and traveler Francisco Cañamaque. Sin título was Entrala’s last novel; it was published in 1881, a year before his death.39 In the novel, the peninsular Spanish doctor Don Paco Alonso arrives in the Philippines, disillusioned with the politics in Spain that characterized the rule of moderantismo in the years prior to the 1868 September Revolution.40 He arrives in the wake of an important historical event of the late nineteenth century in the Philippines:

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the 1863 Manila earthquake that destroyed half of the city. One of his fi rst patients is Rosario Anselmo, nicknamed “Charing,” a beautiful young mestiza whose father is a native-Chinese mestizo and whose deceased mother was of Chinese and Spanish descent.41 The earthquake and the tremors that follow in its wake cause Charing’s illness, which is augmented by the medications of a Chinese herbalist or mediquillo (quack-doctor), whom the father (Don Anselmo) prefers to Don Paco because of his familiarity with traditional healing practices and their explanation.42 For the most part, the novel centers on the struggle between the two doctors (Don Paco Alonso and Tiang-Song) over the life of Charing, a struggle that becomes an allegory for larger divisions at work in the Philippines from the perspective of the late Spanish colonialist: cosmopolitanism vs. parochialism, the social bond of marriage vs. the web of kinship, Spanish vs. Chinese influences over native society, and, ultimately, reason vs. faith. As noted earlier, Charing’s father strongly prefers that the mediquillo Tiang-Song care for his daughter , several times professing his faith in the Chinese doctor to be blind and absolute (Entrala, Sin título, 109, 186, and 215). But when Tiang-Song’s ministrations leave Charing even weaker than she was at the outset, Paco seizes the opportunity to cure her with Western medicine. The results are mixed, because Don Anselmo continually sabotages Paco Alonso’s treatment by replacing the Spanish doctor’s medicine with Tiang-Song’s. Even after Paco and Charing have fallen in love, married, and settled in a suburb outside the city (Sampaloc), Charing’s father arranges for her to consult the Chinese doctor secretly. One night, when Paco is called to treat a sick patient, Charing has a freak accident on the road and falls ill. Don Anselmo, along with his friends, in-laws, and another mediquillo (this time a native Filipino, Mangulang) rush to her bedside, where they once again unwittingly poison her with local cures. She dies only moments before Paco returns, and upon receiving the news, he dies before even having the chance to alight from his carriage. While Cañamaque’s portrayal of an emergent, late colonial, civil society concentrates on the duality between Spaniard and native Filipino in the relationship of the benevolent priest and the child, Sin título takes up an infinitely more popular motif of late colonial literature in the newspapers: the attempted romance between Spaniard and Filipino mestiza. Unlike any other costumbrista type, the mestiza embodied the field of social forces in conflict in the Philippines throughout the late nineteenth

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century. She not only inherits the blood, language, and culture or customs of both Spain and the Philippines, but she also offers alternately the promise or threat of a new culture, completely hybridized, in which Spaniards, native Filipinos, and Chinese transform or become transformed by each other so as to create a new (civil) society.43 For this reason, earlier Spanish ambivalence over the role of the mestizos in Filipino society became complicated by the astonishing influx of Chinese immigrants between the 1840s and 1880s. As Edgar Wickberg notes, the Chinese population increased from “about 6,000 in 1847 (in a total population of about 3,500,000) to perhaps 90,000 by the 1880s (in a total population of nearly 6,000,000” (Wickberg, The Chinese in the Philippines, 147). This influx gave rise to anti-Chinese sentiment among upper-class mestizos and Indios as well as Spanish officials, businessmen, and the religious. On a larger level, however, anti-Chinese sentiment could not but force the colonial government to face the paradoxes and contradictions created by an administration of Special Laws and privileges. Were Chinese immigrants future citizens or colonial subjects? How did their status compare or contrast with other European foreigners immigrating to the Philippines? And what would be the consequences of such assignments of status to already existing mestizos and Indios; or, for that matter, future mestizo families? (156). Charing turns out to be one-quarter Spanish, one-quarter native Filipino, and half Chinese. Not surprisingly, she is torn between faith in her husband Paco Alonso and faith in both her father and the ancient practice of Chinese medicine: What is certain is that every mestiza has three religions: the true religion, taught to her by the Church priests, the religion of her elders, and the religion of her customs. If there are some who show themselves rebellious to the fi rst, you cannot bring me one who would renounce the second. The mestiza who abjures the third does so accidentally or only at fi rst glance, but at bottom, what happens to her happens to other races: they abjure, but continue believing in what they rejected. Dress the mestiza as a Spaniard, but you will hear her speak Tagalog. Prohibit her from speaking her language, but don’t deprive her of her saints and virgins. . . . The mestiza is not cosmopolitan, but Filipino. She is the standard-bearer of the country’s customs. If you deprive her of her mediquillo, she will seek counsel . . . from someone who most resembles one. (257)44

This complex of faith, a combination of Christianization and the intransigence of belief in one’s elders and one’s customs, contrasts with the “triple amor del talento, la ciencia, y el alma” that motivates Paco Alonso’s desire to save her, even at the cost of his own life (227). Yet

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this love belies their incomprehension of each other and the emptiness that it brings. Paco seeks a confidante, “who would be almost he himself . . . but not in public, but alone . . . in the intimacy of the home, to receive applause or censure . . . as one seeking a mirror [que fuese casi su propia persona . . . pero no en público, sino á solas . . . en la intimidad del hogar, para recibir aplausos o censuras . . . como quien busca un espejo]” (229–30). On the other hand, Charing marries him for the opposite reasons: she was proud to marry someone “rich, peninsular: he was wise, and Rosario found herself touched, conquered, full of joy, before so many virtues [preeminencias] in one man” (230) [rico, era peninsular, era sabio y Rosario se inclinaba enternecida, subyugada, gozosa, ante tantas preeminencias reunidas]. For Paco, marriage consolidates the split between the private and public domains; for Charing, marriage is “the satisfaction of her pride” [la satisfacción de su orgullo]—a public ostentation of a private arrangement, a “public secret” so to speak, that guarantees Charing’s status in Manila society (228). In fact, both often question whether or not what they feel for each other is actually love. A fundamental misrecognition of each other’s motives has taken place. Perhaps predictably, the content of these motives returns us to the Spaniard/native Filipino dichotomy: while Paco goes about setting up free medical clinics and pharmacies all over Manila and contracting the most renowned curanderos (healers) in order to take advantage of their herbal knowledge as well as keep them off the streets, Charing fails to understand his inspiration, and instead attempts in various ways to keep him at her side. In reflecting on Paco’s love for Charing, the narrator writes, “Paco had fallen in love . . . not with a woman or her misfortune, but with misfortune itself, embodied in an angelic nature” (228).45 Charing cannot explain her “love” in any other way except to say, “That is my husband” (228). Yet while the author moves toward a reestablishment of such dichotomies, it is clear that the Spaniard/Indio division as a reflection of colonial society has given way to more complex divisions that implicate both Spaniard and native without necessarily designating one as the absence or lack of the other. For one thing, there is the introduction of Chinese blood and medical practice as an omnipresent yet undecided influence on Don Anselmo’s family: while his deceased wife is said to inherit her frugality and industriousness from her Chinese ancestry, the Chinese mediquillo Tiang-Song slowly poisons her daughter. For another, the negative gossip that spreads around Paco Alonso does not arise from native Filipinos, but from other Spaniards (241). But most important,

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the contrast between Charing’s and Don Anselmo’s “blind faith” in the mediquillo vs. the truth or reason of Paco Alonso’s Western medical science cannot be reduced to a question of Spanish vs. native Filipino ways, insofar as faith is just as much an essential element of the colonial missionary enterprise as it is a shelter from or resistance to it (as it is here). In fact, even Entrala admits that superstitious belief is a state of mind shared by Filipinos and Spaniards alike: “For the more imperfect understandings, tradition offers more than evidence. Who believes in Tragic Tuesdays . . . in cracked plates or cracked mirrors? We laugh . . . but we believe!” (256–57).46 This displacement of the relationship between Spaniard and native Filipino through the intervention of the Chinese, the mestizo, other transplanted Spaniards, the enlightenment debate, and so on is prefigured in the aftermath of the Manila earthquake, when Manileños are driven out of the walled city and into the suburbs of Sampaloc, Tondo, and Ermita, where they must face the reconstruction of social relations among a hybrid society of people who move freely through the streets, speaking Tagalog, Spanish, and pidgin with a Tagalog or Chinese accent (32–34). The earthquake that uproots the colonial city may also be said to symbolize this shifting ground between terror and enlightenment that alternately throws the Spanish colonialist into the contact zone with other Filipinos and forces him to analyze the difficulties they face in constructing a civil society together. The difficulty of erecting a program for public health is an example, insofar as it indicates the need for change that is cultural as much as it is a question of government legislation. Again, Entrala differentiates himself from his peers, many of whom concentrate on the inability or incapacity of the native Filipino to change. For Entrala, both faith and reason share the same ground or groundlessness, which is that of doubt: “Insofar as doubt is what fi rst leads us to believe, [faith in mediquillos] is as true as our saying that the principle of knowledge is ignorance” (215).47 The Cartesian genealogy of this dichotomy is not difficult to fi nd: we even see it in Kant’s reflections on the sublime and Hegel’s portrayal of the transition from the terror in which everything is questioned to the dialectic of enlightenment. Entrala’s echo of Hegel is particularly pronounced here: for both, the moment of supreme doubt marks not only the opportunity for enlightenment but a possible return or restoration of the age of faith: “It is not strange that [faith] struggles with the force of a powerful titan, between the old and the new, between the ancient and the modern, between yesterday and tomorrow. . . . Faith does not

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meditate; on the contrary, it becomes even more rooted, intransigent, and arrogant when it is attacked” (215).48 The struggle between faith and reason opens the door to a series of other confl icts that emerge in the transplantation of the Enlightenment to the colonial world. At what point, for example, must a knowledge of nature as it is reflected in Paco Alonso’s medicine give way to a recognition of the other, who may neither need nor want it? After Paco Alonso accuses Don Anselmo of secretly murdering his daughter by replacing his medicines with Tiang-Song’s, Don Anselmo replies, Observe V. que cada cual tiene en este mundo sus creencias: que las creencias deben ser respetadas en el mundo. . . . Y como no me obliga el Gobierno á elegir médico, como soy libre de buscar á quien me plazca . . . ¿qué quiere V. señor? . . . Son nuestras costumbres: son las costumbres que tuvieron nuestros padres . . . son las costumbres de muchos fi lipinos y si de eso se nos priva . . . ¡señor! por caridad! no se ofenda con nosotros.49 [Observe that everyone in this world has their beliefs: that beliefs must be respected in the world. . . . And seeing as the Government does not oblige me to choose a doctor, and seeing as I am free to seek whom I please . . . what, sir, do you want? These are our customs: they are customs that our ancestors held . . . the customs of many Filipinos, and if you deprive us of these . . . good sir! For the love of God! Do not be offensive with us.]

Paco is caught in an ethical trap: his enlightened cosmopolitanism forces him to respect the other’s freedom, as he himself asserts earlier in the novel—even if he believes his understanding of science to be superior. But there is something deeper at stake in Don Anselmo’s refusal to recognize Paco Alonso’s knowledge, in a gesture reminiscent of the Spanish colonialist’s refusal to recognize fully the active participation of the native Filipino in the imagination of civil society. For beneath Don Anselmo’s ignorance lies an assertion of his human dignity in the face of colonialism. In fact, one can read his exacerbated argument that he is not breaking the law and that he has the power to preside over the destiny of his child as an expression of his freedom, however misinformed or misguided. Such an expression contains within it an unspoken threat of revolt against not only Paco but the Spanish colonial order as well: “si de eso se nos priva . . . ¡señor! por caridad!” Don Anselmo seems to be saying that if you deprive us of even our customs, however erroneous they may be, we will rise up and obliterate you. This unspoken hubris against Paco Alonso as a member, willing or not, of the Spanish colonial regime, is not limited to Don Anselmo. While native Filipinos initially “adore” Paco Alonso for his crusading

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works, they later stop attending his clinics and pharmacies. He eventually discovers that all the local healers, led by a rival Spanish doctor, Don Lupercio, have influenced the city populace to boycott them (270). In the meantime, Don Anselmo and his sister-in-law Choleng continue to visit the bedridden Charing when her husband Paco Alonso is away, trying to convince her to return to Chinese medicine. What is noteworthy about their arguments lies not in their anecdotes about Tiang-Song’s renown as a healer but in their conviction that Spanish and native society are ultimately distinct and incompatible, and that this incompatibility must serve as the basis of Charing’s judgment. In her aunt Choleng’s words, “They know a lot . . . [she said,] referring to the European doctors . . . but they do not understand us” (257: italics in original). [Ellos saben mucho . . . pensando y refiriéndose á los médicos europeos . . . pero no nos entienden á nosotros.] Even earlier, Don Anselmo subtly accuses his daughter of alienating herself from her family by becoming Hispanized: “You can believe in what you want . . . and you’ll have more than an opportunity to adopt Spanish customs” (246–47).50 The importation of knowledge is inseparable from the transformation of social values, just as the consideration of customs and traditions plays a constitutive role in one’s evaluation of medical science. Confronted with these accusations, Charing sees her choice of a doctor as a cultural one, and her trust in Paco is twisted to appear as an act of defiance against both her father and the “customs”—language, religious belief, traditions, and so forth—that have formed her ethical life. Instead of continuity and complementarity between Hispanization and native Philippine culture—an idea that provided the cornerstone of the archipelago’s Christianization throughout the colonial period— Entrala wrestles with the colonial impasse of understanding between colonial master and subject. This opposition spurs one of the necessary tasks of the colonial author in the nineteenth-century Philippines: imagining a late colonial civil society or analyzing the conditions that render such a civil society impossible. On the level of the novel’s content, only two solutions exist: either Paco Alonso must become “Filipinized,” that is, accept the coexistence of mediquillos whose practices contradict his own; or Charing must become Europeanized, which she is prepared to do just before the tragedy befalls them both (263). Yet on the level of form, the novel succeeds in doing what Entrala’s costumbrista peers consistently failed to accomplish: portraying the self-recognition of the colonial Spaniard in the eyes of the native or

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indigenized other, an act at once submissive and violent. Paco Alonso’s submission to the other’s representation of him occurs at least twice: when he explodes at Don Anselmo (185) and, later, when his declaration of love must be translated into Tagalog so that the servant-child, María, can carry it to her patroness, Charing (198). In both instances, he is represented by the other in the other’s speech and language. 51 By judging or evaluating the others, he submits to their evaluation of him and faces the ethical task of fi nding a middle ground that will accommodate or synthesize both positions. Both moments force the reader to grasp a point that Entrala makes several times throughout the novel, as well as in his polemical essay Olvidos de Filipinas: even as “we” Spaniards represent ourselves and the natives in Castilian, which they understand at least partially, they represent us and each other in a language we do not understand (see, for example, 102). In fact, knowledge of vernacular Tagalog gives the mediquillos a distinct advantage over the Spanish licensed practitioners (216). Of course, this submission to the other’s eyes and voice should not be seen as a kind of altruistic gesture on the part of the benevolent, liberal Spaniard. As in all examples of the colonial novel, the transplantation of the modern dialectic from Spain to the colony brings with it an interpellative violence, insofar as it demands that the submission of the self to the other, “another’s voice in another’s language,” as Bakhtin puts it, be reciprocal. On the one hand, the Spaniard Entrala does well to criticize the arrogance of colonial costumbrismo, claiming that “the indio, the mestizo, the Spanish woman, the individual who appears in this book or any other, does not determine an entire race, nor the defects of any particular person” (226). 52 Yet, in Paco Alonso’s descent into the relativity of cultural values and his dialectical submission to the voice and language of the native other, the narrator is compelled to make precisely these categorizations. Even as the novel has opened up an outside space where all knowledge and values are called into question—a new zone of contact between Spanish colonialist and subaltern Indio (not to mention Chinese, mestizos, foreign travelers, and other denizens of the colonial world)—the author struggles to delimit the proliferation of contact—to explain it, and ultimately control it. How do we evaluate this ambiguous retrenchment in the colonial divide between colonialist and colonial subject? Like all binarisms, the division between the old and the new, the colonialist and the

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figure 6. The cathedral at Manila after the 1880 earthquake. Courtesy of Archivo General Militar de Madrid (AGMM).

colonial subject, distorts the shifts at work in colonial society, as witnessed in the rise of the colonial novel. Entrala’s contribution to the colonial novel is to arrange these binarisms around a historical event—the 1863 earthquake and the subsequent attempts of the colonial government to respond to it with a comprehensive plan of reconstruction and public welfare—but to allow a narrative to develop in spite of them (see figure 6). Describing the aftermath of the earthquake, Entrala writes: Los escombros de la iglesia, cuya torre parecía una enorme boca vuelta al cielo, las ruinas de las casas, la soledad de aquel pueblo, tan profunda como la de todos los pueblos fi lipinos, se hacían mas sensibles y espantosas al ser bañadas por la claridad del crepúsculo de invierno que arrojaba el moribundo sol a través de cielo acelajado. (202) [The ruins of the church, whose tower seemed like an enormous mouth turned to the sky, the ruins of houses, the solitude of that town (pueblo), as deep as that of every Filipino town, became more palpable and shocking when bathed in the clarity of the winter twilight that the dying sun cast across the cloud-streaked sky.]

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On a symbolic level, the ruined church reveals the gaping emptiness of a secular colonial state, trying to create values in a disenchanted world, just as surely as the novel, in Lukács’s succinct phrase, becomes “the epic of a world that has been abandoned by God.”53 The liberal Spanish colonialist stands before this enigma; and he recognizes his sublime destiny to attempt to “fi ll the hole,” write the book, save the other from herself—or die in the process (227). Armed only with the Cartesian doubt of Western medicine and a romantic passion for “misfortune itself,” Paco Alonso would solve “the indecipherable unknown that agitated his pride: the deep problem that refused his science; the impenetrable mystery that manifested itself before his eyes, the narrow limits of his knowledge as a man [la incognita indescifrable que aguijoneaba su orgullo: el hondo problema que negaba su ciencia; el impenetrable misterio que ponia de manifesto a sus ojos, el límite estrecho de su inteligencia de hombre]” (228; italics in text). Beneath Entrala’s typical costumbrista gestures toward a description of a colonial aesthetic, with Charing as the ideal reflection of the country’s riverbanks, reeds, and forests, lies the articulation of a colonial sublime, in which the cosmopolitan Spaniard’s discovery of death at the heart of his newfound home coincides with the realization of his modern destiny as an enlightened doctor to make of death his home: “Her eyes, whenever he looked into them, seemed to be looking at a blank book. . . . All these ideas, more subjective than objective, made him shiver and gaze upon the house of Charing as we gaze at a ship that bears our children, or at death that in the form of a sob bears our soul” (192).54 Gazing into the depths of Charing’s eyes, he sees himself as a blank book, whose capacity for meaning in the colonial world is infi nite yet indecipherable. This blank book provides a veil behind which Spanish, Chinese, and native blood begin to intermingle, crossing a threshold of becoming even as Manila begins to stumble its way across the ruins of an older order toward an imagined civil society. In fact, from an allegorical standpoint, Manila’s ruin hearkens back to another ruin memorialized in the European imagination: the French terror, which marked the fi rst great challenge to political absolutism on the continent. Perhaps, then, it is only fitting that Paco Alonso is described by the author at key moments in the text as a “sublime” figure in order to designate not only his symbolic importance in the Philippines but his allegorical importance as a child of enlightenment and revolution: “Alonso was . . . sublime. . . . More than Spanish, he seemed at that moment a

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Girondin, Barnabe, such as Lamartine portrays him to us” (241–42; italics in original).55 The symbolic and allegorical registers in Entrala’s text point to at least two possible directions for our Spanish hero: will Paco Alonso entice the native Filipino out into the partial light and recognition of modern Spanish colonialism, “the clarity of the winter twilight that the dying sun cast across the cloud-streaked sky,” or will he lead his fellow Spanish colonialists to a recognition of the regime’s limits and to the threshold of becoming Filipino? Read as an allegory of late Spanish colonialism, it is tempting to concede the latter. This is because Entrala’s limits as a writer merely reflect the limits of civil reform under a colonial regime. Commenting on the predicament of the colonizer who attempts to refuse the violence of colonization, Albert Memmi writes, “It is necessary to keep in mind an essential feature of the nature of colonial life; the colonial situation is based on the relationship between one group of people and another. . . . Colonial relations do not stem from individual good will or actions; they exist before [the colonizer’s] birth, and whether he accepts or rejects them matters little. It is these relations, on the contrary, which . . . determine a priori his place and that of the colonized and, in the fi nal analysis, their true relationship.”56 Memmi concludes that the only resolution to such a dilemma is suicide or ambivalence: “If [the colonizer] does not eliminate himself as a colonizer, he resigns himself to a position of ambiguity” (45). Yet it is our task not only to evaluate the limits of such moments, in which a discourse of late colonialism began to articulate its legitimacy in the late nineteenth century, but also to reveal how those limits introduce new ways of posing the problem of colonial governance. Hence, it may be said that while Entrala runs up against and even attempts to legitimize the late colonial order, the very form of the novel transplants a dialectic of enlightenment into the archipelago that inevitably represents and recognizes contradictions, and experiments with solutions that bypass or evade the censor. The title of Entrala’s novel emblematizes this recognition: contrary to the norms derived from and ascribed to the analysis and attempted regulation of colonial society during the latter half of the nineteenth century (pakikipagkapwa-tao, katuwiran, phrenology, etc.), Entrala’s diagnosis has no name—it is sin título. Its namelessness calls for a redemption of civil society, but one whose operation avoids the easy compromises between church and state, church and native

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tradition, or native tradition and the political rationality of the colonial state. In contrast to the other examples of “novelization” we have discussed, Entrala thus resists the temptation to suture the contradictions of colonial modernity. His diagnosis of late colonial society reveals an underside of tropical enlightenment that has at least partially uprooted the old dichotomies responsible for keeping colonial society together, leaving them exposed to the melancholy sun as ruins that litter the imaginary landscape of late colonialism. Unlike his literary adversary, Francisco Cañamaque, however, Entrala adopts the more difficult decision to keep the interpretation of that rupture open. The cathedral was destroyed. Who would rebuild it?

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chapter 7

Gothic Priest of a God of peace, your mouth full of sanctity and religion, and a heart full of wretchedness, you could not have known what a father is. José Rizal, Noli me tangere

blood compact Viewers in Manila who attended the unveiling of Juan Luna’s Pacto de sangre in 1885 must have greeted the painting with some degree of surprise and perplexity: in the case of Wenceslao Retana, one of the most important figures of Spanish letters and journalism in the Philippines, the reaction was one of outright dismay (see figure 7).1 Luna, a native-born Chinese mestizo who studied painting in Europe as well as the Philippines, had already earned renown for his work in Paris and Madrid, where one of his previous paintings, El spoliarium, had won prestigious awards in the 1884 Paris and Madrid Expositions. 2 In 1885 the Spanish colonial government commissioned Luna to portray what was considered to be a foundational event in the conquest and “pacification” of the archipelago during the sixteenth century. This was the blood compact (Sandugo) sealed between Spanish conquistador and founder of Manila Manuel López de Legazpi and various native leaders (chiefly Rajah Sikatuna of Bohol and Rajah Soliman of Maynila), which amounted to a peace treaty between the two parties. In this procedure, the blood of each leader would be mixed with wine, which the leader of the opposed party would drink. It is through such a compact that Legazpi established a foothold in Luzon and the Visayas for the spread of Christian evangelization and the colonial resettlement of natives in towns established by the Spanish military and religious leaders. 229

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Juan Luna, Pacto de sangre [Blood compact], 1884

Yet Luna’s portrait of the blood compact, which the government had planned to hang in the Manila city hall, leaves the viewer with a very unsettled impression of the historical event. It introduces the two questions that underlie the gothic response to colonial modernity in the nineteenth century: What purpose does the invocation of a specifically Philippine history serve? And what are the implications of this history for the interpretation of the present and future? At fi rst glance, Luna’s painting does not immediately offer any clear answers. To begin with, the scene is enshrouded in darkness: thus, while Legazpi and Rajah Sikatuna have each raised a goblet of blood-wine to commemorate their treaty, the darkness obscures an entire half of the Spanish conquistador’s face, rendering uncertain his facial expression. To complicate matters further, Luna has placed Sikatuna in the foreground of the scene, yet he has his back to the viewer. If Legazpi’s expression (along with that of the priest beside him), is difficult to read, that of Rajah Sikatuna is impossible to see. Even more baffling, Luna has placed in Legazpi’s left hand a written treaty that reiterates the contractual nature of the blood compact; but in reiterating it, also interrogates the blood compact’s legitimacy or dignity as a native custom in the eyes of the Spanish invader. Finally, beside the written treaty, we see Sikatuna’s hand still firmly grasping his drawn kris or sword, again casting suspicion on the successful outcome of the agreement. On the right side of

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the painting, military, religious, and civil authorities alike bear witness to the agreement that is about to conclude. Yet again, as if to reinforce the impression of doubt about the status and legitimacy of the treaty, the Spanish party appears to have Sikatuna half-surrounded, in a semicircle, and their halberds and pikes rise clearly above their heads. The threatening implication of these gestures must have been what led Retana to criticize the painting as “an absurdity” (un disparate).3 Why are there no native witnesses to the treaty? Why did Luna portray Sikatuna with his back to the viewer? Luna’s rendering of this historical event was meant to shed light on Spain’s role in the Philippines. In fact, the commission itself constituted an event in itself: today, art historians consider Luna’s Pacto de sangre as the fi rst “historical painting” of a Philippine subject. Yet the subject that Luna portrays is not an event, but an enigma—the ghost of the past, seemingly resurrected by the very same Spaniards who centuries earlier had suppressed it. It shows the restoration of a custom that came to stand for all native customs, invoked again and again in the years of the Filipino revolution, but this time in the service of war. Previous chapters have illustrated this intersection of politics and aesthetics as an attempt to fashion norms by which the successes and failures of modern colonialism could be evaluated. In each chapter, the historical past—whether in the form of the religious missionary endeavor of the conquest, the relative autonomy of native traditions under paternal rule, or the discourse of lack and absence that characterized native societies prior to Spanish colonization—provides a question that the present appears destined to resolve in the form of the colonial state. Yet what happens when the state can no longer maintain this fiction? What happens when writers begin to look to the past for answers to the irresolvable contradictions of the colonial raison d’état? And what happens when the Indio Filipino, who has been made to speak his desire for individual and collective subjection to colonial domination, begins to speak of other desires? This chapter approaches these questions through a study of the “historical turn” of colonial writers, who were often on opposite sides of the ideological spectrum. What they shared was an implicit agreement that the colonial reason of state no longer sufficed to address the anomalous jurisdiction of Special Laws in the archipelago. Indeed, some writers went so far as to demonstrate that the modern colonial project involved a fundamental miscomprehension and resistance to the incontrovertible nature and character of

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overseas imperial rule, which had been established and documented in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A simple explanation for the disaffection with colonial reform in the late nineteenth century immediately presents itself. The turn to history as a way of criticizing the present reflected a certain disenchantment among peninsular Spanish priests and officials, as well as native-born educated Creoles, mestizos, and Indios alike, with Spain’s failed promises to substantiate the phantom administration of Special Laws. On a deeper level, the turn to history as an antidote to the impasses and compromises of the colonial present weaves together three concerns, distilled and crystallized in the laboratory of colonial reform during the nineteenth century. The fi rst is at once analytic and hermeneutic. It entails the study of history as a way of documenting the stagnation or transformation of the archipelago’s natural and human resources in the three centuries of Spanish colonial rule and expressing the need to develop norms and policies that would address these conditions.4 This use of history manifests itself chiefly in travel narratives, censuses, and guidebooks of the nineteenth century. The second is strategic, and involves the use of history as recourse to the rights and efficacy of Spanish sovereignty, in an age in which Spain’s political authority no longer corresponded to economic hegemony, social prestige, or religious evangelization. The third consideration deals with the passage from these registers of history to the articulation of a certain ethic, a certain attitude with regard to the present, which relies on the narration of “counterhistories” to the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Philippines and expresses an outward antagonism to the compromises of colonial modernity. This occurred at the very moment that the revived memory of the blood compact, which provided the founding gesture to the institution of an official colonial history, promised simultaneously to justify the phantom administration of Special Laws and reveal it to be a product of the native’s very will and desire. It would be difficult to characterize this last feature, colonial history as counterhistory, in strictly ideological terms. As we will see, the production of counterhistories that openly questioned the contractual nature of Spanish sovereignty was by no means limited to ilustrados like Luna or Rizal. Equally important, one cannot reduce the gothic undercurrent of novels like Noli me tangere and El filibusterismo to the political advocacy of Spanish republicanism and the assimilation of the Philippines into a national body. An analysis of these counterhistories, particularly in the work of Rizal, reveals that they reflect, as an inverted

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image, the generative logic of the colonial state. For just as the state attempted to adopt the political rationality of modern government and appropriate the power of the pastorate as a political technology to ensure the continuity of colonial rule, so too did counterhistories adopt a modern critique of colonial rule—its inefficiency, its adherence to racism, the hybridization of religion and politics, and so on—for the sake of defending the original rights of lost emperors, kings, and fathers. Simoun. In these and other works, the modern conception of history as resource, as recourse, and as demystification, allowed writers and artists like Juan Luna to view the rationality of the colonial state not as a norm but an exception and anomaly, and to trace the ramifications of a prolonged state of emergency in the colony for the present and future.

evacuating the past: history as resource When one compares the chronicles of the religious missionaries of the early centuries of Spanish colonialism with the brief histories of the archipelago in the travel narratives and censuses of the nineteenth century, one is immediately struck by the different worlds and worldviews that rendered either form of history meaningful. Consider, for example the introduction to Antonio de Morga’s history of the conquest in 1609, in which the author frames the conquest as the extension and fulfillment of Spanish laws, themselves derived from laws written by Cato and Marcius, “Senators of the Roman people” (Morga, Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, xxxiv). In Morga’s view, Spanish history extends and completes the laws and history of the Roman Empire, augmenting the glory of the past in deeds that confirm Spain’s inheritance of the imperial legacy. In Gaspar de San Agustín’s Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas, written almost a century later, the author emphasizes the “spiritual conquest” of the archipelago as superior to the temporal, but otherwise uses coordinates very similar to those of Morga: “In order to cite the great deeds of Caesar and Pompey, as well as those of Turnus and Aeneus, those of Achilles and other heroes, [the poets] Lucan, Virgil and Homer had to write in an exalted manner, giving life to the dead with their nourishing pens. Without the eloquence that these writings possessed, you will [nevertheless] encounter in my own writing an advantage that they lacked” (23).5 This advantage, he professes, is that of relating the history of a spiritual “conquest” that is superior to a mere temporal conquest in the annals of history:

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In [this history] you will not long for the great deeds of Alexander, if you consider well those deeds to which I refer, which belong to the Temporal as well as the Spiritual Conquest, each crafted by a different sword; one of steel, in the right hands of some, and one of the Good News, in the tongues of others, thereby enriching the laurel fields with rivers of blood belonging to the many martyrs and soldiers. Consider how much more generous are the feats of God than those of Alexander. Seneca, being an unbeliever, tells you himself: Quanto potius erit Deorum opera celebrare, quam Philippi et Alexandri latrocinia? [How much better is it to celebrate the works of the Gods, rather than the pillages of Philippi and Alexandria?] (24)6

The good news of the Church sanctifies the monarch’s sword, but the constitution of history as an enumeration of exemplary deeds worthy of imitation, and as the story of the unbroken, infinitely expanding continuity of imperial glory, remains the same. By contrast, Zúñiga’s history of the Philippines at the dawn of the nineteenth century (1803) begins with a critique of such histories and a demand to use the past in quite a different manner. In the introduction, Zúñiga writes: Histories of the Philippines are made up of huge books and volumes in large folios. . . . To fi ll up such books it has been necessary for our historians, who were for the most part missionary friars, to deal very extensively with the lives of many of their co-religious; and in the contents of their chapters to insert events of little interest to other people. . . . To avoid this error, I have suppressed various reflections, that perhaps ought to have been made, leaving this task to the Laws of History; I have remained silent on other [events], because one ought not to say all that one knows, deliberately leaving them [events] aside, allowing the impartial reader to draw his own conclusions. If other defects are found, they have arisen sometimes from the objective I have sought, which has been to relate concisely as much as possible, without pausing to refer to every small detail, and to attend to the clarity [of the narrative], even at the cost of neglecting somewhat its beauty, which is not so necessary for my purpose in having written this history. Farewell.7

In contrast to the voluminous details documented in the chronicles written by religious missionaries only two or three decades earlier, Zúñiga’s history falls silent on all but the most signifi cant events pertaining to the present and shows little interest in expressing the unbroken continuity of imperial glory. By relating the past primarily to the bedrock of present concerns, it assumes a worldview in which the judgment of historical deeds stems primarily from their impact on other people’s “interests” in “actual conditions.” Its solicitation of an impartial reader designates that outside space discussed in the last chapter, in which norms and values arise as a consequence of

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their realization in the present, rather than as its cause or predetermined model. This brings us to the question of the reader. What readers would desire impartiality in their judgment of the past’s relationship to the present? Zúñiga’s English translator, John Maver, gives us the answer. Upon the publication of the English edition of Zúñiga’s history in 1814, Maver explains the necessity of making a history of the archipelago available to the English-speaking world. According to Maver, the Philippines serves as an important commercial entrepôt in overseas Asian trade: the land is productive; untapped minerals lie beneath the land’s surface; the Philippines offers easy access to Japan and China. The translator continues as follows: The political jealousy, and the national religious prejudices of the Spaniards, have till lately opposed a bar to an extended intercourse with the Philippines; but the tide which hitherto has flowed in that direction seems of late to have commenced its ebb. The events of the last twenty years have been in their nature so extraordinary, and in their effects so powerful a solvent of all the prejudices, fostered by ignorance and superstition, which the dawn of a new day seems to open upon mankind. Let us hope that while these clouds vanish before the morning sun . . . the liberties of Europe, and consequently those of the world, will be fi xed on a permanent foundation.8

One immediately notes the not-so-subtle shift of Spain’s place in the history of Europe’s “liberties,” which extend to the entire world: Spain represents the prehistorical darkness that the closing decades of the eighteenth century have brought to an end, and its demise opens the Philippines to the morning sun of foreign trade and plantation agriculture. On a deeper level, however, both Zúñiga and Maver direct our attention to colonial history’s function in this new world order. Its task is no longer to reinforce the justice and right of present authority as the past’s inheritance or patrimony. Rather, it provides only the necessary information for the cultivation of interests and an impartial evaluation of their success or failure. To accomplish this task, it begins by marking an event or events (“the events of the last twenty years”), which not only separates the present from the past, but also history “proper” from “prehistory.” What distinguishes the former from the latter is that the study of history “proper” does not begin with the past per se, but with the relationship that the present chooses to establish with the past. In a sense, the past no longer provides the rule or guide for the present and becomes instead a timeless reservoir of “natural wealth,” a reservoir capable of generating wealth and knowledge when tapped by the demands of the present and

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future.9 These would include the generation or depletion of wealth, the development or neglect of untapped resources, the prospective integration and organization of trade networks, the decentralization of authority according to “the liberties of Europe.” The past may still lead to the present, but it is the present that determines the past’s value, consigning the rest to a prehistoric darkness whose mutterings have no direct claim to the gratitude of the present nor any messianic debt to the future.10 Throughout the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, it would be safe to assume that the knowledge of the Philippine past was disseminated through these two different sources: the chronicles of religious missionaries and the travel narratives of foreign diplomats and entrepreneurs. In many cases, the latter simply borrowed indiscriminately from the former and added their writers’ own enlightened opinions. Yet these sources reflect two profoundly different approaches to the question of Spanish colonial sovereignty in the nineteenth century. The fi rst source begins and ends with the same question: How is Spanish sovereignty essentially just? The second asks, What aspect of the present—chiefly (but not exclusively) the articulation of new laws and norms accepted elsewhere in Europe—justifies (or fails to justify) the anomaly of Spanish sovereignty? Or to put it another way, how does Spanish sovereignty facilitate or impede the application of these laws and norms— from capital investment to public health, the prosecution of criminals, and education—to the extraction and development of the natural and human resources of this region of the world? We have seen this rationality appear again and again as the condition and constitution of a specifically colonial modernity, beginning with the emergence of the modern colonial state. What throws the state in crisis during the latter half of the nineteenth century is the increasing presence of forces both within and outside the archipelago that fi nd this rationality incommensurate with the practice of government in which exceptions and expediencies come to dictate the production of rules.

the return of the savage : history as recourse The evacuation of the past returns us to the Spanish government’s commission of Juan Luna to paint Pacto de sangre and offers two interrelated ways of challenging the colonial state’s investment in the past. In the fi rst, the blood compact displaces the moment highlighted by Maver, as well as virtually every other foreign traveler who had written about the Philippines in the nineteenth century, as the dawn

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of “modern civilization” in the archipelago. These critics of both the instrumental authority of the friars and the backwardness of the colonial state thought of Spanish rule as defi ned by an insular and paternalistic administration, and they looked to the dawn of foreign enterprise as the solution to colonial stagnation. In response to this charge, emblems such as those of the blood compact displaced this criticism, which located the dawn of civilization in the Philippines around the end of the eighteenth century, and transposed the break between prehistory and history proper to the inauguration of Spanish colonialism at the end of the sixteenth century. We may recall (see chapter 5) the publicist and editor of Ilustración Filipina, Ricardo de Puga, emphasizing this division in his ruminations on the possibility of writing a history of the Philippines: “Don’t bother to investigate the past of that people . . . since you seek in vain. The fi rst page of their history is written by Miguel López de Legazpi, messenger of Christianity and civilization; but turn your gaze further back and you will fi nd chaos, ignorance, nothing!” (Ilustración Filipina, 1:5) Here, in stark contrast to the opposition between Christianity and civilization that Mayer earlier asserted, Christianity and civilization are in fact synonymous. It is in this reframing of “civilization” that the story of the blood compact begins to circulate among the literate classes of colonial society. In the subsequent issue of Ilustración Filipina, Puga features an article on Miguel de Legazpi’s reduction or peaceful occupation of the islands for the purposes of Christian religious evangelization and conversion.11 For Puga, the blood compact inaugurates the “fi rst page of [Filipino] history,” written by the conquistador Legazpi, which at the same time marks a break with “chaos, ignorance, nothing”—a lack. As Puga tells it, this dawn of Western civilization necessitated a generous sacrifice on the part of the conquistador; for in order to ensure the “bloodless pacification” of the archipelago, Legazpi had fi rst to submit himself to the law of the prehistorical and uncivilized other.12 Perhaps for Puga this dialectic of savagery and civilization echoed the Christian dialectic of sin and redemption, which required Christ’s own submission to the law of the flesh. As Puga writes proudly, “Overcoming the natural repugnance that this savage custom inspired in him, the general of our armada had to subject himself to such a ritual lest he awaken the negative suspicions of those natives, still lacking confidence in the intentions of their new guests” (Puga, “Crónica del País,” Ilustración Filipina, 1:18).

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At the same time, neither Puga nor the colonial administration could escape the fact that, however barbaric or savage one judged such a custom to be, it also signified a contract to which the Spanish monarch (or conquistador) as well as the colonial subject were directly and immediately bound. Moreover, the compact assumed the consent of both parties, which in turn presupposed their freedom or autonomy from one another’s subjection outside the contract. Finally, as a treaty, the blood compact implied some way of ensuring its sanctity, whether that meant either the preemption or negative consequence of its breach. Hence we have the second reading of the blood compact by Spanish officials and publicists like Puga: the origins of Philippine civilization began with a kind of “social contract” that, while not placing natives on an equal footing with Spaniards, nevertheless allowed them a place in the empire and a limited form of autonomy in exchange for their conversion and vassalage. At first sight, these features of the blood compact as a prototype of the modern state or social contract appear inimical to the unilateral and arbitrary exercise of colonial sovereignty. As the colonial state project has illustrated, however, native consent and the colonial state’s responsibility to this consent had to constitute one of the foundations of modern rule, colonial or otherwise. Like Rajah Sikatuna, colonial subjects were enjoined to sign a pact with the phantom legislation of the colony’s Special Laws and to recognize that their decision not only saved them from prehistoric savagery, but also bound them to colonial sovereignty. Without this desire, civilization itself would come under attack. Both readings of the blood compact, however, illustrate the need for history to explain and legitimate a Spanish government that no longer bases its authority primarily in the mission of religious evangelization. One may still consider this mission a noble one: yet in order for them to yield the consequences desired by the colonial state, such judgments had to pass through the reason and will of the native colonial subject. This last point, more or less, constitutes the central concern of the treatise by the bishop of Nueva Cáceres, Casimiro Herrero, entitled Filipinas ante la razón del Indio and published under the double pseudonym of “the native Captain Juan for the benefit of his countrymen, and published in Spanish by the Spaniard P. Caro” (1874).13 From the beginning the author adopts literary strategies similar to those we have seen in other colonial apologists (both liberal and conservative) discussed in earlier chapters. For one, he claims not to have written the text, but to have transcribed it from a genuine indigene, Captain Juan, who wrote it “in one of the languages that is spoken in the

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country” (6) [uno de las idiomas que se hablan en el país]. From Herrero / Caro’s alleged perusal of the manuscript, the author finds that it contains “certain principles, simple concepts, clear reasoning and rigorous logic” [principios ciertos, conceptos sencillos, claro razonamiento y rigurosa lógica], which occasion the translation and publication of the work. Fortunately for the reader, “P. Caro” has lived in the Philippines—he neglects to say precisely where—for many years, and his competence in “the Indio’s language” (which, curiously, he never mentions or cites in the text) allows him to faithfully transmit this Indio’s principles, this Indio’s reasoning, to the Spanish-reading public (8). Through the agency of the translator, who professes great sympathies for the country in which he has resided, the Indio speaks his will, consent, and desire for colonial sovereignty and Spain’s “peculiar” Special Laws legislation (184 and 278). On one level, the author (Herrero / Caro / Captain Juan) invokes the study of Philippine history for the same reasons as those of the religious missionaries that preceded him: “The Spaniards,” Captain Juan ruminates, “have exercised a parental responsibility for us for over three hundred years: to them we owe religion, civilization, wise and paternal laws, all benefits, order, and security that we now enjoy; in a word, all that distinguishes us from the savage hordes that surround us” (239).14 At fi rst glance, such statements reiterate the use of history that Spanish missionaries had practiced since the sixteenth century (i.e., the reaffi rmation of the essential justice of Spanish sovereignty). On a deeper level, Herrero is anxious to demonstrate that the “savage hordes” do not merely represent a past, defined as the lack or absence of Spanish civilization, but also a clear and present danger: they have us “surrounded.” The study of history thus not only reveals the origin of Spanish right, but the dangers of its absence for the future of the country. In Capitan Juan’s account, the archipelago began as an aggregate of vastly different regions, peoples, and languages. These differences have not only remained, but have become exacerbated by the division between cities like Manila and the provinces. “The Visayan and the Tagalog did not associate,” Juan professes, “nor did the Tagalog associate with the Pampangueño, nor did certain provinces with others, in order to form the unity of government we have today; every family, every plot of land was united to the Spaniard without the knowledge or intervention of the others” (240).15 Again, however, this task of unification did not end with the arrival of the Spaniards; in fact, it continues unabated to this day:

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Only the Spanish flag with its laws, institutions, and evangelical system binds and keeps the different provinces of the archipelago in a fraternal society. Break the bond [between Spaniards and natives], suppress that flag, and you will see disappear from our lands all unity, order, wealth, and even civilization. [Look at] those nations that had a history, government and laws: if for some reason they fall under foreign domination, one might see them return to their old regime, with its own peculiar laws, on the day of emancipation. Even worse would it be for us, who have none of these [features] that aren’t Spanish, and to return to the past would be to seek out savagery. (240–41)16

In previous chapters, we saw how priests and colonial officials sought to make common cause with the customs, traditions, even “peculiar laws” or “circumstances” of the native colonial subject. The recognition of native autonomy within, or beside, the paternal benevolence of the pastor was a fundamental principle of the Christian economy, just as the acknowledgment of native will and consent provided the force behind the modern colonial state. In this passage, however, Herrero invokes the historical past in terms of an absolute break between civilization and savagery, with no mediating element to supplement colonial domination. For Herrero, the acknowledgment of native autonomy implies an immediate and pressing decision for the present, and the turn to history only sharpens an obviously ahistorical divide between sovereign and subject, Spaniard and Indio, order and anarchy. Herrero’s threats, broadcast through the mimed voice of an Indio, may bring a smile to our lips: one may even go so far as to doubt their efficacy in his own time, let alone ours. What is important to recognize, however, is that the author’s warnings are predicated on the perception that Spanish legitimacy no longer lies in its essential truth, right, or heritage, but in its present capacity to ward off the dissolution of the archipelago and the onset of prehistoric savagery. In response to this threat, it is the Indios who have the fi nal authority to accept or reject Spanish sovereignty as both reasonable and desirable, that is, worthy of their consent, according to their “own” principles, concepts, reasoning, and logic (6). The structure of Herrero’s argument thus reveals—at times, even against his own claims—that the past no longer contains a truth that transcends the judgment of men, but that the “truth” of Spanish civilization must compete with other claims to the native’s reason, consent, and desire.17 On a broader level, this reorientation of history signals a break in the legitimacy of the Christian evangelizing mission, together with

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the expedient relation it had established with the Spanish monarch in centuries past. Herrero’s appeal to the imminent threat of colonial dissolution implicitly acknowledges that the economic symbiosis of Christianity and native tradition and the sovereignty of the imperial monarch no longer determine the “politics of truth” in the present. When “civilization” comes to displace and supplant “Christianity,” and the defense against the threat of the prehistorical, autochthonous savage comes to replace the assimilating, economic task of Christian evangelization, the conceptual transformation of the present also brings with it new, competing criteria for analyzing the past and determining its value for the future. This divestment of the earlier understanding of history led to the attempt to reoccupy the resulting vacuum of authority by appealing to the specificity of the colonial context and its implications for colonial rule. Hence, the surreptitious elision from Christianity to “civilization.” The turn to history as resource and recourse allows us to map this conceptual transformation. For one thing, the emergent division between savage prehistory and history proper renders meaningless the essential justice or injustice of Spanish sovereignty, which it had been the task of Christianity to uphold and monitor for nearly three centuries. Rather, history lays bare a sober assessment of the natural land and its people, their quality and actual condition, as the foundation from which an evaluation of Spanish sovereignty would arise. And in the turn to history as recourse, the study of the past promises to clarify the relation of colonial subject to colonial sovereign without any direct or indirect mediation by the message of salvation, Christian economy, or native transculturation. As Luna’s painting of the blood compact lays bare, the only objects that stand between Legazpi and Sikatuna— the only objects that negotiate the terms of their peace or enmity, their Hispanism or savagery—are a treaty and a sword. Yet the displacement of Christian evangelization as the impetus of colonial rule and the attempted reoccupation of Christianity’s place by the history and prehistory of Spanish civilization also make manifest a central element of colonial rule that both the old Spanish monarchy and the religious had formerly succeeded in either mitigating or evading: the politicization of racial difference. Since the years of the synod of 1582 and the drafting of the Laws of the Indies, both the Crown and Church had kept natives and Spanish officials apart, protecting or censoring the encroachment of one upon the other, calibrating native customs with the management of an empire, and translating expedi-

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ency into a pax Hispanica.18 The demotion of Christian evangelization before the ideology of a civilizing mission eroded these practices, as well as the authority or prestige of religious missionaries. As we saw in the last chapter, the advent of vulgar Darwinism certainly intensified the politicization and ramification of racial difference in the newspaper and novel, which reflected the profound effect it had on embittered Spanish liberals. It is thus only after three centuries of Spanish rule in the Philippines, and with the advent of the press and public opinion, that colonial Spaniards “suddenly” discover they are living with subhumans, near quadrupeds, whose indolence and stupidity have condemned the Malay race to historical oblivion. In similar fashion, writers from the Indio caste like Graciano López Jaena begin to openly distinguish the “genuine” (neto) natives from the inauthentic ones, in disavowal of the cooperation and complicity among Creoles, Spanish-Chinese and Chinese-native mestizos, and Indios, throughout the past century.19 As we will see, through the attempted reoccupation of the Christian res publica by the mission civilisatrice, race and racism come to define the counterhistories of the Spanish conquest and colonization.

counterhistories Norm and Race Studies of nineteenth-century racism often begin with the social application of Darwin’s theory of natural selection to the politics of imperialism among the European countries. 20 Social Darwinism clearly dominates Cañamaque’s interest in composing a “naturalist” novel (see chapter 6). It also characterizes the vicious racist contempt found in the likes of Pablo Feced and Vicente Barrantes, whose purported history of Philippine theater, El teatro tagalo, repeats ad nauseum the allegation that Filipinos are among “the residual races . . . belonging to the lowest rungs of the human ladder” (11) [razas de aluvión . . . pertenecientes a los últimos grados de la escala humana]. What gives this racism its particular character in the context of late colonialism in the Philippines, however, is its inextricable entanglement with the question of Special Laws and the only alternative—the assimilation of Spain’s possessions into the Spanish national body. Barrantes’ denigration of the native colonial subject as utterly lacking in redeeming qualities cannot be separated from his acknowledgment that the Philippines was undergoing a crisis and that only an administration

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of Special Laws and the industry of the natives could save it (7–8, n. 1). Equally, Feced’s demarcation of “us [Spaniards]” as irreducibly different from “them [colonials]” and his maniacal denigration of the natives who sustained him also refer back to the impasses of securing the terms and benefits of native consent without resorting to the rule of sovereign might. 21 As Feced himself repeatedly states in various ways, Over there [in Spain], no one is aware that the awakening of the active energies of the masses requires, absolutely requires, the incessant action of the State; the one hundred or so arms of the administration, supported and strengthened by the loyal elements in the country, ethnically superior to that of the herd [muchedumbre], as well as by the flows of superior [racial] emigrants. . . . No one knows the primitive and markedly infantile character of these herds, [determined] . . . by inescapable physiological factors, which hence demand . . . a special policy [política especial], adapted to their special nature [especial naturaleza]. (Italics in original.)22

With the immovable center gone—one that had anchored the peripheries of Christendom to an unquestioned, stable, and permanent idea of truth, right, and destiny under Spanish imperialism—the colonial state engaged in the task of simultaneously managing the ramifications of this unanchored worldview and developing norms specific to the Philippines, which would interlink the political rationality of government with the ancient principle of Spanish sovereignty. Under this double task, both conservative and professed liberal peninsular Spanish writers found themselves simultaneously advocating reforms in education and an increase in religious piety (see Barrantes, El teatro tagalo, 137–38). Even writers who argued for the freedom of speech and the press also condoned colonial censorship for the sake of “protecting” the native; and publicists who argued for greater stimulus in agricultural production also zealously professed native indolence to be endemic to the race. On the surface of things, these writers were merely aping their more illustrious European counterparts, whose empires were expanding even as Spanish writers and intellectuals lost the confidence and pride of calling Spain a nation.23 Yet beneath this surface, racism and racial dichotomy simultaneously undermined and further propelled the search for an alternative set of governing norms capable of stabilizing the contradictions of colonial rule. To this end, these writers’ approximation of scientific racism, however vulgar, sought to inform a political history in which Spain participated in the spread of “world civilization” instead of obstructing it. And they sought to explain the colonial regime’s failure to solicit the consent and productive desire of

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the colonial subject, where the Dutch and British colonies had encountered economic success. Yet the impasse and reactionary response of both conservative and liberal peninsular Spaniards in the colonial world also brought about two unintended effects, which were exploited by the propagandist writers of the 1880s. In dispensing with the complex series of mediations and qualifications that allowed Spanish sovereignty and Christianity to integrate with native custom and tradition in the archipelago for three centuries and by replacing this with the brute confrontation between Spanish master and colonial subject, writers like Cañamaque, Barrantes, and Feced evoked and gave substance to a historical personage that they could neither manage nor direct. Juan Luna portrays this native, this Indio Filipino leader, in all his negativity: in Pacto de sangre, Sikatuna sits in the foreground with his back to the viewer, a position that evokes certain works by the Italian baroque painter Michelangelo Caravaggio, like The Musicians (1595; see figure 8). But what would happen when the native leader turned around? What would happen when the negatively defi ned Filipino assumed the responsibility of the protagonist in what was, after all, his own drama? This question brings us inevitably to the man posing as Rajah Sikatuna in Juan Luna’s Pacto de sangre: it is José Rizal, friend of Luna’s and artist and sculptor in his own right. We remember Rizal less for his aesthetic concerns than for his politicization of Philippine history. Yet, as we will see, the two are inextricably linked. For the counterhistories of the conquest and colonization that appear in Rizal’s name are inconceivable without both the strategic use of fiction and the importance of aesthetic sentiment in conceiving and giving substance to a panFilipino cultural identity, no longer defi ned solely against the Spanish invader but also according to its own sense of self (amor propio). Like his contemporaries, Rizal had to begin with the rationalization of racial difference as a scientific category, with the social and political implications associated with social Darwinism that had defi ned a norm of human “civilization” from which colonial subjects were excluded. Unlike his contemporaries, however, Rizal was not content to respond point for point to the vulgar expressions of Darwinism and native racial inferiority bandied about by peninsular Spanish writers and publicists— some of them professed “liberals” and defenders of constitutional thought for the Iberian peninsula and Europe. No. His interest, as he repeatedly stated, was to grasp the weak link in the articulation of colonial rationality and its compromise with the pastorate. If, Rizal reasoned,

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figure 8. Michelangelo Caravaggio, The Musicians, ca. 1595. © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

native indolence constituted the economic stumbling block of colonial productivity, as well as a legitimizing reason for the continued necessity (and indefinite postponement) of Special Laws, why not begin with a proper historical assessment of native labor, productivity, and industry, that is, native capacity as opposed to native lack? If the “peculiar conditions” that justified the phantom administration of Special Laws included the infrequency and stagnation of inter-island communication and commerce, ignorance of the Spanish language, lack of education, and the perceived decline of Spanish prestige, why begin with an investigation of the native subject’s “essential” antisocial nature—particularly given the fact that most Spanish writers knew next to nothing of their colonial subjects, living in nearly complete ignorance of the language, customs, and traditions native to the country?24 Why not begin with the desires that all peoples have in common—secure existence, a measure of prosperity, the freedom to determine their collective destiny in a manner of their choosing, and so forth—and then consider the (colonial) policies that either facilitate or impede those desires? Instead of bemoaning,

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with a suspicious, quasi-religious conviction, that the natives lacked a history that linked them with “civilization,” why not study the evidence of history that did exist? The unwritten connections between past and present derived from this material promised to reveal an outline of native life, labor, and language or culture—positivities that synchronized an assessment of native capacities with the development of power relations. Spanish racism, by contrast, offered nothing more than a vicious repetition of the impasse that had conditioned the racial modernity of colonial rule from the end of the eighteenth century. With this revaluation of the kind of questions the present may use in its interrogation of the past, a different history of the colonial subject emerges. To begin with, native life, labor, and culture do not begin with the Spanish conquest but with the origin of peoples in the archipelago. Moreover, this displacement of the origins of Philippine history resituates the conquest as an intermediary event—neither the fi rst nor the last—in the larger continuum. The implications of this reorientation appear immediately in the introduction to Rizal’s essay, “Filipinas dentro de cien años” (Filipinas in a hundred years; hereafter referred to as “Filipinas”]: The past of Filipinas can be reduced to the following broad features. Newly incorporated into the Spanish Crown, [the natives] had to sustain with their blood and the efforts of their children the wars and the ambitions of conquest among the Spanish people; and [in] these struggles, in that terrible crisis of peoples when they change government, laws, traditions, customs, religion, and beliefs, the Philippines became depopulated, impoverished, and backward, surprised at its metamorphosis, bereft as it was of any confidence in its past, lacking even faith in its present, and without any favorable hope in the coming days.25

The question Rizal poses no longer interrogates the existence, character, or quality of the people’s “government, laws, traditions, customs, religion, and beliefs”: the question is rather what happened to them, in a crisis that begins in the sixteenth century and continues unabated in the present. Gone, too, is the assumption that the wars and ambitions of conquest on Spain’s behalf had anything to do with the survival, welfare, and prosperity of the colonial subject who endured them. In the place of a history that presumes the value and trajectory of Western civilization, Rizal paints in broad strokes the creation of a colonial culture whose relationship to the past is marked by catastrophe and the imposition of sovereign violence, against which the Filipino peoples could not defend themselves.

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Rizal’s other major essay of the period, “Sobre la indolencia de los Filipinos” (On the indolence of the Filipinos; hereafter referred to as “Indolencia”] begins with a similar premise. In confronting the theorists of biological racism, who contend that indolence is a dominant hereditary native predisposition that renders futile any attempt to cultivate industry in the archipelago, Rizal concurs that indolence does indeed exist. He adds, however, that, “instead of considering it as the cause of backwardness and disarticulation, we consider it as the effect of these, propelling the development of a regrettable predisposition. . . . The evil does not lie in the more or less latent existence of indolence, but in its fomentation and amplification” (“Indolencia,” La Solidaridad, 2:322–23). Rizal’s point of departure—the conquest and colonization of the archipelago—remains the same as that of colonial apologists. Yet the entire frame of reference that supports any understanding of the conquest has changed. Seen from this perspective, the conquest marks not the beginning, but an end. But the end of what? This brings us to the second feature that both essays of this period exhibit. Against attempts to prove or disprove the absence of native industry, the seeming lack of virility, the profound neglect in conforming to social norms among natives, Rizal chooses to address not the question but the assumptions that make these qualities possible: fi rst, the assumption that natives were not industrious prior to the Spanish conquest; and, second, that they would not be industrious but for Spanish colonialism. Examining the historical record, Rizal contends that the fi rst assumption lacks any foundation: the chronicles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries testify to native industry and a flourishing commerce with other peoples of Asia and the islands that comprised the Malay archipelago. And, by touting the patriotism and illustrious achievements of his contemporaries, from Luna to Gregorio Sanciangco y Goson, he refutes the second. With these assumptions gutted, the question of native indolence has to be posed in an entirely different manner. The issue is no longer whether native industry exists or existed but that something happened to it. Beginning with this premise, Rizal proceeds to narrate a counterhistory of Spanish civilization from a criterion that he borrows from the policies of Bourbon reform in the late eighteenth century (the solicitation and calculation of native consent), but which he uses against its colonial variant. What happened to that civilization, or civilization in general, after three centuries of Spanish rule? How and why did it leave the peoples of the archipelago “depopulated, impoverished,

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and backward, surprised at its metamorphosis, bereft as it was of any confidence in its past, lacking even faith in its present?” “How then,” Rizal asks in “Indolencia,” “and in what way did that active and enterprising pagan Indio of ancient times turn into the lazy and indolent Christian one, of which our writers speak in the present?” (“Indolencia,” La Solidaridad, 2:344). 26 Or again, “To what do we owe this backwardness? Is it rosy civilization, is it the salvational religion of the friars, euphemistically called the religion of Jesus Christ, which has produced this miracle, which has atrophied the mind, paralyzed the heart and made of man some vicious animal species, as portrayed by writers?” (2:398). 27 Where peninsular Spaniards sought out a history superhumans and subhumans by essentializing the condition of lack and negativity in the figure of the native other, Rizal turns to the dynamism of historical transformation: in this case, the brutalization (animalización) of native peoples, which engenders a counterhistory that documents the short- and long-term effects of colonial rule up to and including the present. To the ever-repeated conundrum of colonial writers, who asked in various ways, “Why don’t the natives work harder?” Rizal poses an original counterquestion: “Why work at all,” especially since it only results in one’s greater misfortune?28 In place of the assumption that Spanish civilization attempted and failed to accomplish the proper civilization of native custom and tradition—fi rst through the pastoral power of the clergy and later by the project of colonial reform—Rizal presents the evidence of pre-Hispanic native industry as a compelling reason for us to consider three centuries of Spanish rule as an unmitigated, continuous catastrophe: one that went so far as to enforce a permanent condition of diffidence (“Indolencia” La Solidaridad, 2:394). If the function of government was to preserve and enhance the life of the governed, stimulate industry, and enrich the culture, colonial rule thwarted these functions at every step, amounting to no rule at all—or the rule of the exception. What is interesting about Rizal’s diagnosis here is that, unlike his predecessor, Creole secular priest Fr. José Burgos, Rizal expresses little interest in the Spaniard’s recognition of the native as her or his equal (see chapter 4). Of course, one cannot deny Rizal’s underlying humanism: his noble conviction of the equality of all peoples with regard to their capacity for industry, their ability to comprehend spiritual mysteries, and their right to autonomous collective self-determination. On another level, however, Rizal could not care less about bridging or

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mitigating the racial dichotomy set in motion by peninsular Spanish writers and colonial officials in the late nineteenth century. In fact, his counterhistories of the conquest and colonization exploit the dichotomy; for the dichotomy allows him to conceive a pan-Filipino history and its resulting cultural identity formed entirely outside of and as an outside response to the colonial project. In this way, the culture of the colonial subject comes to be a subject of analysis without primary reference to either the Christian economy or the colonial government’s production and ramification of native will (voluntad). Rizal’s annotated republication of Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas [Historical events of the Philippines; originally published in 1609] in 1890 and the aforementioned essay “Filipinas dentro de cien años” demonstrate this maintenance of colonial racial dichotomy in different ways. After the publication of his fi rst novel, Noli me tangere (1886), Rizal was enjoined by his friend and fellow scholar Ferdinand Blumentritt to write a history of the Philippines that would explode many of the myths of native indolence, stupidity, savagery, unaccountability, and so forth and substantiate many of the claims Rizal set forth in his novel. To this end, he spent almost a year studying the chronicles of colonial Spanish historians at the British Museum library. Due to constraints of time and energy, Rizal instead decided to republish Morga’s seventeenth-century work, with his commentaries in the footnotes, in order to at once supplement Morga’s historical perspective on the period and draw out the implications of the study of the past for the present reader.29 And yet, in Borgesian fashion, it becomes apparent from the very beginning of Morga’s introductory dedication to the reader that Rizal’s annotations attempt to constitute a rival text—a history or archipelago of histories unto itself. The second sentence of Morga’s prologue, which tries to explain in brief the avowed spiritual and temporal justifications for the Spanish conquest, is interrupted five different times by five different “annotations” (Morga, Sucesos, xxxii). Each footnote contests a hidden assumption behind Morga’s prose, whether it concerns the use of phrases like “the true God” (“no one has a monopoly on the true God,” the annotator remarks), or a false allegation. By supplementing the text with footnotes, Rizal takes every opportunity to undermine the author’s authority, place the text in conversation or confl ict with other histories, or engage in open polemic with Morga, as if he were a present adversary. The frequent digressions and interruptions serve less to complete Morga’s account than to hollow it out.

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To take only one of many examples, in chapter 5 Morga relates the unsuspected ambush and assassination of Captain Esteban Rodríguez de Figueroa, who was on his way to do battle with the indigenous inhabitants (Buhayanes) of Mindanao during the conquest of the southern Philippines. “Without being seen, an enemy Indio surprised him from one side,” Morga narrates, “and with the kampilan (Filipino cutlass) he wielded, he struck the governor on the head” (52–53). [Salió un Indio enemigo al paso (sin ser visto) por un lado, y con el campilan que llevaba, le dió un golpe en la cabeza al gobernador.] The Indio is immediately cut into pieces, and the narrative proceeds to recount the death of Figueroa and the end of the failed Spanish expedition. Precisely at this point in the narrative, Rizal interrupts Morga’s account to add the name of the native who kills Figueroa (Ubal), along with a brief account of Ubal’s oath to kill the Spanish conquistador two days prior to the actual battle (52).30 As if this inclusion of Ubal’s own story were not sufficient, Rizal veers into a long digression justifying the right not only of Ubal but of all the native inhabitants to “defend their homes against a powerful invader” (52) [defender sus hogares contra un invasor muy poderoso]. Taking issue with Morga’s brief mention of the manner in which Figueroa was killed (i.e., by surprise, without seeing his enemy), Rizal adds: “It is not Ubal’s fault that he was not seen, as Morga says; they were in full combat . . . would [Figueroa] have preferred the Indio to hail him fi rst, if he was distracted, only to stupidly let himself be killed?” (53).31 From a simple, seemingly trivial detail—the name of the Indio who ambushed the leader of one of many Spanish expeditions in Mindanao during the late sixteenth century—Rizal inserts a rhetorical analysis and polemic regarding the assumptions and implications of Morga’s statements, seizing upon them as opportunities to measure the right of Spanish conquest against contesting authorities to historical “truth.” In doing so, Rizal laboriously takes on the task of exploding the authority of colonial history by questioning every moment of its composition in narrative. His frequent citations of contradictory sources and at times contradictory forms of history—philological explanations of Tagalog terms, the scientific explanation of miracles, comparative statistics, and so forth—refuse to serve the purpose of synthesizing information. Rather, they more often than not reveal either the short-sightedness of the Spanish historian or the negative disparities between “then” and “now.” Every statement of praise by Morga of Spanish success or advancement in the conquest of the Philippines is followed by a comment on the loss of native life (67 and 289) and home (53), the despoliation of natural

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resources (143), and the loss of industry and agriculture (229), as well as culture, government, and society (229, 297, 300). When Morga pronounces judgment on the natives, Rizal usually counters it with another citation. When a countercitation cannot be found, Rizal depends on lengthy arguments either defending the behavior and practices of indigenous groups or making counteraccusations against the benevolence of the Spanish civilizing and Christianizing mission in the archipelago. In this way, knowledge of the (native) other must inevitably give way to the “other’s knowledge”; that is, the possibility of writing a subaltern historiography. The hollowing out of Morga’s authority fulfi lls the rhetorical function of creating spaces in the interstices of the text, “cracks in the parchment curtain,” as a contemporary Philippine historian once said, in which the continuity of Spanish sovereignty, its essential right and glory, have to give way to the ghostly presence of other continuities. The racial division between these continuities inheres in the very form of the annotated history, just as surely as it inheres in the relation of text to footnote in colonial costumbrismo. Yet the division has come to serve a different function. No longer does it distinguish the civilized from the savage, the human from the subhuman. Rather, it indicates the presence of contesting histories, which have been at war with one another since their contact in the sixteenth century. In his introduction to the annotated Morga text, Rizal gestures toward this alternative, racialized continuity in a passage that deserves to be quoted at length: Born and raised, like almost all of you, in the ignorance of our Yesterday; with neither voice nor authority to speak of what we neither saw nor studied, I considered it necessary to invoke the testimony of an illustrious Spaniard who . . . witnessed the fi nal moments of our ancient nationality. It is, then, the ghost of our ancestors’ civilization that the author will conjure up [evocará: lit., evoke] before you; I faithfully transmit to you their words, neither changing nor mutilating them. . . . If the book succeeds in awakening in you the consciousness of our past, erased from memory, and rectifying what has been falsified and defamed, then . . . we will all be able to dedicate ourselves to studying the future. (v–vi)32

“Our Yesterday,” “our ancient nationality,” “our ancestors’ civilization,” thus fi nd their way across centuries and islands to unify one past, one ghost, one lost civilization. Colonial modernity, for Rizal’s readers, does not begin with the suturing of the Spanish empire and the colonial state but with the inheritance of a suppressed patrimony. With the decline of Spanish “prestige,” and the disenchantment with

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the glory of Spain’s messianic empire, we are able to glimpse a suppressed collective life to which the colonial subject is a lost heir, and to which the colonial subject owes a debt of eternal gratitude. Rizal’s essay “Filipinas dentro de cien años” was written in the same period as the annotations to Morga’s history and represents more or less an abbreviated and synthetic version of Rizal’s conclusions to his studies. At the same time, however, the essay also reveals a more ambitious agenda: the attempt to go beyond an evocation of the past and to bind it specifically to the decisions of the present. This program can be formed as a question: How can the hypothesis of past ancestry serve as a norm of analysis against competing claims regarding the native’s negativity, lack, or absence of civilization? Part philological erudition, part speculation, and part polemic, the ghost of Filipino identity or positivity in the annotations to Morga’s text remained as immaterial as the phantom legislation of Special Laws that it confronted. How could such a rhetorical construct provide an ethic of patriotism, spirit of nationality, or critique of Spanish institutions, in the daily life of the colonial subject? “Filipinas” addresses these questions in a unique way, by once again appropriating the racial signifier as the signifier of origins, incontrovertible nature, and preprogrammed destiny, turning it inside out, or toward a different end. To begin with, instead of attempting to write a history of the past, which presumes the original existence of races, their origins and development, Rizal begins with a question that unties the past from its moorings and forces it to address its relation to the present: What will the Philippines be like in a hundred years? This reorientation of the point of reference in historical narration destabilizes the impasse of colonial modernity, forcing the reader to ask new questions about an old situation. While race and racial dichotomy implicitly or explicitly raise the question How does the past become the present? the hypothetical consideration of the Philippines in a hundred years reverses the form of the question: In a hundred years, how does (or will) the present become the past? Corollary to this reversal, the question of colonial social Darwinism, How does native inferiority produce colonial stagnation? becomes How does colonial stagnation produce native inferiority? Finally, the question How must the fact of racial difference determine colonial policy? must yield to the question How does colonial policy produce racial difference?—that is, How are race and racial dichotomy an event? And what are the consequences of this racialization? From the displacement of the racial signifier, a

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counterhistory of race and racialization will emerge. For this displacement allows Rizal’s evocation of the ghost of an ancient Filipino sovereignty and civilization to pass beyond a fictional construct: in the act of making the present past, and the future present, Rizal demonstrates how the “truth” of race is made, and outlines the consequences that derive from its creation. What makes Filipinos a race? Rizal’s use of the word is ambiguous. At times they are a subgroup of Malays in general; at other moments he speaks of “Filipino races” in the plural (La Solidaridad, 1:436). At times he refers to Indios Filipinos but frequently interchanges this designation with that of “indigenous natives” (naturales), “the country’s inhabitants,” or even “children of the country” (hijos del país): a term formerly used exclusively to refer to Creoles (1:378). Finally, Rizal employs the all inclusive pronoun “we.” Yet these ambiguities dissolve when they are subordinated to the narration of historical transformation. This transformation manifests itself, fi rst of all, in the common experience of colonization. To this, Rizal later adds the influence of the climate and the natives’ particular way of feeling. Following the conquest, Rizal writes, Comenzó entonces una nueva era para los Filipinos. Perdieron poco a poco sus antiguas tradiciones, sus recuerdos; 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 a su raza por el clima y por su manera de sentir. (1:378) [Thus began a new era for the Filipinos. Little by little, they lost their ancient traditions, their memories; they forgot their writing, their songs, their poetry, their laws, only to learn by rote other doctrines, which they did not comprehend: another morality, another aesthetic, different from those inspired in their race by the climate and by their manner of feeling.]

Rizal proceeds to focus on this way of feeling in the second installment of the essay. “Los pueblos del Oriente en general y los malayos en particular,” he claims, “son pueblos de sensibilidad: en ellos predomina la delicadeza de sentimientos” (La Solidaridad, 1:430). [Oriental peoples in general and Malays in particular are cultures of sensitivity: the delicacy of sentiments prevails in them.] At fi rst sight, this “sensitivity,” this “delicacy of sentiments” seems innocent enough: it serves as the barest thread to weave together categories of ethnic origin (“Oriental peoples and Malays in particular”) with a transhistorical native epistemology linking the past with the present.

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On the one hand, the past recalls one unmitigated catastrophe. Yet on the other hand, this catastrophe continues unabated to the present, which makes of every injustice, every abuse of government, and every act of neglect not only an offense to the colonial subject in the present but a repetition and magnification of all past offenses. As history telescopes forward a hundred years, it compounds and collapses these grievances. Rizal expresses their accumulation in a metaphor: “The batteries are being charged little by little, and if the prudence of the government does not give vent to the grievances that are accumulating, the fatal spark may one day fly” (La Solidaridad, 1:434). [Los acumuladores se van cargando poco a poco y si la prudencia del gobierno no da escape a las quejas que se concentran, puede que un día salte la chispa.] Yet this sensibility, this way of feeling, however innocuous, nevertheless provides the key to the colonial subject’s racial transformation to the national, Filipino one. This race, as Rizal makes clear, is a thoroughly modern invention: it does not derive its authenticity and integrity from some quasi-scientific “origin” that predetermines the colonial subject’s destiny. For regardless of how one relates Indios to Creoles, Malays to Chinese mestizos, Igorots to Tausugs, the fact is that Spanish writers and colonial offi cials did and do relate them to one another as members of one and the same race, through theories of vulgar Darwinism and fantasies of Spanish superiority. The Filipino race, in other words, exists by virtue of a history set in motion by the project of colonial reform, the application and self-reflexive transformation of its rationality, in which the interpellation of the Indio as a speaking subject intensified rather than diminished the dichotomy of rulers and ruled. In times past, Rizal writes, No se había hecho aun de moda insultar e injuriar en letras de molde, en periódicos con superior permiso . . . de la autoridad eclesiástica, al pueblo que pagaba, combatía, y derramaba su sangre por el nombre de España, ni se consideraba como hidalguía ni como gracejo ofender a una raza toda. (La Solidaridad, 1:432; italics added) [It was never customary, even in jest, to insult and injure, through book titles and newspapers with the supreme approval . . . of ecclesiastical censorship, the people who paid, fought, and spilled its blood for the good name of Spain, nor was it considered noble or clever to offend an entire race.]

Rizal repeats this statement elsewhere throughout the text, with slight variations.33 In these passages, a race is called into being—in part

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by the “racist” who interpellates it and in part by the person who “consents” in some acknowledged way to the interpellation. The action, response, and consciousness of this synchronized labor propels racialization simultaneously back to the dawn of the conquest and forward in time, “the Philippines a century from now.” An identity comes to stand in the place of the ancestor’s ghost: the Filipino, creature of colonial modernity. In attempting to theorize the link between race and nationalism that would apply equally to both the rise of anticolonial liberation struggles and the rise of fascism, Etienne Balibar considers the decisive moment in the articulation of nationalism to be the conception of a “fictive ethnicity”: an “imaginary unity” that foreshadows nationalism insofar as it becomes articulated “in real (and therefore in historical) time . . . against other possible unities” (italics in original).34 In Rizal’s “Filipinas,” to speak of the Filipino as a “fictive ethnicity” allows the author to highlight the speculative character of its history, to introject the relationship between the present and future (“the Philippines in a hundred years”) into the relationship between past and present. If the future promises only the present’s repetition and intensification through the Indio’s sensitivity and sentiment, the present can then be inferred as the continuity, repetition, and intensification of the past. In Rizal’s annotations to Morga’s Sucesos, the past becomes an eternal present that has pitted two adversaries against one another over the course of three centuries. Both examples, however, show that when the Filipino becomes articulated in “real time, against other possible unities,” such articulation begins to link the past to the present in a way that no norm of government or discipline prior to or contemporaneous with it could achieve. This is because, in a certain sense, the crystallization of a Filipino identity does away with the project of fashioning norms in colonial society altogether. Rizal’s “Filipinas dentro de cien años” provides a fitting obituary for colonial policy. If the colonial state implies an underlying rationality, Rizal reasons, surely one can trace its ultimate end or objective. Can you kill all of us? he asks. Can you enslave and brutalize us? he wonders. Impoverish us to the point of surrender? Foster regional enmities that would atomize the identification of a single race? (La Solidaridad, 1:434–36). If indeed the reader senses the absence of any way to negotiate or reach a compromise between the granting of extensive reforms to the colony, on the one hand, and the sovereign repression of dissent on

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the other, it is because the emergence of a Filipino identity, a “fictive ethnicity” articulated “in real time, against other possible unities,” has delivered the articulation of historical norms to a level beyond that of colonial policy. Rizal writes, History does not register in its annals any enduring case of domination exercised by one people over another, of different races, of [mutually] foreign traditions and customs, and of opposed or divergent ideals. One of the two had to relent and succumb (to the other). It is against all natural and moral laws, to posit the existence of a foreign body within another endowed with force and vitality. . . . Necessity is the strongest divinity known to the world, and necessity is the result of physical laws set in motion by moral ones. (La Solidaridad, 2:32])35

Once the grievances of the colonial subject become unified under “the same sore,” the same cancerous tumor, the natural laws of science and the moral law of ethical responsibility enter into a dialectical relationship with one another. Scientific accuracy takes over the development of historical agency through native sentiment, even as native sentiment delivers its newly acquired property as a body over to science. When the possession of knowledge for the purpose of making truth-claims and the assumption of responsibility for this knowledge, in terms of the decisions that have to be made on its behalf, begin to melt into one another, both the colonial subject’s individual and collective actions cease to be refracted through the lenses of Spanish history. They are instead taken together as part of a life in which Spanish colonialism is presented as merely an episode. By weaving in and out of the discursive representations of colonial history in the archives of Europe, Rizal arrives at the startling conclusion not only that Spain has preyed on the resources and labor of the colonial subject for three centuries, but that Spain is and has always been a para-site, a secondary concern and barely tolerated nuisance to the life of a discretely and wholly Filipino nation. In the Name of the Father The preceding discussion demonstrates how Rizal’s counterhistories subvert the project of colonial rationality, in that they show the incompatibility of sovereign rule (expressed negatively through the phantom administration of Special Laws) with the avowed objectives of modern colonialism—the production and ramification of native consent to Spanish rule in all spheres of economic and social life. Yet in a curious way,

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these essays also bring the political rationality of the colonial state to its ultimate implications—the threshold at which the operations, methods, and techniques of government begin to contradict the arbitrary rule of the captain-general in the cities and the “expedient” privileges of the religious orders in the provinces. The mandate of government as a modern political rationality was to establish norms that would integrate Spanish aims (like economic productivity, political security, the discipline of individual bodies, and the management of populations) with homegrown Philippine responses (like native entrepreneurship, Spanish patriotism, the colonial public sphere, and the professionalization of the natives). Yet in order to do so, it would have to dismantle the apparatus of imperial Christendom that had remained intact since the conquest. The maintenance of separation between Spanish laws and native customs, the immunitas or privileges (fueros) of the religious orders, the mercantilism of state monopolies in industry and commerce, the censorship of books and newspapers, and the arbitrary detention, excommunication, and exile of suspected criminals and heretics all had to be rethought from the bottom up. While Rizal’s fi rst novel, Noli me tangere, was written prior to his studies in the British Museum library, the polemical thrust of his long essays helps to attune us to the importance of race, particularly its role in rationalizing the arbitrary division between colonizer and colonial subject, in the aesthetic education of his compatriots. In a sense, the novel outlines in a fictional setting what Rizal proceeded to document in his annotations to Morga’s history, with attention to its implications for the ethical life of the colonized. Noli me tangere tells the tragic story of a native-born mestizo, Crisóstomo Ibarra, a colonial expatriate who returns to the archipelago from his studies in Europe in order to accomplish his familial obligations (his father’s burial), domestic longings (marriage to his childhood sweetheart), and social ambitions (the building of a school). In the process, we receive an aesthetic education about the country and its inhabitants, through the satirical portrayal of costumbrista types, scenes, institutions, and predicaments characteristic of colonial society. On a higher level, however, a continuous theme that runs throughout the novel—from Ibarra’s arrival to his discussions with Elías and María Clara’s explanation of why she cannot marry Ibarra—has to do with the relationship of the past to the present in the lives of the colonial subject. How does the past condition the present? How is

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knowledge of the past suppressed or kept secret? How does knowledge of the past confer the power and burden of free decision on the one who knows? What happens when ethical imperatives drawn from the past come into contradiction with one another? Remembrance and forgetfulness, or suppression, constitute the two activities of the novel that wholly separate Noli me tangere from the universe of colonial costumbrismo. Noli me tangere can, of course, be read as a novel in the genre—in fact, it has been read in this way by critics and scholars who have sought to use the novel as a form of nationalist pedagogy. The description of Capitan Tiago’s house, the picnic by the lake, and the brutal stupidity of Doña Consolación appear on the surface to express a continuity, not a rupture, with the costumbrista types of Puga’s Ilustración Filipina and other colonial newspapers of the period.36 Even today, Filipinos use the names of María Clara and Doña Victorina—characters in Noli me tangere— in adjectival fashion to indicate virginal purity or unwarranted vanity, respectively. By turns satirical and tragic, these types and scenes serve as modern exempla and counterexempla to student and foreign visitor alike. Yet what distinguishes these “types” from their antecedents in colonial literature is that all of them manifest a relationship to the past that remains unresolved in the present, and this past has something to do with the negative consequences of colonial rule. Doña Consolación, for example, the cruel wife of a Spanish corporal of the Civil Guard, or alférez, suppresses her native upbringing by pretending not to speak or understand Tagalog (214–21). Her frequent lapses as well as the emotional outbursts that reveal her native origins often betray her; yet her exposure to the criticism of others only further incenses her, leading her into ever deeper acts of brutality. When her Spanish husband returns home, he punishes her by mercilessly beating her. At other times, it is she who beats and humiliates him. Behind the seemingly humorous satire of a native “type,” the ramification of systemic colonial violence into daily life unfolds in miniature. The historical sense is even more evident in the character Tasio, the schoolteacher in the small town of San Diego. Recall the costumbrista type Tasio in the opening pages of Puga’s Ilustración Filipina (see chapter 5): Puga describes him as like an amphibian, a near quadruped, suited to climbing trees and lacking the mental faculties of memory, regret, or ambition. By contrast, Rizal introduces his Tasio as an elderly, disfranchised, and discouraged philosopher who has educated himself in Spanish and Latin (62–68). His extended discourse on the history of

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the concept of Purgatory (from its ostensible origins in the teachings of Zarathustra to its official sanction during the Council of Trent), reveals a critical faculty that historicizes the teachings of Church dogma as it is practiced in the Philippines. Upon entering Tasio’s house, Ibarra fi nds the philosopher writing a treatise in a hieroglyphic code—an allegorical system of rebuses that refer to Tagalog words. When Ibarra questions Tasio’s activity, the latter responds, “I do not write for this generation. I write for other ages. If the present were able to read me, they would burn my books; . . . on the other hand, the generation that can decipher these characters would be an educated generation; they would understand me, and would say: ‘Not all of us slept during the night of our ancestors’ ” (135). Tasio sees himself—his life, his labor, and his language, or culture—in the form of a future past: a positive force perpetually out of time or synchronicity with the conditions that brought him into being. A version of the Now, stuck in the past, writing to a Future that arises from his utopian longing in the present. The central drama, of course, provides us with the key instances in which the disarticulation of past and present gives rise to a new knowledge and a new ethics—a new set of decisions that have to be made on the basis of the knowledge that informs them and the autonomy that this knowledge makes possible. This drama revolves around the relationship of fathers to their sons and daughters. For those unfamiliar with the novel, it begins when Juan Crisóstomo Eibarramendia y Magsalín, Ibarra for short, returns from his studies in Europe to his hometown of San Diego after six years of absence from his native land. The allegorical reference to Saint John Chrysostom will be discussed later.37 As for his Tagalog namesake (magsalín is the infi nitive verb for “to pour, transfer, or translate”), he has brought the wealth of a European education home for the sake of “transferring” or “translating” it into a prosperous future for the town of San Diego. But he promptly becomes absorbed in a web of disenchantment and tragedy, beginning with the news of his father’s ignominious death (Don Rafael Eibarramendia) in prison, two years before his arrival. Setting out to honor his father’s grave during the Day of the Dead, he fi nds that the body has been disinterred and lost. Other tragedies follow that propel the protagonist toward an increasingly desperate outlook. Ibarra raises the support of his town to build a school; the plans are sabotaged, and Ibarra is nearly killed when the entire edifice nearly falls atop him. The parish priest of San Diego, Fr. Dámaso, further provokes Ibarra by insulting his father’s name from the pulpit; the reader later learns that

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Dámaso is the one responsible for Don Rafael’s disinterment from hallowed ground, on account of his alleged “heresies.” When Dámaso insults Ibarra’s father the second time, Ibarra smacks him on the head, forces Dámaso to his knees, and lays a knife across his neck, threatening to kill him (188–95). While this serves as a turning point in the novel—the point at which Ibarra’s romantic return to the native land yields to the growing recognition that he is regarded as a public enemy—it also highlights a core feature of the colonial state’s compromise with religious privilege. As we know, one of the mandates of religious privilege, held sacred even in times of revolution, was absolute immunity from bodily seizure, threat, or injury (see chapter 2). Ibarra’s hand is held in check, however, by his fiancée, María Clara, who (as it turns out later) is Dámaso’s bastard daughter. At the end of the novel, Ibarra has failed at everything he had set out to accomplish: he fails to fi nd his father’s body, redeem his father’s name, build a school for future generations, and fulfi ll his promise on his mother’s deathbed that he would make María Clara happy. His every ambition thwarted, Ibarra will return in the second novel El filibusterismo under the pseudonym Simoun, determined to start an anticolonial revolution and free his beloved, who has esconced herself in a convent. 38 While the exasperating complexity of intertwined relationships among the main characters renders an adequate plot summary in these pages impossible, the roles of Elías, an Indio sworn to protect Ibarra, and Ibarra’s betrothed María Clara allow us to effectively outline the matrix of patrimony and debt that dramatizes the ethical consequences of historical knowledge. Elías Ibarra’s only effective ally in the novel is the Indio Elías, whose unknown origins add to his notoriety as a man both feared and suspected by colonial authorities. When Ibarra saves Elías’s life on a fishing expedition, Elías returns the favor by saving Ibarra from the sabotaged school. From that moment on, Elías swears to protect Ibarra, twice identifying himself as Ibarra’s “debtor.”39 Elías later informs Ibarra of the plot led by the parish priest to implicate Ibarra in an uprising, and he also helps Ibarra escape from prison. What complicates Elías’s relationship to Ibarra, however, is that Ibarra’s very existence is inextricably tied up with the history of misfortune

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and injustice borne on the shoulders of Elías and his family. Beginning with the libelous accusation against Elías’s grandfather (an Indio laborer) by Ibarra’s grandfather (a Creole commercial agriculturalist), the succeeding two generations of Elías’s family encountered one tragedy after another. Elías’s grandmother descended to prostitution; the grandfather committed suicide. Of their two children, one became a bandit (tulisan) who was later drawn and quartered; the other was forced to hide the paternity of his children, who grow up under the illusion that their father is their house servant. As he admits to Ibarra prior to his realization of Ibarra’s ancestry, Elías’s entire raison d’etre stems from his desire to avenge his family by killing the descendants of his malefactor. Unbeknownst to Elías, he now owes his life to the man whose family is responsible for his family’s past misery.40 María Clara The contradiction between Elías’s confl icting debts to Ibarra reflects and foreshadows María Clara’s own. At the beginning of the novel, the betrothal of Ibarra and María Clara could not be more fitting. Ibarra belongs to the Spanish mestizo caste, and María Clara is fi rst presented as a Chinese mestiza. Ibarra’s father (Don Rafael) comes from a prosperous career in capitalism, and María Clara’s father (Captain Tiago, short for Santiago) has occupied respectable, if minor, positions in the colonial government. Both Ibarra and María Clara show every promise of improving their estate in colonial society. Yet the romantic plans are cut short when the secret of María Clara’s paternity comes to light toward the end of the novel. Her true father is Father Dámaso, the same Spanish priest responsible for seducing (or raping: it is not certain) María Clara’s mother, disinterring the body of Ibarra’s father, calumniating Ibarra’s father’s name, and provoking the son Crisóstomo’s wrath. If Ibarra were to marry María Clara, he would betray the memory of his father. And by marrying Ibarra, María Clara would dedicate her life to the man whom her real father regards as an enemy. This conflict comes to a head when Ibarra strikes Fr. Dámaso after hearing him cast aspersions on Ibarra’s father (chapter 35). The protagonist catches Fr. Dámaso by the neck, and, in a reversal of the colonial subject’s homage to Spain, Ibarra brings the latter to his knees, preparing to kill him. “Are there any among you,” Ibarra announces, “who has not loved your father, who has hated his memory, any one of you born in shame and humiliation? You see? In this entire group that you despise

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there is no one like you! You are judged!” [¿Hay entre vosotros alguno que no haya amado a su padre, que haya odiado su memoria, alguno nacido en la vergüenza y la humillación? ¿Ves? ¡Entre esa multitud que tú desprecias no hay uno como tú! ¡Estás juzgado!]41 Yet as he raises the knife to stab Dámaso, María Clara intervenes and saves him. Ibarra’s dissertation on the memory of one’s father ties up a central knot of compromised relationships between Ibarra, Elías, and María Clara. It determines their sphere of virtuous actions in the novel, yet simultaneously places these actions in opposition to one another. Ibarra’s will to kill Dámaso is his way of sacrificing his entire future for the sake of his father’s honor. Yet it would also make Ibarra the murderer of the father of his beloved María Clara. María Clara’s case is even more complicated. Superficial readings of Noli me tangere have led more than one scholar to interpret her silence throughout Ibarra’s ordeal with the colonial authorities as a reflection of Rizal’s supposed belief that women ought to be docile. But María Clara’s quiet obedience may also refer to the silent struggle she wages with the patrimony of her ancestry, a struggle with the secret that would compromise herself, her biological father Fr. Dámaso, her public father Capitán Tiago, her deceased mother, and fi nally her relationship with Crisóstomo Ibarra. No act of ethical virtue would suffice to cut the Gordian knot of her situation: the “clarity” of her intentions belies the tangled web of paternity that swears her to silence. In the course of protecting her secret, María Clara unwittingly places Ibarra’s signature in the hands of forgers who frame him. After Elías helps Ibarra to escape from prison, Ibarra is forced to leave the country once more, as a fugitive. In Ibarra’s last dialogue with his betrothed, María Clara assumes responsibility for Ibarra’s misfortunes and reveals the secret of her shame. Ibarra, who originally visits María Clara in order to forgive her for deserting him for another man in his hour of desperation, arrives at the recognition that colonial history has placed their patrimonies at odds with one another.

colonial modernity between allegory and irony How do we read this tangled skein of paternities, patrimonies, and debts? To begin with, we cannot fail to hear the messianic pulse, the new piety, in the call to restore the name of the Father to its rightful place at the center of the law and the moral universe. The gothic impulse in Rizal’s novel illustrates what Walter Benjamin once referred to as

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the “weak messianism” of all historical inquiry: “Like every generation which has preceded us,” Benjamin writes, “we possess only a weak Messianic power: we are unable to fully redeem the past, or to undo the distortions and destructiveness of the cultural hegemony of successive ruling classes. But at unexpected moments we are given the opportunity of grasping the ‘true image of the past’ as ‘it flares up at a moment of danger’ (the danger of becoming a tool of the ruling classes).”42 At the very moment that the Spanish government began to incorporate the Philippine past into its post-evangelical, post-Christendom discourse of civilization, the state of insecurity in the colony after 1872 allowed Rizal and other ilustrados to reorient the frames of reference that linked the past to the present. What law, after all, could stand in the place of the Father, when the Father was in fact defined as the place of the Law? The search for redemption informs the allegorical register of the novel, which gives it the appearance of a “foundational fiction”—that is, a novelistic codification of various social classes (mestizo and Indio) and the star-crossed romances produced between them, which symbolize the crisis of the colonial state in order to produce either a comedy of national unity or the tragedy of its failure.43 The novel’s trappings further lend themselves to allegorical interpretation: Juan Crisóstomo Ibarra’s name, for example, recalls that of Church father Saint John Chrysostom.44 Like the latter, Ibarra stands at the juncture of the Eastern and Western worlds (Chrysostom was one of the fi rst bishops of Constantinople in the Eastern Roman Empire); both dare to confront the imperial authorities, and both are sent into exile.45 Moreover, the title of the book, Noli me tangere, refers to the passage in the Christian gospel when Christ has been resurrected from the dead but has not yet ascended into heaven. In a well-known letter written to Félix Resurrección Hidalgo on 5 March 1887, Rizal explains: “Noli me tangere, words taken from Saint Luke, mean, ‘Do not touch me.’ The book contains, therefore, things about which none of us have spoken until now; they are so sensitive that they cannot be touched by any person.”46 The biblical passage (which is actually from John 20) behind Rizal’s statement refers fi rst of all to a missing body. Mary Magdalene runs out of the tomb of Jesus Christ, crying, “They have taken the Lord out of his tomb.” So too in the novel, Ibarra’s father has been taken out of his tomb. Mary Magdalene later sees Jesus Christ, and mistakes him for a gardener: “Thinking it was the gardener, she said ‘If it is you, sir, who removed him, tell me where you have laid him, and I will take him away.’ Jesus said, ‘Mary!’ She turned to him and said, ‘Rabbuni!’

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(which is Hebrew for ‘My Master’). Jesus said, ‘Touch me no more [noli me tangere], for I have not yet ascended to the Father’ ” (John 20:15–17).47 This allegorical register illustrates how Rizal saw the plight of his characters under late colonialism as symptomatic of a larger transition: from resurrection to ascension, from sickness to health, from silence to speech. Ibarra, María Clara, and Elías all epitomize this state of transition: between the promise of accounting for one’s debts and their fulfillment, each character confronts the absence of a historical ground on which the completion of these debts would be possible. The only alternative is to abolish these debts in the creation and circulation of new ones. This leads us to a quite different level of interpretation for the novel, which follows not the lines of allegorical exegesis but those of irony and disenchantment. On an allegorical level, the racial dichotomy that accompanied centralized colonial sovereignty and the failure of colonial rationality to mitigate or manage the division between rulers and ruled provided little in the way of imagining the modernity of colonial rule. Between Spanish civilization and native prehistory, gothic history and the allegorical spirit could only develop and explore the consequences of an other law, an other writing, an other civilization: one separated from that of Spain’s colonial empire but imagined under the same terms of sovereignty. On the level of irony, however, Rizal’s novel is engaged with exploring the ethical consequences of unleashing counterhistories of colonial rule, insofar as these awakened contesting claims, authorities, and multitude of counterhistories had to be somehow negotiated, managed, and synthesized in the oncoming confrontation with Spanish sovereignty. Even as each narrative thread that comprises Noli me tangere shares a grievance against the colonial engineering of mutual enmity and confl ict, it also brings characters belonging to different strata and interests in colonial society into a new conversation. Here, the hate and resentment unleashed by “weak messianic power” has a different objective than the symbolic representation of collective vengeance. Rather, the conversation turns toward the possibility of collective sacrifice, which becomes a precondition for the cultivation of national sentiment in Rizal’s second novel, El filibusterismo. This other, ironic register, calls on each character in the novel to abandon or rethink his or her investments in the colonial past for the sake of a largely unimagined future, bound by nothing more than their

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willingness to exist for one another. If an allegorical reading enables the reader to imagine the present as a culmination of the past and Rizal’s judgment of that past in the fi nal tragedy of Ibarra, Elías, and María Clara, an ironic reading defies and corrects this gesture by highlighting the characters’ freedom from that past in a disenchanted present, that is, one that is not yet determined all the way to the end.48 Confronted with a world that calls Spanish prestige into account for the parasitism, corruption, and hypocrisy that it engenders, the characters must test the extent and limits of a new aesthetic vision to replace it—even as Rizal (the writer) witnesses his own attempt to do the same through them.49 The intersection in narrative of these two aesthetic modes, which Paul de Man identifies as the primary “rhetorics of temporality,” occurs in the dialogues between Ibarra and Elías and between Ibarra and María Clara (chapter 62).50 In one scene, Ibarra and Elías withdraw to an obscure corner of the lake to discuss the prospects and limitations of armed revolt against the Spanish regime, and each fails to convince the other of the validity of his reasons for supporting or opposing revolutionary violence. In the course of their debate, each reveals something about the prospects and limitations of each other. “My apologies, sir,” Elías says after he fails to convince Ibarra of the justice of armed revolt, “I am not eloquent enough to convince you; even if I have had some education, I am an Indio, my existence in your eyes is doubtful, and my words will always seem to you suspect. Those who have expressed the contrary opinion are Spaniards, and as such, the tone, the titles, and the origin of their opinions, however trivial or simplistic they be, make them true.” (Noli me tangere, 274–75).51 Ibarra responds, “What do you want? I have not been educated among the people, whose necessities I am perhaps ignorant of; I’ve spent my childhood in a Jesuit school, I’ve grown up in Europe, I’ve been formed in the midst of books, and I have read only what men have been able to bring to light: what remains in shadows, what the writers do not say—of that I know nothing” (275).52 And when Elías discovers Ibarra’s paternity, he turns on him, hissing, “Look at me well, look how I have suffered, and you live, you love, you have a fortune, a home, special consideration, you live . . . you live!” (297).53 On the one hand, the failure of each character to convince the other leads to an awareness of their historical separation and antagonism throughout colonial history. Elías feels compelled to say: “I am an Indio”; Ibarra admits, in his turn, “What the writers do not say—of that I know nothing.” Yet their awareness of each other’s limitations prepares the ground for their self-overcoming, in that each

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is forced to see himself or herself in the eyes of the other. In fact, by the end of the novel, both participants of the revolutionary debate have switched sides, with Ibarra fi nally committing himself to armed revolt, and Elías refusing to join it in the name of the people (chapter 61). A related reversal occurs in the relationship between Ibarra and María Clara. After escaping from prison, Ibarra comes to pardon his childhood sweetheart for her (forced) engagement to another man. She detains him and calls on him to “hear and judge” her only after she tells the story of her bastard Spanish origins (333). “What was I to do?” she asks after telling Ibarra the secret of her natural father, Father Dámaso. “Should I have sacrificed, for the sake of love, the memory of my mother, the honor of my false father and the good name of my true one? Could I do this without even you coming to despise me?” (334). [¿Qué iba a hacer yo? ¿Debía yo sacrificar a mi amor la memoria de mi madre, el honor de mi padre falso y el buen nombre del verdadero? ¿Podía hacerlo sin que tú mismo me despreciaras?] The reversal of symbolic debt between father and daughter in the revelation of María Clara’s secret parallels the reversal of Ibarra’s relationship with María Clara. Instead of pardoning her, he must recognize her as his equal. Both have suffered for the sacrifices each has made to preserve the good names of their respective fathers. And both see those sacrifices as a necessary condition for their mutual love and respect for one another—to the point that it also entails their separation. In these discussions, the characters begin as the extensions of their own respective, allegorical histories and end up as the extensions of one another’s histories. By representing themselves to one another, they begin to seek the manner in which those representations (and the histories they presuppose) might be superseded in the anticipation or creation of a “new contract,” a new symbolic economy of debt and reciprocity, a new ethical norm. The tragedy of Ibarra, María Clara, and Elías brings a new element into play: the free and ethical decision among all three characters to break with one cycle of debt and announce the coming of another; to recognize their allegorical constructions as past traumas that are ultimately fictitious and subject to future transformation. Ibarra breaks with his commitment to peaceful reform and begins to entertain the idea of revolution; María Clara breaks with the sovereignty of all three “fathers” (biological, confessional, juridical) and locks herself in a convent; Elías breaks with his investment in vengeance as a form of reciprocating the death of his grandfather and his belief in the justice of armed revolution. They listen to one another and

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reconsider the strength of their convictions. There emerges an unspoken complicity among them, insofar as each of them independently undertakes the difficult task of considering the fate of the other as one’s own. There are no words for this mutual recognition: María Clara and Elías demonstrate this fugitive complicity in the only scene of Noli me tangere where he acknowledges her. As María Clara watches Ibarra go for the last time, Elías reveals himself: “He took off his hat and bowed deeply” (335) [se descubrió y la saludó profundamente]. Elías registers the depth of their complicity: to hold one another in the eyes of a collective fate, however tragic. Beyond the failure of one economy of indebtedness, then, there is the silent withdrawal of each character into the shared attempt to create another one, consecrated only by each other. The ironic corollary of their heroic actions, of course, is that they take place in a world where their sacrifices and heroism are deprived of fi nal judgment. By the end of the novel, either Ibarra or Elías has died (the author leaves uncertain who); the other has become a fugitive; and María Clara enters the convent. Even Elías’s noble last words are swallowed in the wilderness. “I die without seeing the dawn shine upon my native land [patria]!” he murmurs. “You, who will see it, salute it [saludla]. . . . Do not forget those who fell during the night!” (349).54 Yet the scene is immediately followed by one in which a native lay sister who sees the funeral pyre built by Elías from afar and exclaims: “Who is that heretic [hereje] clearing the fields on a fiesta day. . . . He’s sure to go to purgatory, and see if I get you out, savage [salvaje]!” (350).55 All that knowledge and moral fiber, but just as sinful and savage as ever! Yet the irony of this passage captures the double valence of the enlightened colonial subject, or ilustrado: his or her identity cannot remain bound by the colonial past, yet the conditions do not exist for either an overcoming of that past or the realization of a different future. While the internal division between an allegorical and ironic interpretation of Rizal’s novel appears at fi rst sight abstruse, it reflects the crisis of colonial sovereignty on the level of poetics. As two “rhetorics of temporality,” the presence of allegory and irony reflect the shift in historical consciousness that propelled at once the production of counterhistory and the dialectical form of the novel. As such, they also inform the divergent tensions at work in the self-reflexive production of cultural identity. The allegorical register of counterhistories defies the law of Spanish sovereignty by establishing its dark and suppressed twin. Yet as the genre of irony par excellence, the novel also invites the

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reader to acknowledge the essential dignity of the characters who make decisions and take responsibility for them. In this way, Noli me tangere foregrounds the aesthetic elaboration of the modern, ironic, Filipino question: “How do we see ourselves seeing the slow decay of Spanish colonialism? And how are we going to take responsibility for ourselves and each other under or beyond colonial rule?” As Georg Lukács has said, the ethical impulse revealed in irony lies in “the self-recognition and, with it, self-abolition of subjectivity.” As a formal constituent of the novel form [irony] signifies an interior diversion of the normatively creative subject into a subjectivity as interiority, which opposes power complexes that are alien to it and which strives to imprint the contents of its longing upon the alien world, and a subjectivity which sees through the abstract and, therefore, limited nature of the mutually alien worlds of subject and object, understands these worlds by seeing their limitations as necessary conditions of their existence and, by thus seeing through them, allows the duality of the worlds to subsist. 56

If Rizal sought an expression of colonial subjectivity in romantic irony, it is because irony provided him with a way of bracketing the overwhelming presence of colonial rule, reducing it to the outside of a new, inner drama wherein the moods, states, philosophies, and ideologies of the colonial subject take center stage with respect to the reader and to one another. For a country in which the law of free association still did not juridically exist, Noli me tangere offers the colonial reader a virtual public square. Here, colonial subjects are asked to reveal themselves to one another as thinking and speaking subjects; and afterwards, they are called on to see themselves in the eyes of each other, in order to map out the terms of their collective prosperity. Individually, their projects fail, and this failure is at least partly due to the contesting histories that influence the path of each character. But the failure of the characters on the allegorical register of contesting colonial histories signals a victory for the author on the level of irony, insofar as he succeeds in articulating the question of colonial rule as a question to be grappled with in the present, where the allegory’s wisdom has not been determined all the way to the end. The characters’ demise goes beyond an attempt to teach a lesson on the fate of those who fight the system: from the beginning to the end, their willingness to confront, debate, help, or simply respect one another comes about in a world whose values are in the perpetual process of destruction and recreation, or “becoming,” as Lukács (and later Mikhail Bakhtin) were to assert. They live and die

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as the result of their ethical decisions and the responsibility that such decisions entail; this responsibility is thus simultaneously an assertion that the disenchantment of the world has given birth to a new kind of human freedom. “Irony,” Lukács writes, “the self-surmounting of a subjectivity that has gone as far as it was possible to go, is the highest freedom that can be achieved in a world without God. That is why it is not only the sole possible a priori condition for a true, totality-creating objectivity but also why it makes that totality—the novel—the representative art form of our age” (Theory of the Novel, 93). In reading Rizal along these lines, the death of Elías affi rms in aesthetic terms an ethical imperative to live in a world where the divine will neither reveals itself nor allows for its co-optation by anyone. By reform or revolution, speech or silence, vengeance or sacrifice, colonial subjects had to take responsibility for the entire weight of colonial rule: only then could they be free to aesthetically reimagine and rewrite the terms of a social contract between Spain and the archipelago. 57 Counterhistories, which inform and serve as the foundation for the gothic impulse in Western literature, arose at a moment in history when the political theory of kingship and sovereignty as well the political theology of Christendom—both derived from the Middle Ages—began to fall apart. 58 Foucault describes these histories, which developed as polemical narrations that questioned the sovereign use of history, in the following way: “The role of [counter] history will, then, be to show that laws deceive, that kings wear masks, that power creates illusions, and that historians tell lies. This will not, then, be a history of continuity, but a history of deciphering, the detection of the secret . . . and of the reappropriation of a knowledge that has been distorted or buried.”59 The war that these counterhistories launch against sovereignty, and the inequality or injustice that these counterhistories claim to address, always presuppose a racial element, insofar as race designates an irreducible political difference—whether supplemented by the recounting of tradition, lineage, or vulgar Darwinism—between one group and another, with the question of life and death at stake (Foucault, “Society,” 77). Rizal’s counterhistories of the conquest and colonization belong to this genealogy: they illuminate the traces of the Hispano-Christian empire in its last gasps, with the feeble gesture of the Special Laws administration as an attempt to postpone Spain’s inevitable loss of the

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colony. Yet this account only tells half the story. For counterhistory does more than unmask and indict the theater of colonial sovereignty, the ruse of Special Laws and its bureaucratization and commodification of religious piety. The political histories of native sentiment (in “Filipinas”) and native industry (in “Indolencia”) also reconfigure the status of knowledge about the Philippines and its inhabitants in such a way as to place the onus of political and ethical action in the new, enlightened Filipino subject. In Spain, Rizal labored to bring the expatriate students together as an intellectual community beyond the anticolonial propaganda of the newspaper La Solidaridad. As Rizal wrote to his fellow contributors to the newspaper: “To understand is to dominate. We are the only ones capable of arriving at a perfect understanding of our country, because we know both languages, and besides we are informed of the secrets of the people, among whom we educate ourselves and one another.” [Conocer es dominar. Nosotros somos los únicos que podemos llegar al perfecto conocimiento de nuestro país, porque conocemos ambos idiomas y además estamos enterados de los secretos del pueblo en medio del cual nos educamos.]60 In “Filipinas,” Rizal declared the emergence of the expatriate community as an intellectual class intending to disseminate this knowledge, closely tied to the interests of the islands: “If [this class] does not yet form more than the cerebrum of the country,” he wrote, “it will soon constitute the country’s entire nervous system, and will manifest [the nation’s] existence in its every act” (La Solidaridad, 2:434). [Si hoy no forma mas que el cerebro del país, en algunos anos formará todo su sistema nervioso y manifestará su existencia en todos sus actos.] The knowledge of the country—and the calculation and orchestration of native consent that such knowledge implied—had to be inseparable from its historical transformation through the ethic of enlightened patriotism bestowed on the Filipino subject of knowledge. Despite the failings and incompetence of Spanish administration, the colonial subject had to assume the entire responsibility of the history of Spanish rule in order to deactivate the colonial state’s claim to reason.

Epilogue Colonialism and Modernity

Sa ganoong mga ritwal ng mga pilay na pastol naiuuusad ang kawan ng tupa sa mundo Through rituals like this, performed by lame shepherds Are the flock of sheep in this world driven. Edel Garcellano, “propesor / I”

Colonial officials, scholars, and writers of the nineteenth century were fond of relating or referring to a popular anecdote that circulated in Manila and its environs from about 1845 concerning the death and legacy of an extraordinary priest and scientist, Fray Manuel Blanco, O. S. A. Blanco was primarily recognized in the colonies for two achievements: fi rst, he was a Tagalog “specialist,” or tagalista, responsible for writing and translating a number of works into the vernacular Tagalog. Chief among these works is a translation of French botanist Tissot’s Aviso al Pueblo (Notice to the Public) into Tagalog.1 Second, he was the author of the monumental four-volume folio of plant species unique to the Philippine tropics, Flora de Filipinas (1837), which the most important colonial archivist and bibliophile Wenceslao Retana once called “the typographic work of the greatest importance made in Filipinas during the period of Spanish rule.”2 And yet, while these two works assured Blanco’s posthumous fame for both native practitioners of tropical medicine and Western botanists anxious to classify the natural world according to tables and taxonomies, it was his third book, El Indio, which all but guaranteed his reception as Spain’s true philosopher of colonial modernity in the Philippines. For it is in the pages of this book that Blanco ostensibly brings the depth of his knowledge and understanding to bear on the paradoxes of the colonial state’s political rationality and its simultaneous pursuit of native consent and native enslavement to Spanish rule. 271

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Ostensibly, of course: for from the fi rst page of that monumental work to the last, the pages are as “blank” (blanco, “white”) as the name of its author. How does Blanco’s book speak to the attempted transition in colonial policy throughout the nineteenth century, whose silence solicited the voices and opinions of the very agents it sought to repress in the nineteenth century? Let us hear a retelling of the tale by Wenceslao Retana. The story, which by the end of the century had passed into folklore, appeared in the introduction to his self-proclaimed colonial ethnology of the native Filipino Indio, El indio batangüeño: Se cuenta que el P[adre] Blanco, hombre dotado de raro entendimiento, como asimismo de un espíritu de observación superior á cuanto se diga, guardaba en uno de sus estantes un voluminoso libro en cuyo lomo leíanse solamente estas palabras: El Indio; el cual volumen jamás enseñó á nadie. Muerto el P. Blanco, gloria y prez de la provincia Augustiniana, varios fueron los curiosos que se precipitaron hacia el codiciado presuntuoso manuscrito; y ¿cuál no sería el pasmo y la sorpresa de todos ellos, cuando, después de hojearlo desde el principio hasta el fi n, no encontraron escrita ni una sola palabra? —El silencio, á veces, dice más que miles de discursos: el sabio Agustino dió á entender á los curiosos que el indígena de Filipinas es un ser indefi nible, un libro en blanco. (Italics in original.)3 [It is recounted that Padre Blanco, a man endowed with unusual mental faculties, exemplified in a spirit of observation superior even to (its) reputation, kept on one of his shelves a voluminous book on whose spine could be read only these words: El Indio; he never showed this volume to anyone. Upon Padre Blanco’s death, the glory and prize of the Augustinian order, many were those curious who hurried to the coveted presumed manuscript: and what would not be the shock and astonishment of all when, after leafi ng through it from the beginning to the end, they did not fi nd one written word? Silence, at times, says more than a thousand treatises: the wise Augustinian led the curious to understand that the Philippine native is an indefi nable being, a blank (blanco) book.]

Blanco’s blank book El Indio diagrams the impasse of colonial modernity around this finite set of voices: place-positions in a standoff between would-be liberators, would-be overseers, and the anomalous would-be subjects, would-be participants in the imagination of colonial hegemony. The tale introduces a protagonist, Padre Blanco, whose previous Flora de Filipinas embodied the transition of the missionary task from evangelization to the enlightened study and calculation of resources (natural as well as human) for the future welfare and benefit of both Spain and the Philippines. Here was a man whose empirical investigation of the country and its inhabitants revealed his facility with

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vernacular languages, his ability to subordinate the knowledge gleaned from native customs to a rational method, and, finally, a pastoral concern for the welfare of his flock. The legend further initiates the protagonist’s encounter with an object of study and missionary activity, the Indio. The product of that encounter, the Philippine book of knowledge, apophatically refers to an earlier book of knowledge, the Book or Bible, and the sacred-profane history of evangelization and colonization that it inspired. It is this history whose aura has been tarnished, if not utterly extinguished, by the pursuit of ends that fundamentally changed the meaning, instrumentality, and stakes in the constitution and deployment of knowledge itself. Knowledge has ceased to be derived from one Truth, one Word made flesh, one juridically omnipresent and theoretically omnipotent sovereign who presided over a world empire, one heroic people and their overseas shenanigans. Neither is knowledge an ever-shifting calculus that measures the value of natural resources and native capacities against the regularities of catastrophe, expediency, and expense on the periphery of imperial collapse. What has replaced both is an enigma at once so dark that no light can dispel or penetrate it, and so “white” that no careful scholar can read it. If we are like Retana, we might choose to identify this obscure silence, this empty place, with the Indio: “the indigenous native of Filipinas is an indefi nable being, a blank book [italics added].”4 As we have seen in previous chapters, he was not the fi rst to do so. Throughout the latter half of the nineteenth century, peninsular Spanish officials, writers, and pundits repeated ad nauseum the rhetorical question, Were the Indios rational beings? Were they capable of gratitude, respect, and other arts of civilization? Did their customs follow some practical logic? Were they, in a word, governable? In the words of one satirist, F. de Lerena, writing for Ilustración Filipina in 1859, Os diré, en suma, que el indio Es una cosa tan rara, Especial é incomprensible Que no se parece a nada. 5 [I will tell you, in closing, that the Indio Is a strange thing Special, incomprehensible Like nothing else.]

Of course, in following the line of interpretation advanced by Retana and Lerena, the reader completely misses the self-reflexive turn indicated by pun on the author’s name. As the Creole ilustrado scholar

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(and later colonial official under U.S. rule) Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera somewhat scornfully replied, the blankness of Blanco’s book dramatizes not the enigmatic character of the Indio but “the incompetence of the observer,” that is, the missionary priest and police power of the colonial state.6 For Pardo de Tavera, Blanco’s Indio lays bare not the unknowability of the colonial subject but the inability of the modern colonial project to transform this subject into an object of knowledge, calculation, and consent to Spanish rule. Taken together, Retana and Pardo de Tavera’s answers constitute the anomaly of colonial rationality as a derivative “reason of state” in the nineteenth century. The resulting emptiness of Blanco’s insight registers and reflects the colonial government’s ultimate failure to write a Special Law that would make the Indio fully legible to the project of colonial reform, thus enabling the colonial state to secure and manage native consent. At the same time, it made the Indios responsible for their invisibility (or irrationality), insofar as one infers Spanish colonial rule to exist “for the sake of the natives.” Blanco’s book serves as an apt emblem for the impasse of Special Laws as the reproduction and extension of the very absence of authority that it sought to ward off or evade. On a larger level, the terms Special Laws and El Indio belong to a chain of floating signifiers that anchored the imagination of colonial rule after the nineteenth-century collapse of the imperial order—along with phrases like “colonial raison d’état,” “peculiar circumstances,” and others. As the target object of Special Laws, the Indio belongs to an exceptional order of reason—the enigma—that signifies by ceaselessly announcing its imminent clarification or enlightenment: some plainspoken explanation capable of reconciling despotism with hegemony, expediency, or exception within the norm, the figure within the letter, the blankness within the book, instead of merely reiterating and amplifying its mystery. A quasi-object of quasi-laws: a metafiction whose task it was to calculate the threshold of its hypothetical existence along the axes of a politics of truth and an ethics of social belonging.

from imagined to conceptualized communities In 1870, Javier Tisco y Morales wrote a lengthy series of newspaper articles on the present and future of Philippine commerce in the illustrated weekly periodical El Oriente. The last section focused on a remarkable question, remarkable in the sense that the writer presumed it to be a question that no one had thought to ask during three centuries

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of imperial rule: What is the State? It is certainly not, Tisco y Morales contends, an authority that directly tends to the survival and sustenance of its “citizens”; nor does it regulate the actions of individuals. Rather, “it exercises power . . . only in those acts that directly or indirectly apply to order and justice in general . . . and does not administer for its own sake, but rather for the nation . . . and respects and does not trespass on the rights of the individual, the civil person.”7 This rather Smithian interpretation of the state and the individual—in marked contrast to the more Cameralist-inspired character of the Bourbon and post-Bourbon reforms—ought to be based (in his words) on the science of political economy and “the gains made in constitutional and civil law,” as well as on a better understanding of “the special laws [leyes especiales] that rule the country, in its customs, in its commerce and industry, in its means of production, in its physical geography and demography; in sum, in all matters that properly constitute the object of administration in its most essential functions” (7).8 Indirectly, Tisco y Morales was reacting, like most peninsular Spaniards in the Philippines at the time, to two important events that had occurred in recent history linking metropole and colony in a new, ambiguous way. The first was Spain’s “Glorious Revolution” in 1868, which led to the promulgation of a new Constitution. The 1869 Constitution called for a parliamentary monarchy, the principle of popular sovereignty, universal male suffrage, and the protection of various civil liberties. In its immediate aftermath, Carlos María de la Torre was appointed captain-general of the archipelago. Not only did he stir up controversy as a leader sympathetic to the liberal aspirations of Philippine Creoles, as well as the (Creole-led) mestizo and native secular clergy, but he also brought with him a retinue of ministers and officials who, like their leader, combined liberal sympathies with virtually total ignorance of the anomalous “state” they had come to govern. The second event was the opening of the Suez Canal (also in 1869), which cut the length of travel and communication between Spain and the Philippines in half. In response to the difficulty of reconciling the tumultuous events obtaining on the Iberian Peninsula with the continuity of Spanish colonial sovereignty in the Philippines, Tisco y Morales could not but reiterate the same “hybrid” solution to an anomalous political state that had been pursued since the beginning of the nineteenth century. On one level, he imagines the administration of Special Laws as facilitating the liberalization of the economy, the increased safety and prosperity

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of Philippine “citizens,” and a more enlightened, nuanced approach to the growth of a civil society that was bound to be different from that of the Iberian Peninsula. On a deeper level, however, if the goal of Adam Smith’s philosophy was to restrain political authority from interfering with the “natural” growth of economic interests outside it, and if civil liberties dovetailed with the “invisible hand” of the market economy, the administration of Special Laws could not but present itself as the very antithesis of the basic principles of constitutional law and government. For, under the idea of Special Laws corresponding to the peculiar circumstances of the colonial frontier and subject, political authority is defi ned by its necessary exception from restraint. On the one hand, this exception allowed political authority to claim for itself its own rationality, its own forms of political technology, its own norms of governance, and its own aesthetic; on the other hand, it simultaneously undermined any claim to rationality whatsoever and preempted any appeal to universal ideas of consent, will, autonomy, free enterprise, love of Spain, beauty, and so forth. The “conceptualized” communities that emerged from this impasse reflected and ramified the contradiction of modern colonial rule in various ways—from the conception of Spanish racial purity to a pastorless Christian “flock” and from the racialization of a reified entity, the Indio Filipino, to an enlightened Filipino “class.” Yet in struggling for control over the interpretation of how exactly a legislation of Special Laws would proceed, they directly and indirectly highlighted the anomaly of Special Laws with respect to both the principles of the imperial monarchy and the principles of constitutional government. Applied to the broader field of comparative studies of colonial frontiers, we can see how the Philippines in the nineteenth century provides a vital point of reference. The foundation of this field has been dominated by the history of Eurocentrism—whether it has been the genesis of the modern world-system of capitalism, the development of “core” capitalist countries, and the corresponding establishment of its economic peripheries, or the demarcation and conquest of an alien and hostile “other” that has endowed Christendom with its exceptional mission and has propelled the articulation of international law and order. When we examine the rhetoric typically used by colonial endeavors in the late nineteenth century—what Eric Hobsbawm has called the “Age of Empire”—the two appear to be mere variations of the same objective, which is the pursuit of wealth and military supremacy. The embarrassingly unsophisticated propaganda of U.S. imperialism in the Philippines

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and the Americas at the beginning of the twentieth century provides an example of the arrogant, cynical, and rather juvenile obfuscation of history to flaunt the ostensible manifest destiny of an “Anglo-Saxon,” (pan-) “Christian” “civilization”—a rhetoric still resurrected from time to time to spectacular effect. The study of the colonial state in the Philippines, however, as well as the corresponding society it elicits and the colonial culture it addresses has compelled us to examine the political economy and rationality it develops from its starting point of articulation, which is precisely the identification of the irreducible difference between conditions obtaining on the colonial frontier and in the metropolitan state. This recognition in turn necessitates and justifies an irreducibly different approach to modern governance, as well as the production of two very different realities. John S. Furnivall’s analysis of “plural societies” in Burma and the Dutch East Indies had already laid the ground for this understanding of modern political economy in Southeast Asia by demonstrating how the entrance of capitalism and foreign investment into these regions led to the atomization rather than consolidation of national interests and patriotic sentiment, as well as the destabilization rather than stabilization of national and international security. More recently, Partha Chatterjee’s critiques of Indian nationalism’s “derivative discourse” have provided us with a complementary frame of reference for studying colonial difference from the level of officialdom and its inevitable recourse to expediency and exception. These contributions to the comparative study of colonial frontiers and the cultures they produce have not only largely informed and sustained this study of the nineteenth-century colonial state and society in the Philippines, but they also remind us that the “area” we identify as South and Southeast Asia was deliberately regarded and treated as a vast frontier for European powers like Britain, France, the Dutch, and Spain, where the future of international law (most notably the doctrine of preemption) and the preservation or strategic transformation of trade and communication networks were staked.9 Finally, these works have (directly and indirectly) served to complicate the area studies model of studying Asian, U.S. and Latin American culture.10 As Dipesh Chakrabarty has shown, with this attunement to colonial difference comes a corresponding revaluation and displacement of Europe as the primary reference for the study of these regions: Europe becomes “provincialized” in academic study. This displacement entails the necessary subordination of any predetermined ideas

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of reason, universality, disenchantment, progress, value, and so on to the histories of the present in which colonial or postcolonial subjects see themselves as participants in their own dramas. The resulting picture, as I have portrayed it, is neither the expansion and institution of a generally “Spanish” or “Hispanization” interest, nor the collective awakening of “national sentiment,” but the folding and refolding of a reified idea of political order (“the colonial state”) in and through the interpellation of political communities and their corresponding attempts at self-coherence—“common sense.” The cross-cultural comparative study of colonial frontiers, with attention to the discourses that conceptualize or contest the arrangement of borders and limits as well as the “colonial modernities” they elicit or repress, might yield similar conclusions, although at present it is beyond the means of this researcher to project what the results of such a study would show.

race and the colonial state of exception One privileged object of inquiry in such a field of study would have to be the determination of expediency and exception in the establishment of a colonial hegemonic order or rule of law as well as the points of conflation or identification between domination and hegemony, where the force of law becomes indistinguishable from the “law” (if one could call it that) of force. As Giorgio Agamben recently wrote, Far from being a response to a normative lacuna, the state of exception appears as the opening of a fictitious lacuna in the order for the purpose of safeguarding the existence of the norm and its applicability to the normal situation. . . . It is as if the juridical order [il diritto] contained an essential fracture between the position of the norm and its application, which, in extreme situations, can be fi lled only by means of the state of exception, that is, by creating a zone in which application is suspended, but the law [la legge], as such, remains in force. (Italics added)11

The state of exception, in colonial Philippines and elsewhere, illustrates this “essential fracture between the position of the norm and its application,” in which “peculiar circumstances” obtaining on the colonial frontier became identical with the “extreme situations” manifesting themselves in a century of Spanish revolution and restoration during the nineteenth century. As Josep Fradera has shown, in the case of Spain’s postimperial “three-colony system” (Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines), the promised legislation of Special Laws amounted to an indefinite suspension of the law itself. This suspension,

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not surprisingly, coincided with the concentration of authority in the figure of the captain-general, the creation of an internal security force in the islands (the Guardia Civil, in 1855), and the eventual allocation of more than 50 percent of the colonial budget to the army and navy throughout the late nineteenth century.12 Less than a century later, the United States launched its own version of Special Laws in the designation of its new island possessions (Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines) as “unincorporated territories.” In 1901, a famous Supreme Court case (Downes vs. Bidwell) referred to them as “territories belonging to, but not a part of the Union of states under the Constitution” and concluded as follows from this definition: “In exercising [lawmaking] power, Congress is not subject to the same constitutional limitations, as when it is legislating for the United States. And in general the guaranties of the Constitution, save as they are limitations upon the exercise of executive and legislative power when exerted for or over our insular possessions, extend to them only as Congress, in the exercise of its legislative power over territory belonging to the United States, has made those guaranties applicable.”13 The study of colonial frontiers as laboratories for the simultaneous enforcement of law and its suspension is inseparable from an analysis of racial difference and dichotomy, and its application to all spheres of colonial life.14 Philippine historians are usually quick to emphasize that any form of Spanish colonial racism in the nineteenth century must pale in comparison to the racism practiced by Spain’s European counterparts. For one thing, Christian evangelization was from the beginning predicated on universal salvation: an egalitarianism of souls that presents a permanent challenge to racial division and hierarchy. Moreover, one might argue that coerced labor in the Philippines, however brutal, never led to the barbarous extremes witnessed in chattel slavery in the Americas and Caribbean. Equally, despite the severe decline of the native population in the century following the conquest, no mass killings and mutilations that resembled King Leopold II’s reign in the Belgian Congo ever came to light during the three centuries of Spanish rule. Finally, one may conclude, the paternal legislation protecting the customary rights of native communities, the increase of Chinese trade and immigration in the nineteenth century, and the emergence of a mestizo entrepreneurial class all testify to a “softer,” less binary, perhaps weaker and more complex racism than that obtaining in British India or French Algiers.15 If this writer expresses skepticism at such claims, it is because such a position pretends to evaluate racism from an imaginary scale of various

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degrees, each of which may be assigned a different value in comparison and contrast to the others (e.g., “the British were more racist than the Spaniards, but the Belgians were the worst of all”). Despite their differences, the modern colonial project in each case has to confront the calculation and calibration of two incommensurable extremes: the law as it is understood and applied in the metropolis and the “peculiar circumstances” that render such an understanding and application impossible overseas. While this understanding and application does not necessarily begin with a natural(ized), irreducible difference between the biological essence of colonizers and colonial subjects, the rationalization of colonial difference from the beginning of the nineteenth century was the ground that made racism both sensible and expedient. To what degree must the colonial state as “the fashioning of Leviathan,” in John Furnivall’s words, violently overrun or override the attunement of colonial masters to the expediencies of, accommodations to, and negotiations with the denizens of the colonial world?16 Conversely, to what degree can the numerous exceptions, shortcomings, impasses, and contradictory results of the law’s application come to engender and develop a law of exception—whether that law expresses itself in the language of “peculiar circumstances,” symbolic prestige, or vulgar Darwinism? In both instances, the articulation of difference between self and other necessitates and furthers an exceptional order in which the law’s fulfi llment manifests itself in its indefi nite suspension. In any case, this study hopes to contribute to the further correspondence and mutual enrichment of the fields of colonial and postcolonial culture and the political philosophy of the exception. This intersection seems to me to offer new ways of approaching the paradoxical synchronicity or consonance between the perpetual idiosyncrasy of colonial projects and the remarkable—all-too-remarkable—coherence of a Western philosophical tradition. To put it another way, the relationship between the two is mutually constitutive rather than incidental or phenomenological. In studies as diverse as Fernando Ortiz’s classic study of the role that the indigenous and African consumption of tobacco played in the institutions of enlightened society in Europe, Gauri Viswanathan’s work on the impact of British colonial pedagogy in India on educational reform in England, and Susan Buck-Morss’s study of the Haitian Revolution’s impact on the ultimate direction of Hegel’s philosophical system, the history of the ambivalent repression and incorporation of colonial frontiers corresponds to the ambivalent repression and incorporation of lawless anomie and force into the law

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itself.17 More recently, debates in the United States concerning the invasion and occupation of Iraq—from the suspension of the citizen’s right to privacy during wartime, the indefinite incarceration without trial of “terrorist” suspects at Guantanamo Bay, and the right to launch preemptive strikes and assassinate political leaders without a formal declaration and congressional approval of war, to the anomalous character of military justice and private security fi rms, and so forth—have further given the study and analysis of colonial rule in the past century a contemporary resonance. It should come as no surprise that reference to the Philippines (along with Vietnam) regularly appears in discussions of Iraq’s present and future: this illustrates that the exceptional reach of executive privilege and authority, which unfolds through the suspension of various parts of the U.S. constitution and the erection of (post-) colonial peripheries, has historical precedents that ought to be studied in comparison.

culture without exception In a dark and gloomy forest on the (imagined) frontiers of Christendom, a Muslim prince rescues his bound archenemy—a Christian prince renowned for leading his forces into battle against the infidel— from certain death in the form of two fierce lions. When the Christian Prince Florante regains consciousness and recognizes his enemy, Prince Aladin, the latter reassures him with the following words: Ipina-hahayág ng pananamít mo Tagá-Albania ca at aco,i, Perciano; Icaw ay caaway ng baya,t, secta co, Sa lagay mo ngayo,i, magcatoto tayo. “Moro aco,i, lubós na táong may dibdib Ay nasasaklao rin ng útos ng Langit, Dini sa púso co,i, kusang natititik Natural na leyng sa abá,i, mahapis. (Florante at Laura, 25: stanzas 149–50) [Your manner of dress says it all, You are from Albania and I am Persian You, the enemy of my country and religion (But) in your present state, we have something in common. Muslim though I be, I am a person with a heart And governed by Heaven’s laws Etched here in my heart from the beginning Is the natural law to empathize with the wretched.]

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Balagtas’s invocation of a “natural law,” “etched here in my heart from the beginning,” provides us with a fitting, fi nal antidote to the shibboleths of colonial rationality in the nineteenth-century Philippines. Here, Balagtas’s “natural law,” which serves as the point of common sense between two protagonists whose identities are defi ned in opposition to one another, refers to a well-known passage in Paul’s epistle to the Romans 2:14–15: “For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: which show the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the meanwhile accusing or else excusing one another” (King James Version). This “law of the heart” was particularly important to the Scholastic development of natural law, which framed the central debates around the role of Christian evangelization in the Spanish conquest and colonization of the New World and the Philippines.18 Closer to Balagtas’s own time, however, this metaphor had undergone a radical reinterpretation in the work and thought of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In discussing the different forms of law that comprise the modern republic, Rousseau writes, “To the [different] sorts of law must be added a fourth, the most important of all, which is inscribed neither on marble nor brass, but in the hearts of the citizens, a law which forms the true constitution of the state . . . a law that, when other laws grow obsolete or fade, reanimates or supplements these, [which] sustains a people [Fr., peuple] in the spirit of its institution and imperceptibly substitutes the force of habit for the force of authority. I refer to morals, customs, and above all, opinion” (italics added).19 Like Balagtas, Rousseau situates the question of sentiment, pity, and feeling—all of which comprise the “morals, customs, and . . . opinion” he mentions in the aforementioned passage—at the heart of natural law. “Our passions,” he writes in Émile, “are the chief means of self-preservation; to try to destroy them is therefore as absurd as it is useless; this would be to overcome nature, to reshape God’s handiwork. . . . He has never given such a foolish commandment. . . . His words are written in the secret heart” (italics added). 20 Rousseau identifies pity as one such passion awakened by the imagination, in which a person “shares the suffering of his fellow-creatures, but he shares it of his own free will and fi nds pleasure in it.”21 Needless to say, this pleasure in a freely willed sense of shared suffering buttresses the political order that Rousseau saw on the horizon of enlightened Europe. That was the constitutional republic, based neither on the divine right of

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kings and nobility nor the fear of perpetual war (Hobbes), but on the formal covenant of individual wills to freely invest their freedom in a sovereign—or, conversely, withdraw that investment under breach of social contract. This “law” that “reanimates or supplements” all others through the morals, customs, and opinions of a nation or people fi nds its conditions of reproduction in the power of aesthetic or reflective judgment. As Terry Eagleton shows, the “law of the heart” posits a universal, knowable, clear, and public principle or end in the most particular, unknowable, inscrutable, private individual. “Once the bourgeoisie has dismantled the centralizing political apparatus of absolutism,” he writes of eighteenth-century Europe, “it fi nds itself bereft of some of the institutions which had previously organized social life as a whole. . . . This is one reason why the ‘aesthetic’ realm of sentiments, affections, and spontaneous bodily habits comes to assume the significance it does. Custom, piety, intuition and opinion must now cohere an otherwise abstract, atomized social order.”22 It is this ambiguous authority that disposes the supplementary “laws” imagined in aesthetic works to both utopian revolutionary movements and the reactionary consolidation of nineteenth-century bourgeois hegemony. The point of such a gloss on Balagtas’s curious invocation of natural law, of course, cannot be to ponder whether or not Balagtas had read Rousseau and Kant, or whether his lyric poetry anticipated bourgeois individualism or its closest colonial correlate. Rather, the genealogy of Aladin’s metaphor means to highlight the poet’s search for a supplementary law to stabilize and grant coherence to the crisis of Spanish hegemony, which was perceived as both the collapse of moral order and an opportunity to reinvent the meanings of morality, custom, opinion, and will. If the colonial state saw in this collapse an opportunity to appropriate Christianity as an ideology for the disposition of docile bodies—colonial vassals whose subjection was self-willed and selfperpetuated—Tagalog poets like Balagtas seized the metrical romance as a form of missionary pedagogy in order to explore and experiment with the articulation of newly sanctioned desires and pleasures in the realm of sentiment, custom, and tradition. If the administration of Special Laws (which was announced in 1837, the same year Balagtas was writing his masterpiece) intended to formalize the de facto rule of expediency into a general rule of colonial exception, Aladin juxtaposes this move with the common sense of a “natural law” freely shared by rulers and ruled alike, without exception. If native will had become the

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target object of colonial rationality, the task of modern poetry would be to make manifest the new authority of native will to determine its own political rationality. As revolutionary Katipunan leader Andres Bonifacio wrote in his famous manifesto “Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog” (What the Tagalogs should know): “The time has come that we make known the fact that we have our own feelings, honor, sense of shame and mutual sympathies.” [Panahon nang dapat nating ipakilala na tayo’y may sariling pagdaramdam, may puri, may hiya at pagdadamayan.]23 For Balagtas and his interpreters, the only antidote to colonialism as the perpetuation of a formal state of emergency was a real state of emergency in which native will, customs, and sentiment could exist as inalienable and unconditioned properties. Its message certainly reached the right people, who were poised to examine—and begin to dismantle—the impasses and contradictions that at once compromised and further propelled the order called the colonial state in nineteenth-century Philippines. José Rizal cited Balagtas in various chapters of his seditious novel, Noli me tangere and brought a copy of the poem back to Europe with him after his brief return to the Philippines in 1888. A little over a decade later, when prime minister of the revolutionary government Apolinario Mabini was captured and exiled in Guam, he demonstrated just how thoroughly he had imbibed the spirit and ideas of Balagtas’s poem by transcribing the entire poem from memory. Contrary to the historical differences that separate each reiteration of Balagtas, both writers highlight the continuity of colonial rule. Yet to this day, while writers and critics regard the poem as the defi nitive statement of all that the tradition of Tagalog poetry might have achieved in colonial society, the modern transformation of the meaning of “tradition” in its relationships with Christendom and the colonial state remains invisible—in writers as diverse as Balagtas, Modesto de Castro, and Fr. Miguel Lucio y Bustamante. To speak of “tradition,” in any case, partially obscures Balagtas’s fundamental break with any prior understanding of Tagalog poetry, based on the identification of formal elements (like the native talinghagâ) or the pedagogical function of poetry in the service of imperial Christendom. On a larger level, Balagtas’s “revolution” in poetic language compels us to rethink its message to writers and revolutionaries like Rizal and Mabini. Perhaps the lesson each took from Balagtas had less to do with the fulfi llment of an already defined tradition in native culture and more to do with the recognition that every notion of tradition available to colonial vassals

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and their Christian pastors was in the process of disenchantment, flux, and transformation. Behind the peninsular Spanish denigration and ilustrado “invention” of (native) tradition propagated by Rizal and his contemporaries (Pedro Paterno, Isabelo de los Reyes, Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera, and Juan Luna) lay a struggle either to preempt or multiply the explanations for being what one ostensibly was and to derive from that explanation the ethical question: What should I do now?

constitutions of colonial modernity Several months after the Cavite mutiny, a military uprising that took place on 20 January 1872 in Cavite province (just outside Manila), the Spanish governor and captain-general of the Philippine colony, Rafael de Izquierdo, wrote the following words to the overseas minister of Spain: “The state of the country is not what it was some years ago, in which the [colonial] Government and state governing bodies could rest with the ignorance, the apathy of the native [Indio], and his respect for us; the native people is not today what it once was.”24 Izquierdo’s perplexity concludes this study of Philippine literature and culture, which has analyzed the intersection of modern colonialism with the constitution of a distinctly colonial modernity. If neither the state of the country nor the native people were what either once was, what were they? How was this difference reflected in colonial politics as well as the production of modern, late colonial culture— from the debates on the role of public opinion to the bureaucratic subordination of religious evangelization to state interests and the rise of the colonial novel? Most important, how does the partial and selective memory of Izquierdo and the peninsular Spaniards of his generation omit the government’s own complicity in simultaneously transforming the Indio’s “ignorance,” “apathy,” and “respect” for Spanish prestige into calculating, desiring, and critical participation in colonial affairs, and then instituting repression on the basis of racial difference? In a few tumultuous decades—between 1808 and 1837—Spain went from representing the imperial unity of world Christendom in the sixteenth century, to being merely the Spanish nation. While its remaining colonies became profitable sources of revenue as well as strategic military outposts in the European interstate competition for world economic and military hegemony, they also became sites of struggle for the determination of individual and collective agency, as well as the articulation of new interests, alliances, and conflicts. Did

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Spanish fraternity apply to its overseas territories? What distinguished the Spanish and Filipino “races” from others? Did free trade ultimately imply the acknowledgment of other freedoms? Could vernacular Tagalog concepts of “social fellowship” (pakikipagkapwa-tao) and “reason” (katuwiran) be translated back into the colonial language that inspired them? In the pages of Blanco’s book, the reader strives to decipher, and impart to others, what the Augustinian has written on the basis of the words he could not or refused to write. The task of this study has been to revisit anew the narrative traces and compromised situations of that nameless modernity and enlightenment, that indefi nable being of El Indio, and the undefi ned law of the colonial state. Indirectly, it also outlines a political task, which would entail the closing of Blanco’s book where it opens ever anew like the hungry mouth of a pitiless predator. As the blank book ceaselessly articulates the elevation of colonial (and postcolonial) expediency to the status of law-as-exception, the praxis of critical inquiry must also measure the limits, the breakdowns, the glitches and malfunctions of that machine, and experiment with the possibility of channeling the flows of will, desire, creativity, and collective dreams in different directions. It is from the ruins of past empires that the folklore of the future grows.

Notes

Short titles are generally used for citations in the notes. Works frequently cited are identifi ed by the following abbreviations: AB

Wenceslao E. Retana, ed. Aparato bibliográfico de la historia general de Filipinas. 3 vols. Madrid: Imprenta de la Sucesora de M. Minuesa de los Ríos, 1906.

BR

Emma Blair and James Robertson, eds. The Philippine Islands, 1493– 1898: Explorations by early navigators, descriptions of the islands and their peoples, their history and records of the Catholic Missions, as related in contemporaneous books and manuscripts, showing the political, economic, commercial and religious conditions of those islands from their earliest relations with European nations to the beginning of the nineteenth century. Cleveland, OH: A. H. Clark, 1962.

introduction 1. José María Cariño, José Honorato Lozano, 35. 2. Luciano Santiago, “The Quest for Identity in Filipino Portraiture,” 17–18. 3. Karl Marx, “Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte,” 439. Italics added. 4. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 338. 5. Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 324–50. 6. The application of this term to the study of the late colonial Philippines is admittedly sui generis, although it directly and indirectly draws from a growing bibliography on the attempt to designate the histories of colonial domination, hegemony, collaboration, and resistance that are inseparably linked to modernity as a philosophical concept or critique. For some major statements 287

288

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on modernity as a philosophical concept, see Martin Heidegger, “The Age of the World Picture”; Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”; Jürgen Habermas, “Modernity’s Consciousness of Time”; Michel Foucault, The Order of Things, and “What Is Enlightenment?”; Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity; and Frederic Jameson, A Singular Modernity. On the critique of modernity as Eurocentrism, see Edward Said, Orientalism; Samir Amin, Eurocentrism; Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad”; Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas; Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance, 315–34; and Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe. On the imbrications of philosophical modernity and the politics of colonial rule, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, ed., Selected Subaltern Studies; Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd, eds., Politics of Culture; Tani Barlow, ed., Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia; Gi-Wook Shin and Michael Robinson, eds., Colonial Modernity in Korea;; and Saurabh Dube, ed., “Critical Conjunctions (esp. articles in this special issue by Saurabh Dube, Enrique Dussel, and Sudipta Sen). On the paradoxical formation of the “colonial state,” see Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments; David Scott, Refashioning Futures; Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony; and Dagmar Engels and Shula Marks, eds. Contesting Colonial Hegemony. 7. Nicholas Tarling, Imperialism in Southeast Asia, 21–43. 8. The works of Josep Fradera here are indispensable: see particularly Gobernar colonias and Colonias para después de un imperio. 9. David Brading, The First America; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities. 10. Anthony Milner uses the idea of “conceptualized communities” to highlight the discursive and interpellative nature of those collective identities fashioned around the translation and transculturation of British and Malayan concepts of authority; see Milner, The Invention of Politics in Colonial Malaya. Partha Chatterjee’s recent Politics of the Governed follows a similar line of thought, in part derived from Foucault’s concept of governmentality; see Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, et population, 91–138. Excerpts from these lectures have been published in Foucault, Power. 11. Cited in Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 91. Italics in original. 12. Gramsci, Antonio, Selections from Cultural Writings, 421. For a useful discussion of this concept as it appears in Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, see Partha Chatterjee, “Caste and Subaltern Consciousness.” 13. The sense of descent also inheres in Foucault’s key understanding of Nietzsche’s genealogical approach to history. See Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History.” The theory of transculturation derives from Fernando Ortiz’s baroque history of Cuban tobacco and sugar, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. The term vernacularization was originally used to describe the translation of the Latin vulgate (itself a translation of Greek and Hebrew manuscripts) into European vernacular languages, although it also refers more generally to the idea of “popularization”: see Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, eds., The Vulgar Tongue. On the concept of hybridity and

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hybridization, see Homi Bhaba, Location of Culture, 102–22; and Nestor Canclini, Culturas Híbridas. 14. Sinibaldo de Mas, Informe secreto del Estado de Filipinas en 1842, 88–89: “Por amor nuestro, caemos en anomalía, porque ¿cómo combinar el que pretendamos para nosotros la libertad y queramos al mismo tiempo imponer la ley a pueblos remotos? ¿Por qué negar a otros el beneficio que para nuestra patria deseamos?” 15. While the bibliography that charts this transformation in the Philippines is long, the texts I have found most useful for investigating the dynamic between modernity, colonialism, and the rise of national sentiment are Benito Legarda, After the Galleons; Edilberto de Jesus, The Tobacco Monopoly in the Philippines; Elidoro Robles, The Philippines in the Nineteenth Century; John Larkin, Sugar and the Origins of Modern Philippine Society; Norman Owen, Prosperity without Progress; Jonathan Fast and James Richardson, Roots of Dependency; Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life; Xavier Huetz de Lemps, L’Archipiel des épices; and Filomeno Aguilar, Clash of Spirits. See also the collection of essays in Alfred McCoy and Edilberto C. de Jesus, eds., Philippine Social History. 16. For general histories of the early Spanish colonial government, see José Montero y Vidal, Historia de Filipinas; Nicholas Cushner, Spain in the Philippines; John L. Phelan, Hispanization of the Philippines; and O. D. Corpuz, Roots of the Filipino Nation. 17. Ranajit Guha raises a similar point in his study entitled “The Prose of Counter-Insurgency.” 18. Teodoro Agoncillo’s A Short History of the Filipino People (coauthored with Oscar Alfonso), for instance, virtually cedes the historical narrative of the fi rst chapter to extensive quotations from Phelan’s book. 19. Prospero Covar, “Unburdening Philippine Society of Colonialism.” 20. See, for example, the collection of essays edited by Rogelia Pe-Pua, Sikolohiyang Pilipino. 21. This conception of culture as an “inner sanctum” of individual and collective self-fashioning owes itself to the nineteenth-century debates on the role of culture as a state project (Bildung), which sought to placate or control the collateral effects of industrialization and the proletarianization of labor in Europe. See Raymond Williams, “The Idea of Culture,” in Essays in Criticism, 230–36; Theodor Adorno, Prisms, 17–34 (“Cultural Criticism and Society”); and Pierre Bourdieu, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, 47–112 (“The Conquest of Autonomy”). For an instructive comparison with the rise of culturalism in Latin America and India, see Julio Ramos, Divergent Modernities in Latin America, 219–50 (“Culturalism and Latinoamericanismo”); and Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 5–13 (“Whose Imagined Community?”). 22. Caroline Hau, Necessary Fictions, 48–93. 23. See Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America; and Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System. The point of departure for this approach is the collection of essays edited by Alfred McCoy and Ed. C. de Jesus, Philippine Social History. See especially McCoy, “Introduction: The Social History of an Archipelago,” 1–18.

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Notes to Pages 14–18

24. See Tarling, Imperialism in Southeast Asia, 47–112. 25. John S. Furnviall, Netherlands India, and Colonial Policy and Practice, 303–18. 26. “There is a natural, and perhaps misleading, tendency to conceptualize [social] relations in hierarchical terms as a ladder leading from locality, to the national/colonial capital, to the world market. . . . [But] in the case of the Philippines and other areas of Southeast Asia, [each] region might be better understood as an independent point operating in a shifting network of linkages” (McCoy, “Introduction,” 12). 27. McCoy admits this possibility in his introduction, which is reiterated by Ed. de Jesus in his “Conclusion” to their Philippine Social History; see also John Larkin, Sugar and the Origins of Modern Philippine Society, 8. 28. For a critique of the concept of “base” as a reified category of Marx’s thinking on the economy as a determining process of social life, see Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, 75–82. 29. Josep Fradera, Colonias para después de un imperio, 676–82. 30. For Ilocano migration in the central lowlands, see Marshall S. McLennan, The Central Luzon Plain, 103–45. For population transfers between Luzon and Negros, see Jonathan Fast and James Richardson, Roots of Dependency; and Filomeno Aguilar, Clash of Spirits. 31. Fradera, Colonias para después de un imperio, 183–326. “As an absolute externality,” Guha writes elsewhere, “the colonial state was structured like a despotism, with no mediating depths, no space provided for transactions between the will of the rulers and that of the ruled” (Domination Without Hegemony, 65). In a related vein, Partha Chatterjee writes, “When one looks at regimes of power in the so-called backward countries of the world today, not only does the dominance of the characteristically ‘modern’ modes of exercise of power seem limited and qualified by the persistence of older modes, but by the fact of their combination in a particular state formation, it seems to open up at the same time an entirely new range of possibilities for the ruling classes to exercise their domination”; see Chatterjee, “More on Modes of Power and the Peasantry,” 390. 32. Stuart Hall, “Gramsci’s Relevance for the Study of Race and Ethnicity.” 33. Reynaldo Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution. The main sources of Ileto’s polemic are David Sturtevant’s Popular Uprisings in the Philippines and Teodoro Agoncillo’s Short History of the Filipino People, although it also applies to class-based analyses of the revolution. For the latter, see Fast and Richardson, Roots of Dependency; and Milagros Guerrero, “The Provincial and Municipal Elites of Luzon During the Revolution, 1898–1902,” 155–90. 34. Gyan Prakash, “Can the ‘Subaltern’ Ride?” 175. 35. For an analysis of this tendency, see Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 47–71; and Partha Chatterjee’s polemic with Benedict Anderson, “Anderson’s Utopia.” For a critique of continuity and change as criteria of historical analysis, see Marshall Sahlins, Islands of History, 136–55. 36. The term strategic essentialism comes immediately to mind: a term that paradoxically sterilizes the very process its author meant to designate as a critical engagement with and riposte to the modern, postcolonial precariousness of social belonging. See Gayatri Spivak, “Subaltern Studies.” Similar examples

Notes to Pages 19–31

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occur in Ernst Bloch’s notion of “nonsynchronism,” Homi Bhaba’s ideas of colonial “mimicry” and “hybridity,” and Foucault’s otherwise suggestive term counter-modernity (contre modernité). See Ernst Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its Dialectics”; Homi Bhaba, The Location of Culture; and Michel Foucault, “What Is Enlightenment?” 37. See René Javellana, “Introduction,” in Ang Casaysayan nang Pasiong Mahal ni Jesucristong Panginoon Natin na Sucat Ipag-Alab nang Puso nang Sinomang Babasa, 3–43. 38. See, for example, Epifanio de los Santos, “Balagtás y su Florante”; and Lope K. Santos, “Ang Apat na Himagsik ni Francisco Balagtas.” For Rizal, see essays by Claro M. Recto, “Si Bonifacio at si Rizal”; and Renato Constantino, “Veneration without Understanding.” See also Floro Quibuyen’s book-length treatment of the debate on Rizal’s political convictions, A Nation Aborted: Rizal, American Hegemony and Philippine Nationalism. 39. Josep Fradera, “La formación de una colonia.” Fradera’s periodization of Spanish imperial rule in the archipelago roughly follows that of John Larkin, “Philippine History Reconsidered.” The most notable departure from Larkin’s schema is that, where the latter considers the period between the 1820s and the 1920s as dominated by the central theme of interior settlement, Fradera’s chronology (93–98) divides this period into two stages, the fi rst highlighting the apogee of colonial state reform, and the second outlining the state’s failure to control or manage the socioeconomic forces it had unleashed. 40. For cameralism, see Keith Tribe, Governing Economy, 175. See also Foucault, Securité, territoire, et population, 3–29.

chapter 1. imperial christendom and the colonial state Epigraph: Cited in Fr. Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga, Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, ó mis viajes por este país, 1:405; italics in original 1. For the official statement of this position and the economic transition it intended to engineer, see José Basco y Vargas, Recuerdo. 2. Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” 3. Vicente Rafael makes a rather Nietzschean observation that frames his study of early colonialism, which is that the theological aspect of this idea translates into a rule of perpetual and infi nite debt to the sovereign; see Contracting Colonialism, 121–35. 4. Friedrich Meinecke, Machiavellianism, 1. 5. Sergio Villalobos writes, “Levene, al igual que todos los hispanistas, se mantenía en el plano de lo jurídico y de las buenas intenciones de la política; pero prescindía por completo de la realidad americana, de la falta de cumplimiento de la ley o de su distorsión y de la trama compleja de abusos, intereses y negocios que caracterizaron la existencia colonial.” See Historia del pueblo chileno, 40. John Lynch more recently mentions Levene’s legalism in his review of Jaime E. Rodriguez’s Independence of Spanish America, implying Levene’s willful ignorance of colonial domination; see Lynch, “Review.” 6. This debate belongs to a larger and intense debate on the status and continued currency of Spain’s “black legend” (leyenda negra), which advances

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an idea of the Spanish conquest and colonization of the Americas in simple terms of cruelty and aggrandizement. For a representative example of this debate, see Benjamin Keen’s review of Lewis Hanke’s The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America, “The Black Legend Revisited,” and the exchange between Keen and Hanke in the Hispanic American Historical Review: Hanke, “A Modest Proposal for a Moratorium on Grand Generalizations”; and Keen, “The White Legend Revisited.” For the importance of this question in economic studies, see Enrique Tandeter, “Sobre el análisis de la dominación colonial.” 7. John L. Phelan, “Authority and Flexibility in the Spanish Imperial Bureaucracy”; and Frank Jay Moreno, “The Spanish Colonial System.” John Lynch calls this form of flexible administration “compromise government”: see “The Institutional Framework of Colonial Spanish America.” For an excellent study of the culture of flexible authority in colonial Mexico, see Alejandro Cañeque, The King’s Living Image. 8. On the frontier system, see Herbert E. Bolton, “The Mission as a Frontier Institution.” See also Charles R. Boxer, The Church Militant and Iberian Expansion, 1440–1770, 71–77. 9. See Nancy Farriss, Crown and Clergy in Colonial Mexico, 6–7. 10. Recopilación de las Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias, bk. 2, title 1, law 22. 11. Jean-François de Galaup, Comte de La Pérouse, Voyage de La Pérouse autor du monde (1797), 349. 12. Phelan, Hispanization of the Philippines, 158–59 13. Farris, Crown and Clergy in Colonial Mexico, 124–29. 14. For an account of Basco y Vargas’s administration, see José Montero y Vidal, Historia de Filipinas, vol. 2, 286–92; Benito Legarda, After the Galleons, 70–90; and Jesus, The Tobacco Monopoly in the Philippines, 13–70. 15. “No hay desdicha maior en el mundo, que la pobreza; todos la desprecian; todos la miran con desagrado; nadie respecta ál pobre, por sublime, y esclarecido, que sed; sus dependientes le sirven con disgusto, y se le atreven con facilidad; nada consigue por falta de dinero; y en fi n todo le cuesta immensas trabajos, fatigas, desvelos, y affl icciones. Esto es lo que sucede en estas Yslas al pie de la letra. . . . Pues, si nada producen; si ha de costar tanto el mantenerlas, que debilite el Royal Erario con perjuicio de otros Dominios mas importantes; si por falta de dinero, no se puede conservar el honor de las Armas Católicas en estas distancias; si estamos expuestos á ser el juguete de todas las Naciones; si no podemos resistir, ni hacer frente al mas débil enemigo, que nos acometa, y en fi n si hemos de sufrir la ignominia de que nos los quiten con descrédito, y con perdida de cuanto tienen estos fieles Vasallos; mas vale ocurrir en tiempo á estos daños; abandonar en las tierras; ó venderlas, y dejar libertad á todos para que asegurasen sus Caudales, y se retiren á otros Dominios, donde los abrigue y defienda el poder de nuestros amados Reyes y Señores. Este es el modo de ahorrar gastos; de emplearlos en otros destinos mas utiles, y de precaver las ignominias á que estamos expuestos con peligro.” Francisco Leandro de Viana, Demostración, pars. 1 and 6–7. A partial translation of this document can be found in BR, 50:77–117.

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16. “Con este ingreso en Cajas Reales, y con la Tropa arriba dicha, sus sueldos, Marina, Artilleros, y Pertrechos de Guerra, que cosas no se podrían emprender en estas Yslas? No será un estableciemiento el mas respetable de toda la Yndia? Habrá fuerzas, que nos pudan vencer? Los Yngleses, que tienen sus Plazas y Factorías con la Guarnición precisa, se atreverán á bover á invadir esta Plaza?” 17. “Y se hiciese el Comercio, que hacen los Extrangeros, pues todo consiste en tomarlo con el empeño, que ellos, para cuya idea seria muy perjudicial el abandono de estas Yslas, aun presindiendo del los motivos de Religión, que son poderosos entre el Catolicismo de los Españoles.” 18. “Creo, que á vista de estas reflexiones, y de lo que seria exponiendo, todo buen Español se convencerá de la necesidad de conservar Nuestras Yslas (aunque . . . no hubiera el poderoso motivo de la Religión) por la grande utilidad, que puede resultar á la Monarchia.” 19. For the relationship of colonialism to international law, see Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 87–212 (pts. 2 and 3); Anthony Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law, 13–114. 20. It is worth citing Max Weber’s pronouncement here, as reproduced in Richard Tuck’s Rights of War and Peace: “The historical origin of modern freedom has had certain unique preconditions which will never repeat themselves. Let us enumerate the most important of these: fi rst, the overseas expansions. In the armies of Cromwell, in the French constituent assembly, in our whole economic life even today this breeze from across the ocean is felt . . . but there is no new continent at our disposal” (15). For the reappearance of this reflection on the intertwined histories of European freedom and colonial expansion in Hegel and Marx, see Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 337–50; and David Harvey, “The Spatial Fix: Hegel, Von Thünen, and Marx.” 21. On the doctrine of preemption as a central feature of the emergence of modern international law, particularly as it emerged in the wars between the Catholic kings (Spain and Portugal) and the Dutch in the region now known as Southeast Asia, see Tuck, Rights of War and Peace, 183–86; and C. H. Alexandrowicz, An Introduction to the History of the Law of Nations in the East Indies, 41–60. For Spain’s concern for the empire’s “total security,” see Fradera, Colonias después de un imperio, 61–182. 22. “Es absolutamente necesario hacer un escarmiento ejemplar con los Moros de Jolo, y Mindanao, cuya insolencia, perfidia, maldades, piraterías, cautiverios, y donde tienen destruidas estas miserables Provincias, y las aniquilarán enteramente, si no se pone remedio, y no ay otro, que invadirlos en sus proprias tierras” (pt. I chap. 4, par. 4). [It is absolutely necessary to inflict exemplary punishment on the Moros of Jolo and Mindanao (who) have ruined these wretched provinces, and will entirely annihilate them unless the remedy be applied—and there is no other, than to attack them in their own territories.] 23. Tomás de Comyn, general manager of the Royal Company of the Philippines in 1810, explicitly invokes the idea of raison d’état to justify a reorientation of colonial policy: see Comyn, Las islas Filipinas, 156. 24. It has been argued, of course, that such concerns inhered in the 1582 Royal Synod of Manila, where a congregation of bishops and friar missionaries

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laid the bases of law and government later adopted by the Spanish Crown: see José Luis Porras Camuñez, The Synod of Manila of 1582, pt. 1, vol. 4: 3–4. Yet the legitimacy of Spanish rule established thereunto still saw the occupation of territory (and its “temporal administration”) as secondary to the care of souls (and its “spiritual administration”)—a premise that is reversed under the doctrines of self-preservation and preemption that guide the political rationality of raison d’état. I deal with this contention in chapter 6 of this work. 25. “Nadie mejor que V.S. puede conocer la triste constitucion de estas Yslas Philipinas, porque como Gefe de ellas pulsa . . . una falta universal de quanto es necessario para su desempeño [italics added].” 26. For a comparative study of colonial modernity in nineteenth-century Siam in this period, see Thongchai Winichakul, Siam Mapped. 27. It is significant that throughout the entire text of his memorandum, Viana only refers to the Philippines as a colony once, and only indirectly: “On the contrary will [the British] not fear, and with just cause, that we, superior then in forces, will attack them in their own colonies?” (229). In most other instances he refers to the Philippines by their name, as Spain’s dominion (dominio), or as simply “the islands.” This observation corroborates Ricardo Levene’s controversial argument that, until the eighteenth century, the New World, the Caribbean, and the Philippines (gathered under the juridical category of the Indies) were not considered colonies in the sense that the Dutch, British, and French powers established colonies overseas: “Durante el siglo XVIII, la legislación y los juristas indianos continuaban considerando como dominios y no como colonias los establecimientos ultramarinos” (Las Indias no eran colonias, 101). 28. See, for example, José Basco y Vargas’s general economic plan for colonial reform in the archipelago (cited in note 1 above). 29. “Queriéndose aplicar los Yndios aun muy moderado trabajo, podrían pagar mayor Tributo, y vivir con mas conveniencias, pues no habrá Vasallos en todo el mundo, que tengan tanta facilidad, y proporción de hacerse ricos, como los Yndios de Philipinas; pero no se consigue con la ociosidad.” 30. “Anyone who has had any experience with this, will consider the increase of the tribute indispensable for delivering them from their sloth and their vices; and the necessity of obliging them by said measure to labor beneficial to the King, in matters spiritual as well as temporal” (pt. 1, chap. 4, par. 18). [El que tuviere alguna experiencia de ellos, juzgará indispensable el aumento de sus Tributos para sacarlos de su ociosidad, y vicios; y la necesidad de obligarlos por dicho medio á un trabajo útil al Rey; y asimismo en lo espiritual, y temporal.] 31. “No se adoptaba resolución alguna importante, de carácter económico, por los altos poderes del Estado y relativamente a Filipinas, sin consultar el libro de Comyn. . . . Aun ahora, no comprendemos se pueda hacer estudio serio administrativo de cualquiera ramo sin conocer los precedentes que se exponen y comentan con el mejor criterio en este libro.” 32. “Mientras el gobierno se ciña al sistema meramente protector, los efectos han de ser necesariamente muy lentos. [Es], pues, forzoso poner en acción resortes mas poderosos que los ordinarios, y prescindir algún tanto de principios generales que hablan mas directamente con sociedades constituidas de otra suerte, o por decirlo mejor, formadas de elementos muy diferentes.”

Notes to Pages 43–46

295

33. Comyn (like Viana), still relies on the law to compel the native to perform certain duties, most notably the repartimiento. This system of forced labor fi rst appeared during the time of the conquest, but became formally outlawed due to the confl ict it engendered between the message of Christian evangelization and the virtual enslavement of natives by their Spanish protectors. 34. For a general history of the encomienda in Philippine history, see O. D. Corpuz, Roots of the Filipino Nation, 1: 62–127. 35. “de retribuir por la proteccion que se le dispensa, y de cooperar al aumento del poder y opulencia del Estado.” 36. “Aunque esto parezca al pronto una vulneración directa de los derechos imprescriptibles de la propiedad, es menester tener presente que el interés individual, en algunos casos, debe ser sacrificado a la general utilidad, y que la balanza de que se usa tratándose del bien del Estado, ni es ni puede ser tan fi na como la que sirve para pesar oro.” 37. “Debe esperarse . . . que contribuya algun tanto a disipar la desconfianza del indio la noticia de los nuevos y paternales desvelos del Gobierno Supremo por minorar sus males, y entender que serán respetados en adelante sus derechos, y abolidas probablemente las tasas y demás coartaciones que lo desalentaban” (Comyn, Islas Filipinas, 37). [One should hope . . . that the news of the new and paternal concerns of the Supreme Government will contribute something to dissipating the Indio’s mistrust . . . by diminishing [the Supreme Government’s] miseries, and [having the Indio] understand that her or his rights will be respected from the start, and that the exactions and levies that dishearten the indio be hopefully abolished.] 38. The concentration of the population into towns and missions (reducción) was a project started by the religious missionaries but left incomplete for lack of the power to enforce it. See William Henry Scott, Cracks in the Parchment Curtain, 23. 39. “¿Qué otros pueden ser los operarios en un país donde es tan corto el número de los blancos, si no lo son los naturales? Y si repugnando estos el servicio personal, se negasen a trabajar a justo jornal, ¿qué razón podrá impedirnos entonces de compelerlos a que contribuyan por este medio a la prosperidad de la sociedad de que son miembros, en una palabra, al bien público? Si el soldado arrancado del seno paterno, vive cercado de peligros, arrostrando continuamente la muerte por salvar el Estado, ¿qué mucho será que el indio sude un poco y labre los campos por sustentarlo y enriquecerlo?” (41). Personal service (servicio personal) refers to an early practice of the encomienda or royal land grant awarded by the monarch to an individual on the condition that he would collect tribute from native communities who resided on the land and otherwise assist in the pacification and evangelization of the countryside. Colonial vassals who either could not pay the required tribute or whose labor was useful to the encomendero could be compelled to serve their tribute collector in a variety of ways. The ambiguity between personal service and slavery became a subject of debate in the seventeenth century and contributed to the decline of the encomienda system. For the most comprehensive study of this practice, see Silvio Zavala, El servicio personal de los Indios en la Nueva España. 40. “Satisfechos facilmente todos sus deseos,” Comyn complains, “[los naturales] cifran su felicidad en el reposo y el sumo bien en el sueño” (40).

296

Notes to Pages 47–49

[Since every desire of the natives is easily satisfied, they invest their happiness in repose and their ultimate welfare in sleep.] The insertion and circulation of need or lack in commercial society is discussed briefly in Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, 50–52. See also Tribe, Governing Economy, 142. 41. A succinct point of departure for understanding the changing meanings of state and its related terms (estate, status), along with those of society, see Raymond Williams, Keywords, 292–93. 42. For Hegel, the state embodied “the ethical whole [of society], the actualization of freedom; and it is an absolute end of reason that freedom should be actual. . . . The march of God in the world, that is what the state is” (Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, sec. 258: “Addition to Remark”). Research on the politics of colonial rule has predictably hewn closer to an examination of the state as the centralization of administrative structures, and most notably the monopoly of legitimate force. See for example, Eliodoro Robles, Philippines in the Nineteenth Century; and Greg Bankoff, Crime, Society, and the State in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines, 188–92. 43. Writing on the understanding of the state in political philosophy and sociology (from Hegel to Weber), Nicos Poulantzas writes, “Regarded as a Thing, in the manner of the old instrumentalist conception, the State is a passive, or even neutral, tool, which is so completely manipulated by one class or fraction that is divested of any autonomy whatsoever. Conceived as a Subject, the State enjoys an absolute autonomy that refers to its will as the supposedly rationalizing instance of civil society. . . . However, the State is not purely and simply a relationship, or the condensation of a relationship; it is the specific material condensation of a relationship of forces among classes and class fractions (State, Power, Socialism, 129). 44. “The centralized State power, with its ubiquitous orders of standing army, police, bureaucracy, clergy and judicature—organs wrought after the plan of a systematic and hierarchic division of labor—originates from the days of absolute monarchy, serving nascent middle-class society as a mighty weapon in its struggles against feudalism” (Marx, quoted in Perry Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, 16). 45. See Richard Falk, “The Interplay of Westphalia and Charter Conceptions of the International Legal Order,” 49; Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth. 46. See Temerario Rivera, “Rethinking the Philippine Social Formation: Some Problematic Concepts and Issues,” in Feudalism and Capitalism in the Philippines: Trends and Implications, 1–13. 47. As John Furnivall so succinctly put it in his study of the Dutch East Indies and Burma, reforms under the mantle of the colonial state in Southeast Asia (however well-meaning) were destined to lead not toward the consolidation of a “social will”—either in the sense of stable class society or the monopoly of legitimate violence—but to the atomization of already existing societies into a plural society of irreconcilably heterogeneous groups, whose only common denominator is economic competition. See Furnivall, Netherlands India, 446–68, and The Fashioning of Leviathan. 48. Ranajit Guha, Dominance without Hegemony, 65. 49. Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, 10.

Notes to Pages 49–54

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50. Philip Abrams has pointed out that the reluctance to relinquish the idea of the state as an autonomous political entity derives from the two demands that the state as a concept satisfies. First, “Marxist theory needs the state as an abstract-formal object in order to explain the integration of class societies”; second, “Marxist practice needs the state as a real-concrete object, the immediate object of political struggle (“Notes on the Difficulty of Studying the State,” 70; italics added). 51. “Bien sûr, il serait absurde de dire que l’ensemble des institutions que nous appelons l’État date de ces années 1580–1650. Ça n’aurait pas de sens de dire que l’État naît alors. . . . Mais ce qui est important, ce qu’il faut retenir, ce qui est en tout cas un phénomène historique réel, spécifique, incompressible, c’est le moment où ce quelque chose qu’est l’État commencé à entrer, est entré effectivement dans la pratique réfléchie des hommes. Le problème est de savoir à quel moment, dans quelles conditions, sous quelle forme l’État a commencé a être projeté, programmé, développé à l’intérieur de cette pratique consciente des gens, à partir de quel moment et comment il est entré dans une stratégie réfléchie et concertée, à partir de quel moment l’État a commencé à être, par les hommes, appelé, désiré, convoité, redouté, repoussé, aimé, haï” (, 253–54). 52. Foucault’s analysis of Western Europe traces this political rationality to early texts on the doctrine of “reason of state” (raison d’état), which refers not to an a priori designated “state’s” particular form of reason or reasoning but to the reification of the state itself in a given context as the expression and institution of political reason. See Foucault, Sécurité, population, et territoire. 53. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 144–64. 54. See John L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, 25–38. 55. For a general discussion of this theme in Spanish political philosophy, see José Antonio Maravall, Estado moderno y mentalidad social, 2:353–95. 56. Prior to Comyn, French explorer and scientist the Comte de La Pérouse (Jean-François de Galaup) identified the “lack of needs,” as well as the climate and the spirit of resignation instilled by the religious, as hindrances to the growth of commerce (Voyage de La Pérouse autour du monde, 348). 57. “In place of the old wants, satisfied by the productions of the country, we fi nd new wants, requiring for their satisfaction the products of distant lands and climes. In place of the old local and national seclusion and selfsufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. . . . [The bourgeoisie] compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e. to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image. . . . Just as it has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of the bourgeois, the East on the West (Marx and Engels, “Manifesto of the Communist Party,” 338–39). 58. For the abolition of censorship, see Wenceslao Retana, La censura de imprenta en Filipinas. On the fi rst official Philippine Academy of Drawing (Academia de Dibujo), closely tied to the life and labors of Spanish mestizo

298

Notes to Pages 55–56

Damian Domingo, see Nick Joaquin and Luciano Santiago, Nineteenth-Century Manila, 9–23; and Luciano Santiago, “Philippine Academic Art.” On the history of theaters in Manila, I have relied primarily on three works: Wenceslao Retana, Noticias historico-bibliogáficas del teatro en Filipinas; Nicanor Tiongson, Kasaysayan ng Komedya sa Pilipinas, 1766–1982; and Cristina Lacónico-Buenaventura, The Theater in Manila, 1846–1946. All three writers base much of their information on a series of articles entitled “Los teatros de Manila” by Juan Atayde, originally published between 1892 and 1893. See also Nicanor Tiongson’s introduction to the work, “Juan Atayde’s ‘Los teatros de Manila.’ ” While Retana claims the fi rst theaters came into existence in 1834, José María Rivera, biographer of Tagalog poet and playwright José de la Cruz (Huseng Sisiw), claims that the theater in Tondo was in operation before 1829 (Lacónico-Buenaventura, Theater in Manila, 1). 59. See Dean Fansler, “Metrical Romances of the Philippines,” 204. In 1780, Augustinian priest Fr. Agustín María de Castro related the life of one Domingo Obregoso, a “man of letters and great conduct” [letrado y hombre de mucha conducta], who arrived in the Philippines in 1724 and, shortly after completing his preparation for missionary work in Panayano (also called Kinaray-a), composed a tome of metrical romances and short farces in the language that “passed from hand to hand among all those Indios.” See Manuel Merino, O. S. A., ed., Misioneros Agustinos en el Extremo Oriente, 1565– 1700 (an originally unedited work entitled Osario venerable), 82–83. Literary scholars have conjectured that missionary priests throughout the colonial period wrote similar vernacular translations of metrical romances, although the majority of existing romances have been published anonymously. 60. Martínez de Zúñiga, Estadismo de las Islas Filipinas, 1:73–4. 61. Tomás de Comyn pointed out in 1810 that the Manila suburbs of “Santa Cruz, San Fernando, Binondo, Tondo, Quiapo, San Sebastian, San Antonio, and Sampaloc” all began to melt into a composite whole, so that “their subsequent union . . . might be better understood as a prolongation of the city, divided into so many neighborhoods and parishes, with no other intervals than small plaza squares, in the center of which they have built their respective churches” (Comyn, Islas Filipinas, 14–15). On the threat of urbanization and the settlement of the indigenous and mestizo population just outside Manila, see Manuel Bernáldez Pizarro, Dictamen (discussed in chapter 3 of this volume). 62. According to the biography of poet and playwright José de la Cruz (alias Huseng Sisiw, or Chick-José) by José Ma. Rivera, the Teatro de Tondo was in operation before the playwright’s death in 1829. Rivera also claims that Cruz had a company of traveling actors that went from town to town and gave performances on feast days of the patron saint (see Rivera, Huseng Sisiw, 12–15). However, Rivera’s biography is largely based on questionable sources of information (see Fred Sevilla, Poet of the People: Francisco Balagtas, 155). By contrast, Retana’s study on Filipino theater claims that the fi rst “primitivos teatros de Arroceros y Tondo” were constructed in 1834, the year Manila became an open port. See Lacónico-Buenaventura, Theater in Manila, 3. For an analysis of Huseng Sisiw’s poetry, see Bienvenido Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry, 72–82. 63. See Hermenegildo Cruz, “Kun Sino ang Kumatha ng ‘Florante,’ ”12. 64. Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry.

Notes to Pages 57–65

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65. On sentimentalism and sentimentality in vernacular Tagalog literature, see Resil Mojares, “Aspects of Sentimentality in Philippine Vernacular Fiction,” Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society 4 (1976): 243–49; and Soledad Reyes, “The Romance Mode in Philippine Popular Literature,” in The Romance Mode in Philippine Literature, 23–39. 66. See Hermenegildo Cruz, Kun sino ang kumatha ng “Florante,” 186. The all but official literary medium of love,” writes Roland Greene, “lyric takes on urgency because in Western literature and especially after Petrarch, its franchise is to represent unrequitedness in a European culture for which requital is an important but little theorized condition of public and private life. . . . Its aesthetic counterpart . . . is autoreflexivity, or poetry’s construction of its own world of values as distinct from those it receives from the state, the classics, and especially scripture.” See Roland Greene, Unrequited Conquests, 11–12. 67. Anthony J. Cascardi, Ideologies of History, 123–24. See also José Antonio Maravall, Culture of the Baroque, 57–78. 68. See Damiana Eugenio, Awit and Corrido, xvii. 69. While it is difficult to measure its popularity during a period about which we still know little, it is the most frequently cited narrative in the wellknown metrical romances that have been preserved from the nineteenth century (Eugenio, Awit and Corrido, xviii). 70. Cited in Damiana Eugenio, ed., Mga Piling Awit at Korido, 149 (stanzas 959–61). 71. The earliest extant copy of the poem dates from 1863, and was used by Hermenegildo Cruz in his pioneering study and compilation of Balagtas’s work, Kun sino ang kumatha ng “Florante.” However, a mimeographed copy owned by Carlos Ronquillo is said to have been based on a version of the poem that was published in 1838. See Virgilio Almario, “Si Balagtas at Ang Florante at Laura.” 72. Vicente Rafael makes a similar observation in his recent work, The Promise of the Foreign, 145–47. For an earlier analysis of Balagtas’s work that many features of Rafael’s analysis echo, see John Blanco, “Vernacular Counterpoint: Filipino Enlightenment in a Late Colonial Context, 1837–1891” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2001), 67–121. 73. See Garcilaso de la Vega’s sonnets in Obras, 205–54. A sustained comparison between Balagtas’s Florante at Laura and the works of Garcilaso has yet to be done, but it seems evident that Balagtas adopted and adapted a number of literary strategies from his Spanish forbear. 74. Jonathan Culler, “Apostrophe.” 75. Balagtas, Florante at Laura, stanzas 139–40. 76. The use of ekphrasis as the central feature of Christian sermons has been discussed in René Javellana, “Introduction.” See also chapter 3 of this book.

chapter 2. special laws and states of exception Epigraph: Quoted in Henry Piddington, “Remarks on the Philippines in 1822,” 113, n. 67. 1. For a general account of Carlos III’s approach to the Church, see John Lynch, Bourbon Spain, 269–90; see also Nancy Farriss, Crown and Clergy in

300

Notes to Pages 65–69

Colonial Mexico, 87–145. For the history of Church-state relations throughout the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, see William J. Callahan, Church, Politics, and Society in Spain, 1750–1874. The restoration of the missionary orders in Spain to the authority of the Vatican occurred with the signing of the 1851 concordat. The concordat also placed the religious orders in charge of education and censorship in Spain, but under the supervision of the state. 2. “Nuestras posesiones de América y Asia, ni por la distancia a que se encuentran de la Península, ni por la naturaleza de su población, ni por la diversidad de sus intereses materiales, pueden ser regidas por unas mismas leyes, han convenido de común acuerdo en proponer a las Cortes que desde luego declaren en sesión pública que: No siendo posible aplicar la Constitución que se adopte en la Península e islas adyacentes a las provincias ultramarinas de America y Asia, serán éstas regidas y administradas por leyes especiales y análogas a su respectiva situación y circunstancias, y propias para hacer su felicidad, y que en su consecuencia no tomarán asiento en las Cortes actuales Diputados por las expresadas provincias.” Dictamen de las Comisiones reunidas de Ultramar y Constitución, proponiendo que las provincias ultramarinas de América y Asia sean regidas y administradas por leyes especiales, cited in Javier Alvarado, Constitucionalismo y codificación en las provincias del Ultramar, 118; author’s translation. 3. Pagès, Voyages autour du monde, 293–94. Compare this statement with that of British explorer Henry Piddington in 1822: “In the most distant provinces, with no other safeguard than the respect with which he has inspired the Indians, he exercises the most unlimited authority, and administers the whole of the civil and ecclesiastical government, not only of a parish, but often of a whole province. His word is law—his advice is taken on all subjects. No order from the Alcalde, or even the government, is executed without his counsel and approbation, rendered too in many cases the more indispensable from his being the only person who understands Spanish in the village” (Piddington, “Remarks,” 113). 4. Michel Foucault, Power, 300 (“The Subject and Power”). 5. Foucault calls the act of mortification “a kind of everyday death.” The individualizing knowledge of the pastor is demonstrated in Vicente Rafael, Contracting Colonialism; and Emmanuel Lallana, “Advent of Disciplinary Power in the Philippines,” 1–29. 6. “Ce peuple fut divisé en paroisses, et assujetti aux pratiques les plus minutieuses et les plus extravagantes: chaque faute, chaque péché, est encore puni de coups de fouet; le manquement à la prière et à la messe est tarifé, et la punition est administrée aux hommes ou aux femmes, à la porte de l’église, par ordre du curé.” 7. Otto Gierke puts the matter succinctly in his explication of the spiritual and temporal powers during the Middle Ages, emblematized in the doctrinal allegory of Church and state as “two swords”: “Both Swords have been given by God to Peter and through him to the Popes, who are to retain the spiritual sword, while the temporal they deliver to others. This delivery, however, will confer, not free ownership, but the right of an ecclesiastical offi ce-holder [italics added]. As before the delivery, so afterwards, the Pope has utrumque gladium [the other sword]. He has both Powers habitu [by custom] though only

Notes to Pages 69–72

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the Spiritual Power actu [in effect]. The true ownership (dominium) of both swords is his, and what he concedes in the temporal sword is merely some right of independent use [sic]” (Political Theories of the Middle Age, 13–14). 8. Quoted in Porras Camuñez, Synod of Manila, 133. The original document is held at the Archivium Historicum Societatis Iesu (Rome), under the title “Documentum pretiosum, sed non completum,” Secc. Philippinarum, vol. 12: fols. 268 r., 289 vl. For a detailed explanation of the debates surrounding this statement, see Jesus Gayo y Aragon, The Theology of the Conquest, 47–61 and 121–43. 9. The threshold between understandings of the law as the administration of the exception and the administration of a governing norm is clearly visible in Salamancan jurist Francisco de Vitoria’s early perorations on natural law as the basis for international law—a law “outside” of yet presupposed by the jurisdiction of law itself. See Richard Tuck, Natural Rights Theories and The Rights of War and Peace. 10. For the term respublica Christiana, see J. N. Figgis, Churches in the Modern State, 175–226 (app. 1, “Respublica Christiana”). 11. “No sentían los Regulares, el que los visitasen los Obispos, por que en su modo de administrar nada podían hallar reprehensible, como no hallaron, cuando se entabló esta visita, pero no se podía establecer esta practica sin reconocer con toda formalidad el Real Patronato, que antes reconocían de un modo nada perjudicial a su gobierno. . . . [la colación del Cura secular] le concede al Religioso un derecho perpetuo al Curato, en que está colado, de donde no lo pueden remover sus Prelados sin causa. Esta perpetuidad en los Curatos se opone mucho á la dependencia, que pide el estado Religioso, y atendiendo á la flaqueza humana es fácil, que engendre en el Religioso algo de menos de subordinación, de la que requiere la obediencia. . . . lo que solo se ha logrado es, que los Religiosos estén menos subordinados á sus Prelados, que es muy poco favorable á la Religión, y nada útil á estas Christianidades” (Fr. Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga, Historia de las Islas Philipinas, 142–43). 12. Tratado de la regalia de amortización (1765). 13. According to Anda y Salazar and others, the spiritual administration of the islands rightfully belonged to the Spanish Crown under the Patronato Real (right of royal patronage), given to it by the Pope during the time of the conquest (BR, 50:148). For a brief summary of this debate, see Horacio de la Costa, S. J., “Episcopal Jurisdiction in the Philippines During the Spanish Regime,” 44–64. 14. Don Francisco Leandro de Viana, Fiscal de la Audiencia de Manila, Libro de cartas y consultas, 40. 15. Horacio de la Costa, “Development of the Native Clergy in the Philippines.” For a collection of arguments voiced by secular and religious officials, see John Schumacher, Readings in Philippine Church History. For a description of this legal procedure in secular government, see O. D. Corpuz, Bureaucracy in the Philippines, 68. 16. Simón Anda y Salazar, “Anda’s Memorial, 1768,” 142. It may be added that such a plan would render the coordination between temporal and spiritual administration easier, since the bishopric came under the direct authority of the Crown, while the missionary orders received their instructions from the Vatican in Rome. Since the rights of royal patronage decreed that both

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spiritual and temporal administration ought to fall under the jurisdiction of the monarch, the missionaries ostensibly had no right under the monarchy to these parishes—being, after all, missionaries whose task it was to proselytize, not administer. For the transference of missions and doctrinas from the regular to the secular clergy in Mexico, see Farriss, Crown and Clergy in Colonial Mexico,19–20. 17. Francisco Leandro de Viana, “Financial Affairs of the Islands, 1766,” in BR, 51:88–91. The 1758 Ordinances of Good Government (Ordenanzas del Buen Gobierno) call for precautionary measures to insure against the accumulation of wealth by the Church at the expense of the natives. See BR, 51:227–62. 18. See Francisco Leandro de Viana, “Letter from Viana to Carlos III,” in BR, 50:122–23, and Anda y Salazar, “Anda’s Memorial, 1768,” 157–72. 19. For the origins of this strategy, see Porras Camuñez, Synod of Manila, 67. A statement from a friar in 1666 sums up the regular clergy’s recourse to this expediency: “[I]f the desires of his Majesty are that the regulars shall live in accordance with their own laws [!]; that the natives of the Indies be well instructed; and that they not be molested by the officials of the two estates: the remedy for that is to leave the regulars to their observance without obliging them to become more subject than they have been hitherto. If this is either not advisable or cannot be done, it would be better for the orders that the secular clergy should administer those missions” (BR, 36:273). According to this writer, various reasons warrant the regular clergy’s refusal to accept visitation by the bishop: (1) “the Indians are not yet well rooted in the faith”; (2) the missions require those willing to accept and manage extreme hardship; (3) the regular clergy, being rooted in Spain and anticipating their return home, maintain their zeal and missionary aspirations, the lack of which can be seen in the secular clergy; (4) most important, the mixture of religious and secular administration in the parishes would create overlapping forms of jurisdiction and authority. See BR, 36:266–72. Compare this statement to the memorial of Dominican Fray Juan de Polanco, submitted to the Council of the Indies in 1666 (in Schumacher, Readings in Philippine Church History, 135–36). 20. On the relationship of the general strike to the state of emergency in modern times, see Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, 239–41 (“Critique of Violence”). 21. For a comprehensive digest of struggles between the spiritual and temporal authorities, see Charles Cunningham, “The Ecclesiastical Influence in the Philippines, 1565–1850.” For a selection of official documents regarding specific controversies, see John Schumacher, Readings in Philippine Church History. 22. A longer study of pastoral power would show that tracing the genealogy of consent, as a constitutive feature of modern government would lead not to the rediscovery of the classics during the Renaissance, but to the medieval doctrine of popular sovereignty as a check on the monarchial power. In Political Theories of the Middle Age, Otto Gierke contends that “in the Middle Age absolutistic theory invariably recognized that the monarchy which it extolled to Sovereignty was subject to duties and limitations, and . . . there survived an opposite doctrine which, holding fast the notion that Monarchy is Office, would concede to the Emperor and other princes only a potestas

Notes to Pages 73–74

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limitata and a right conditioned by the fulfi llment of a duty. The element of Limitation which was thus immanent in the medieval idea of Monarchy began to receive theoretical development in the doctrine of the rights of the Community” (36–37; italics added). One may even argue that the result of the confrontation between ideas of monarchial and popular sovereignty in the period of conquest and expansion was the development of natural law as a brake on the legitimacy of Spanish sovereignty in the New World. For debates on this issue, see Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man; for the influence of natural law on the early development of Philippine government, particularly in the figure of Bishop Domingo de Salazar, see the collection of arguments presented in Schumacher, Readings in Philippine History; for the impact of natural law as a restraint on the sovereign power, see Porras Camuñez, Synod of Manila,132–40. 23. See Gierke, Political Theories, 10; John N. Figgis, Churches in the Modern State, 175–226 (app. 1, “Respublica Christiana”). I have also benefited from Carl Schmitt’s understanding of the respublica Christiana as a nomos or “world-spatial order”: see his fascinating and controversial study, Nomos of the Earth. 24. This is captured in Christ’s maxim, “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which be Caesar’s, and unto God the things which be God’s” (Luke 20:25, King James version). For a summary of the role of free will in Christianity, see Jaroslav Pelikan, Reformation of Church and Dogma, 1300–1700, 38–58, 203–16. 25. As O. D. Corpuz has noted, outside the encomiendas established in the fi rst century of the conquest, submission to Spanish sovereignty did not immediately derive from conversion to Christianity: a whole series of mediating steps, including the organization of scattered individuals and families into a pueblo or mission (the cabecera-visita complex), the petition to the insular government for recognition under the king’s sovereign dominion (dominio), the clearing and planting of fields for agriculture, and the acceptance of various duties (most notably the payment of tribute and the polo, which consisted in forty days of required manual labor per year for the construction and improvement of royal works). See Roots of the Filipino Nation, 1:187–93). 26. Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth, 101–25. 27. An earlier analysis of the missions as a proto-police power in the Philippines appears in Lallana, “Advent of Disciplinary Power in the Philippines.” Lallana’s study fails to specify, however, the relationship (or nonrelationship) of pastoral order to the temporal administration of imperial rule. Regarding the coercive powers of the pastorate, Greg Bankoff notes that religious corporal punishment, which often took extreme forms, continued all the way up to the end of the nineteenth century: see Bankoff, In verbo sacerdotis: The Judicial Powers of the Catholic Church in Nineteenth-Century Philippines. For an instructive comparison of the pastorate as a police power in Latin America, see Pedro Borges, O. F. M., Métodos misionales en la Cristianización de América (Siglo XVI), 203–49. 28. Monsieur Pierre-Marie François de Pagès, Voyages autour du monde, et vers les deux poles, par terre et mer: pendant les anées 1767, 1768, 1769, 1770, 1771, 1773, 1774 et 1776, 156–58.

304

Notes to Pages 74–76

29. Compare this statement to those of N. De Lamare’s Treaty on the Police: “[L’uniuqe objet de la police] consiste à conduire l’homme à la plus parfaite félicité dont il puisse jouir en cette vie” (quoted in Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, et population, 334). [(The sole object of the police) consists in leading man to the most perfect happiness he can possibly enjoy in this life.] 30. In attempting to trace a genealogy of governmentality as a political rationality inherent in the rise of modern states, Michel Foucault outlined a series of points of departure for understanding the specificity of what he called this “pastoral modality of power”; see Power, 308–11. (“ ‘Omnes et singulatim’: Toward a Critique of Political Reason”). In the literature of the Church and monastic fathers, Foucault fi nds a series of recurring themes that anticipate how pastoral power will make its way into both the metropolitan and colonial states. These are (1) an economy of salvation, which consists in “a complex exchange and circulation of sins and merits” for which the shepherd is held accountable; (2) obedience as both a virtue and “an end in itself” or “permanent state”; (3) an “individualizing knowledge,” which apprehends or interpellates each member of the flock in terms of her or his relationship to the flock as a whole, and which proceeds primarily through the practices of confession and the examination of conscience; (4) mortification as the renunciation (Foucault calls it “a kind of everyday death”) of this world in order to reach the afterlife. 31. Louis Turquet de Mayerne, quoted in Foucault, Sécurité, territoire, et population, 331. This idea was often associated with the political philosophy of German cameralism: see Keith Tribe, Governing Economy, esp. 55–90. 32. “A series of ‘worldly’ aims took the place of the religious aims of the traditional pastorate, all the more easily because the latter . . . had followed in an accessory way a certain number of these aims” (Foucault, Power, 334). 33. Anda y Salazar relates a story in which Archbishop Rojo “dispatched an order to the province of Pampanga; it fell into the hands of a father, and he tore it to bits with great calmness, the archbishop overlooking that act of disrespect. Hence, even in case that one obey any mandate of the royal jurisdiction, so many are the obstacles and difficulties that the fathers find for its execution, that they absolutely do not have any other endeavor or desire than to cause the Indian not to recognize any sovereign than themselves” (BR, 50:152). The unofficial name for this common disobedience was cúmplase, in which an official would formally recognize the law’s legitimacy, but declare it inapplicable or invalid for the particular time and place in which it was to be followed. See chapter 6. 34. See Archbishop Basilio Sancho de Santa Justa y Rufina’s letter to the secular parish priests of Bataan, in Schumacher, Readings in Church History, 204–5. 35. For the anti-friar ordinances decried by the religious and Comyn, see Ordinances 17, 18, 27, 28, 30–2, 53, 85, 87, and 89 in BR, 50:191–264. Another governmental responsibility delegated to the religious in this period (1768) was accounting for vassals needed for forced labor (repartimiento) on public or royal works: “To each individual priest must be sent a statement of the number of people necessary, and of the quota from each village; and the headmen shall be under strict obligation to obtain certificates from the said father priests that they have carried out the repartimiento in conformity with the decrees” (Don José Basco y Vargas, “Agriculture in Filipinas,” quoted in BR, 52:299).

Notes to Pages 76–80

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36. For various accounts of this failure, including the ill-preparedness of native and mestizo priests to assume the responsibilities of pastorship owing to their insufficient education, see Pablo Fernandez, O. P., History of the Church in the Philippines, 118–20; John Schumacher, Revolutionary Clergy, 1–21; Corpuz, Roots of the Filipino Nation, 1:541–97. 37. Documentos interesantes acerca de la secularización y amovilidad de los curas regulares de Filipinas (“Documento nm. 1, Sobre la inconveniencia de la secularización de los curatos”), 2. Compare Sarrio’s statement with that of Governor General Rafael Aguilar in 1803: “Porque un clérigo, que por su color, calidad, modo de pensar en acciones es en todo igual a los demás indios, que a más de poseer otros mil defectos carece de aptitud para gobernar un pueblo neófito, de ningún modo podía estimularle ni conducirle a un estado mediano como los regulares que han tenido diversos principios y educación, cuyo color es poderosísimo para infundir todo el respeto necesario obligándoles su pundonor a conservar la mejor opinión pública, y haciéndoles su amor al Rey por carácter recomendables con preferencia, para encomendarles a más de nuevas reducciones la dirección de los pueblos ya convertidos” (cited in Blanco Andrés, “La administración parroquial de los Agustinos en Filipinas,” 203). [Given that a secular priest, . . . on account of his color, quality, [and] way of thinking about his actions, is in all matters the same as the rest of the Indians—who, besides possessing a thousand other defects, lacks the aptitude to govern a newly converted people—[that] priest can in no way stimulate or lead his flock halfway to the point that the missionary priests can, who have been trained and are educated, [and] whose [skin] color is extremely powerful in instilling all the necessary respect, with their pride compelling them to maintain the highest public opinion and their love for the King making them highly exemplary in matters of character. Beyond entrusting to them new missionary settlements, they should be entrusted with the guidance of the baptized natives in the parishes.] 38. Josep Fradera, Colonias para después de un imperio, 183–326, esp. 231–53 and 271–80. 39. Hannah Arendt makes a crucial distinction between “race- thinking” (upon which racial difference is based), which she associates with national sentiment in eighteenth-century Europe, and racism proper as an ideology based on vulgar Darwinism and eugenics. “Race-thinking,” she writes, “with all its roots deep in the eighteenth century, emerged simultaneously in all Western countries during the nineteenth century” (Arendt, Imperialism, 38). 40. Quoted in Charles R. Boxer, The Church Militant and Iberian Expansion, 1440–1770, 22. 41. “No pudiendo el Gobierno local por falta de fuerza militar, y á causa de la escasez de europeos, hacerse debidamente obedecer por sí, es forzoso llamar en su ayuda al poderoso influjo de la religión.” 42. “Se verán con asombro sembradas sus dilatadas campiñas de templos y conventos espaciosos . . . regularidad en las calles, aseo y aun lujo en los trajes y casas: escuelas de primeras letras en todos los pueblos . . . abrirse calzadas, construirse puentes de buena arquitectura, y darse en fi n puntual cumplimiento en la mayor parte á las providencias de buen Gobierno y policía.”

306

Notes to Pages 81–90

43. “Puede asegurarle que el Gobierno de S. M. tiene en esta clase de ministros el nervio mas poderoso para mantener aquella posesión adiestra á su soberanía . . . [ellos] ejercen sobre [los Indios] una fuerza moral mas poderosa que no ejerce el Gobierno mismo” (Bernáldez Pizarro, Dictamen [bound manuscript], 205–6). 44. “Así pues, como la república se sostiene sobre la virtud, y la monarquía sobre la fidelidad, esta economía, en mi concepto, debe mantenerse por la religión” (Sinibaldo de Mas, Informe secreto, 28; italics added). 45. David Brading, The First America, 492–513 (“Erastian Church”). Unlike those in the Philippines, natives and mestizos in New Spain were drafted into the ranks of the missionary orders. 46. R. Blanco Andrés, “La administración parroquial de los Agustinos en Filipinas,” 181. 47. For an overview of this connection, see Manuel Artigas y Cuerva, The Events of 1872, 21–32 and 103–14. 48. See Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad y modernidad/racionalidad”; and Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas. 49. “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 necessidad; y su vanidad, con el aplauso que han de querer tener, queriendo ser servidos de aquellos, que en otro estado respetarían y obedecerian, viniendo sobre los Pueblos la maldicion de Isayas 24: “Sicut Populus sic sacerdos” (Gaspar de San Agustín, Carta, par. 95). [Because to propose that they will suppress their customs, and their aforementioned bad habits, is impossible. If anything, their pride at being elevated to such a sublime status will only worsen; their envy, spurred by power, will puff up, as well as their laziness for lack of immediate needs; and their vanity, with the applause they crave, in their desire to be served by those who in other circumstances would be respected and obeyed, will cast over these peoples (sic) the curse of Isaiah 24: “Sicut Populus sic sacerdos,” “As are the People, so are the priests.”] For a partial translation of this letter, see BR, 40:183–283. 50. With regard to Chinese expulsion, one might in fact characterize the nineteenth century as a reversal of earlier anti-Chinese imperial policies. After 1766, there were no mass deportations of Chinese. And after 1848, the Philippines witnessed a steady growth of the Chinese population. See Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life, 1850–1898, 45–64. 51. For example, he suggests a special annual license for carriages owned by natives and mestizos, for which they would pay a large fee, so as to discourage their use by anyone other than white Europeans. 52. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class; see especially Balibar’s essays “Raicsm and Nationalism” and “Class Racism” (37–67 and 204–15). 53. For a basic statement on the constructed nature of race and racial difference, see Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s Racial Formation in the United States. 54. “He viajado entre turcos, egipcios y beduinos sin aparato y sin escoltas, y debo asegurar que en ningún país se me ha tenido menos deferencias y respeto que en Filipinas. . . . Por lo cual, en mi opinión, es indispensable el cortarles poco

Notes to Pages 90–97

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a poco las alas que se les ha dado” (Sinibaldo de Mas, Informe secreto, 53–54). [I have traveled among Turks, Egyptians, and bedouins with neither fuss nor escort, and I am certain that in no country have I been paid less deference and respect than in Filipinas. . . . For reasons which, in my opinion, it is necessary to cut little by little the wings which (the native clergy) have been given.] 55. Juan de la Matta, quoted in BR, 52:96. 56. For the relationship of Matta’s proposal to introduce Special Laws with the rationalization of government bureaucracy and power, see his 1843 letter to the Minister of Finance (cited in Horacio de la Costa, Readings in Philippine History, 147). 57. Joaquín Arimón y Andario, Proyecto de Leyes Especiales para las provincias de Ultramar (1852). 58. Cited in Corpuz, Bureaucracy in the Philippines, l20–22. 59. Manuel Azcárraga, quoted in Javier Alvarado, Constitucionalismo y codificación en las provincias del Ultramar. La supervivencia del Antiguo Régimen en la España del S. XIX, 76. [Como individuo del partido liberal debo consignar aquí una protesta, porque constituyen un pequeño golpe de Estado que pudiera ser precursor de otros mayores. . .un ataque a las atribuciones del poder legislativo.] 60. In addition to Fradera, Colonias para despúes de un imperio, 183–326, see Manuel María de Artaza Montero, “El Gobernador General de Filipinas: El ultimo Virrey Español,” in María Dolores Elizalde, Josep Fradera, and Luis Alonso, eds. Imperios y naciones en el Pacífi co, 1:347–65. For the increased military districting of Philippine provinces, see William Henry Scott, Cracks in the Parchment Curtain, 23–24; for the Cuerpo de Carabineros de Seguridad Pública and Guardia Civil, see Theodore Grossman, “The Guardia Civil and Its Influence on Philippine Society,” 3; and Greg Bankoff, Crime, Society, and the State in the Nineteenth-Century Philippines, 129–54, esp. 141. For the evolution of the policy of enforced deportation and migration, as well as penal labor, see Bankoff, 185–87. 61. Quoted in Scott, Cracks in the Parchment Curtain, 26. 62. “Decreto de 30 de enero de 1869 creando una Junta Especial de Reformas de Administración y Gobierno de las Islas Filipinas,” cited in Alvarado, Constitucionalismo y codificación en las provincias del Ultramar, 139–40. 63. Secondary school began in 1865, offering a bachelor’s degree, in accordance with the educational reform decree of 1863. 64. Izquierdo, Quoted in Manuel Artigas y Cuerva, The Events of 1872, 126–27. 65. Raymond Carr, Spain, 1808–1975, 142. 66. Nancy Farriss, Crown and Clergy in Colonial Mexico, 197–253.

chapter 3. customs /(k a)ugali(an) 1. See, for example, Frank Lynch and Alfonso de Guzman, eds., Four Readings on Philippine Values, an important book that influenced the generation of scholars identified with the nationalist Filipino Psychology movement (Sikolohiyang Pilipino). 2. See Nick Joaquin, Culture and History.

308

Notes to Pages 97–102

3. In Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar, Fernando Ortiz developed his thesis on the shortcomings of acculturation and deculturation as adequate terms to describe the emergence of frontier societies under colonial rule; see esp. 92–97. 4. The elevation of the Pasyón to a form of historiography, Ileto argued, not only interrupted the circular logic by which official documents provided the basis (and prejudice) of official histories, but also reminded readers that historical events belong to the cultures that experience and remember them. In Ileto’s words, “Documents ‘from below’ are useful not because they are repositories of ‘solid facts,’ but because they point to underlying meanings and perceptions of events. . . . The task is to discover the units of meaning that shape the narrative” (Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution, 226). 5. For Santo Niño, see Joaquin, Culture and History, 61–69; and Resil Mojares, “Stalking the Virgin.” The larger theoretical point of this discussion has been the source of debate among historians and anthropologists over the simultaneous “inventedness” of traditions and the “derivativeness” of innovation and modernity (Western or otherwise) as they appear in ethnography and the historiography of nationalism. For some key texts surrounding this debate, see Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds., The Invention of Tradition; Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth; George Marcus and James Clifford, eds., Writing Culture; and V. Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa. For a good introduction to these debates, see Gaurav Desai, “The Invention of Invention.” 6. Fr. Gaspar de San Agustín, Carta de Fr. Gaspar de S. A. a un Amigo suyo en España (manuscript), par. 67. 7. The reasons for adopting vernacular languages and customs to preach the Gospel were theological as well as practical. In the words of Paul’s epistle to the Romans, “For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves; Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts, their conscience also bearing witness, and their thoughts the mean while accusing or else excusing one another” (Romans 2:14–5 [King James Version]). 8. For an example of this balance, see Schumacher, Readings in Philippine Church History, 185–87. 9. Cited in Sinibaldo de Mas, “Estado eclesiástico,” 38–39 (italics added). For an instructive comparison of the challenges faced by Spanish missionaries in the Americas, see Borges, Métodos misionales, 247–306. 10. Patriarch Nicephorus of Constantinople argued for the expediency of custom and tradition in the following manner: “In effect, in everything, custom has full power, and deeds prevail over words. To tell the truth, what is a law, if not a custom consigned to writing. Conversely, custom is a nonwritten law” (quoted in Marie-José Mondzain, Image, Icon, Economy 130). Centuries before Nicephorus, Maximus Confesor anticipated this position in his Book of Ambiguities: “Every word of God written for men according to the present age is a forerunner of the more perfect word to be revealed by him in an unwritten way in the Spirit” (quoted in Jaroslav Pelikan, Spirit of Eastern Christendom, 31). For evidence of this concept in the nineteenth-century Philippines, see the

Notes to Pages 103–108

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letters of Pablo Pastells to José Rizal in Raul Bonoan, The Rizal-Pastells Correspondence, esp. 189–214. 11. “Tradition [as understood by the Church] was an organic force that expressed a regional identity, preserved local legal custom and language, while resisting subordination to a centralized national state.” See Anthony M. Stevens-Arroyo, “The Evolution of Marian Devotionalism,” 69. 12. Mojares, “Stalking the Virgin.” 13. Quoted in Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry, 1570–1898, 21; italics in original. 14. See also Monina Mercado, Antipolo, 59. According to Lumbera, the fi rst comprehensive Tagalog dictionary (1754) by Juan de Noceda and Pedro de Sanlúcar distinguishes both the dalit and pamatbat from the sixteen types of musical poetry, or awit. This is perhaps to highlight the latter’s primary association with music and singing, as well as to contrast the rhythmic and rhyming variety of the various types of awit with the plodding, narrative rhythm of the dalit, which is recited in monorhyming quatrains of octosyllabic lines (Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry, 32). In the eighteenth century, Gaspar de San Agustín described the dalit as “more grave and somber [than the awit], in the manner that the Greeks and Latins called epic-dithyrambs” (quoted in Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry, 32). 15. Quoted in Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry, 35. [Y porque solían y suelen aquellos Indios cuando muchos a una hacían alguna cosa, como cuando arrastraban algún palo grande o piedra o remaban en sus embarcaciones, cantar canciones sucias, entonándolas uno y prosiguiendo el canto de ellos respondiendo todos a cada verso, digamos, y arrimado entonces todos a una las manos al trabajo que hacían; les compuso muchas coplas en su lengua a lo divino . . . y las introdujo entre ellos para aquellas ocasiones, con que les hizo olvidar las antiguas que olían algo a su Gentilidad pasada.] 16. Vicente Barrantes, El teatro tagalo, 19–32. For the versification of Gospel stories in the medieval period, see Paul Zumthor, Toward a Medieval Poetics, 40–76. 17. Barrantes, El teatro tagalo; José Rizal, “A su excelencia, Don Vicente Barrantes.” 18. Vicente Rafael adds that in submitting the variety of language use and dialect to the discipline of vocabularies, grammars, and lexica, missionaries in effect transformed the language, reifying certain aspects into rigid rules while condemning others to obsolescence; see Contracting Colonialism, 23–39. 19. Schumacher notes that there were “a few” Indio priests prior to 1708 under the administration of Archbishop Camacho: “A regular policy seems to have been instituted only in the 1720s.” See Schumacher, Readings, 198; for the creation of law degrees, see 150. See also Santiago, The Hidden Light. 20. For a brief history of this movement, see Costa, Readings in Philippine History, 193–230. 21. San Agustín, Carta de Fr. Gaspar de S. A. For a translation of his open letter, see BR, 40: 183–294. 22. Santiago, Hidden Light, 150; and “Doctor Mariano Bernavé Pilapil.” In The Hidden Light, Santiago notes that Saguinsín’s novena was the fi rst to be written by an Indio priest (145–50).

310

Notes to Pages 109–114

23. René Javellana, S. J., “Introduction” to Ang Casaysayan nang Pasiong Mahal ni Jesucristong Panginoon Natin na Sucat Ipag-Alab nang Puso nang Sinomang Babasa (anonymous; annotated and translated by René Javellana). 24. “[He corregido] casi enteramente mudando palabras, proposiciones y aun versos a benefi cio de los que lo lean en adelante, de modo que no tengan ni aun siquiera medio resquicio de error en puntos de fe que insensiblemente se divaga en todas estas Islas, por pasar de mano, de pueblo en pueblo, de provincia en provincia, y de generacion, unos cuadernos en los que parecen, y es asi, han tenido parte sus indiscretos lectores. . . . [M]e parece que a consecuencia de todo lo expuesto, convendra muy el caso que en el momento se ordene que recojen luego los sobredichos manuscritos por sus respectivos Párrocos y que estos mismos los entrequen al fuego.” Quoted in a popular edition of the Pasyón originally published in 1949; see “Paunang Salita,” in Kasaysayan ng Pasiong Mahal ni Hesukristong Panginoon Natin Sukat Ipag-Alab ng Puso ng Sinomang Babasa (Pasiong Henesis), 2. 25. For Pilapil’s biography, see Santiago, “Doctor Mariano Bernavé Pilapil.” 26. For this discussion, see Javellana, “Introduction,” 25–27. 27. Such a possibility would also explain how the richness of Belén’s figurative language, which betrayed a native’s facility with the vernacular Tagalog, is either reduced or eliminated altogether in the pedestrian and hackneyed rhymes of the 1814 Pasyón (Lumbera, Tagalog Poetry, 93–95; Javellana, “Introduction,” 20). 28. The fact that Pilapil’s ancestral home was in Antipolo and his authorship of the novena dedicated to the Virgin of Antipolo further demonstrate this conflation of oral and written traditions, to the point of obscuring their original relationship with Church dogma and its accountability to its criterion of legitimate authority (Scripture, the learned councils, the Church Fathers). By the turn of the nineteenth century, around the time that Pilapil’s novena became available to the populace, Antipolo had come to attract ever-increasing numbers of pilgrims from Manila and the outlying towns. Perhaps not coincidentally, the growth of Antipolo’s popularity as a shrine that dispensed miraculous cures and the fulfi llment of prayer requests corresponded not only with Pilapil’s novena, but also the fact that the Antipolo church had become a stronghold of the native secular clergy. From the expulsion of the Jesuits in 1768 to the redistribution of the parish to the Augustinian Recollects in 1856, it was the native secular clergy who administered the rise of Antipolo as the privileged site of Christian pilgrimage from the nineteenth century to the present. 29. Specifically, Javellana cites the statement by Christ in the Mahal na Pasión: “Dili aco tavo dito / sa lamang Bayan di toto” (stanza 444). This statement can either mean “I am not of the people here / who reside in an untrue World” or “I am not like those humans / who are born in an untrue World.” The anonymous writer of the 1814 Pasyóng Pilapil would attempt to clarify this statement by emphasizing the latter interpretation: “Dili aco tauong tunay / dito sa hamac na bayan” (stanza 1495), or “I am not a real

Notes to Pages 115–124

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human being / (born) here in this wretched world.” Comparison of the two Passion texts, then, seems to indicate that there has been a move away from the humanity of Christ, toward his description as an outsider and, in a sense, an intruder (conqueror). In the body of a human being, the divine realm has entered the profane world to align it with the sacred. Javellana concludes: “The [Pasyóng Pilapil] . . . gives substance to this claim of docetism. In the Pasyóng Pilapil, the poet overstresses the miraculous power of Jesus, his foreknowledge, and absolute control over his life” (34). 30. Medieval scholar Sandro Sticca narrates that the popular confraternities that sprouted in Italy during this time were primarily organized around the “people’s desire to participate more fully in the church services of the liturgical year” (Sticca, The Planctus Mariae in the Dramatic Tradition of the Middle Ages,149). Participation in these sodalities involved the extraction and development of certain tropes that had accrued and had become integrated into the Latin liturgical mass throughout the middle ages. These tropes also became popular lyric poems and songs; even later they became dramatized in the Latin Passion play. And since the most important (or at least the most popular) of these tropes included the Laudae or laments of Mary (and Jesus Christ) used in the liturgical mass, these confraternity groups were called the Laudesi. Thus, although both Phelan and Javellana attribute the formation of sodalities in the Philippines to the Jesuits, the religious confraternity has a much older origin that begins outside the boundaries and control of the Church. See John Phelan, Hispanization of the Philippines, 82; Javellana, “Introduction,” 12. 31. “Aco na ang pagbuntuhan, / nang lahat mong cagalitan, / aco na,i, siyang mamatay, / lalo co pang catouaan / ang siya,i, siyang mabuhay” (stanza 986). [Let me take the blame / of all of your anger. / I would (rather) be the one who dies. / It would make me truly happy / (to die) so that he may live.] 32. In Javellana’s translation of the Casaysan nang Pasiong Mahal the stanzas are numbered 989, 984 and 985 respectively. 33. Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution, 31–33. 34. [Aunque las Leyes de Yndias procuraron cimentar la paz y buen gobierno temporal y espiritual de los (15) pueblos, demarcando la extensión de casas y el numero de sus vecinos, la falta de atención de los Gobernadores de Filipinas, sobre este punto, tan importante, de una parte y de la otra el interés de los curas, párrocos y doctrineros han dado origen al abuso de las desmedidas poblaciones, que hoy se encuentran establecidas en Filipinas, las cuales, como no pueden ser bien gobernados por sus autoridades locales respectivas, mantienen, en si, un germen de discordia civil interior, y han brotado de tiempo en tiempo en alborotos, que han puesto en una situación muy critica a las Yslas.] 35. [Dentro del tiro de cañón de la plaza de Manila y aun sin mas distancia que la anchura del río, se ha consentido que se establezcan 100,000 almas Yndios, mestizos, y chinos; gente advenediza, en mucha parte, sin pasaporte, clase, destino ni otro algún requisito de una policía bien ordenada, y cuyo numero formidable esta amenazando a Manila con un golpe de mano inevitable.] 36. On this issue, see Giovanni Arrighi, Terrence K. Hopkins, and Immanuel Wallerstein, Antisystemic Movements.

312

Notes to Pages 124–135

37. See Javellana, “Introduction,” 8. The letter is dated November 13, 1844.

chapter 4. publics 1. See Manuel Sarkisyanz, Rizal and Republican Spain. 2. O. D. Corpuz, Economic History of the Philippines; Jonathan Fast and James Richardson, Roots of Dependency; John Larkin, The Pampangans, and Sugar and the Origins of Modern Philippine Society. 3. Rafael Díaz y Arenas, Memoria sobre el comercio, 1. 4. Mas, Informe secreto, 62. 5. In the introduction to Patricio de la Escosura’s book Memoria sobre Filipinas y Joló (1883), author of Recuerdos de Filipinas Francisco Cañamaque makes this point explicit: “Let it not be argued that peace and the preservation of these islands would arise from the traditional practice of Spanish politics in the Indies. No. . . . Let us turn our eyes to the past; let us scrutinize the causes of our loss of other colonies; let us rest our gaze on Cuba, and [we see that] such an approach . . . cannot have suffered a more tremendous and painful ignominy [Sp., desprestigio]. . . . It is necessary to govern in the name of reason, justice [derecho], and law” (xiii). [No se arguya que la paz y conservación de las islas Filipinas estriban en la tradicional política española de Indias. No . . . Volvamos los ojos al pasado; escudriñemos las causas de la pérdida de otras colonias; fijemos nuestra mirada en Cuba, y esa tradicional política española . . . no puede haber caído en más tremendo y doloroso desprestigio. . . . Es menester gobernar en nombre de la razón, del derecho, y de la ley.] 6. For an account of this event, see AB, 2:168–69. 7. Medina, quoted in Wenceslao Retana, El periodismo filipino (Journalism in the Philippines), 1811–1894, 165–83. 8. While no copies of these French pamphlets remain, they almost certainly contained or at least made reference to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, in which notions of the general good and the general will, the rights and civil liberties of universal man, and the sovereignty of the nation over any one manifestation of its government implicitly overturned the foundations of Spanish rule. Perhaps Folgueras was sensitive to this apparent dichotomy and hastened to confuse the language of the French revolution with the defense of the Spanish monarchy. Consider, for example, the following statement: “The energy and enthusiasm of our beloved nation are manifested, to sustain the fair and holy cause of our King, of religion and the independence of the monarchy” (AB, 2:172; italics added). In addition to defending the monarchy and religion on the basis of its “fair and holy cause,” a dual principle that was echoed throughout the colonial period, Folgueras adds the “independence of the monarchy,” which, while fueling patriotic sentiment for the monarchy in the short term, was bound to encounter contradictions when such independence did not devolve onto the people who maintained it for the sovereign. 9. Don Luis Rodríguez Varela, Proclama historial. 10. Retana, La censura de imprenta, 2. 11. Rousseau, Social Contract, 59.

Notes to Pages 135–142

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12. “The state needs a government, something often unhappily confused with the sovereign, but of which it is really only the minister. What, then, is the government? An intermediary body established between the subjects and the sovereign [i.e., the general will] for their mutual communication. . . . The members of this body are called magistrates or kings, that is to say governors, and the whole body bears the name of prince” (Rousseau, Social Contract, 102). 13. See, for instance, Teodoro Agoncillo, “Philippine History Through Philippine Eyes. 14. Retana, AB, 3:1501–3. 15. “Felipe the Escorialite” refers to King Felipe II, who ruled Spain during the sixteenth-century conquest of the Philippines. 16. El Indio agraviado (anonymous), in Retana, Archivo del bibliófilo filipino, 5:191. 17. Retana judges by the awkward prose as well as the content of the argument that it was written by “a pure native” (un indígena puro): see Archivo del bibliófilo Filipino, 5:xiii). John Schumacher contends that it was written by a Franciscan monk. The pamphlet’s publication roughly coincided with an antiforeign riot in Manila, which followed the outbreak of cholera. Filomeno Aguilar makes a convincing case that this riot was provoked by the regular clergy, who took advantage of the cholera epidemic to protest the Bourbon policy reforms and the opening of Manila and other ports to foreign trade; see Clash of Spirits, 16. 18. This narrative strategy echoes that of St. Paul in the epistles. For a discussion of St. Paul’s relation to the universal aspirations of modern thought, see Alain Badiou, St. Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. My thanks to Cynthia Sowers for this observation. 19. Carta de Fr. Gaspar de S. A. a un Amigo suyo en España (1720). For a partial translation of this letter, see BR, 40:183–283. For a discussion of this letter, see John Schumacher, The Propaganda Movement, 1880–1895, 199–200. 20. Quoted in Retana, Archivo del bibliófilo Filipino, 2:196, 198. 21. The “three powers” attributed to the Indio are physical, intellectual, and moral or spiritual. 22. A feature editorial from the 1870s identifies this date as the most important event in Philippine history since the conquest and colonization of the islands. See Javier Tisco y Morales, “El comercio en Filipinas” (part 18), El Oriente, no. 2, 18 January 1877. 23. “Uno de los elementos mas poderosos del positivo progreso de los pueblos es el espíritu de asociación y á él son deudoras la mayor parte de las empresas antiguas y modernas que los hombres han llevado á cabo” (La Esperanza, 28 December 1842, 1). [One of the most powerful elements of positive progress among peoples is the spirit of association: to this spirit is indebted the great part of ancient and modern enterprises that men have brought to fulfi llment.] However, as the editorial continues, “No podemos menos de lamentarnos de lo intimo de nuestro corazón de la tendencia a aislamiento para las especulaciones que se nota en estas Islas y de la escasez, por no decir carencia absoluta, de medios que existe para que los poseedores de cortos capitales, puedan procurar su aumento, sin descender á especulaciones mezquinas y muchas veces ilícitas, inmorales é infames” (2). [We cannot but

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lament from the bottom of our hearts the fact that investments of note in these Islands tend to be marginal, not to mention the scarcity, if not absolute lack, of existing means for small capital investors to procure its increase, without descending to paltry speculations, oftentimes illicit, immoral, and disgraceful.] Here, as in other examples, capital investment becomes tied to not only to the institution of banks but also ethical virtues fostered by the Church and the recognition of a common interest shared by all classes of society: “En efecto, quien . . . puede ignorar que hay una infi nidad de pequeños capitales en poder de personas de todas clases, y de diferentes condiciones sociales todos sin acción, ocultos en una gaveta, muertos por decirlo así con grave perjuicio de sus dueños y del país en general?” (2). [In fact, who . . . can deny that there is an infi nity of small pockets of capital in the hands of persons belonging to all classes, of all distinct social conditions, without movement, hidden in a drawer, dead in a manner of speaking, to the serious detriment of its owners and to the country in general?] 24. Diario de Manila, 1 September 1860, 3. The official newspaper of the government continued under the title Boletín official de Filipinas, while Diario de Manila became a privately funded newspaper under the editorship of José Felipe del Pan. 25. El Porvenir Filipino, 28 September 1865, 2. The article continues, “Hence we see that the more numerous, the more expeditious, and the easier are those means of communication in a country, the more enlightened and wealthy it is . . . enlightenment and wealth are the sources of power and value among peoples.” 26. For a brief history of censorship in the Philippines, including the establishment of a Permanent Board of Censorship in 1856 and various examples of their rulings on banned books, see Retana, La censura de imprenta. In 1883, peninsular writer and colonial official Francisco Javier de Moya y Jiménez, complained that the only effect of censorship was to increase the illicit importation of contraband books in the archipelago; see Horacio de la Costa, Readings in Philippine History, 189. 27. The opening of Manila to foreign ships between 1830 and 1834, the new emphasis on export agriculture, and the conversion of friar landholdings into plantations had little to do with the health of the nation or people. On the contrary, the capitalization of agriculture and the exposure of the Philippines to the international market were accompanied by the decline of rural industry, the crisis of subsistence agriculture, and the widespread disfranchisement of indigenous property owners, not to mention the collapse of cultural traditions. See Corpuz, Economic History of the Philippines; and Stephen Resnick, “The Decline of Rural Industry.” 28. It is for this reason that Marx denounced the idea of public opinion as false consciousness. See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 117–29. 29. Ibid., 127. 30. See Kant, “An Answer to the Question: ‘What is Enlightenment?’ ” 31. “El pueblo fi lipino está dando un espectáculo del mayor elogio: todas las clases de la sociedad desde el clero regular hasta el oscura labrador, así el negociante acaudalado como el hombre de letras, el bracero como el artista,

Notes to Pages 145–149

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cada uno en su esfera manifi esta bien claramente que dentro de sus pechos laten corazones españoles, dispuestos á sacrificarse en aras de la patria, en aras del bien general, siempre que fuere necesario” (El Oriente, 30 January 1876, 4). 32. Quoted in Artigas y Cuerva, The Events of 1872, 104. 33. Benedict Anderson, “Forms of Consciousness in Noli me tangere.” 34. Mas, Informe secreto, 16–17. 35. For the locus classicus of Spanish republicanism and the influence of the Creole revolutions in Latin America upon the Philippines, see Nick Joaquin, A Question of Heroes. See also Manuel Sarkisyanz, Rizal and Republican Spain. 36. Edmund Plauchut, “The Philippine Islands”; see La Solidaridad, 4:65. The articles were originally published in the French newspaper Revue des deux Mondes (March, April, and June 1877). 37. “[Un español fi lipino] goza de los derechos de [los españoles], pero nunca ha estado en España, ni tiene en ella amigos ni relaciones personales. En Filipinas ha pasado su infancia, allí ha disfrutado de los juegos de la niñez y conocido sus primeros amores: allí están todos sus compañeros; allí toda su alma. . . . Filipinas es su patria.” 38. Enjoying the privileges of peninsular Spaniards, Creoles were also inclined toward the same professions as the peninsulares, which for the most part consisted in government employment. Yet, as Mas explains, “Insofar as the positions are limited to the few career positions that are offered in the Colony, and since the esteemed appointments are conceded to those who hold favor with government officials in Madrid, the Filipinos [Creoles] see themselves perpetually passed over” (Mas, Informe secreto, 17). [Como los ascensos están limitados a lo que dan de sí las respectivas carreras en la Colonia, y como los destinos de categoría e interés se conceden en Madrid a los que tienen favor con los ministros, los fi lipinos se ven, por decirlo así, continuamente postergados.] This inequality, which had begun as a question of jobs (20), often led to misunderstandings and mutual resentments. Indeed, as late as 1895, José Montero y Vidal maintained that these tensions were still prevalent; see Historia general de Filipinas desde el descubrimiento de dichas islas hasta nuestros días, 2:566). 39. Mas, Informe secreto, 92. 40. “Mucho menos amados de los indígenas que los europeos . . . bien fácil es de ver que el Gobierno de Filipinas, dentro de muy pocos años hab[r]ía de estar en manos de los Filipinos (Indios) o tal vez, en la de los mestizos chinos o de las dos razas mezcladas; y que los blancos quedarían sometidos a la gente de color.” 41. “La habilidad del gobierno ha de consistir en tenerlas siempre separadas y en pugna, para que nunca formen masa, ni espíritu público común. . . . Los fi lipinos se asocian más bien con mestizos que con españoles, porque, aunque los primeros los tiranizan, . . . los convidan a comer, y los tratan de modo que parecen todos unos.” 42. “Los españoles fi lipinos no piensan en formar cuerpo con los naturales [Indios], porque ahora son señores y entonces vendrían á ser iguales y aun inferiores” (Mas, Informe secreto, 23).

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Notes to Pages 150–155

43. For the background and history of these events, see John Schumacher, Father José Burgos. 44. Schumacher, Burgos, 56–57. 45. It is difficult to assert the proportion of the Spanish to the native-born secular clergy in the nineteenth century. John Schumacher lists an estimate of 1,200 secular priests in 1810, of whom the large majority (1,000) were native-born, but does not list another entry for the total number of secular priests until the year 1903. While the number of native-born priests in 1880 was 748, there are no numbers recorded between this date and 1810. See the appendix, “Statistics on the Philippine Clergy for Selected Years,” in Horacio de la Costa and John N. Schumacher, The Filipino Clergy, 120. 46. Don Manuel Bernáldez Pizarro, quoted in Blair and Robertson, The Philippine Islands, 51:183–84. 47. See Lilia Hernández-Chung, Facts in Fiction, 83–84. 48. Quoted in John Schumacher, Father José Burgos: Priest and Nationalist, 66; translation slightly modified. 49. William Henry Scott, Barangay, 7. 50. In Michael McKeon’s magisterial study of the English novel from 1640–1700, the author examines the premodern as well as early modern period in Europe to show how the feudal concept of honor involved an inward or ethical aspect and an outward one, closely associated with the feudal notion of aristocratic privilege and an economy of patronage; see Michael McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 1640–1700. These two aspects roughly correspond to the distinction between honra and honor. According to McKeon, these two aspects were portrayed as united in the aristocracy. “The notion of honor as a unity of outward circumstance and inward essence,” he writes, “is the most fundamental justification for the hierarchical stratification of society by status. . . . What it asserts is that the social order is not circumstantial and arbitrary, but corresponds to and expresses an analogous, intrinsic moral order” (131). In McKeon’s analysis of the English case, this disarticulation became expressed in the increasing disparity between the external and internal manifestations of honor. While social institutions of honor as status (honor) became discredited or “disenchanted” to the point that titles of nobility were freely priced, bought and sold according to the demand of the nouveaux riches in the seventeenth century, honor as virtue (honra) became appropriated by a progressive ideology to delegitimize or symbolically dispossess the aristocratic order of rank, status, and privilege. “The transvaluation of honor,” McKeon writes, “is a process of separation and detachment. . . . ‘Honor’ now fails to unite internals and externals. Progressive ideology requires that it resolve itself into virtue on the one hand and aristocratic rank on the other, a discrimination that repudiates the automatic aristocratic signification of internals by externals (155; italics added). 51. In a related argument, Max Weber distinguishes between “social honor” and “the sense of dignity,” as two different registers capable of evaluating virtue in society; see Weber, From Max Weber, 276. 52. The term reoccupation comes from Hans Blumenberg, who uses it to explain (among other things) the reappearance of a metaphoric language pertaining to political theologies, such as the divine right of kings, the patrimony

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of caste-privilege and nobility among the aristocracy, and so on, at the very moment those systems were collapsing in Europe. “What mainly occurred in the process that is interpreted as secularization,” Blumenberg writes, “should be described not as the transposition of authentically theological contents into secularized alienation [sic] from their origin but rather as the reoccupation of answer positions that had become vacant and whose corresponding questions could not be eliminated” (Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 65). 53. Burgos, in Schumacher, Burgos, 56. 54. The “reversal of the relation of debt,” in Blumenberg’s comprehensive study of the idea of secularization, signified a fundamental shift away from the political adaptation of Christianity in forms of Spanish hierarchy and patronage: “A religion [Christianity] that . . . came historically to claim to provide the exclusive system of world explanation . . . but that fi nally, in its medieval pursuit of the logic of its concern for the infi nite power and absolute freedom of its God, itself destroyed the conditions that it had asserted to hold for man’s relation to the world—such a religion, as a consequence of this contradictory turning away from its presuppositions, inevitably ends up owing to man a restitution of what belongs to him” (Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 115–16; italics added). 55. Burgos, in Schumacher, Burgos, 128. 56. For a development of this thought in later Filipino writers, see John Blanco, “Transformations of the Blood Compact.”

chapter 5. aesthetics 1. “Aquí no existen opiniones políticas; aquí no hay más que españoles desde el momento en que se pisa este suelo, y ustedes serán tratados por mí y por todos como compatriotas desgraciados, como españoles y caballeros” (quoted in José Montero y Vidal, Historia de Filipinas, 3:90). 2. Clavería’s decree on surnames is quoted in Miguel Luque Talaván, “Narciso Clavería y Zaldúa: Gobernador y Capitán General de las Islas Filipinas, 1844–1849,” Revista Complutense de Historia de América 23 (1997): 237–38. 3. See Montero y Vidal, Historia de Filipinas, 2:89–91; Schumacher, Propaganda Movement, 1880–1895, 4, n. 1. 4. Puga, “Introducción.” Ilustración Filipina, 1, no. 1 (1 March 1859): 2 [una publicación artística-científica-literaria; es decir, una publicación que marche en armonía con el gusto del siglo; que á lo útil reúna lo agradable]. For a description of this newspaper and its history, see AB, 3:1522–33. An earlier version of Retana’s history of Philippine journalism, including that of Ilustración Filipina, appeared under the title El periodismo Filipino. 5. Habermas, Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 43. 6. Cited in Michel Delon, “L’Esthétique du tableau et la crise de la representation classique à la fi n du XVIIIe siècle,” 11. 7. “The drawing up of ‘tables,’ ” Foucault writes, “was one of the great problems of the scientific, political, and economic technology of the eighteenth century. . . . It was a question of organizing the multiple, of providing oneself with an instrument to cover it and to master it; it was a question of imposing upon it an ‘order.’ ” See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 148; and The

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Notes to Pages 162–163

Order of Things, 125–165. See also Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes, 15–37; and Julio Ramos’s analysis of Sarmiento’s hybrid orientalism in Divergent Modernities in Latin America, 3–22. 8. See Retana, AB, 3:1523. 9. “Por la publicidad . . . los pueblos se unen y comprenden; la palabra escrita, al transmitirse entre aquellos, ejerce la doble influencia de ilustrarlos y de predisponer sus ánimos á la fraternidad y asociación; y cuando esa palabra escrita se presenta ataviada con los encantos del buril del artista, rica de color local, su influencia es tanto mas directa, cuanto se encuentra en ella á la vez, pasto sabroso para la inteligencia y un objeto agradable en que fijar los ojos . . . [las publicaciones ilustradas] familiarizan á los hombres con las costumbres y localidades de los países mas distantes, y les presentan paulatinamente un curioso álbum, donde el sabio, el artista y el negociante encuentran divertimiento, instrucción y provecho.” 10. “la poca exactitud con que lo han descrito algunos viajeros, que sin tiempo para formar razonado juicio, han dado crédito á narraciones absurdas, generalmente desfavorables, en la necesidad de satisfacer su vanidad, llenando algunas hojas de sus carteras con impresiones de viaje.” 11. Mesonero Romanos states his purpose in the following manner: “to vindicate the good fame of our character and national customs, so disfigured by foreign novelists and playwrights, by opposing to these a simple and impartial painting of our country’s true nature and its indigenous and natural qualities, without exaggeration or acrimony” [revindicar la buena fama de nuestro carácter y costumbres patrias, tan desfiguradas por los novelistas y dramaturgos extranjeros, oponiendo a ellos una pintura sencilla e imparcial de su verdadera índole y sus cualidades indígenas y naturales, sin exageración y sin acrimonia]. Quoted in José Montesinos, Costumbrismo y novela, 46. See also E. Correa Calderón, Costumbristas españoles, 1:xxvii–xxviii. 12. Susan Kirkpatrick analyzes the internalization of disenchantment in the wake of this failure as it is reflected in the works of Mariano José de Larra, the most celebrated and tragic figure of Spanish nineteenth-century romanticism; see “Spanish Republicanism and the Liberal Project, 451–71. A shorter version of this paper appears in her book Las Románticas, 98–109. 13. As early as 1827, member of the Royal Audiencia Manuel Bernáldez Pizarro warned that foreigners set a bad example to the natives, causing harm to missionary enterprise (BR, 51:208). 14. Margarita Ucelay de Cal, Los Españoles pintados por sí mismos, 1843–1844, 135–41. 15. Several literary historians have pointed out the two tendencies of Spanish costumbrismo, represented by Mariano José de Larra and Mesonero Romanos, respectively: while the former tended to describe Spanish life as a point of departure for social critique, for Mesonero the description of character types was an end in itself (see Calderón, Costumbristas españoles, lxxxiv). Larra’s essay “¿Quién es el público y dónde se encuentra?” (1832) simultaneously registers the frustration of a disarticulate public sphere and the impotence of its spokesperson—the journalist—in asserting the legitimacy of public opinion: “empeñado en escribir para mi público, y sin saber quién es el público

Notes to Pages 164–168

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[devoted to writing for my public, and yet without knowing who the public is]” (Mariano José de Larra, Artículos, 128). 16. “A unique, invariable public, an impartial judge, to which one would aspire, does not exist,” Larra proclaimed in 1832, “each class of society has its particular public, whose diverse and even heterogeneous features and characteristics comprise the monstrous physiognomy that we call the public.” Mariano José de Larra, Artículos, 137. 17. Despite the central importance of the Chinese in all aspects of Philippine economy and society, they rarely appear as the main subject of costumbrista articles. One notable exception is the article “Ah-tchu!” by Manuel Garrido, originally published in 1851 and republished by Revista de Filipinas in 1875 (3: 419–20). 18. Puga, Ilustración Filipina 2:71 and 63. 19. “Melancólica y contemplativa la poesía Occidental, baña el alma con su ternura y amable fi losofía . . . al paso que la Oriental llena de languidez y como enervada por el perfume de sus jardines, adormece los sentidos y los embriaga con el lujo y valentía de sus encantadoras imágenes.” 20. “Cuando las oimos [las canciones ‘orientales’] en boca de un Indio con esa entonación que le es peculiar, creemos ver su retrato al daguerrotipo . . . el pausado compás de sus cantigas; la postura original en que permanece sentado horas enteras acariciando . . . su gallo . . . tan ensimismado, tan distraído . . . que juzgamos no se cuide en aquel instante ni de su familia . . . ni de sí mismo.” 21. John Bowring reiterates this portrait in Visit to the Philippine Islands: “It has been said of the Indian that he is more of a quadruped than a biped. His hands are large, and the toes of his feet pliant, being exercised in climbing trees and divers other activities. He is almost amphibious, passing much of his time in the water” (84). 22. “No investiguéis el pasado de ese pueblo, no le preguntéis cuales fueron sus creencias, sus costumbres, su origen por que es en vano. La primera página de su historia está escrita por Miguel López de Legazpi, mensajero del cristianismo y de la civilización; pero volved mas atrás la vista y encontraréis el caos, la ignorancia, ¡nada! Filipinas presenta una excepción notable entre todos los países, cual es la de carecer de historia y monumentos.” 23. “Aprendió, pues, á coser y á mentir; á ser muy limpia para su cuerpo é indolente para el trabajo; se hizo presumida y descuidada . . . se hizo, en fi n, un ser excepcional, característico, sui géneris, que solo tiene completa semejanza consigo mismo.” 24. “Como se improvisan los cocheros, los cocineros y casi todos los maestros en artes y oficios, . . . verdaderamente asusta y conmueve, ver como las mas groseras preocupaciones hacen que el arte contraríe y destruya la bondad de la naturaleza.” 25. Cultural critic Homi Bhaba has written on such moments: in The Location of Culture, he argues that this mimicry of subjects that ought to have been invested with some form of authority, wielding symbols such as the medical prescription or Blanco’s translation of Tissot’s book on herbal medicine (Ilustración Filipina 1: 15; 122), must have threatened the authority of the

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colonial power. “The hybrid object,” he writes, “retains the actual semblance of the authoritative symbol but revalues its presence by resisting it as the signifier of Entstellung—after the intervention of difference. . . . The display of hybridity—its peculiar ‘replication’—terrorizes authority with the ruse of recognition, its mimicry, its mockery” (Location of Culture, 115). In the context of mimicry, it is interesting to note that literary costumbrismo often mimicked the methodical writing of scientific discourse, which allowed it to adopt the latter’s claim to truth through the force of its rhetoric. See Ucelay de Cal, Los Españoles pintados por sí mismos, 127–28; and Foucault, The Order of Things, 303–43 (“Man and His Doubles”). This parodical sense is most acutely portrayed in the representation of the “kitchen Spanish” that spread in and around the environs of Manila, despite the policy among the civil and ecclesiastical orders before 1863 to teach Castilian. For a brief historical overview of the forms of pidgin Spanish spoken in the Philippines, see John M. Lipski, P. Mühlhäusler and F. Duthin, “Spanish in the Pacific.” 26. The collapse of Indio “types” into an Indio type “in general” demonstrates, in inverted form, Edward Said’s observation that knowledge of the “Orient” and the “oriental” begins with the Orientalizing of the Orient itself: “Orientalism is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between ‘the Orient’ and (most of the time) ‘the Occident’ ” (Orientalism, 2). From this difference in general the Orientalist proceeds to “incorporate [the object of knowledge, ‘the Orient’] schematically on a theatrical stage whose audience, manager, and actors are for Europe, and only for Europe” (72–73). Hence Said’s characterization of Orientalism as “a form of radical realism,” a kind of aesthetic realism that everyone forgot was aesthetic (73). 27. For the increase in the Spanish population in the fi rst half of the nineteenth century, see the excerpt from Luís Prudencio Álvarez y Tejero’s De las islas Filipinas (1843) in Horacio de la Costa, ed., Readings in Philippine History, 172–73. 28. Eliodoro Robles, The Philippines in the Nineteenth Century, 290. 29. Retana, AB, 2:1560. 30. Federico Casademunt, “Agapito Macapingan,” Revista de Filipinas, 1 (1875): 28. All further citations will mention the volume number and page number corresponding to this reference. 31. “He pintado esas verdades demasiado desnudas, pero ¿quién que conozca el país y el carácter de los naturales podrá negarlas?” 32. For the etymology of the word barangay, which is tied to the transformation of this form of social organization from the precolonial to colonial period, see William H. Scott, Barangay: Studies in Sixteenth-Century Philipppine Culture and Society, 4–6. 33. “Agapito Macapingan,” in Revista de Filipinas, 2:27. [La justicia se la representa el de los Indios de mi clase y en mis circunstancias con faz adusta, y no ven en esa hermosa fi gura la maternal protectora de un (sic) falsa acusación sino la madrastra tirana, implacable, que mantiene enhiesto un brazo cruel y arado.]

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34. “No hay despotismo, ni insolencia, ni grosería, que iguale á las del Indio de humilde cuna, cuando ha logrado conquistar un puesto oficial cualquiera . . . empieza la más cruel de las tiranías . . . el más completo olvido de los mútuos respetos y consideraciones, precisamente donde debían nacer los lazos de la fraternal igualdad, de la protección y del apoyo, que son los más fuertes vínculos de todas las clases” (Revista de Filipinas, 1:53). [There is no despotism, nor insolence, nor uncouthness, that equals that of the Indio of humble mien, when he has succeeding in conquering some official post . . . the cruelest of tyrannies begins . . . the most complete forgetfulness of mutual respect and considerations, precisely where there ought to be born those ties of fraternal equality, of protection and support, which are the strongest ties among all classes.] 35. “El amo nunca debe descender nunca de cierto elevado pedestal, si quiere hacerse servir bien. Dar a un criado un prestijo que no siempre es merecido y que depende de la simpatía más que la conciencia exacta de sus méritos, es minar ese pedastal por su base, exponerse á que caiga con el y sea pisada la figura que sustenta.” 36. “Una educación incompleta, una absoluta falta de nociones de lo que representa en las sociedades, de la verdadera misión que en ellas desempeña la justicia, es lo que conduce al Indio el extraviado campo que he indicado.” 37. This passage bears a striking resemblance to a similar passage in nineteenth-century Cuban slave Juan Francisco Manzano’s autobiography, in which Manzano narrates his self-education in letters: see Manzano, Autobiografía, 31. The constitution of the subject in writing with regard to Manzano certainly sheds light on the complex relationship between Casademunt and Agapito as an emblematic moment in the late colonialism of the Philippines and its relationship with late colonialism in Cuba. Two articles that discuss this transition are Sylvia Molloy, At Face Value, 36–54; and Julio Ramos, “La ley es otra: Literatura y constitución de la persona juridical.” 38. “para mis paisanos, para los filipinos, como yo, que mandan a manadas á sus hijos á los colegios de la capital, arrastrados por los mismos impulsos de que mi madre se vio poseída al mandarme a mí, cuando la sedujeron las palabras de Ñor Ciriaco.” 39. “Cuando el hombre pierde el sentimiento de su dignidad personal, cuando llega á desconocer sus derechos entre los hombres . . . dése por ser inútil para el resto de sus días.” 40. “Yo había recibido durante mi estancia en el colegio, bastante cultura intelectual para conocer el horror de mi situación. Sin aquel rudo aprendizaje, como tantos otros, la hubiera aceptado inconscientemente.” 41. “Mi criado hablaba y yo escribía. El se explicaba unas veces en castellano, otras en tagalo, y otras ni en castellano ni en tagalo, y yo procuraba dejar consignado en el idioma de Cervantes lo que el pobre Indio, moreno de rostro, de baja estatura, y con los pies descalzos, me iba diciendo.” 42. “No voy a escribir una novela, ni menos un cuento, ni tan siquiera un artículo de variedades de los que publican aquí los periódicos diarios. Los que crean hallar en este trabajo la relacionada trama y las escenas bien preparadas de las primeras, la fuerza de imaginación y la galanura de lenguaje

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de los segundos, los golpes de efecto y el fi n moral o jocoso de los últimos, que pasen por alto esta hoja y las que en los números sucesivos de la REVISTA nos ocupe Agapito Macapingan. No debo engañarles: antes de presentarles la mercancía debo como tratante de buena fé, decirles sus cualidades. . . . Los lectores saben ya lo que les aguarda: mi conciencia queda tranquila: habla Agapito Macapingan.” 43. “La narración quizá se resienta de falta de método, de falta de órden, de falta de reglas literarias . . . con toda la volubilidad propia de una imaginación poco desarrollada . . . con todos los defectos de plan, que hacen inadmisible como novela, como cuento, y como artículo de variedades.” 44. “A fuerza de contemplar al español, fui familiarizándome con su rostro, como con el de un amigo, y la vecindad motivó que trabara relaciones con sus sirvientes, que eran dos, y que estas relaciones y lo que por ellas supe, así como aquella contemplación, dieran por resultado en mi ánimo un deseo irresistible de entrar de criado con el castila.” 45. In another passage we read, “La casa del español era el refugio seguro contra la tiranía, contra la bárbara esclavitud á que estaba sometiendo” (Revista de Filipinas, 1:618). It is interesting to note here that one of the immediate effects of the 1868 September Revolution was the outbreak of the Ten Years’ War in Cuba, with the revolutionary army calling for the abolition of slavery. Thus, it was precisely in those years that the question of slavery and the colonial relation between the mother country and Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Filipinas in general converged. 46. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 40.

chapter 6. values /norms 1. Francisco Cañamaque, Las islas Filipinas: De todo un poco, 66. 2. See Izquierdo, cited in Jaume Santaló i Peix, “La administración colonial española en Filipinas durante el Sexenio”; and Horacio de la Costa, Readings in Philippine History, 160–62. On the history of the tobacco monopoly, see Edilberto C. de Jesus, The Tobacco Monopoly in the Philippines: Bureaucratic Enterprise and Social Change, 1766–1882. 3. Josep Fradera, Gobernar colonias, 93 and 95–127. 4. See Santaló y Peix, “La administración colonial española,” 67; and Julia Celdrán Ruano, Instituciones hispanofilipinas del siglo XIX, 127–136. 5. Quoted in Schumacher, Readings in Philippine Church History, 224–25. 6. See Encarnación Alzona, A History of Education in the Philippines. The parish priest “was given ample powers, such as admonishing and choosing the teachers, determining the admission to the schools, and whether a pupil should pay or be exempt from payment of fees” (67–68). On the level of higher education, after a failed attempt to secularize the University of Santo Tomás, the government established the secular University of the Philippines. However, the Dominican order was given the authority to choose and appoint the rector and vice-rector from among the ranks of the Dominican order (135–36). 7. For insightful essays on this contradiction, see Manuel Sarkisyanz, Rizal and Republican Spain. 8. Quoted in Santaló y Peix, “La administración colonial española,” 69.

Notes to Pages 187–199

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9. See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 259–422 (“Discourse in the Novel”); see esp. 288–94. 10. See León Ma. Guerrero, The First Filipino. 11. “The novel,” Bakhtin writes, “is determined by experience, knowledge and practice (the future). . . . When the novel becomes the dominant genre, epistemology becomes the dominant discipline” (Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 15). He later writes of the novel in terms of its immanent inconclusiveness, which demands an empiricist approach to knowledge and the present: “The present, in its so-called ‘wholeness’ . . . is in essence and in principle inconclusive. . . . Through contact with the present, an object is attracted to the incomplete process of a world-in-the-making, and is stamped with the seal of inconclusiveness. . . . And in this inconclusive context all the semantic stability of the object is lost; its sense and significance are renewed and grow as the context continues to unfold” (30). 12. See also Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, 187–228 (“The Rhetoric of Temporality”). 13. The pronominal “Kabesa(ng)” in Basio Macunat’s mother’s name derives from her title as the wife of the local “chief” or community head (cabeza de barangay), Kabesang Dales. 14. Michael McKeon, Origins of the English Novel, 20–22 and 48. It is no surprise that Foucault considers the novel in terms of the production of norms. See “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the College de France, 174–75. On the history of the norm in scientific discourse and sociology, see Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, 233–56. 15. In the words of Philippine psychologist Virgilio Enriquez, “kapwa is the unity of the ‘self’ and ‘others.’ In English the word ‘others’ is actually used in opposition to the ‘self,’ and implies the recognition of the self as a separate identity. In contrast, kapwa is a recognition of shared identity”; see Enriquez, “Kapwa.” 16. Furthermore, drunkenness exposes the victims to committing further infractions against their families, friends, and loved ones: “Walang hayop na tulig, walang hayop na mangmang na para ng taong lasing kaya panira ng puri sa magulang na pinanggalingan, sa asawa, anak at buong kahinlugan: ikinahihiya sa bayan, at palibhasa’y walang iningat na puri at kamahalan” (Castro, Urbana at Feliza, 105). [No dumb, stupid animal compares to a drunkard because he brings dishonor to the parents who gave birth to him, to his wife, children, and all his relatives: he brings shame to his town, leaving exposed all honor and value.] 17. Enriquez, “Kapwa,” 11. 18. “Ang marunong makipagkapwa-tao saan-saan ma’y pinakamamahal, at isang tandang pinagkakakilanlan na may pinag-aralang bait. . . . Sa pakikisama o sa pakikipag-usap sa kanyang kaparis ay diyan nakikilala ang marunong makipagkapwa-tao at ang hindi; ang may mahal na asal, o asal-timawa, ang may tapat na loob at ang lilo, ang may pinag-aralang bait at ang wala.” 19. “Kung matutong makipagkapwa-tao’y magpapakailag sa kilos, asal, at pangungusap na makasusukal sa mata ng iba.” 20. For Castro’s biography, see Luciano P. R. Santiago, “Of Prose and Souls.” 21. In his introduction to the 1996 edition, Romulo Baquiran, Jr. astutely compares the book to Foucault’s panopticon: “Tulad sa panopticon ni Foucault,

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Notes to Pages 199–209

minamatyagan ng bantay ang bawat kilos ng nasasakupan. . . . At sa tagal ng pagkamtambad sa bantay, hindi na kailangan ng nasasakupan na laging matyagan dahil naisasaloob na niya ang asal na inaasahan sa kanya ng awtoridad o ng kaayusang kolonyal.” [Like Foucault’s panopticon, the guard presides over every movement of the subject. . . . And through the long process of surveillance, the subject no longer needs to be monitored (matyagan, lit., “endured”) because he has already internalized the behavior expected of him on the part of authority or colonial order.] Quoted in Castro, Urbana at Feliza, xiv. 22. On “contact zone,” see Bakhtin, Dialogic Imagination, 11. 23. “Iba ngayon sa dati ang mga katwiran at kaugalian ko sapagkat ngayon lamang luminaw ang aking pagtingin na dati-dati ay malabo. . . . Wiwikain ko sa iyo na ako’y nasasa katwiran at ika’y wala.” 24. “[Prospero] ay lumilihis na sa matuwid na daan, o kung sana sa lumalakad, ay tumutungtong sa mga lanay o kumunoy.” 25. “palibhasa kayo po’y marunong kumilala ng katwiran ko o ng hindi kaya katwiran, at marunong din po kayong humalang sa akin kung baga ako’y nagkakamali.” 26. “Pinag-uusapan din naman ang iba’t ibang ugali ng mga Tagalog at ako’y natutuwa nang di hamak sa pakikinig ko ng kanyang matitinong katwiran at kasagutan sa lahat ng bagay na aming pinag-uusapan.” 27. “Huwag mong hamakin itong hatol o pangangaral ko sa iyo sapagkat hindi nanggagaling sa isang biglang sumpong kundi sa isang matagal at sadyang pagmamasid ko ng inyong mga ugali at pakikipagkapwa-tao.” 28. “Ang kura dito sa amin . . . bagaman Kastila, anakin, ay Tagalog na Tagalog kung sa pangungusap. At palibhasa’y matagal siyang totoo dito sa Katagaluga’y naalaman niya ang lahat na mga asal at ugali naming mga Indio.” 29. In 1843, Juan de la Matta summarized this problem in words that echo our own: “The mutual interference of unrelated powers gives rise to frequent disputes and disagreements, fanned by imprudent or malicious persons, inducing in all branches of the administration a kind of anarchy that engulfs us and that cannot coexist today with the safety and preservation of the colony.” Quoted in Costa, Readings in Philippine History, 147. 30. With the singular exception of Lilia Hernández-Chung’s Facts in Fiction: A Study of Peninsular Prose Fiction, 1859–1897, Philippine literary history avoids the study of novels written by peninsular Spaniards, for reasons that can only be attributed to reverse racial prejudice: peninsular Spanish writing cannot be “truly” (i.e., ethnically) native because the authors are not native-born Filipinos. Hernández-Chung deftly avoids this charge by claiming instead that these writings lack “a truly Philippine quality” (167). “The Filipino as a distinct personality,” she writes, “with a defi nite psychology as well as expressed aspirations, does not appear in these narratives. He is constantly examined, his personality often dissected and his customs scrutinized; yet he never occupies center stage long enough to reveal himself” (170). This criticism, however, cannot apply to the study of the novel as a social artifact in nineteenth-century Philippines. 31. See José Montesinos, Costumbrismo y novela, esp. 11–18.

Notes to Pages 210–217

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32. An introductory point of departure for this discussion is William Luis, “How to Read Sab.” See also Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 114–37 (“Sab, c’est moi”). 33. Cañamaque was a temporary resident and bureaucrat for the Spanish colonial government. Retana records that the colonial government found Cañamaque’s book so offensive to Spain’s colonial subjects that it was banned throughout the archipelago (AB, 2:851 [no. 1564]). 34. “Desde hoy te llamarás como tu madre, es decir, con la variación consiguiente de hembra á varón, estás?: te llamarás Candelario.” 35. “No hay en Filipinas . . . ninguno de los elementos terroríficos, tremebundos, espeluznantes de ciertas novelas europeas.” 36. “No poseen . . . en su cerebro la cantidad de entendimiento que otras razas, por lo cual, sin duda, no solo penetran poco ó no penetran nada en el abismos que las miserias y congojas de la vida tienen constantemente abierto a nuestro discurso.” 37. “Es indudable para los frenólogos que á la depresión en el ángulo facial en el orden físico responde una depresión moral e intelectual. En el indio malayo es un hecho claro, como la luz meridiana, de esos que no admiten duda.” 38. See Entrala, Los hombres de la época. 39. According to Lilia Hernández-Chung, Sin título was a “landmark” novel because “it was the fi rst full-length novela de costumbres written about the Philippines, and it introduced a literary approach conducive to the rise of a distinguished body of costumbrista literature in the country” (Facts in Fiction, 82). Retana claims that Entrala was widely held to be the “initiator [sic] of the Philippine novel” (AP, 3:1550), although he credits García del Canto’s Misterios de Filipinas (1859) as the fi rst novel dealing entirely with the Philippines. 40. Moderantismo denoted a compromise between Spanish liberalism and the oligarchy established and maintained by the ancien régime. This compromise entailed the formation of one party (the Moderate Party) and the protection of many civil liberties, but it also led to the maintenance of aristocratic privileges or immunitas and the interpenetration of Church and state. See Raymond Carr, Spain, 1808–1975, 227–46. 41. Francisco de Paula Entrala, Sin título, 72–73. 42. The mediquillo (quack) as a costumbrista type that represents a threat to the public good goes back to the writings of Addison and Steele in the eighteenth century, along with José Clavijo y Fajardo in Spain. See Giocanda Marún, Orígenes del costumbrismo, 44–57, esp. 48. 43. In Olvidos de Filipinas, Entrala celebrates the racial and cosmopolitan diversity to be found in Manila, which necessarily affects the imagination of all that the Philippines could be (52–54). 44. “Lo cierto es que la mestiza tiene tres religiones: la verdadera, que le enseñan los padres de la Iglesia, la religión de sus mayores y la religión de sus costumbres. Si hay alguna que se muestre rebelde á la primera, no me presentareis una sola que renuncie á la segunda. La que abjure de la tercera lo hará accidentalmente ó por apariencias del momento, pero en el fondo, le pasará lo que á otras razas, abjuran, pero creen en lo que niegan. Vestid a la mestiza de

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Notes to Pages 218–225

española, pero la oiréis hablar tagalo. Prohibidles su idioma, mas no le quitéis sus santos y sus vírgenes. . . . La mestiza no es cosmopolita, es fi lipina. Es el heraldo de las costumbres del país. Si le quitáis el mediquillo, se aconsejará, . . . del que más se le parezca.” 45. “[Paco] se habia enamorado . . . nó de una mujer ó del infortunio de esta mujer, sinó del infortunio mismo, encarnado en una naturaleza de ángel.” 46. “Para algunos entendimientos imperfectos, la tradicion puede más que la evidencia. ¿Quién cree en lo aciago de los martes . . . del plato que se quiebra ó del espejo que se rompe? Nos reímos . . . ¡y creemos!.” 47. “Que la duda es lo primero que nos induce á creer, [la fe en los mediquillos] es tan exacto como si dijéramos que el principio de la sabiduría es la ignorancia.” 48. “No es extraño que luche con fuerza de titán poderoso, entre lo viejo y lo nuevo, entre lo antiguo y lo moderno, entre el ayer y el mañana. . . . La fe no medita; al contrario, hácese tanto más arraigada, intransigente y soberbia cuanto mas se la ataca.” See Hegel’s discussion of enlightenment as it is posed in terms of “Absolute Freedom and Terror” in The Phenomenology of Mind, 599–610: “This brings on the scene spirit in the form of absolute freedom. It is the mode of self-consciousness which clearly comprehends that in its certainty of self lies the essence of all the component spiritual spheres of the concrete sensible as well as of the supersensible world, or, conversely, that essential being and concrete actuality consist in the knowledge consciousness has of itself” (600). Yet this self-consciousness as the absolute freedom of human thought and abolition of external forms of hierarchy, prestige, and power carries within it the terror of absolute indifferentiation: “It is merely the rage and fury of destruction” (604). Faced with such a moment, Hegel theorizes the likelihood of the partially enlightened subject returning to the darkness from which she or he arose: “Out of this tumult spirit would be hurled back upon its starting-point. . . . Spirit would have anew to traverse and continually repeat this cycle of necessity” (607). 49. Entrala, Sin título, 186–87. 50. “Puedes creer en lo que quieras . . . y buena ocasión te se presenta de adoptar las costumbres españolas.” 51. “Heteroglossia, once incorporated into the novel, is another’s speech in another’s language, serving to express authorial intentions but in a refracted way” (Bakhtin, Dialogical Imagination, 324). 52. “El indio, el mestizo, la española, el individuo, que aparezcan, ya en este libro, ya en otro, no determinan toda una raza, ni los defectos de determinada persona.” 53. Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel, trans. Anna Bostock, 88. 54. “Sus ojos, siempre que miraba, parecían mirar un libro en blanco. Todas estas ideas mas subjetivas que objetivas, le hacian estremecerse y mirar á la casa de Charing como miramos la nave que se lleva á nuestros hijos, ó la muerte que en llanto convertida, se lleva nuestra alma.” 55. “Alonso estaba . . . sublime. . . . Mas que español, parecía en aquel momento un girondino, Barnave, tál como nos lo pinta Lamartine.” 56. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized, 38–39.

Notes to Pages 229–234

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chapter 7. gothic 1. Wenceslao Retana, Noticias histórico-bibliográficas del teatro en Filipinas desde sus orígenes hasta 1898, 150–53. 2. For a brief biography of the Luna brothers (Juan and Antonio), see Nick Joaquin, A Question of Heroes, 167–70. 3. Retana, Noticias, 150–53. 4. In Imperial Eyes, Mary Louise Pratt demonstrates how the genre of travel narratives that followed in the wake of Alexander von Humboldt’s famous expeditions effectively reinvented América almost solely in terms of natural history, at the expense or devaluation of precolonial and colonial human history: “What is shared [in Humboldt’s Views of Nature] with scientific travel writing . . . is the erasure of the human” (125). The historicization of Spanish colonial rule, by contrast, serves a different function: it is to measure the promise of this natural history against the narrative of past attempts and failures to exploit it. In this respect, it represents a moment quite different from that of Ricardo de Puga’s tableaux vivants displayed in chapter 5. 5. “Para referir las hazañas de César y Pompeyo, las de Turno y Eneas, las de Aquiles y otros héroes, elevaron el estilo Lucano, Virgilio y Homero, dando vida a los muertos con los alientos de las plumas. En las mías hallarás, sin la elocuencia que tuvieron sus escritos, el provecho que no tuvieron.” 6. “En [esta historia] no echarás menos [de] las hazañas de Alejandro, si reparas en las que te refiero, así en la Conquista Temporal como en la Espiritual, obradas con una y otra espada; con la de acero, en las diestras de los unos, y con la del Evangelio, en las lenguas de los otros, fertilizándose los campos de laureles con el riego de la sangre de tantos mártires y soldados. Mira si serán más generosas las hazañas de Dios que las de Alejandro. Séneca, con ser gentil, te lo dice: Quanto potius erit Deorum opera celebrare, quam Philippi et Alexandri latrocinia?” Even after the British invasion of 1762, in which the British seized Manila and held it until the signing of a treaty with Spain and France led to their withdrawal, Juan de Concepción’s prologue to his Historia general de Philipinas (1788) reiterates the same atemporal continuity of Spanish imperial glory, marked with a delirious conviction that the all-butdefunct Spanish empire was at that very moment poised to complete its world conquest. In an extended identification of Spain’s history with the history of Rome (taken from Seneca), Concepción declares King Carlos III worthy of the title Universal Monarch, a monarch “whom God perhaps appointed for the domination of the World, given that anyone who considers [the Spanish monarchy’s] reign from its creation, trembles” (n.p.) [a quien acaso distintó Dios á la dominación del Mundo; por que si se considera, desde la creacion su dominio, pasma]. His enumeration of Christendom’s victories against the British, Dutch, French, Chinese, and Muslims over the course of two centuries provides a marked contrast to the general consensus (at least in Europe) that this was the very period in which Spain experienced its worst defeats at the hands of these rival powers. 7. Fr. Joaquín Martínez de Zúñiga, Historia de las Islas Philipinas, iii–v. [Las historias de Philipinas se componen de volúmenes grandes, y tomos en

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Notes to Pages 235–239

folio mayores. . . . Para llenar estos libros ha sido preciso a nuestros Historiadores, que por lo común son Regulares, tratar muy por extenso las vidas de muchos Religiosos, y las determinaciones de sus Capítulos, noticias poco interesantes al resto de los hombres. . . . Para no caer en este error, he suprimido varias reflexiones, que se debieran hacer; arreglándose á las Leyes de la Historia , hé callado otras, por que no se debe decir todo lo que se sabe, dejándolas de intento, para que el Lector imparcial las haga por si mismo . Si se encuentran otros defectos, procederán a veces del fi n que me he propuesto, que ha sido atender todo lo posible á la concisión sin dejar de referir todas las circunstancias de los hechos, y cuidar de la claridad, aunque sea á costa de descuidar un poco de la hermosura, que no es tan necesaria para el fi n, que he tenido en escribir esta Historia. Vale.] 8. Martínez de Zúñiga, Historical View of the Philippine Islands, xvi. 9. “By revealing the law of time as the external boundary of the human sciences,” Foucault writes, “History shows that everything that has been thought will be thought again by a thought that does not yet exist” (The Order of Things, 372–73). This new function of history, which Foucault labels “the analytic of fi nitude,” is opposed to historicism, which in a sense takes up the older function of history and ramifies it through connections established between history and the modern social or “human” sciences. 10. One may argue that this historical tendency had everything to do with the integration of knowledge and technologies for the sake of capitalism, as well as the rise of the human sciences in Europe. While Foucault’s The Order of Things does not explicitly address this conjuncture, his study of the transformation between an “analysis of wealth” (Adam Smith) and “political economy” (Ricardo), as well as his discussion of positive knowledges, is inextricably tied to the globalization of capitalism in this period. See, in particular 303–43 (“Man and His Doubles”). 11. Ricardo de Puga, “Crónica del País (El Pacto de Sangre),” Ilustración filipina, 1:18–19. 12. On the idea of a “bloodless pacification,” see John Phelan, The Hispanization of the Philippines, 8. Phelan notes that the king’s written instructions to the chief of the Spanish expedition Miguel de Legazpi “could have been lifted almost verbatim from the lectures of the Dominican theologian, Francisco de Vitoria. . . . The adoption by the Spanish court of the Dominicaninspired ideal of pacification coincided with the founding of the Philippine colony” (8–9). 13. The bishopric of Nueva Cáceres presently belongs to Naga City and the surrounding Bicol province of Camarines Sur. For a recent analysis of this text and its relation to debates on colonial censorship as well as the generation of Filipino ilustrado propagandists, see Smita Lahiri, “Rhetorical Indios.” Lahiri’s argument states in abbreviated form some of the general themes outlined in this chapter. 14. “Los españoles han ejercido con nosotros por más de trescientos años el cargo de padres: á ellos debemos la religión, la civilización, las leyes paternales y sabias, los bienes, orden y seguridad que disfrutamos: en una palabra, todo lo que nos distingue de las hordas salvajes que nos rodean.”

Notes to Pages 239–246

329

15. “No se convino el visaya con el tagalo, ni este con el pampango, ni unas provincias con otras para formar la unidad de gobierno que hoy tenemos; cada familia, cada ranchería, sin conocimiento ni intervención de las demás, se unió al castila.” 16. “Sólo la bandera española con sus leyes, sus autoridades y su sistema evangélico, es el lazo que une y conserva en sociedad fraternal a las distintas provincias del archipiélago. Romped ese lazo, suprímase esa bandera, y veréis desaparecer de nuestras playas la unidad, el orden, la riqueza, y hasta la civilización. Las naciones que tuvieron historia, gobierno y leyes, si por alguna causa caen bajo la dominación extranjera, el día de su emancipación pueden volver a su antiguo régimen con sus peculiares leyes; mas nosotros nada de esto tenemos que no sea español, y volver a lo antiguo sería buscar el salvajismo.” 17. In her extended analysis of this text, Smita Lahiri writes, “When friar authors disseminated images of an indio public they advanced both a selfserving construction as well as an unintended foundation for the efforts of Philippine nationalists to summon a differently construed national public into existence” (“Rhetorical Indios,” 270). 18. O. D. Corpuz notes that the Recopilación de las Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias prohibited Spaniards from residing in native villages until 1752, although the law still seemed to be in effect in various towns and villages afterward. See Roots of the Filipino Nation, 1:690, n. 2. 19. See, for example, Graciano López Jaena, Discursos y artículos varios, 337 (letter 6, March 1887), as well as letters by José E. Aguirre and Antonio Luna to Rizal in Epistolario Rizalino, 1:246–47 and 2:59. See also John Schumacher, The Propaganda Movement, 70. For an extended discussion of this episode in propagandist history, see John D. Blanco, “Vernacular Counterpoint,” 340–48. 20. Hannah Arendt, Imperialism, 38–64; Colette Guillaumin, Racism, Sexism, Power and Ideology, 61–98; Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 37–67. 21. Feced, “Ellos y nosotros.” The article was originally published in 1887. 22. Pablo Feced, Filipinas: Esbozos y pinceladas, 360–61. “No se conoce allá que para despertar actividades de la masa, es necesaria, de toda necesidad, la acción incesante del Estado; los cien brazos de la administración, ayudados y robustecidos por elementos fijos en el país, de valor étnico superior a la muchedumbre; por corrientes de superior emigración. . . . No se conoce el carácter primitivo y acentuadamente infantil de estas muchedumbres . . . [determinado] por factores fisiológicos ineludibles, que demandan por tanto una política especial, adaptada a su especial naturaleza.” 23. See Miguel de Unamuno’s En torno al casticismo. The group of writers who expressed their disenchantment with Spain’s fallen empire were called the Generation of ‘98, and included Unamuno, Angel Ganivet, Pio Baroja, Azorín, Ramón María del Valle-Inclan, Antonio Machado, and Ramón de Maetzu. 24. See, for example, Rizal’s withering critique of Vicente Barrantes’ history of Tagalog theater, “A su excelencia, Don Vicente Barrantes.” 25. “El pasado de Filipinas se reduce en grandes rasgos á lo que sigue. Incorporadas apenas á la Corona Española, tuvieron que sostener con su sangre

330

Notes to Pages 248–251

y con los esfuerzos de sus hijos las guerras y las ambiciones conquistadoras del pueblo español, y 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.” José Rizal, “Filipinas dentro de cien años,” La Solidaridad 1:378. 26. “¿Cómo entonces y de qué modo se convirtió aquel activo y emprendedor y dio infiel de los antiguos tiempos en el cristiano perezoso e indolente, que dicen nuestros escritores de ahora?” 27. “¿A qué se debe este retroceso? Es la dichosa civilización, es la salvadora religión de los frailes, llamada de Jesucristo por eufemismo, la que ha producido este milagro, la que ha atrofi ado el cerebro, paralizando el corazón y hecho del hombre esa especie de animal vicioso que pintan los escritores?” 28. “Y además, ¿para qué trabajar? Se decían muchos indios. El cura dice que el rico no va al cielo; el rico en la tierra se expone a todas las vejaciones, a todas la molestias . . . a ser desterrado si estalla una sublevación, a ser el obligado prestamista del jefe militar de un pueblo. . . . ¿Para qué ser rico? Para que todos los Ministros de la Justicia tengan un ojo de lince sobre sus acciones, a fi n de que al menor tropiezo le susciten enemigos, le procesen, le armen toda una historia laberíntica y complicada.” [And besides, why work at all? many Indios ask one another. The priest says that the rich man won’t go to heaven; the rich man on earth exposes himself to every manner of vexation, every kind of burden . . . only to be exiled, if an uprising breaks out; only to be obliged to pay a special tax to the military leader of the town. . . . Why be rich? So that all the Ministers of Justice can keep a predator’s eye [ojo de lince] over his actions, and over the least allegation unleash upon him enemies, trials, a labyrinthine and complicated indictment (“Sobre la indolencia de los Filipinos,” La Solidaridad, 2:392. 29. This account is covered in Leon Ma. Guerrero’s biography of Rizal, The First Filipino, 205–9. See also John Schumacher, The Making of a Nation, 109. 30. Rizal derives this information from Bartolomé Leonardo de Argensola’s history of the conquest, Conquista de las islas Malvcas (1609). 31. “No es culpa de Ubal el que no haya sido visto, como dice Morga; estaban en pleno combate . . . [¿]desearía . . . que el Indio le llamase primero la atención si estaba distraído, para dejarse matar estúpidamente?” 32. “Nacido y criado en el desconocimiento de nuestro Ayer como casi todos vosotros; sin voz ni autoridad para hablar de lo que no vimos ni estudiamos, consideré necesario invocar el testimonio de un ilustre Español que . . . presenció los últimos momentos de nuestra antigua nacionalidad. Es, pues, la sombra de la civilización de nuestros antepasados la que ahora ante vosotros evocará el autor; os transmito fielmente sus palabras, sin cambiarlas ni mutilarlas. . . . Si el libro logra despertar en vosotros la conciencia de nuestro pasado, borrado de la memoria, y rectificar lo que se ha falseado y calumniado, entonces . . . podremos todos dedicarnos á estudiar el porvenir.”

Notes to Pages 254–263

331

33. “Las antiguas enemistades entre diferentes provincias las ha borrado una misma llaga, la afrenta general inferida a toda una raza” (La Solidaridad, 1:432). [The old enmities dividing different regions have been erased by the same sore, the general affront applied to an entire race.] “Una misma desgracia y un mismo rebajamiento han unido a todos los habitantes de las Islas” (La Solidaridad, 2:434). [One and the same misfortune and degradation have united all the inhabitants of the Islands.] 34. Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class, 49. 35. “La historia no registra en sus anales ninguna dominación duradera ejercida por un pueblo sobre otro, de razas diferentes, de usos y costumbres extrañas, y de ideales opuestos o divergentes. Uno de los dos ha tenido que ceder y sucumbir. . . . Es contra todas las leyes naturales y morales la existencia de un cuerpo extraño dentro de otro dotado de fuerza y actividad. . . . La necesidad es la divinidad mas fuerte que el mundo conoce, y la necesidad es el resultado de las leyes físicas puestas en movimiento por las fuerzas morales.” 36. Not coincidentally, Rizal owned a bound copy of Ilustración Filipina’s full subscription, which only lasted two years, and brought it with him when he went to Spain to study medicine. See Isagani Medina, comp., Index to “Ilustración filipina”: An Author and Subject Index, March 1859–December 1860, 2. 37. Rizal’s explanation for the name Juan Crisóstomo does not appear until the end of his second novel, El filibusterismo. 38. An earlier version of this section emphasizes the symbolic economy of debt and reciprocity at work in the colonial expatriate’s return home, by comparing the Noli to the symbolic economies of debt and reciprocity as they appear in Gregorio Sanciangco y Goson’s El progreso de Filipinas (1881) and Rizal’s epistolary correspondence with Jesuit priest Pablo Pastells. See John Blanco, “Economium Admirabile: Return and Redemption in Rizal’s Noli me tangere and the Rizal-Pastells Correspondence,” 373–405. 39. Rizal, Noli me tangere, 185 and 187. 40. The implication of Ibarra’s Spanish Basque paternity is discussed briefly in Nick Joaquin’s essay, “Why Was the Rizal Hero a Creole?”; see A Question of Heroes, 78. Joaquin somewhat disingenuously conflates Creoles with Spanish and Chinese mestizos, whereas colonial policymakers sought to keep these categories separate. 41. Rizal, Noli me tangere, 194. 42. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, 254. 43. See Doris Sommer, Foundational Fictions, 30–51. 44. Ibarra’s full paternal appellation, Eibarramendia, is a contraction of Ybarra and Mendia, two illustrious families from the Basque country. Ibarra’s Basque ancestry is significant for several reasons. Manuel López de Legazpi, the conquistador largely credited for the initial pacification of Manila and other parts of Luzon in the sixteenth century, was Basque. Closer to Rizal’s own time, the Basque country waged two wars in the nineteenth century (which they lost, in 1839 and 1876) to protect their provincial autonomy from intrusion by the Spanish constitutional government. Their loss led to a tumultuous

332

Notes to Pages 263–265

history of resistance and exile that continues to this day. See Marciano R. de Borja, Basques in the Philippines. 45. Elaine Pagels juxtaposes the thought of the early Church fathers like Chrysostom with that of Augustine, whose Christian doctrines of original sin, free will, and temporal government came to accommodate the adoption of Christianity as the religion of the Roman Empire. By contrast, “as John saw it, imperial rule epitomized the social consequences of sin. Like his persecuted Christian predecessors, John ridiculed the imperial propaganda, which claimed that the state rests upon concord, justice, and liberty. On the contrary, he said, the state relies upon force and compulsion, often using these to violate justice and to suppress liberty” (Pagels, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, 29). For a summary of the contrast between Chrysostom and Augustine’s views, see www.drury.edu/faculty/ess/values/chrysostom.html. 46. “Noli me tángere, mots tires de l’Évangile de Saint Luc, signifie ne me touché point. Le livre contient donc de choses dont personne chez nous n’a jusqu’á present parlé: tant elles sont delicates que ne consentaient point á être touché par quelque ce soit” (quoted in Retana, Vida y escritos del Dr. José Rizal, 126). 47. This translation is taken from The New English Bible, 1970. 48. The romantic dignity of the symbol stems from this assertion. See Ernst Bloch, Natural Law and Human Dignity: “Freedom,” the author writes, “in all of its levels as a freedom of choice and of action, as ethical and religious, is only founded contra fatum, thus in a perspective of a still open world, one not yet determined all the way to the end” (112; italics in original). 49. “For the creative individual’s reflexion, the novelist’s ethic vis-à-vis the content, is a double one. His reflexion consists of giving form to what happens to the idea in real life, of describing the actual nature of this process and of evaluating and considering its reality. This reflexion, however, in turn, becomes an object for reflexion; it is itself only an ideal, only subjective and postulative; it, too, has a certain destiny in a reality which is alien to it; and this destiny, now purely reflexive and contained within the narrator himself, must also be given form” (Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 85). 50. For a discussion of allegory and irony as two aesthetic modes of representing time in the narrative, see Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight, 187–228. 51. “Perdonad, señor . . . no soy bastante elocuente para convenceros; si bien he tenido alguna educación, soy un indio, mi existencia para vos es dudosa, y mis palabras os parecerán siempre sospechosas. Los que han expresado la opinión contraria son los españoles, y como tales, aunque digan trivialidades o simplezas, el tono, los títulos y el origen lo consagran.” 52. “¿Qué quieres? No me he educado en medio del pueblo, cuyas necesidades desconozco tal vez; he pasado mi niñez en el colegio de los jesuitas, he crecido en Europa, me he formado en los libros y he leído solo lo que los hombres han podido traer a la luz: lo que permanece entre las sombras, lo que no dicen los escritores, eso lo ignoro.” 53. “Miradme bien, mirad si he sufrido, y vos vivís, amáis, tenéis fortuna, hogar, consideraciones, vivís . . . ¡vivís!”

Notes to Pages 267–271

333

54. “Muero sin ver la aurora brillar sobre mi patria . . . ! Vosotros, que la habéis de ver, saludla. . . . ¡No os olvidéis de los que han caído durante la noche!” 55. “¿Quién será el hereje que en día de fiesta hace kaining? . . . ¡Prueba ir al purgatorio, y verás si te saco de allá, salvaje!” In Tagalog, kaining refers to the burning of the rice stalks after the harvest so that the ashes fertilize the earth for the next planting season. 56. Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel, 74–75. 57. Hans Blumenberg makes an interesting observation regarding the symbol and its co-optation as part of a “rhetoric of secularizations” in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. He writes, “The difference between a symbol and an image or a metaphor or an allegory always consists in the symbol’s unspecific adoption, in its being understood as a result of an agreement; an alliance or an antecedent relation of hospitality as support of resulting rights” (111). 58. This is the subject of Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976. For a compatible illustration of this transformation of thought in the history of philosophy, see Hans Blumenberg, Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 125–226. 59. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” 72. 60. José Rizal, Epistolario Rizalino, 2:98–99. “Both languages” ostensibly refers to Spanish and one vernacular language, which, for his compatriots, may or may not have been Tagalog.

epilogue : colonialism and modernit y 1. See AB, 3:992 [no. 2086]). Written for the vernacular Tagalog reading public, Aviso al Pueblo described the medicinal and beneficial qualities of various plants and herbs in order to benefit the local medical practitioners and healers. This information was particularly useful, given the lack of licensed doctors in the archipelago and the colonial government’s alarm at the spread of quack-doctors. See Luciano Santiago, “The First Filipino Doctors.” Francisco Cañamaque, a bureaucrat writing in the 1870s, claimed the lack of licensed medical practitioners as well as other service professionals in Manila and the municipalities was sufficient justification for discouraging the native Filipino from aspiring to professions like the priesthood; see Recuerdos de Filipinas, 273–78. 2. Wenceslao E. Retana, Tablas cronológica y alfabética de imprenta e impresores de Filipinas, 5; and AB, 2:562, 568, and 849–50. Originally published in 1837, Flora de Filipinas went through two more editions in 1845 and 1877. The last edition included illustrations by the most renowned artists of the colony (including a young Juan Luna), along with two earlier works on Philippine plants by two other Augustinian priests, Antonio Llanos (a contemporary of Blanco’s) and Ignacio Mercado. The latter, a Spanish-Tagalog mestizo of the seventeenth century, wrote the fi rst study on the medicinal qualities of plants native to the Philippines in 1666 (AB, 1:12); however, his unpublished manuscript was not discovered until more than two centuries later, when it was reported in the liberal newspaper Revista de Filipinas (2:1560), under the editorship of José Felipe del Pan. In 1887, Flora de Filipinas was displayed

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Notes to Pages 272–279

in Madrid’s world exposition, where it received an award and a great deal of public attention. 3. Juan Alvarez Guerra also relates this story in his travel memoirs, Viajes por Filipinas: De Manila a Tayabas, chapter 7 (available online: see www. gutenberg.org/etext/12276, last accessed August 13, 2007). Francisco de Paula Entrala also briefly mentions the story of Fray Blanco’s El indio and its fate in Olvidos de Filipinas, 61; it also appears as a metaphor for his character Charing in his novel Sin título (see chapter 6). 4. Retana, El indio batangüeño, 1. 5. F. de Lerena, “Cuatro palabras sobre el Indio Filipino,” cited in AB, 3:1532. 6. “It was deduced from such an anecdote that the Indio was a mysterious being, becoming more indecipherable the more one was concerned with him, or rather, one knew the Indio less and less the more one studied him. Of course, in the satisfaction received in ridiculing the Filipino, it didn’t strike anyone how illogical that deduction was, because really, from logically examining such a story, what [Blanco] demonstrates is THE INCOMPETENCE OF THE OBSERVER” (Trinidad H. Pardo de Tavera, El carácter de Rizal, 15; capitals in original). 7. Javier Tisco y Morales, “El comercio en Filipinas,” (part 17), El Oriente, 1 January 1877, 6. 8. “El conocimiento de las leyes especiales que rigen el país, en sus costumbres, en su comercio e industria, en sus medios de producción, en su geografía física y civil, en todo aquello, en fi n, que constituye, propiamente dicho, el objeto de la administración, en sus mas esenciales funciones.” 9. See Nicholas Tarling, Nations and States in Southeast Asia, 47–56; Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace, 1–15; Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth. 10. The most visible cross-fertilization of Asian and Latin American studies in recent years has been the organization (now defunct) of a Latin American Subaltern Studies group. This group initiated a series of lively debates on the status of the Gramscian concept of “the subaltern” in Latin America, but also (and more significantly) contributed to the visibility of an interregional “Americas,” formed by the politics of border-making and border-crossing, population diaspora and transmigration, intellectual cosmopolitanism, and transculturation. It also spurred new lines of investigation into the idea of “colonial modernity” (Dube) and “trans-modernity” (Dussel). This in turn renewed our attention to earlier thinkers of Latin American modernity, from José Martí to Fernando Ortiz and José Carlos Mariátegui, even as it forged new links between the humanities and social movements. See Ileana Rodriguez, ed., The Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader. For an insightful critique of subaltern studies in a Latin American context, see Florencia E. Mallon, “The Promise and Dilemma of Subaltern Studies.” 11. Agamben, State of Exception, 31. 12. Josep Fradera, Colonias para después de un imperio, chap. 2; Theodore Grossman, “The Guardia Civil”; Eliodoro Robles, Philippines in the Nineteenth Century, 255.

Notes to Pages 279–282

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13. In his dissenting opinion, Supreme Court justice John Harlan wrote the following statement, which gets right to the heart of the paradox of “exceptional legislation” already prefigured in Spain’s earlier Special Laws: “The idea prevails with some, indeed it has found expression in arguments at the bar, the we have in this country substantially two national governments; one to be maintained under the Constitution, with all of its restrictions; the other to be maintained by Congress outside and independently of that instrument, by exercising such powers as other nations of the earth are accustomed to . . . I take leave to say that, if the principles thus announced should ever receive sanction of a majority of this court, a radical and mischievous change in our system of government will result. We will, in that event, pass from the era of constitutional liberty guarded and protected by a written constitution into an era of legislative absolutism. . . . It will be an evil day for American Liberty if the theory of a government outside the Supreme Law of the Land fi nds lodgment in our Constitutional Jurisprudence. No higher duty rests upon this court than to exert its full authority to prevent all violation of the principles of the Constitution.” 182 U.S. 244, 21 S. Ct. 770. 14. See Hannah Arendt, Imperialism, 65–101; Chatterjee, “More on Modes of Power and the Peasantry”; Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 35–52. 15. See, for example, Edgar Wickberg, The Chinese in Philippine Life, 131–32. 16. John Furnivall, The Fashioning of Leviathan, 153–60. 17. See Fernando Ortiz, Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar; Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest; Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti.” 18. See Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man. 19. “À ces trois sortes de lois, il s’en joint une quatrième, la plus importante de toutes; qui ne se grave ni sur le marbre ni sur l’airain, mais dans les coeurs des citoyens; qui fait la véritable constitution de l’Etat; qui prend tous les jours de nouvelles forces; qui, lorsque les autres lois vieillissent ou s’éteignent, les ranime ou les supplée, conserve un peuple dans l’esprit de son institution, et substitue insensiblement la force de l’habitude à celle de l’autorité. Je parle des moeurs, des coûtumes, et surtout de l’opinion” (Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Du Contrat Social, bk. 2, chap. 12). 20. Quoted in Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, 174 (italics added). Derrida cites two other passages in which Rousseau makes use of this metaphor. According to Derrida, the economy of pity as outlined by Rousseau shares an intimate relationship with the birth of speech, insofar as both express a logic of supplementarity; that is, both are considered an addition to (i.e., outside of) and constitutive of the state of nature as “natural law” in its most general sense. For Derrida, this contradiction betrays the underlying impossibility of asserting and invoking the authority of onto-theological notions of being or presence (state of nature, origin, “transcendental signified,” subjectivity); it also demonstrates the manner by which these tropes of presence are nevertheless reaffi rmed in the denotation of lack that motivates the order of signification according to the Saussurean tradition of linguistics. On the economy of pity, see 171–92.

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Notes to Pages 282–285

21. Ibid., 190. 22. Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic, 23. 23. Bonifacio, “Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog,” 94. 24. Confidential letter no. 816 to the overseas minister from the governor of the Philippines, Rafael de Izquierdo, Manila, 12 October 1872.

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Index

Abrams, Philip, 49–50, 297n50 acculturation, 13, 45, 97, 164, 169, 308n3 Addison, Joseph, 161, 325n42 aesthetics, 7–9, 16, 23, 157–83; and “Agapito Macapingan,” 160–61, 171–83, 320n37, 322n45; and costumbrismo, 54, 158, 162–71, 174, 182, 318–19nn11,12,15–17, 319–20n25; and historical turn, 244, 257; and production of longing, 53–63; and publics, 130–31, 133; and values/norms, 186, 209, 224 Aetas, 87 Agamben, Giorgio, 278 “Agapito Macapingan” (Casademunt), 160–61, 171–83, 320n37, 322n45 Agoncillo, Teodoro, 151 agriculture. See export agriculture; subsistence agriculture Aguilar, Filomeno, 96, 313n17 Aguilar, Rafael, 305n37 Agustín. See San Agustín, Fr. Gaspar de akribeia (letter of law), 103 Alaras, Consolación, 96 “albums,” 54, 162 alcohol state monopoly, 14, 20 allegory, 4, 5–6, 59, 262–70, 300n7, 333n57; and aesthetics, 165; and historical turn, 259, 262–70, 331n37, 333n57; and native customs, 112–13, 117; and values/ norms, 216, 224–25 Alvarez Guerra, Juan, 334n3

amor propio (sense of self), 141, 244 Anda y Salazar, Simón, 71–72, 301–2nn13,16, 304n33 Anderson, Benedict, 7, 146 “Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog” (Bonifacio), 284 Ang Mahal na Pasión ni Jesu Christong P. Natin na Tola (Aquino de Belén), 107 Ang Pagsisiyam sa Pagmamahal na Virgen ng Kapayapaan at Mabuting Paglalakbay (Pilapil), 110 Ang Pagsusulatan nang Dalauang Binibini na si Urbana at si Feliza na Nagtuturo ng Mabuting Kaugalian (Castro). See Urbana at Feliza (Castro) Anselmo, Rosario, 216 anticolonial movements, 96, 98, 108, 117, 146, 148, 208, 260, 270 apartheid, 90, 156. See also racial difference Apolinario de la Cruz uprising (1841). See Tayabas rebellion (1841) apostrophe (literary device), 57, 61 Aquino de Belén, Gaspar, 103, 106–7, 110–12, 114–15, 310–11nn27,29 Arendt, Hannah, 305n39 Arimón y Andario, Joaquín, 90 aristocracy, 73, 89, 193, 316– 17nn50,52, 325n40 Aritao commune, 98, 118–19. See also Tayabas rebellion (1841) “artistic-scientific” publications, 160–61

359

360 Augustine, Saint, 332n45 Augustinian Recollects, 310n28 Augustinians, 82, 100, 272, 286, 333–34n2 Austin, John L., 52 authorship, 117, 137–38 autochthonous originality, 23, 163–67, 166fig., 241, 319n21 Aviso al Pueblo (Tissot), 271, 319– 20n25, 333n1 awit (Tagalog poetry), 309n14 Azcárraga, Manuel, 91 Azorín, Antonio, 329n23 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 187, 190–91, 222, 268, 323n11 Balagtas, Francisco, 19, 55–56, 58–62, 100, 123, 125, 281–84, 299nn71–73 balagtasan (oral poetic jousts), 100 Balibar, Etienne, 88, 255 Baliwag rhyme, 27–29 Baltazar. See Balagtas, Francisco Bankoff, Greg, 303n27 Baquiran, Romulo, Jr., 323–24n21 barangay (municipality), 101, 105, 172–73, 320n32 Baroja, Pio, 329n23 baroque, 57–61 Barrantes, Vicente, 100, 106, 242–44 Basco y Vargas, José, 27, 34, 39–40, 51, 79, 130 Belén, Gaspar Aquino de. See Aquino de Belén, Gaspar Benjamin, Walter, 262–63 Berlin Conference (1883), 21 Bernáldez Pizarro, Manuel, 81, 83–86, 120–21, 152, 318n13 Bhaba, Homi, 319–20n25 “black legend” (legenda negra), 30–31, 291–92n6 Blanco, Manuel, 271–74, 286, 319– 20n25, 333–34nn1–3,6 Blanco Andrés, Roberto, 82 Bloch, Ernst, 332n48 blood compact (Sandugo), 229–33, 230fig., 236–38, 241 “bloodless pacification,” 237, 328n12 Blumenberg, Hans, 155, 316–17nn52,54, 333n57 Blumentritt, Ferdinand, 249 Boletín Ofi cial de Filipinas, 159, 314n24 Bolton, Herbert, 31 Bonifacio, Andres, 284 books, 142, 257, 259, 265, 314n26. See also names of books

Index Bourbon reform policy, 10, 20–21, 27, 31, 33–34, 275; and historical turn, 247; and missionary orders, 64–66, 74, 77, 79–80, 82, 93, 199, 313n17 Bowring, John, 152, 319n21 Boxer, Charles R., 79 Brading, David, 7 British Empire, 14, 27–28, 30, 34, 79, 244, 277, 280, 294n27 British invasion of Manila (1762), 6, 14, 22, 30, 33–34, 52, 71–72, 77, 82, 327n6 British Museum library, 249, 257 brutalization (animalización), 248 Buck-Morss, Susan, 280 Burgos, José Apolinario, 146–47, 150–51, 153–56, 248 Burma, 277, 296n47 Calderón de la Barca, Pedro, 58 Camacho y Ávila, Archbishop Diego, 309n19 Camba, Captain-General. See García Camba, Captain-General Andrés Campomanes, Pedro Rodríguez de, 71–72 Cañamaque, Francisco, 184–85, 209, 211–16, 226, 242, 244, 325n33, 333n1 Cannell, Fennella, 96 capitalism, 13, 14, 17–19, 44, 47–48, 53, 276–77; and historical turn, 261, 328n10; and missionary orders, 82; and publics, 130, 142; and values/norms, 185, 199, 209 Los Caprichos (Goya), 164 Caravaggio, Michelangelo, 244, 245fig. Carlos (Charles) III, king of Spain, 27, 33–34, 41, 64, 71, 327n6 carnivalesque, 190, 209 Casademunt, Federico, 160–61, 172–83, 215, 320n37, 322n45 Cascardi, Anthony, 58 cash-crop agriculture. See export agriculture Castilian language. See Spanish language Castilians. See peninsular Spaniards Castro, Agustín María de, 298n59 Castro, Modesto de, 23, 189, 191–92, 194–201, 203, 206–8, 215, 284, 323–24nn14,16,21 catechism, 56, 96, 101–2, 105, 107, 109, 112 Catholic Church, 12, 23, 65, 68–73, 75, 82–83, 93–94, 299–300n1, 300–301n7, 301–2n16; and historical turn, 234, 241, 259, 332n45;

Index and native customs, 98, 101–24, 310n28; and values/norms, 184, 186, 212, 217, 225. See also missionary orders Cavite mutiny (1872), 93, 150–51, 160, 171, 184, 186, 285 Cecilia Valdés (Villaverde), 210 censorship, 16, 20, 55, 297–300n1; and aesthetics, 160; and historical turn, 241, 243, 257, 328n13; and native customs, 109–11, 123–24; and publics, 134–36, 141–43, 150, 314n26; and values/norms, 186, 212 censuses, 91, 158, 232–33 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 277 chapbooks, 7, 54 Chatterjee, Partha, 48–49, 277, 288n10, 290n31 Chick-José. See Cruz, José de la (Huseng Sisiw) Chinese expulsions, 83 Chinese mestizos, 1, 3, 6, 7, 14–15, 17, 33, 51; and aesthetics, 159, 319n17; and historical turn, 242, 254, 261, 331n40; and native customs, 121; and publics, 148–49; and racial difference, 83, 87, 306n50; as secular clergy, 77, 83, 89; and values/ norms, 185, 210, 216–22, 224 Chirino, Fr. Pedro de, 105 cholera epidemic, 313n17 Christendom, Spanish, 1, 11, 18, 46, 51–52, 63, 69, 269, 276, 284–85 Christian conversion, 29, 31, 52, 58, 69, 74, 96–97, 303n25; and historical turn, 237–38; and native customs, 101, 103, 107. See also evangelization, Christian Christian economy (oikonomia), 23, 102–4, 112–20, 121fig., 122–24, 240–41, 249, 308–9n10 Christianity/civilization, 167, 237–41, 263, 277 Christianization, 12, 74, 97, 100, 217, 221, 251, 303n25 Church lands, seizure of, 71–72, 82, 93 Civil Guard. See Guardia Civil civilization, 273, 277; and aesthetics, 161–62, 164–65, 167, 176; and historical turn, 167, 237–41, 243–44, 246–48, 251–53, 263–64; and publics, 131, 145, 156; and values/ norms, 185–86, 203, 211 civil liberties, 211–12, 275–76, 312n8, 325n40 civil society, 9, 49, 63, 276; and aesthetics, 158–59, 164, 167–69, 174,

361 180; and publics, 131, 144, 146; and values/norms, 216–17, 219–21, 224. See also public sphere Clavería, Captain-General Narciso, 3, 124, 157–58 Clavijo y Fajardo, José, 325n42 cleanliness (kalinisan), 195 clergy. See missionary orders; secular clergy colonial bureaucracy, 6, 22, 40, 51, 64, 211, 325n33 colonial hegemony, crisis of, 6–10, 22, 30, 48, 52, 63, 66; and historical turn, 232; and native customs, 97–98; and publics, 144; and racial difference, 86; and values/norms, 187, 209 colonial literature, 9–10, 18–19, 55, 123, 189, 216, 258. See also names of works colonial modernity, 5–6, 23, 24, 45, 53, 62, 271–72, 278, 285, 287–88n6, 334n10; and aesthetics, 159–60, 169, 171, 183; and historical turn, 230, 232, 236, 246, 251–52, 255–56, 262–70; and native customs, 96, 99, 104, 119–20; and publics, 130, 142, 149; and racial difference, 87, 246; and values/ norms, 189–90, 199–200, 204, 206, 208–9, 226 colonial state, 1, 3, 6–10, 14–17, 19, 20, 21–22, 24, 274–86, 290n31; and aesthetics, 160–63, 169–80, 183, 320n37; and historical turn, 233, 236–70, 327n4; invention of, 27, 29–31, 41–57, 63, 296nn42– 44,47, 297nn50,52; and missionary orders, 64–68, 76–82; and native customs, 118–20, 123–25; and publics, 133, 137, 141–45, 147, 150–51; and racial difference, 83–90; and Special Laws, 6, 21, 23, 65–66, 80, 83, 90–94; and values/norms, 185–86, 197–99, 209, 217, 220, 222–26 colony, 14–15, 30–31, 38–40, 42, 46, 53 comedia. See kumedya playwrights commerce, 5, 14–15, 33–36, 40–43, 274–75; and historical turn, 235, 245, 247, 257; and publics, 130–33, 142, 313n22. See also trade commercial agriculture. See export agriculture common good. See public good common laws. See customary rights (derecho consuetudinal)

362 common sense, 7–11, 12–13, 14, 19–20, 64, 66, 97, 187, 278, 282, 288–89n13 community of sentiment (sensus communis), 7–8 “compromise government,” 46, 64, 69, 292n7 Comyn, Tomás de, 41–46, 51–54, 60, 79–81, 83, 130, 293n23, 295n33, 297n56, 298n61, 304n35 Concepción, Fr. Juan de, 327n6 “conceptualized communities,” 50–51, 274–78, 288n10 El Conde Filipino. See Rodríguez Varela, Luis (“El Conde Filipino”) confession, 68, 101, 304n30 Conquistas de las Islas Filipinas (San Agustín), 233–34 conscience, examination of, 68, 304n30 Consejo Supremo, 132 Constantine, emperor of Rome, 112 corporal punishment, 68, 74, 303n27 Corpuz, Onofre D., 303n25, 329n18 corruption, 34, 40, 43, 185 Cortes (Spanish Assembly), 21, 65, 91–92, 185, 215 costumbrismo: and aesthetics, 54, 158, 162–71, 174, 182, 318– 19nn11,12,15–17, 319–20n25; and historical turn, 251, 257–58; and values/norms, 209–10, 213, 216, 221–22, 224, 325nn39,42 Council of the Indies, 82 counterhistories, 24, 232–33, 242–62, 264, 267, 269–70 courtship, pre-Hispanic (bigaycaya), 196–97 Covar, Prospero, 13, 96 Creoles, 1, 3, 6, 21, 40, 52, 273, 275; and historical turn, 232, 242, 248, 253–54, 261, 331n40; and publics, 145–54, 156, 315n38; and racial difference, 64, 66, 87; as secular clergy, 82–83; and values/norms, 185–86 “Crónica del País” (Puga), 166–67 Cruz, Apolinario de la, 23, 86, 98–99, 108, 118, 120–22, 124 Cruz, Hermenegildo, 299n71 Cruz, José de la (Huseng Sisiw), 55–57, 62, 297–98nn58,62 Cuba, 6, 16, 21, 52, 65, 77, 185, 209–10, 215, 278, 312n5, 320n37, 322n45 Cuerpo de Carabineros de Seguridad Pública, 91 Culler, Jonathan, 61

Index cultural commodities, 55–57, 62–63 “culture,” 51, 53–63, 277; “general culture” (Comyn), 27, 44, 52–53 cúmplase, 96, 304n33. See also “Obedezco pero no cumplo” customary rights (derecho consuetudinal), 32, 83 customs, 20, 23, 24, 39, 95–125, 162, 273, 282–84; Christian economy (oikonomia), 23, 102–4, 112–24, 121fig., 308–9n10; dalit (oral versification), 28–29, 103–7, 111, 117–19, 121–22, 309n14; folk Christianity, 17–19, 23, 96–99, 103, 111, 118, 123–25; and historical turn, 230–31, 238, 240, 245–46, 248, 257; ladinos, 107–8, 124, 309nn19,22; native traditions (kaugalian), 97–103, 109–11, 115–21, 124, 308nn5,7,10, 309n11; Pasyóng Pilapil, 98, 109–19, 121fig., 122–24, 122fig., 310–11nn27–29; and values/norms, 190–201, 203–11, 214, 217, 220–21 dalit (oral versification), 28–29, 103–7, 111, 117–19, 121–22, 309n14 Dalit sa Caluwalhatian sa Langit na Cararatnan ng mga Banal, 121–22 damay (sympathy or compassion), 97 “dangerous supplement,” 51 Darwinism, vulgar, 242, 244, 252, 254, 269, 280, 305n39 Declaration of the Rights of Man, 312n8 deculturation, 97, 308n3 de Man, Paul, 265 deportation policies, 83, 87, 91, 306n50 Derrida, Jacques. See “dangerous supplement” despotism, colonial, 17, 49, 71–72, 75–76, 91, 94, 175, 179, 187, 208, 274, 290n31 desprestigio (disrepute), 89, 155 dialectics, 23, 97; and aesthetics, 171, 182; and historical turn, 237, 256, 267; and publics, 145–46; and values/norms, 193, 200, 208, 219, 222, 225 dialogism, 187, 190–91, 199, 201, 208 Diario de Manila, 142, 159, 171, 215, 314n24 Díaz y Arenas, Rafael, 130 Diderot, Denis, 161 discrimination, 43, 64, 148. See also racial difference La Discusión, 155

Index disenchantment, 21, 151, 190, 193 Doce Pares de Francia, 57–59, 299n69 docetism, 114 doctrinal errors, 109–14, 123 Domingo, Damian, 54, 297–98n58 Dominicans, 105, 186, 322n6, 328n12 Downes vs. Bidwell, 279, 335n13 drawing school, 54, 297–98n58 drunkenness, 196–97, 323n16 Dutch colonies, 28, 30, 34, 79, 244, 277, 294n27, 296n47 Eagleton, Terry, 283 Economic Society (Real Sociedad de los Amigos del País), 14, 20, 34, 54, 63 economy, Christian concept of. See Christian economy (oikonomia) economy of debt, 28–29, 63 educational reform, 280; and custom, 124; and historical turn, 243; and missionary orders, 65, 92–93, 307n63; and values/norms, 184, 186, 198–200, 206, 208–10, 322n6 empiricism, 189–90, 193, 208, 211, 214, 272–73, 323n11 enlightenment, 1, 4, 33, 274, 286; and aesthetics, 160, 162–64, 176, 182; and publics, 138, 314n25; and values/norms, 203, 219–20, 224–26, 326n48 Enriquez, Virgilio, 197, 323n15 Entrala, Francisco de Paula, 211–12, 215–26, 325nn39,43, 334n3 entrepreneurship, 5, 7, 20–22, 28–29, 33, 40, 45, 52, 54, 73, 198, 204, 236, 257, 279 eschatological frame, 111–12 Escosura, Patricio de la, 312n5 España en Oceania, 215 Espartero, General Baldomero, 147 La Esperanza, 142, 158, 313–14n23 Esquilache riot (1766), 71 Estado de las islas Filipinas en 1810 (Comyn), 41–42, 83 estates. See haciendas (large estates) eugenics, 305n39 Eurocentrism, 18, 276 evangelization, Christian, 7, 12, 22, 35–36, 272–73, 279, 282, 295nn33,39; and historical turn, 229, 232, 237–38, 240–42; and native customs, 99, 101–2. See also Christian conversion exception, state of, 22, 91–92, 94–96, 177, 233, 248, 274, 276–81, 283, 286 excommunication, 196–97 executive power, 47–48, 77

363 expatriate community, 146, 257, 270, 331n38 expediency, political, 37, 63, 65, 94, 96 expediency of religion, 22, 69–70, 74, 80–81 export agriculture, 6, 15, 16, 28, 34, 40–43, 45, 54; and historical turn, 235, 243, 261; and missionary orders, 81–82; and publics, 130–31, 142, 314n27; and racial difference, 87; and values/norms, 210 Extramuros (Manila suburbs), 121 false consciousness, 146, 314n28 Fanon, Frantz, 17 fascism, 255 Feced, Pablo, 242–44 Felipe (Philip) II, king of Spain, 136, 313n15 Fernando VII, 20, 41, 65, 130, 132, 134–35 feudalism, 47–48, 89, 316n50 “fictive ethnicity,” 255–56 Figueroa, Esteban Rodríguez de, 250 La Filantropía, 135–36 El filibusterismo (Rizal), 189, 232, 260, 264–65, 331n37 Filipinas ante la razón del Indio (Herrero), 238–41, 329n17 “Filipinas dentro de cien años” (Rizal), 246, 249, 252–56, 270 Filipino political/cultural identity: and aesthetics, 161–71, 170fig.; and historical turn, 244, 249, 252–56, 268; and publics, 146–56 Filipino Spaniards. See Creoles flexible authority, 46, 63–66, 70, 96, 102, 120, 130 Flora de Filipinas (Blanco), 271–72, 333–34n2 Florante at Laura (Balagtas), 19, 55–56, 59–62, 125, 299nn71–73 Folgueras, Mariano Fernandez de, 132–34, 312n8 folk Christianity, 17–19, 23, 96–99, 103, 111, 118, 123–25 folk messianism, 108 forced labor (repartimiento), 11, 20, 28–29, 33, 39, 43–46, 52–53, 279, 295n33; and missionary orders, 64, 303n25, 304n35; and publics, 155; and racial difference, 87; and values/norms, 185 Foucault, Michel, 50–51, 68, 75, 269, 288–89nn10,13, 297n52, 300n5, 304n30, 317–18n7, 323–24nn14,21, 328nn9,10

364 Fradera, Josep, 16, 20–21, 77, 278 Franciscans, 91, 102, 106, 191, 200, 313n17 Francisco de Yriarte, 1, 2fig., 3 Freemasonry, 99 free trade, 34, 40, 143, 183, 210, 286 free will in Christianity, 58, 74, 303n24 French colonies, 79, 294n27 French invasion of Spain (1808), 130, 132–33, 147, 157, 312n8 friars. See missionary orders fueros (privileges). See religious privileges (fueros) Furnivall, John S., 277, 280, 296n47 Ganiver, Angel, 329n23 García Camba, Captain-General Andrés, 148 García del Canto, Antonio, 325n39 general culture, 27, 44, 52–53 Generation of ’98, 329n23 Genesis, book of, 98, 111 Gierke, Otto, 300–301n7, 302–3n22 Gomes, Mariano, 150 Gómez de Avellaneda, Gertrudis, 210 Góngora, Luis de, 58 governmentality, 96, 120, 123, 144, 151, 197, 288n10, 304n30. See also pastoral power Goya, Francisco de, 164 Gramsci, Antonio, 8–9, 187, 288– 89n13, 334n10 Greene, Roland, 299n66 Guam, 279, 284 Guantanamo Bay, 281 Guardia Civil, 91–92, 186, 258, 279 Guardia de Honor, 99 Guardian, 161 Guerra Chiquita (1879 “little war,” Cuba), 21 Guerrero, Leon Ma., 188 Guha, Ranajit, 48–49, 290n31 Gunder Frank, Andre, 33 Habermas, Jürgen, 144–46, 161 haciendas (large estates), 43–46, 53, 87, 130, 314n27 Haitian Revolution, 280 Hall, Stuart, 17 Hapsburgs, 10, 31–33, 46 Harlan, John, 335n13 Hau, Caroline, 13 “Heads of the People,” 54 Hegel, G. W. F., 18, 47, 219, 280, 296nn42,43 Heidegger, Martin, 193 Helen, empress of Rome, 111–14

Index hemp (abaca), 27 heresy, 136, 260 Hernández-Chung, Lilia, 325n39 Herrero, Bishop Casimiro, 238–41, 329n17 heteroglossia, 187, 190 Hidalgo, Félix Resurrección, 263 Hispanization, 3, 11–13, 15, 18, 19, 278; and aesthetics, 164–71, 170fig., 174, 182–83; and native customs, 97, 100; and publics, 138, 140, 147–48; and values/norms, 210, 221 Hispanization of the Philippines, The (Phelan), 11–13 Historia general de Philipinas (Concepción), 327n6 historical turn, 229–70; blood compact (Sandugo), 229–33, 236–38, 241; counterhistories, 24, 232–33, 242–62, 264, 267, 269–70; history as recourse, 232–33, 236–42; history as resource, 232–36, 241, 327n6, 328nn9,10 historicism, 14–19, 328n9 Historic Proclamation, 134 hiya (shame), 97 Hobbes, 47–48, 283 Hobsbawm, Eric, 276 Hollsteiner, Mary, 97 honor (honra), 154–55, 316nn50,51 Humboldt, Alexander von, 327n4 Huseng Sisiw. See Cruz, José de la (Huseng Sisiw) hybridity, 167–68, 179, 219, 233, 275, 319–20n25 identities, political/cultural, 3, 13, 23; and aesthetics, 161–71, 170fig.; and historical turn, 244, 249, 252–56, 267–68; and publics, 131, 133–34, 136–41, 146–56; and values/norms, 190 Igorrots, 87 Ileto, Reynaldo, 17, 96, 98–99, 108, 118–20, 308n4 illustrated albums, 54 El Ilocano, 159 Ilocano uprising (1762), 146 La Ilustración del Oriente, 171, 215 Ilustración Filipina (Puga), 160–69, 171, 174, 237, 258, 273, 317n4, 331n36 ilustrados, 151, 232, 263, 267, 273–74, 285, 328n13 imagined communities, 7, 274–78 immigration, 142, 217, 279

Index immunitas, 96, 257, 260, 325n40. See also religious privileges (fueros) India, 17, 28, 277, 279–80 Las Indias no eran colonias (Levene), 30–31 indigo dye, 27–29 Indio, El indio batangüeño (Retana), 272 El Indio (Blanco), 271–74, 286, 334nn3,6 El Indio agraviado (anon.), 137–41, 313n17 Indio Filipino, 168–69, 170fig., 180–81, 231, 244, 276. See also Filipino political/cultural identity; natives (Indios) Indios. See natives (Indios) individualizing knowledge, 68, 70, 300n5, 304n30 indolence, 39, 43, 92, 211, 242–43, 245, 247–49 “Indolencia” (Rizal). See “Sobre la indolencia de los Filipinos” (Rizal) “inner sanctum,” culture as, 13, 189n21 international law, 21, 36, 48, 276–77, 293n21, 301n9 investments, 36, 46, 52, 130, 142–43, 236, 277, 313–14n23 Iraq invasion, 281 irony, 190, 262–70 Izquierdo, Captain-General Rafael de, 93, 184, 186, 209, 285 Javellana, René, 108, 110–11, 114, 310–11nn29,30 Jesuits, 34, 65–66, 71, 75, 82, 92–93, 101, 105, 265, 310n28, 311n30 Joaquin, Nick, 151, 331n40 Jocano, F. Landa, 13, 97 John Chrysostom, Saint, 259, 262, 331n37, 332n45 Jolo, 37, 184, 293n22 Joseph, Saint, 118 Joseph Bonaparte, 20, 41, 130, 135 Juan, Captain. See Herrero, Bishop Casimiro Junta Central, 132 Kant, Immanuel, 7–9, 144, 162, 187, 219, 283 kapwa (kindred/fellow-being), 194, 197, 323n15 katuwiran (reason), 200–201, 203, 205–7, 225, 286 kaugalian. See native traditions (kaugalian) Kirkpatrick, Susan, 318n12 kumedya playwrights, 55

365 ladinos, 107–8, 124, 137–38, 309nn19,22 Lahiri, Smita, 328n13, 329n17 Lallana, Emmanuel, 303n27 La Pérouse, Jean-François Galaup de, 33, 68, 297n56 Larra, Mariano José de, 162–64, 318–19nn12,15,16 latent historicism, 18–19 Latin, 114–15, 175, 177, 258, 311n30 Latin America, 21, 31, 33, 41, 52, 64, 86, 132, 147, 151, 277, 334n10 Latin American Subaltern Studies, 334n10 Latin passion plays, 115, 311n30 Laudesi, 311n30 law, Spanish, 4–5, 9–10, 28–29, 31–32, 39, 43–44, 49, 275, 280–82; and aesthetics, 159, 173–75, 177, 181; and historical turn, 233, 236, 240, 257, 262; and missionary orders, 67–74, 76–77, 81, 83; and native customs, 102–3, 107, 117, 122–23; and publics, 133, 137–38, 141, 144, 146, 149, 151; and values/norms, 204, 211, 220. See also Laws of the Indies; Special Laws Laws of the Indies (Recopilación de las Leyes de Indias), 32–33, 37, 48, 101, 120, 134, 198, 241, 329n18 Legazpi, Miguel López de, 167, 229–30, 230fig., 237, 241, 328n12, 331–32n44 legibility, 4, 6, 28, 125, 274 Lerena, Federico de, 273 Letras y figuras, 1–6, 2fig., 19–20, 28, 54, 106, 194 “Letter On the Filipinos” (San Agustín), 139 Levene, Ricardo, 30–31, 291n5, 294n27 Leviathan (Hobbes), 48 “literary-scientific” publications, 160–61 literature, Philippine, 13–14, 16, 18–19, 182, 188–90, 209–10, 213–15, 325n39. See also awit (Tagalog poetry); colonial literature; novels; Tagalog literature; names of literary works liwanag (light, radiance), 119 Llanos, Antonio, 333–34n2 loob (inside), 117, 119 López, Juan, 105 López Jaena, Graciano, 242 Lozano, José Honorato, 1–6, 2fig., 19–20, 28, 54, 56, 106, 194

366 Lucio y Bustamante, Miguel, 23, 189, 191–92, 200–208, 215, 284, 323n13 Lukács, Georg, 190–91, 224, 268–69 Lumbera, Bienvenido, 56–58, 61, 107–8, 123, 309n14 Luna, Juan, 229–31, 230fig., 233, 236, 241, 244, 247, 285, 333–34n2 Lynch, Frank, 97 Lynch, John, 291n5, 292n7 Mabini, Apolinario, 151, 284 Machado, Antonio, 329n23 Maetzu, Ramón de, 329n23 Mahal na Pasión (Aquino de Belén), 103, 106, 110–12, 114–15, 310–11nn27,29 Mallat, Jean, 152–53 manifest historicism, 14–19 “Manifiesto que a la noble nación española dirigen los leales Filipinos” (Burgos), 150–56 Manila Alegre, 171 Manila earthquake (1863), 216, 219, 223–24, 223fig., 226 Manila port opening (1830–34), 142, 210, 313n22, 314n27 Manila suburbs. See Extramuros (Manila suburbs) Manzano, Juan Francisco, 320n37 Marian depositions. See Pasyóng Henesis (anon.) Mariátegui, José Carlos, 334n10 Martí, José, 334n10 Martínez, Archbishop Gregorio Melitón, 108 Martínez, Captain-General, 147 Marx, Karl, 4, 47–48, 50, 146, 296n44, 297n50, 314n28 Mas, Sinibaldo de, 9, 81, 86–90, 124, 131, 142, 147–49, 152, 155, 210, 306n51, 315n38 master-servant relationship, 174–77, 179–82, 221–22 Matta, Juan de la, 90, 324n29 Maver, John, 235–37 Maximus Confesor, 308–9n10 McCoy, Alfred, 14, 290n26 McKeon, Michael, 193, 208, 316n50 medieval epics, 55, 57 Medina, Joseph T., 132 mediquillos (quacks), 168, 216, 218–19, 221–22, 319–20n25, 325n42, 333n1 Meinecke, Friedrich, 29 Memmi, Albert, 17, 182, 225 Mercado, Ignacio, 333–34n2

Index Mesonero Romanos, Ramón de, 163–64, 318–19nn11,15 mestizos, 1, 3, 6, 7, 14–15, 17, 21–22, 33, 51, 275, 279, 297–98n58, 333–34n2; and aesthetics, 159; and historical turn, 229, 232, 242, 254, 257, 261–62, 331n40; and native customs, 121; and publics, 147–49, 152, 156; as secular clergy, 72, 77–79, 82–84, 86, 89, 94, 306n45; and Special Laws, 93; and values/ norms, 185–86, 198, 201, 210–11, 216–22, 224 metrical romances, 54–62, 189, 298n59, 299n66 Mexican war of independence (1810– 21), 82, 93 Mexico, 11, 27, 64, 82, 93, 147, 306n45 Middle Ages, 69, 300–301n7, 302–3n22 military strategy, 11, 14–16, 21, 27, 31, 35, 37, 51, 77, 91–93, 147 millenarian revolt (1870), 184. See also Aritao commune Milner, Anthony, 288n10 Mindanao, 37, 93, 184, 250, 293n22 missionary orders, 16, 20, 22–23, 32, 34, 41, 51, 58, 64–82, 272–74, 299–300n1, 301–2nn16,19; and aesthetics, 175–77, 183; and blood compact, 230, 230fig.; and historical turn, 232–34, 236–37, 239–42, 244, 248, 257, 259, 261, 329n17; and native customs, 100–101, 103– 9, 119, 121, 124, 309n18; pastoral power of, 71–76, 80–82, 89, 96, 302–3n22, 304n30; police power of, 74–76, 94, 303n27, 304n29; and publics, 131, 135–36, 139, 143, 150, 153–55, 313n17; and racial difference, 82, 85–89, 93; and respublica Christiana, 67–71, 73–74, 76; and Special Laws, 65–66, 80, 83, 90–94; and values/norms, 185–86, 191–92, 194–208, 211–15, 217, 219, 322n6 Misterios de Filipinas (García del Canto), 325n39 moderantismo, 215, 325n40 Mojares, Resil, 104, 188–92 Mondzain, Marie-José, 102 monopolies, government, 14, 20–21, 34, 41, 185, 187, 257 Montero y Vidal, José, 315n38 morality, Christian, 194–200, 207 “moral weeklies,” 161–62, 171, 317– 18n7. See also costumbrismo Moreno, Frank Jay, 32

Index Moret, Segismundo, 184 Morga, Antonio de, 233, 249–52, 255, 257 mortification, 68, 70, 300n5, 304n30 Moya y Jiménez, Francisco Javier de, 314n26 Murillo Velarde, Pedro, 101 Musicians, The (Caravaggio), 244, 245fig. Muslim (Moro) sultanates, 36–37, 83, 87, 93, 145, 183–84 Napoleon, 20, 41, 130, 134, 147 Napoleonic invasion of Spain, 130, 132–33, 147, 157, 312n8 Narváez, Ramón María, 147 nationalism, 11, 13, 188, 255, 264, 277–78, 308n5 nationalism, cultural, 13–14, 18, 100, 188, 207 native consent, 10, 22, 24, 27, 29–30, 37–41, 45–47, 51–53, 56, 63, 272, 274; and aesthetics, 170, 182–83; and historical turn, 238–40, 243–44, 247, 255–56, 270; and missionary orders, 67, 70, 73–74, 76, 79, 81; and native customs, 96, 98; and publics, 129–30, 133, 136, 141–43; and racial difference, 86–87, 89; and values/norms, 186–87, 197–98 native elite (principalía), 15, 16, 158, 200–201, 207 natives (Indios), 1, 6, 36, 273–75, 285, 334n6; and aesthetics, 159, 162, 164–82, 166fig., 170fig., 320n26; and historical turn, 229–32, 230fig., 237–55, 258–62, 265–67, 329nn17,18; and publics, 137–41, 147–54, 156, 313nn17,18,21, 316n45; and racial difference, 84, 87–88; as secular clergy, 23, 70, 72, 77–80, 82–86, 89, 94, 306n45; and Special Laws, 93; and values/norms, 185–86, 200–207, 209, 211–14, 217–22, 224–26. See also ladinos; secular clergy native traditions (kaugalian), 23, 51, 97–103, 109–11, 115–21, 124, 284–85, 308nn5,7,10, 309n11; and historical turn, 240–41, 244–45, 248; and values/norms, 190–200, 203, 206–7, 209, 221, 225–26 native tribute, 20, 28–29, 33, 38–39, 43, 45, 52, 295n39; and aesthetics, 172; and missionary orders, 64, 76, 82, 303n25; and publics, 131, 133,

367 155; and racial difference, 87; and values/norms, 214 native will (voluntad), 24, 38, 51–52, 141, 170, 240, 249, 283–84, 286 naturalism, 212, 214, 242 natural law, 156, 215, 282–83, 301n9, 302–3n22, 332n48 natural resources, 131, 142, 236, 250–51, 272–73 New Spain (Mexico), 82, 306n45 newspapers, 7, 22, 274; and aesthetics, 158–59, 161–82; and historical turn, 242, 257–58, 270; and publics, 131–33, 135–36, 142–45, 150–51, 312n8; and values/norms, 185, 198, 210, 215–16 Nicephorus of Constantinople, 308–9n10 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 288–89n13, 291n3 Noli me tangere (Rizal), 146, 189, 232, 249, 257–68, 284, 331–32nn37,38,40,44 norms. See values/norms Novales, Captain Andrés, 147 novela de costumbres, 209–10, 325n39. See also costumbrismo “La novela de Filipinas: Candelario” (Cañamaque), 212–15 novellas, 160, 182, 212–14. See also names of novellas novels, 7, 22, 23, 158–60, 164, 242; and historical turn, 257–58, 262, 264, 267–68; and values/norms, 187– 210, 213–16, 221–23, 323nn11,14, 325n39. See also names of novels novena (pagsisiyam), 103–5, 108, 110, 118–20, 122, 309n22, 310n28 Nuestra Señora de la Esperanza de Macarena, 121fig. Nueva Cáceres, bishopric of, 238, 328n13 “Obedezco pero no cumplo,” 32, 71, 304n33 obedience, 68, 70, 304n30 Obregoso, Domingo, 298n59 oikonomia. See Christian economy (oikonomia) Olvidos de Filipinas (Entrala), 211–12, 222, 325n43, 334n3 “Omnimoda,” 69–70 oral poetry (Tagalog). See dalit (oral versification) Ordinances of Good Government (Ordenanzas del Buen Gobierno), 75–76, 302n17, 304n35 Orientalism, 320n26

368 El Oriente, 145, 171, 274–75 Origins and Rise of the Filipino Novel, The (Mojares), 188 Origins of the English Novel (McKeon), 193 Ortiz, Fernando, 280, 288–89n13, 308n3, 334n10 Our Lady of Peace and Safe Passage. See Virgin Mary: Virgin of Antipolo Our Lady of Peñafrancia procession (Naga City, Bicol), 122fig. pabasa (oral rendition/improvisation of Passion), 106, 109–11, 117–19, 124 Pacto de sangre, 229–31, 230fig., 236, 244 paganism, 101, 105 Pagels, Elaine, 332n45 Pagès, Pierre-Marie François de, 67, 74–75, 300n3 pagsisiyam. See novena (pagsisiyam) pakikipagkapwa-tao (social fellowship), 194–201, 203, 205–7, 225, 286 pamatbat, 105, 309n14 Pan, José Felipe del, 42, 144, 159, 171, 215, 314n24, 333–34n2 papal authority, 69–70, 82, 93, 300–301n7 parabasis (transgression), 103 Pardo de Tavera, Trinidad H., 274, 285, 334n6 El Pasig, 142, 159 Passion of Christ, 19, 98, 103–22, 310–11nn29,30 pastoral power, 71–76, 80–82, 89, 96, 124, 150, 248, 302–3n22, 304n30; and historical turn, 233, 248; and values/norms, 183, 199 Pasyón (Aquino de Bélen). See Mahal na Pasión (Aquino de Belén) Pasyon and Revolution (Ileto), 17, 98–99, 118–20, 308n4 Pasyóng Henesis (anon.), 18–19, 98–99, 103–4, 109–19, 115, 121fig., 122–24, 122fig., 310–11nn27–29 Pasyóng Pilapil. See Pasyóng Henesis (anon.) paternalism, 39, 237, 240, 279 Paterno, Pedro, 106, 285 Patriotic Societies (Sociedades Económicas de los Amigos del País), 40 patriotism, 15, 16, 22–23, 63, 96, 277, 312n8; and historical turn, 247, 252, 257; and publics, 130–35, 141, 143, 145, 147, 150, 152, 154; and values/norms, 186, 188, 198

Index patronage, royal, 51, 70, 72, 75, 301–2nn13,16 Patronato Real (right of royal patronage), 301n13 patronymics, 3, 158 Paul, Saint, 282, 308n7, 313n18 pax Hispanica, 242 Peláez, Pedro, 150, 152, 155–56 peninsular Spaniards, 1, 6, 9, 22, 272–73, 275, 285; and aesthetics, 171–83; and historical turn, 232, 243–44, 248–49, 254; and native customs, 106; and publics, 148–50, 152–53, 155–56, 315n38; and racial difference, 129; and values/norms, 184, 201, 209–19, 221–22, 224–25, 324n30. See also missionary orders; Spanish rule Pérez, Domingo, 102 periodization, 20–21 Permanent Board of Censorship, 314n26 personal service (servicio personal), 47, 295n39 Petrarchism, 57–59, 299n66 Phelan, John, 11–12, 32–33, 96, 311n30, 328n12 Philippine Academy of Drawing (Academia de Dibujo), 54, 297–98n58 Philippine Audiencia, 34, 132, 318n13 Philippine independence (1946), 13 Philippine Revolution (1896), 6, 17, 20, 21, 124, 151, 188, 215, 231 Philippine Royal Company, 41 Les Philippines (Mallat), 152–53 Philippinization, 12, 15, 18, 19, 96–97 phrenology, 214, 225 Piddington, Henry, 66, 81, 300n3 pidgin Spanish, 219, 319–20n25 Pilapil, Mariano, 98, 108–19, 123–24, 310n28 Pilipinolohiya, 13 piracy, 36–37, 145, 183 Pizarro, Manuel Bernáldez. See Bernáldez Pizarro, Manuel plantation agriculture. See export agriculture plantation complex. See haciendas (large estates) Polanco, Juan de, 302n19 police power, 74–76, 92, 94, 274, 303n27, 304n29 political communities, 7, 9, 19, 288n10 political rationality, 29–30, 37, 40–42, 46, 50, 52, 56, 271, 274, 276–77, 282, 284, 293–94n24, 297n52; and aesthetics, 170; and historical turn,

Index 233, 243–44, 255–57, 264; and missionary orders, 65–69, 74, 78–79, 304n30; and publics, 150; and racial difference, 87, 94; and values/ norms, 197, 209, 226 polos y servicios (mandatory labor), 155, 303n25. See also forced labor (repartimiento) El Porvenir Filipino, 143, 215, 314n25 Poulantzas, Nicos, 296n43 “practico-reflexive prism,” 50–51 Prakash, Gyan, 17–18 Pratt, Mary Louise, 327n4 pre-Christian “native” values, 97, 207 preemption doctrine, 37, 43, 48, 144–45, 277, 281, 293–94nn21,24 prestige, Spanish, 280, 285; and historical turn, 232, 242, 245, 251, 265; and publics, 147, 149, 155; and racial difference, 89–90; and Special Laws, 92–94; and values/norms, 186–87 priests. See missionary orders printing presses, 58, 63, 132, 161 private interests, 23, 142–46 privileges (fueros). See religious privileges (fueros) productivity, 35–37, 41, 44–45, 51, 81 progress, 13, 18 propaganda, 10, 133, 160, 244, 276, 328n13, 332n45 protectionism (proteccionismo), 142 protective system of rule, 29, 42–45, 53, 69, 75, 134 protego ergo obligo, 29 proyectistas (colonial state engineers), 184, 209, 212 public good, 27, 40, 44–45, 51–54, 186 public opinion, 7, 16, 23, 282–83; and aesthetics, 159, 167–69, 171, 318–19n15; and historical turn, 242; and publics, 131, 133–34, 137, 141–47, 150–51, 156, 314n28; and values/norms, 186 publics, 7, 23, 129–56; newspapers, 131–33, 135–36, 142–45, 150–51, 312n8; patriotism, 130–35, 141, 143, 145, 147, 150, 152, 154; political/cultural identities, 3, 13, 23, 131, 133–34, 136–41, 146–56; public opinion, 131, 133–34, 137, 141–47, 150–51, 156, 314n28 public sphere, 130–31, 138, 144–46, 159, 163–64, 168–69, 171, 257, 318–19n15. See also civil society Puerto Rico, 6, 16, 21, 52, 65, 185, 278–79, 322n45

369 Puga, Ricardo de, 160–69, 174, 215, 237–38, 258, 317n4, 327n4, 331n36 Pule, Hermano. See Cruz, Apolinario de la quacks. See mediquillos (quacks) “race-thinking,” 305n39 racial difference, 7, 23, 31, 43, 48, 79, 82–90, 92–94, 276, 278–81, 285, 305n39, 306n50; and aesthetics, 160, 164–71, 324n30, 325n43; and historical turn, 233, 241–57, 264, 269; and publics, 148–49, 152–56; and values/norms, 185, 214, 217, 325n43 Rafael, Vicente, 96, 291n3, 299n72, 309n18 raison d’état (reason of state), 22, 29, 37, 46, 51, 65, 80–81, 185, 231, 274, 293–94n23,24, 297n52 Ramos, Magdalena Ana, 59 rationalization (Weber). See Weber, Max reading public, 147, 156, 161–62, 180, 183, 333n1. See also newspapers; novels realism, 190–91, 193 reason. See katuwiran (reason) reason of state. See raison d’état (reason of state) Recollects. See Augustinian Recollects Recuerdos de Filipinas (Cañamaque), 209, 211 reducción. See town settlements (reducción) “Reflections on the Influence of Climate on Literature” (Puga), 164 Reglamento (1788), 34 religious orders. See missionary orders religious privileges (fueros), 22, 32, 64, 67, 69–71, 75, 80, 94, 96, 155, 257, 260 “reoccupation,” 155, 316–17n52 republicanism, 73, 130, 145–46, 159, 183, 185, 211, 215, 232 respublica Christiana, 67–71, 73–74, 76, 96, 199 Retana, Wenceslao E., 61, 100, 135, 142, 171, 229, 231, 271–74, 297–98nn58,62, 313n17, 317n4, 325nn33,39 Revista de Filipinas, 171–83, 322n45, 333–34n2 Revista del Liceo Artístico-Literario de Manila, 171

370 Reyes, Isabelo de los, 285 Rivera, José María, 297–98nn58,62 Rivera, Maria Asuncion, 59 Rizal, José, 19, 24, 106, 140–41, 146, 151, 188–89, 207, 232, 244–70, 284–85, 331–32nn36–38,40,44 Robles, Eliodoro, 94 Rodríguez Varela, Luis (“El Conde Filipino),” 134, 141 Rojo, Archbishop Manuel, 71, 304n33 Roman Empire, 97, 112–14, 233–34, 263, 327n6, 332n45 Ronquillo, Carlos, 299n71 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 135–37, 164, 282–83, 313n12 Routledge, David, 146 Royal Patriotic Society, 41 Royal Synod of Manila (1582), 69, 241, 293–94n24 Royal Trading Company of the Philippines, 14, 20, 34, 185, 293n23 “Rural Scenes of the Country” (Puga), 165 Sab (Gómez de Avellaneda), 210 Saguinsín, Fr. Bernard, 108, 124, 309n22 Said, Edward, 17, 320n26 Salazar, Bishop Domingo de, 302–3n22 salus populi suprema lex est, 143 salvation, 68, 75–76, 112–17, 122, 241, 248, 279, 304n30 San Agustín, Fr. Gaspar de, 83, 100, 102, 108, 123, 138–40, 233–34, 309n14 Sanciangco y Goson, Gregorio, 247, 331n38 Santacruzan festival, 112 Santiago, Luciano, 3 Santo Niño de Cebu, 99 Sarrio, Governor-General Pedro, 76–78, 81, 84, 305n37 satire, 164, 168–69, 258, 273 savagery, 237–38, 240–41, 249, 251 Schmitt, Carl, 5, 50, 74 Schumacher, Fr. John, 313n17, 316n45 Scott, William Henry, 13, 154 secular clergy, 22–23, 70, 72–73, 75– 79, 82–86, 94, 275, 301–2nn16,19, 305n37; and historical turn, 248; and native customs, 96, 104, 107–11, 118–22, 124, 309nn19,22, 310nn27,28; and publics, 138–39, 147–56, 316n45; and values/norms, 186, 191, 204, 212 secularization, 75–76, 79, 118–20, 152, 189–90, 193, 316–17nn52,54, 333n57

Index segregation, 82, 85, 87, 148, 152, 200. See also racial difference Segui, Archbishop José, 124 self-education, 176, 320n37 self-reflexivity, 187, 190, 207, 209, 267, 273, 334n6 September Revolution (1868), 210, 212, 215, 322n45 Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), 6, 30, 33 Sexenio revolution. See September Revolution (1868) Siete Infantes de Lara, 57 Sikatuna, Rajah, 229–31, 230fig., 238, 241, 244 Sikolohiyang Pilipino, 207, 307n1 Silang, Diego, 146 sinakulo, 124 Sin titulo (Entrala), 215–26, 325n39, 334n3 Si Tandang Basio Macunat (Lucio y Bustamante), 189, 191–92, 200–208, 323n13 skepticism, 29, 203–5, 208 slavery, 21, 31, 52, 66, 210, 215, 279, 295n39, 322n45 Smith, Adam, 53, 275–76, 295–96n40, 328n10 “Sobre la indolencia de los Filipinos” (Rizal), 247–48, 270 social contract, 37, 135–37, 238, 269, 282–83 Social Contract, The (Rousseau), 135–37 social Darwinism, 242, 244, 252, 254, 269, 280, 305n39 social fellowship. See pakikipagkapwatao (social fellowship) “society,” 51–54, 144, 277 sodalities, 311n30 La Solidaridad, 270 Soliman, Rajah, 229 Spanish Civil War (1936–39), 130 Spanish colonialists. See peninsular Spaniards Spanish conquest, 30–31, 279, 291– 92n6, 295n33; and blood compact, 229–30, 230fig.; and Constantine, emperor of Rome, 112; and historical turn, 233–34, 237–38, 242–43, 246–47, 249–53, 255, 269, 331–32n44; and missionary orders, 67, 69, 73–74, 301n13, 302–3n22; and publics, 131, 134, 136; and racial difference, 83 Spanish constitutional government, 41–42, 53, 275–76, 282–83; and aesthetics, 159, 163, 177, 179–81, 183; and historical turn, 244,

Index 331–32n44; and publics, 130, 133– 37, 141, 143–46, 149, 151, 156; and Special Laws, 65, 90, 93; and values/norms, 185–86, 204, 211 Spanish Golden Age, 55, 58 Spanish language: and aesthetics, 174–77, 180–81, 319–20n25; and historical turn, 245, 258; and missionary orders, 73; and native customs, 107, 124; and publics, 138–40, 144; and racial difference, 88; and values/norms, 184, 186, 199, 201, 203, 212, 219, 222 Spanish nation, 96, 135–36, 141, 150, 156, 186, 242–43, 285, 329n23 Spanishness (españolismo), 89 Spanish purity, 88, 193, 210 Spanish Reconquista, 83 Spanish regular clergy. See missionary orders Spanish revolution (1868), 215, 275, 278, 322n45 Spanish rule, 9–10, 20–22, 27, 30–45, 47–48, 50–53, 63, 272–74, 276, 285; and aesthetics, 159, 163, 171, 173–81; and blood compact, 229–31, 230fig.; and historical turn, 232, 236–54, 264–70, 329nn17,18; and missionary orders, 65–66, 69–77, 79, 81, 300–301n7, 301–2n16, 302–3n22; and native customs, 97–98, 100–103, 123–24; and publics, 130, 134–37, 141–44, 147–49, 152–56, 312n8, 313n12; and racial difference, 83, 85–86, 90; and Special Laws, 93, 96; and values/norms, 186, 197, 199, 210–12, 215, 325nn33,40 speaking subject (sujet d’énonciation), 137–41, 313nn17,18,21 Special Committee of Reforms to the Administration and Government of the Philippines, 92 Special Laws, 6, 21, 22, 23, 65–66, 80, 83, 90–94, 274–76, 278–79, 283; and aesthetics, 160; and historical turn, 231–32, 238–39, 242–43, 245, 252, 256, 269–70; and publics, 130, 152, 155–56; and values/ norms, 185, 209, 211, 213, 217 Spectator, 161 “spirit of association,” 142, 313–14n23 “spiritual conquest,” 233–34 Spivak, Gayatri, 28 El spoliarium, 229 state of exception. See exception, state of state violence, 28, 32, 48–50, 174 Steele, Richard, 161, 325n42

371 Stevens-Arroyo, Anthony, 103 Sticca, Sandro, 311n30 strategic essentialism, 18, 290–91n36 Sturtevant, David, 96 Subaltern Studies Collective, 17 subsistence agriculture, 34, 251, 314n27 Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas (Morga), 249–52, 255, 257 Suez Canal, 21, 184, 211, 275 sugar industry, 21, 27 “superstructure,” 17, 47, 49 tableaux vivants, 3, 5–6, 54, 161, 327n4 tagalistas (secular priests who worked in Tagalog), 108, 124 Tagalog literature, 54–62, 98, 103, 107, 119, 123, 125, 189, 207–8, 213, 257–58, 283–84, 297–98n58. See also names of individual works Tagalog vernacular language, 7, 54, 271–73, 286, 333n1; and aesthetics, 177, 181; and historical turn, 250, 258–59; and native customs, 98, 104, 107, 114–15, 121–25, 310n27; and values/norms, 199, 207, 219, 222 talinghagà (figures of speech), 56–57, 61, 101, 284 Tasio, 165, 166fig. Tatler, 161 Tayabas rebellion (1841), 23, 86, 98–99, 118–21, 124 Teatro de Tondo, 298n62 El teatro tagalo (Barrantes), 242–43 temperate/tropical division, 164–65, 171 Ten Years’ War (1868–78), 21, 322n45 theater, 54–55, 63, 100, 242, 297–98nn58,62 Thirty Years’ War, 48 tipos del país. See costumbrismo Tisco y Morales, Javier, 274–75 Tissot, Samuel Aguste, 271, 319–20n25, 333n1 tobacco monopoly, 14, 20–21, 27, 34, 185, 187, 280 Torre, Carlos María de la, 185–86, 211, 275 town settlements (reducción), 20, 45, 67, 120–21, 229, 295n38, 298n61 trade, 15, 21, 34, 277, 279, 286; and aesthetics, 183; and historical turn, 235–36; and missionary orders, 73, 76; and publics, 130, 142–43, 313n17, 314n27; and values/norms, 184, 210. See also commerce transculturation, 8, 23, 97, 100, 103, 106–7, 124, 136, 188, 199, 241, 334n10

372

Index

translatio imperii, 69 travel narratives, 232–33, 236, 327n4, 334n3 Twelve Peers of France legend. See Doce Pares de Francia Ubal, 250 ugali, 100, 123–24. See also native traditions (kaugalian) Unamuno, Miguel de, 329n23 University of Santo Tomás, 107, 322n6 University of the Philippines, 186, 322n6 Urbana at Feliza (Castro), 189, 191–92, 194–201, 203, 206–8, 323–24nn14,16,21 U.S. imperialism, 13, 276–77, 279, 281, 335n13 U.S. Philippine Commission, 91 utang na loob (debt reciprocity), 97 vaccination, 236 Valle-Inclan, Ramón María del, 329n23 values/norms, 184–226, 323n14; “La novela de Filipinas: Candelario” (Cañamaque), 212–15; Olvidos de Filipinas (Entrala), 211–12, 222, 325n43; Recuerdos de Filipinas (Cañamaque), 209, 211; Sin titulo (Entrala), 215–26, 325n39; Si Tandang Basio Macunat (Lucio y Bustamante), 189, 191–92, 200–208, 323n13; Urbana at Feliza (Castro), 189, 191–92, 194–201, 203, 206–8, 323–24nn14,16,21 Varela, Luis Rodríguez. See Rodríguez Varela, Luis (El “Conde Filipino”) Vatican, 65, 69, 82, 93, 299–302n16 Vega, Garcilaso de la, 57–59, 299n73 La Verdad, 151–52

vernacular languages, 124, 142, 159, 205, 238–39, 245–46, 273, 308n7, 333n60. See also Tagalog vernacular language Viana, Francisco Leandro de, 34–39, 41–43, 45–46, 51–52, 60, 71–72, 294n27, 295n33 Villalobos, Sergio, 291n5 Villaverde, Cirilio, 210 virginity, 191, 195–96, 258 Virgin Mary, 102, 104–5, 108, 111–12, 115–18, 123–24; Virgin of Antipolo, 110, 118, 310n28; Virgin of Guadelupe, 99; Virgin of the Rosary, 118 virtue (honra), 154–55, 316nn50,51 visitatio (inquisitorial visitation), 70, 72, 75, 302n19 Visit to the Philippine Islands, A (Bowring), 152 visual public, 161–62 Viswanathan, Gauri, 280 Vitoria, Fr. Francisco de, 301n9, 328n12 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 16 Walton, William, 42 wars of independence (1809–1821), 21, 41, 52, 64, 82, 147 Watt, Ian, 190 wealth, 35–36, 42, 44, 52–54, 75–76, 130–31, 236, 314n25, 328n10 Weber, Max, 47–50, 293n20, 296n43, 316n51 Wickberg, Edgar, 217 world market, 15–17, 18–19, 51–52 Zamora, Fr. Jacinto, 150 Zola, Émile, 212 Zúñiga, Fr. Joaquín Martínez de, 27–28, 70, 78, 106, 109–10, 113, 234–35

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