Richardson, Jim. "Roster of Katipuneros at Balintawak, August 1896." 2005.

Amidst all the debate about precisely when and where the revolution started, historians have often neglected to ask exactly who gathered in Balintawak or thereabouts in August 1896. In the absence of a complete roster – clearly an impossibility at this distance in time – the fullest listing is to be found in an interview given by the KKK veteran Guillermo Masangkay to the Manila newspaper Bagong Buhay in 1952.¹ In this interview, Masangkay recalled the names of 56 men who had met in Balintawak prior to the first encounters with Spanish forces. In the great majority of cases, he also recalled their occupations, and it is fascinating to note that nearly half the patriots on his list worked in some capacity or other for branches of the Spanish administration. The three 'government secret agents', it is presumed, had in the preceding months been supplying useful information to the Katipunan and misinformation to the Spaniards.

Masangkay’s list is reproduced below; the occupational descriptions have been translated into English from the original mix of Tagalog and Spanish, and in a few cases have been amplified. Since the list was reconstructed from memory more than fifty years after the event, erroneous inclusions are likely and omissions are inevitable. Any corrections or other comments will be most welcome.

Aguedo del Rosario Apolonio Cruz Alejandro Santiago Deogracias Fajardo Juan Fajardo Tomas Alegre Pio H. Santos Patricio Belen Crispulo Chacon Lorenzo Martinez Tomas Villanueva Procopio Bonifacio Rogelio Borja Isaac del Carmen Hilario Sayo Melecio Ruestra Pastor Santos Guillermo Masangkay Pedro Zabala Macario Sakay Salustiano Cruz Juan de la Cruz Emilio Jacinto Andres Bonifacio Nicomedes Carreon Miguel Resurreccion Vicente Leyva Cipriano Pacheco Briccio Pantas Teodoro Plata Jose Trinidad Hermogenes Plata Tomas Remigio Pantaleon Torres Vicente Molina Enrique Pacheco Faustino Manalac Calixto Santiago Restituto Javier Hermenegildo Reyes Valentin Lagasca Eugenio Santos Francisco Carreon Sarhento Marcelo Roman Ramos Tito Miguel Julio Navarro Alejandro Andaya Marcelo Badell Geronimo Cristobal Cosme Taguyod Rafael Gutierrez Estanislao Vargas Apolonio Samson Pio Valenzuela Ramon Bernardo

Printer at the Diario de Manila Printer at the Diario de Manila Printer at El Resumen Printer Printer Master cigar maker Master tobacco worker Tobacco worker Tobacco worker Tobacco worker Tobacco worker Railway baggage-master Mechanic Mechanic Mechanic Draftsman Draftsman Kuridor [meaning unknown] Kuridor [meaning unknown] Sales agent [personero] Master tailor Barber; playwright Student Warehouse employee at Fressel & Co. Salesman at Casa Chupre Grass (fodder) cutter Milkman Clerk Assistant to Court of First Instance judge Clerk, Mindoro Court of First Instance Clerk, Tondo Court of First Instance Court clerk Government treasury clerk Government treasury clerk Government treasury caretaker Manila city government clerk Manila port administration clerk Customs official Customs official Customs official Customs guard sergeant Customs guard sergeant Customs guard Customs guard Government arsenal employee Government arsenal employee Government secret agent Government secret agent Government secret agent Army corporal Fire Department lieutenant Fire Department captain Property owner Property owner Physician Municipal captain of Pandacan

¹"Unang sigaw, unang labanan sa paglaya," Bagong Buhay (25 August 1952).

Read more.

Taylor, John R. M. "The Philippine Insurrection of 1896-97." The Philippine Insurrection against the United States: A Compilation of Documents with Notes and Introduction. Pasay City: Eugenio Lopez Foundation, 1971 [1906]. 61-78.

[61]

Chapter III

The Philippine Insurrection of 1896-97

The Filipino insurrection of 1896-97 was planned and carried out under the auspices of a society, local to the Philippines, called the Katipúnan. According to Spanish writers on the subject, this organization was the outgrowth of a series of associations, formed by what afterwards became the revolutionary clique with the expressed purpose of securing reforms in the government of the Philippines, but whose unexpressed and ultimate object was to obtain the independence of the archipelago. In order to accomplish this purpose, a systematic attack was made on the monastic orders in the Philippines to undermine their prestige and to destroy their influence upon the great mass of the population. Among the societies actively opposed to the friars and perhaps to Spain the first formed was the Tagálog Center of the Spanish Orient, lodges of which had been established in the islands some five or six years before this formidable insurrection by Miguel Morayta and others, who had used similar methods to combat the influence of the friars in the Spanish peninsula. The Spanish Orient, which has no affiliation with and is not recognized by English and American Masons, may be regarded as the source of that propaganda in the Philippines which afterwards developed into the sanguinary Katipúnan. A grand master of the Spanish Orient presided over the Carbonari of Italy. Its proselytes formed the Katipúnan of the Philippines.

The native, with all the oriental susceptibility to ritual and to secrecy, was attracted and held as he could have been in no other wav. The attraction of the Catholic influence was successfully neutralized. The rapid growth of the lodges of the Spanish Orient convinced the leaders of the movement that secret societies were the proper medium for disseminating their influence. Accordingly, José Rizal, the Filipino author and reformer, came into the islands and organized from among the more intelligent classes what was called the “Philippine League," a society whose platform consisted of the round and sonorous sentences usual in the announcements of Filipino propaganda and of customary vagueness. Generally speaking, a system of education and reforms was to be provided which should teach the Philippines to stand alone. Its ultimate purpose was stated by the Spanish Government, when shortly after its foundation its existence was

[62]

discovered by the authorities, to be to secure the independence of the Philippines from Spain. Its president was deported. Rizal, himself, had already been exiled to Dapitan, a lonely village in the southern islands. The society dissolved, or, perhaps, better said, shrank back into the Tagálog lodges whence it had originated.

Marcelo del Pilar, Rizal's most formidable rival, set out to organize in the Philippines a similar society to work for the same end, but which he believed he could make more successful by limiting his recruiting to the less intelligent classes, who would form a more powerful and more easily wielded body than the one formed from the timid theorizers and wealthy half-Spaniards of the earlier project had proved to be. Only a few of the well-to-do middle class were admitted; its members believed in action and action of the most drastic character, and felt a fierce scorn for mere political agitation not backed up by the rifle and the knife. Thus in 1894 or in 1892 the Katipúnan was born. In two years its lodges were the controlling factor in every Tagálog town. Its officers, as well as members, were drawn from the uneducated classes. Its directorate passed from the control of one to another, until it was seized on the 1st of January, 1896, by the most powerful and radical member, one Andrés Bonifacio, a night watchman in a warehouse on the Pásig River, a man of little education, keen intelligence, passionate and courageous. The poor were to have their brother's wealth distributed among them; the native priests were to succeed their Spanish preceptors, and the native clerk his peninsular superior; the ambitious Spanish or Chinese mestizo would no longer have to give way to men of unmixed Spanish blood; out of race hatred and envy and blood lust there was to be born, by slaughter and pillage, a Malay republic.

The plans of Bonifacio were far-reaching. He attempted to negotiate with Japan. He brought all the other influential Filipino exiles into his fold and sought to win the support of Rizal. He sent an agent to the place of exile of that leader to aid him to escape and to ask him to return and lead the Katipúnan in open revolt. Doctor Rizal refused. He did not favor open and bloody revolt, and thought the Philippines were not yet ready for their independence. Bonifacio resolved to proceed without him.

The time was propitious. The army of the Philippines which, at the beginning of 1896, had consisted of 18,000 men, of whom only 2,000 were Spaniards, was to be increased to a force of 21,600 men, including the civil guard. The strictly military force was to be composed of 17,659 men, of whom 3,005 were to be Spaniards. This reorganization was being made. Apparently the increase was largely in the Spanish noncommissioned officers serving in native regiments, which must have caused dissatisfaction among the native soldiers, as it limited their opportunities for promotion. Such discontent caused by similar changes was at least one of the causes of the mutiny in Cavite in 1872. Bonifacio probably reckoned on such discontent increasing his adherents in the army, and assured his followers that when he gave the signal for the uprising the native troops would

[63]

join him with their arms. What was of at least equal importance to the success of the plot was the fact that the army, as in 1872, was engaged in operations against the Moros in Mindanao. At the end of August, 1896, there were available for use in Manila only some 300 Spanish artillery, Spanish detachments amounting to some 400 men, including the sailors which could be landed from the ships of war in port, and about 2,000 native soldiers, the greater part of whom belonged to detachments of the regiments in the field. A force so constituted is hardly available for anything but guard duty, and in case of a serious outbreak a force so small would be immobilized by the necessity of preventing an outbreak in the city of Manila and an attack on the arsenal, the treasury, and the foreign banks.

Reports had been made to the Spanish authorities during the summer of 1896 of an extensive conspiracy among the natives, but that they did not consider it serious is shown by the fact that no troops were withdrawn from Mindanao. On August 19 a native denounced the plot to the Spanish parish priest of Tondo, one of the districts of Manila, and the next day documentary evidence of a far-reaching conspiracy was in the hands of the authorities. This time the evidence was of such a nature that it could not be ignored; link after link of the hidden chain of intrigue revealed itself to the investigators, and when the extent and murderous character of the plotting were revealed arrests and trials followed swiftly. Many Europeans in Manila, rightly or wrongly, believed that all men there of white blood had been marked for murder. Documents were captured which, if authentic, showed this. Bonifacio escaped. Hundreds of others marked by the local authorities for their membership in secret societies were forced to flee for their lives.

Bonifacio was thus able to commit a large faction to an openly hostile position, but the native troops, on the whole, stood firm. He fled to Caloocan to avoid capture. The Katipúnan came out from the cover of secret designs, threw off the cloak of any other purpose, and stood openly for the independence of the Philippines. Bonifacio turned his lodges into battalions, his grand masters into captains, and the supreme council of the Katipúnan into the insurgent government for the Philippines. He himself was dictator. The insurrection declared, he put himself at the head of those of his people whom he was able hastily to collect about him at Caloocan, and sent out order!; for a general uprising on August 29 throughout such portions of the island of Luzón as the Katipúnan had organized.

The governor-general, realizing that if the insurrection was not promptly crushed it would be joined by a constantly increasing number of the disaffected, on August 25 sent a small column to attack the rebels at Caloocan. The Spanish force in the city was so small that nearly half of this column was composed of sailors from the flagship. No decisive result was obtained; the rebels scattered only to unite again, and on August 30 made a daring attempt, under Bonifacio, to seize the powder magazine at San Juan del Monte in the suburbs of Manila, but

[64]

[Image]

[No caption]

[65]

were repulsed by the detachment which guarded it. They then attacked Santa Mesa, but the detachments of Spanish and native troops which had been hurried there succeeded in driving them back. Some leaders of the rebels were captured, brought before a military court and publicly executed. So few Spanish soldiers were available for this action that a body of 100 men was under the personal command of the Spanish general next in rank to the governor-general. This attack, in which the rebels had been led almost into the streets of the city, made the authorities realize how serious were the conditions by which they were confronted. The governor-general ordered troops from Mindanao, asked for reinforcements from Spain, called upon the Spaniards of Manila to volunteer for the defense of the country, and proclaimed 8 provinces of Luzón in a state of war .

[Scrawled at this point on the margin of the third proof is the following: Map No. 1 here.]

In Cavite, on August 31, the seacoast towns rose under the leadership of Emilio Aguinaldo, a young radical, who was already a recognized leader among the local disaffected. The Spaniards had not expected this outbreak in Cavite. Aguinaldo had personally assured the governor of the province of his devotion to Spain (p. --), and when it came isolated Spanish officers were killed and their families carried into captivity. A conspiracy was discovered in the town of Cavite to release the prisoners and kill the Spaniards. Thirteen men found to have engaged in it were at once tried and shot. By the middle of September Manila Province was in ablaze, and Cavite Province, beyond the walls of the port, was in the hands of the insurgents. The Spaniards had taken refuge in Manila and the town of Cavite, where they could be safe within the walls from the attack of the rebels, who, as yet, had few firearms, and were armed chiefly with lances and with knives. The difficulty of the situation was much increased by the fact that the defense of these two places -- until reinforcements arrived from Spain -- would be chiefly in the hands of native soldiers, among whom it was known that agents of the Katipúnan had been at work. The silence with which the propaganda of revolt had been carried on, and the success which it had met, must have filled the Spaniards with the gravest doubts of the fidelity of the native troops which, for nearly the first month of the insurrection, were the chief guarantee for their lives. The troops of the old native regiments -- the men who for years had followed Spanish officers -- were, on the whole, faithful, and it was largely due to them that Manila and Cavite were held until the arrival of reinforcements.

By the end of September all the troops which could be spared from the south had been concentrated in Manila and Cavite, but Governor-General Blanco, although he probably had some 6,000 men, did not consider himself strong enough to move against Cavite Province, which was rapidly being turned into an intrenched camp [44]; the towns, rivers, defiles, and a multitude of positions in the interior were being fortified by more or less united works, depending upon the strategic loca-

[66]

tion of each point, while an infinite number of parapets and every kind of obstacle were being thrown up to render the roads of communication useless. Two lines of trenches, one continuous and one with intervals, occupied the frontiers. Intrenchments were constructed on the banks of streams and such places where roads and defiles leading into the interior could be enfiladed, and usually there were several parallel lines of intrenchments, those in the rear commanding those in their front. Within these exterior lines the towns were defended by intrenchments constructed at points commanding the roads leading to them; pitfalls were dug and barricades were built in the streets. The defensive possibilities of stone buildings were made use of and increased. Sluices in the dams across the rivers were contrived so as to produce inundations when desired. A continuous line of intrenchments was built along the seacoast, and at intervals there were casemates where the defenders, the sentinels, and even the fishermen could take refuge from the fire of Spanish war ships.

All of these preparations greatly increased the defensive strength of the province, whose natural features are such as to render difficult the operations of any but native troops [41]. It abounds in rivers which run parallel to each other at short distances, their beds being the bottoms of deep ravines, which present excellent positions for defense. The roads are few and bad. In many places troops would be forced to move upon trails and foot paths. The trails and roads alike are crossed at frequent intervals by streams and bordered by dense growth, affording opportunity for the ambush of small parties. There were a number of well-constructed bridges in the province, but on the approach of the Spaniards these were partly or wholly destroyed by the insurgents. Cavite Province was the center of the insurrection. With its reoccupation by Spain organized resistance could be crushed down.

The population of Cavite Province was about 141,250. According to the system of organization employed by the insurgents, everyone of these people had his place in the scheme of defense. For military purposes, the territory was divided into five parts, called zones of war, having as capitals Siláng, Imus, Bacoor, San Francisco de Malabon, and Alfonso. Each of these zones was defended by an army, which was divided into an active and a volunteer force, the former comprising all the fighting men and the latter all those engaged outside of the ranks in works of a mechanical character. The active army was organized into regiments, companies, and batteries, performed duties in the trenches, towns, and on the roads, and also patrolled the territory to check desertions and disaffection. In turn, the companies were divided into soldiers with firearms and those without, the duty of the latter -- in the proportion of some five to each rifleman -- being to keep themselves close to the rear of the firing-line and secure the guns of men who became disabled, it being also required that such reserves should be provided with spears and bolos (a native knife), to attack with the riflemen when the order was given to charge the Spaniards. To the batteries were committed duties pertaining to the care and use of the rude na-

[67]

tive cannon, or "lantakas," the firing of mines and fougasses, and the preservation of the gunpowder. According to Spanish writers, the insurgents had obtained their firearms from deserters, from the detachments which they had overpowered at the outbreak of the insurrection, by capture, and by purchase. The statement has been made that at the beginning of 1897 they had 15,000 of all descriptions. The estimate is probably too high. Gen. Primo de Rivera stated that at the close of that year he did not think that they had more than 1,500, which estimate is undoubtedly too low [45].

The function of the volunteer army was the gathering and storing of food supplies and obtaining iron and copper from every possible source for the construction of arms. It was also their duty to search the surface of the fields for projectiles which, fired by the navy at the trenches along the coasts, had failed to explode; to carry food to the troops on guard or on duty in the defenses, and with those of the active army; and the women and children; since when works of this kind were concerned neither age, sex, nor condition could procure exemption, to strengthen daily the defenses and throw up others on suitable sites.

Some Spanish writers on the subject think that, owing to the influx of the disaffected from other provinces, there were 105,000 men in arms in Cavite Province. The estimate is high, but it is undoubtedly a fact that the Spanish forces operating there were opposed, not by an army, but by a people in arms.

Within these lines the men of greater intelligence dreamed of a government to be conducted for their exclusive benefit under the name of a republic. The great mass of the people who had gathered there knew nothing of a republic. There is no word for it in Tagalog, Bicol, Visayan, Ilocano, or any of the languages which the natives speak, and which the far greater part of them speak alone. The longing of this great mass was to be rid of the restrictions and the centralized form of government established by Spain. They wanted to be free, which meant that they wanted to go back to the wild life of the hills. The Malay of pure blood is not a dweller in large towns. If left to himself, he builds his house -- in many cases hardly more than a shelter -- upon some stream, and gathering his family about him, lives upon what fish he has caught in his own nets and the crop he has raised with his own hands. But even then he must have a leader -- a man who can speak to him in his own tongue and awaken that longing to obey, that lust of devotion which smoulders in his soul. These men -- the "taos" -- form the great mass of the people. Many of them have lived for generation after generation upon the same land, and when not under the control of the friars, under the domination of that class of natives who call themselves “ilustrados" (enlightened men), whose blood is, in almost every case, partly Spanish or partly Chinese. The supremacy of the friars was passing, and men of this class intended to be, in all things, the heirs to their domain. The control exercised by this class of “ilustrados" is absolute, and it is outside of the law. It is not possible for an American to understand why it is that a Filipino who happens to be rich and to know

[68]

Spanish and to have been educated in Manila, is, from the possession or those advantages, able to exact absolute and willing obedience, from the men who live about him, an obedience which extends in many cases to a perfect willingness to commit murder, under the conviction that the "ilustrado" is responsible and not the murderer, who has done his mere duty in passively obeying the orders of the man whom he looks up to, and who, in some things at least, seems to have succeeded to the absolute and paternal power of the tribal chiefs who now rule in Mindanao and Joló, and who, prior to the coming of the Spaniards, ruled on all the seacoasts of the wide-flung Archipelago.

The idea of forming a republic or of adopting the titles appropriate to a republic to designate the functionaries of a Malay despotism was an afterthought. The men who, in August, 1896, raised the standard of revolt, the fighting men like Bonifacio and Aguinaldo, did not know enough of the outside world to realize its expediency. Aguinaldo learned it when he was joined by men who had been better trained than he in Spanish methods of thought, and who had read the history of France and Spain. They found it was expedient to cover their system of absolutism with the name of a republic. It was probably a republic as they understood it, but there seems no reason for doubting that in September, 1896, Vito Belarmino, one of the most prominent of the insurgents, called himself Vito, viceroy of Siláng, one of the largest towns of Cavite Province, and to the very end of the so-called Filipino Republic the "royal family" was a common form of reference to the mother and wife and child of Emilio Aguinaldo, and over and over again the orders of the President of the Republic were spoken of by his followers as "royal decrees."

Such a blind devotion to their leaders on the part of the great mass of the people does not make for the security of government. There is always the probability of the appearance of a new enchanter able to weave a more powerful spell, and such men did appear in 1898 and 1899, whose opposition to Aguinaldo had to be suppressed by arms at a time when it was of the utmost importance to the group about him to show that they, and they alone, represented the aspirations of the Filipino people.

A republic is a government founded upon the consent of the governed. To be anything more than a name it must embody, in working form, the aspirations of the people. To found one it is not sufficient to juggle with words and call the grant of such rights as a clique in power finds it expedient to bestow upon the people whom they rule the establishment of a republican form of government. Republics are the result of a slow growth. To exist in anything more than name they are the expression of the aspirations of the whole people to be partners in the State; the establishment of a republic in fact is something more than a feat of political legerdemain.

By the end of September, 1896, the government within the insurgent lines was in the hands of Emilio Aguinaldo, who called himself the “generalissimo;" next in rank was Andres Bonifacio, “el supremo" (the supreme master) of the Katipúnan, who, as delegate of the generalis-

[69]

simo, ruled the three districts into which Cavite Province had been divided -- the vice-royalty of Siláng, a district with a capital at Imus, and a district with its capital at San Francisco de Malabón. Each of these districts had a head. assisted by a council of government, among the members of which were many of the future generals of the Filipino Republic.

Until the 1st of November General Blanco did not consider himself strong enough to take the offensive, but the few troops in Manila and Cavite did not remain inactive. They made some reconnaissances in the vicinity of those cities, but their numerical inferiority exposed them to checks which increased the audacity of the insurgents. In a short while it was seen that the only possible thing to do was to wait, and in the meanwhile restrain the people of Manila and Cavite, who were being excited by insurgent emissaries.

Although the nature of the territory in the hands of the insurgents was favorable to defense, yet the manner which that territory lay with respect to the surrounding provinces made it comparatively easy to isolate Cavite Province and the portions of Laguna and Batangas provinces to which the insurrection had spread. The Spaniards were masters of the sea and of Lakes Taal and Bay. General Blanco had the town of Cavite put into a condition of defense and works were constructed on the neck connecting it with the mainland. Two passages from the insurgent territory were partly barred by the Pásig and Pansipit rivers, which connect Lakes Bay and Taal with the sea. General Blanco established a line from Lian to Balayan, intended to cut off from the insurgents the eastern part of Batangas Province. Then he strongly occupied Taal and Saint Nicolas in order to guard the passage of the Pansipit. North of Lake Taal, where the country was more difficult to observe, he garrisoned San Domingo and established in advance of it the line Calamba-Tanauan-Bañadero, intended to protect the provinces of Laguna and Batangas.

On the side of, Manila he had the Pásig patrolled and further covered the approach to the capital by placing in a state of defense the line Parañaque-Las Piñas.
Daily reconnaissances were made from the points thus occupied; on their side the rebels made constant attacks on the circle which enclosed them. The capture of Nasugbu, the defense of Lian, combats at Pansipit and to the north of Lake Taal, the capture of Talisay by the insurgents, attacks on Bilog-Bilog and on San Domingo, are the principal military events during this period of expectation.

Reinforcements arrived from Spain and, little by little, grew accustomed to the war. The daily operations developed cohesion in the different commands, in which the commanders and soldiers, taken right and left in the Peninsula, had not had time to know each other. By the end of October, when General Blanco must have had a force of 6,000 Spanish troops and 3 native regiments available for active operations against the insurgents, the latter were in possession of Cavite Province and the immediately surrounding territory, and the insurrection had spread to all the central provinces of Luzón, where, however, the rebel

[70]

forces were widely scattered and deficient in organization and equipment, only a few having firearms of any description. Nevertheless, under Llanera, they were able to gather as many as 5,000 men to raid along the railroad and the towns about Manila, plundering and burning. A small column was kept moving against them, but although it usually scattered the bands it attacked, they came together again to resume their marauding expeditions.

On November 1, 1896, General Blanco decided to assume the offensive in Cavite Province. He collected considerable quantities of supplies at Dalahican, a village on the peninsula of Cavite, where he had established his camp, and at Calamba.

He formed the forces concentrated at these points into three columns. The first one, under command of General Rios, marched from Cavite on Noveleta; the second, transported by sea to Binacayan, was to take possession of that village. and the third, that of Calamba, was composed of 1,500 men under the command of General Aguirre, commanding in the provinces of Laguna and Batangas. The duty of the latter was to march on Siláng by Talisay, and to join there a column then formed at Bañadero. These operations began on the 9th. They were not successful. The command which bad moved on Binacayan was forced back with heavy losses, and the column directed upon Noveleta failed to take possession of the trenches covering the approaches of the town, and also lost heavily. The heaviest losses in these engagements were the Seventy-third, a native regiment. The two columns had to fall back on Cavite. Talisay was taken on the 12th, but the, check which he had suffered near Cavite decided General Blanco to suspend the movement, and General Aguirre was ordered to return to Calamba, from which place he proceeded to Santa Cruz to suppress an uprising which had just taken place. Laguna Province was pacified in a few days, and on December 1 the command was again concentrated at Calamba and Santo Domingo, where a camp for 4,000 men was
prepared; General Rios’s brigade was reorganized in Cavite on December 1 and was also ready to take the offensive.

Weeks had passed, and the insurrection held its own. Blanco was the subject of bitter attack by the clerical party for his previous protection of Rizal, for his alleged connection with Masonry, and for his too great leniency in punishing the rebels. The Spanish press was filled with complaints of his inactivity, and finally an order was issued for his relief by General Polavieja, then on his way to the islands. Some days before the order was issued this telegram was published in the Madrid press. The immediate result suggests the influence of the friars in the conduct of Philippine secular affairs at Madrid.

Hongkong, October 31.

Dominicos, Madrid:

Situation growing more serious. Rebellion spreading. Apathy of Blanco inexplicable. In order to avert danger immediate appointment of a commander necessary. We agree in this.

[71]

General Polavieja assumed the supreme command on December 13, 1896. The force at his disposal for operations against the insurgents must have been nearly 13,000 Spanish soldiers and probably three native regiments. It is probable that the remainder of the native regiments were retained in their usual garrisons to prevent outbreaks at new points. The new governor-general proceeded to carry out the plans of his predecessor. He intended to strongly occupy the lines which shut off the center of the insurrection in the province of Cavite in order to finish with the scattered centers in the neighboring provinces. After that he intended to employ the majority of his command in Cavite Province to finally trample out the insurrection there.

In consequence he changed the assignment of troops in Laguna, Batangas, and Tayabas provinces and formed a division under the command of General Lachambre composed of two brigades in Laguna Province and one in Batangas Province, while Cavite was held by an independent brigade and another occupied Manila and covered the line of the Pásig. Numerous light columns rid the provinces of central Luzón of the scattered groups of insurgents which occupied them. The rebels were held in about Cavite in spite of their repeated attacks upon the lines which confined them. Attacks on Santo Domingo and Las Piñas and a daring offensive movement toward the line of the Pásig followed by a hasty retreat on Pamplona were the principal manifestations of the activity of the enemy. General Polavieja laid a heavy hand upon the men charged with aiding and abetting the insurrection. A permanent court-martial sat in Manila charged with their trial. A number were shot, and by the end of December about 1,000 men, many of them rich and influential, had been tried and deported to various penal settlements and their property seized. On December 30 José Rizal was shot in Manila for conspiracy against the State.

As reinforcements continued to arrive, the month of January, 1897, was one of great activity, and constant combats took place in the center of Luzón, the most important of which was an attack upon the insurgent leader Llanera in Bulacán, who was forced to take refuge in Nueva Écija, while the majority of his followers availed themselves of an amnesty proclamation and surrendered. By the end of the month Bataan, Zambales, and Batangas provinces were reported free of insurgents. The time was fast approaching when it would be possible to move upon Cavite Province.

Spain, by February 1, 1847, had succeeded in transporting to the Philippines 15 battalions of infantry, 4 battalions of marine infantry, the men necessary to increase the companies in each battalion of infantry from 6 to 8, one battery of artillery, 9 cm. guns, and one squadron of cavalry. In all, some 25,000 officers and men had been sent to the Archipelago since the beginning of the insurrection, but the resources of the Peninsula were being severely tried by the war in Cuba, and the troops sent to the Philippines were young conscripts -- boys of 18 or 19 in most cases. Spain. exhausted by two rebellions, was drawing upon her last reserves.

[72]

Nearly all of the reinforcements received from Spain, the Seventy-fourth Regiment and battalions of the Sixty-eighth, Seventieth, and Seventy-third native regiments, a small force of cavalry, three batteries and some 2,000 native volunteers, raised in provinces remote from the centers of insurgent activity, were available for an attack upon the insurgent positions. The period of preparation had passed and the governor-general prepared to engage in offensive operations.

The staff had been informed of the dispositions of the enemy by spies and frequent reconnoissances. The three principal centers were known to be Siláng., Nov[e]leta, and Imus. General Polavieja resolved to finish first with Silang. At the same time he had to hold the insurgents at the other points by means of vigorous demonstrations.
General Polavieja, captain-general, and as governor-general in supreme command, organized the following commands, which on February 7 were stationed as follows:

Division of La Laguna, Batangas and Tayabas, Major-General Lachambre. Under his immediate command were 16 guns, 200 cavalry, and organizations of volunteers and the civil guard, which gave him a force of under his personal command of 1,363 men. His three brigades were as follows:

First brigade. -- Brigadier-General Cornel; 4,001 men; headquarters at Calamba.

Second brigade. -- Brigadier-General Marina Vega; 3,913 men; headquarters at Biñang,

Third brigade. -- Brigadier-General Jaramillo; 1,645 men and 2 guns; headquarters at Taal, Batangas Province. It had also detachments along the line Lian-Taal, in Batangas Province, which amounted to 1,095 men.

The first and second brigades had detachments amounting to 1,563 men on the lines Santa Cruz-Calamba and Tanauan-Bañadero. These dispositions gave General Lachambre a total force of 13,580 men, of which 10,922 were available for the offensive. These commands were composed of infantry.

A fourth brigade under Brigadier-General Galbis, operating under the immediate command of the governor-general, with a strength of 100 cavalry, 5,869 infantry, and 14 guns, was extended along the northern bank of the Zapote River. The lakes of Bay and Taal were guarded by launches and small craft, while the gunboats of the squadron patrolled the seacoast.

Brigadier-General de los Rios held Cavite and Dalahican with a force of about 3,812 infantry and 100 cavalry, and Major-General Zappino held Manila and Morong provinces with a force of about 2,754 infantry, 216 heavy artillery, 200 cavalry, the Manila volunteers, and the civil guard of his provinces. His command included the city of Manila.

On February 14, General Lachambre, with Cornel’s and Marina Vega's brigades, moved on Siláng, which he took on February 19 and put in a condition of defense. On February 26, the division took Dasmari-

[73]

ñas, which was defended by Aguinaldo in person. After beating off incessant attacks, the division moved on Salitrán, which it occupied on March 8. On February 16 Jaramillo took Bayuyuñgan and drove the insurgents from their intrenched positions in Batangas. On February 15, Galbis took Pamplona. On March 7, the first line of works about Imus was taken, but the resistance met was of such a nature that it was not considered advisable to attack the main position without reinforcements, and the troops which had occupied them were withdrawn.

On March 10, 1897, the division marched for the Zapote River and effected contact with the Fourth Brigade, then commanded by General Barraquer. On March 24 the division moved on Imus from Salitrán with a force of about 12,000 combatants, obtained by adding the Fourth Brigade and detachments to the First and Second brigades. By evening the first line of works about Imus had been taken; the next day the town was occupied and garrisoned. On March 26 General Polavieja offered amnesty to all who would surrender their arms before April 11. The same day the insurgents abandoned Bacoor on the approach of the Spanish troops, and an attack was delivered on Binacayan which failed, and the brigade making it fell back on Bacoor. On March 30 the division was concentrated at Imus, which it left next day, directed upon Noveleta, which was taken, and the insurgents abandoned Binacayan and Cavite Viejo. On April 6 Lachambre moved on San Francisco de Malabon, which he took after an obstinate resistance by the insurgents under the command of Bonifacio, head of the Katipúnan. Santa Cruz and Rosario were occupied without resistance, and the natives flocked jn from every direction to take advantage of the amnesty offered by the governor-general. Organized resistance in Cavite Province had been broken. The campaign had lasted fifty-two days, 57 combats had taken place, and the division had lost 15 officers and 168 men killed, and 56 officers and 910 men wounded. Probably a larger number had died or been invalided from disease.

It is impossible to say what the insurgent casualties were; the Spanish reports give their dead as about 3,450, which was probably as exaggerated as such estimates usually are. Reports of killed and wounded drawn up by the force which has suffered losses in action are accurate, as the men are known and must be accounted for on rolls of some form. No one in the victorious army has any personal interest in the dead of the enemy. The estimates of their number are influenced by the natural tendency to exaggerate the effect of fire directed by the officer making the report, even if it is not considered expedient to exaggerate the estimate for its effect upon the people of the country of the enemy when published. Even when count is made of the enemy's dead it is usually done in a perfunctory manner. There are other and more important things to be attended to after an action, and the totals are obtained by adding the reports and estimates of many men, who frequently report the same dead which have been reported upon by others. In these actions the insurgents evidently fought gallantly and lost heavily. The loss which, with a most imperfect armament, they had inflicted upon the Spaniards shows that they fought well. Nearly 12

[74]

per cent of casualties in the attacking force, during operations lasting less than two months, shows a capable resistance on the part of the defense. They fought well; almost as well as the people of Achin, a Malay tribe which for thirty years has, from their hills and intrenchments, defied a Dutch force almost as large as that which the Spaniards employed against Cavite Province.

On April 25 General Polavieja, who had applied to be relieved from his command on account of illness, was succeeded by Gen. Primo de Rivera as governor-general of the Philippines. At the time of this change in the supreme command the insurrection had been almost extinguished in the provinces north of Manila, as, with the exception of a few hundred insurgents who had taken refuge in the mountains, all armed resistance had disappeared. In Batangas and Cavite provinces the eastern part had been pacified, but in the mountainous western part the insurgents still held the towns in the foothills of the Sierra de Tagaytay and the towns of Ternate and Naic, near the seacoast, and prevented the inhabitants of the neighboring towns from appearing to take advantage of the amnesty, although elsewhere in Cavite, on April 13 alone, 24,000 had presented themselves for that purpose.

Among the insurgent leaders the pressure of common adversity was not sufficient to destroy old rivalries. At the end of April they broke out into sudden flame and the band of Bonifacio fired upon the band of Aguinaldo. Bonifacio was taken and stripped of his rifles, his wife narrowly escaped rape by one of his rival's leaders, and after trial he was sentenced to death for conspiracy against the life of the president. On May 8, 1897, Aguinaldo commuted the sentence to solitary imprisonment for life, but since that time no man has seen the supreme leader of the Katipúnan. Aguinaldo later stated that he had had him shot. His action upon the sentence must have been for the purpose of avoiding the alienation of the adherents of Bonifacio. He could say in public that he had spared his life, as proven by a written record (Exhibit 30), while some secret emissary, under private instructions, made away with his rival. While the leaders were thus struggling for the mastery of the Katipúnan the Spanish authorities were preparing to sweep their bands from the towns which thev still held.

Shortly after his arrival Gen. Primo de Rivera issued a proclamation of amnesty, to run until the King’s birthday, May 17, and proceeded to Cavite Province to take the field in person. On May 1 operations began by the three brigades of that province moving forward in concert, while the fourth brigade in Batangas was charged with preventing the beaten force from taking refuge on the precipitous slopes of the Suñgay and Tagaytay mountains. In two weeks the last intrenched insurgent positions were occupied with but small loss, and Cavite Province was declared conquered and pacified.

The governor-general drew up a plan by which troops were to be so stationed and such measures were to be taken as would prevent the recrudescence of the insurrection. This plan was never put into effective operation, probably because men could not be spared, and the

[75]

troops, without having remained long enough in their stations to accomplish anything permanent in the way of tranquilizing their various districts, were withdrawn to Manila on May 18, leaving a single battalion under the orders of the governor. As the province was thus stripped of troops the members of the Katipúnan, seeing the time opportune, renewed their activities and formed plans to revive the insurrection.

Aguinaldo, conquered in Cavite Province, took refuge in the almost inaccessible mountains which divide it from Batangas, and gathered about him the insurgents who had refused to avail themselves of the amnesty granted by the governor-general. As he had rid himself of his ablest rival, his authority seems to have been everywhere recognized by the insurgents, who saw that in his hands were now the formidable powers of the Katipúnan.

In the districts bordering on Cavite and Manila provinces, the insurrection, in place of dying out, revived. In Bulacán many insurgents appeared in arms and frequent encounters took place between them and the Spanish forces, which were kept moving incessantly. On May 30 Malvar took possession of Talisay, on Lake Taal, and had to be driven out from the intrenchments which he had built.

On June 10, 1897, Aguinaldo, with some 500 men, crossed the Pásig River almost within sight and hearing of Manila, proceeded to Biac-na-bató, some 60 miles from the capital in the foothills of the mountains of Bulacán, where he was joined by other bands. On June 14 a Spanish column had to withdraw with heavy loss from the northern part of Manila Province.

From his mountain fastnesses, Emilio Aguinaldo, now installed as president of the revolutionary government, with the additional title of generalissimo of the army of liberation, proceeded to perform various acts of supreme authority, and appointed as vice-president Mariano Trias. who remained in Batangas and Cavite provinces at the head of a small force.

When Aguinaldo reached Biac-na-bató, resistance had not ceased but its character had changed. Guerrilla warfare had been adopted by the insurgents, and the Spanish commands were forced to follow an enemy who was never dangerous to large bodies, but who always was to small ones -- an enemy who, wearing no uniform, upon the approach of a large body, became peaceful laborers in the fields along the road, ready to pick up their rifles or bolos and use them against a small party or a straggler. The leaders had not been killed or captured, and, although the result of the campaign in Cavite had been to sweep the organized insurgents from that province, yet, in spite of their heavy losses, enough were left to act as centers for the guerilla warfare which continued to extend from that province as from a single point of infection. The Spaniards had cut wide and deep, but they had not cut wide and deep enough.

Men who adopt the methods of guerrilla war thereby abandon the restrictions which international law has placed upon indulgence in

[76]

the more base and cruel passions to which war gives rise, and have decided to cross the line of delimitation, which the public sense of civilized nations has drawn between the belligerent and the noncombatant; or else the men who adopt these methods have never heard of international law, and are guided by no sense except that of apparent immediate expediency. And yet guerrilla warfare is not a warfare of despair. Its cruelty is a calculated cruelty, and its adoption, except by savages, is a conscious and willful return to savag[e]ry. It or submission was the only choice left to Aguinaldo, and he did not choose it without some hope, for Spain had sent her last reinforcements. General Polavieja at the close of his campaign in Cavite had asked for 20 battalions to garrison the places which he had captured and to complete the pacification of the disaffected provinces. Spain had no more reinforcements for the Far East, and his request had been refused. Upon his arrival, Gen. Primo de Rivera had informed the Spanish authorities that he would need no reinforcements and had disbanded the Spanish volunteers. Aguinaldo must have realized that, although he had lost heavily in men and arms, yet the Spaniards, too, had lost, and that unless the country was won over to them their loss of men could not be replaced, while his could. He, however, could replace his loss in firearms and ammunition only by capture from the Spaniards, while they could draw upon Spain.

Failure to adopt the methods of guerilla warfare is almost always due to a desire to avoid the suffering which it inevitably causes among noncombatants. In Aguinaldo's theory of war there were no noncombatants. Although there could have been no reasonable expectation that the prolongation of the conflict would secure the recognition of the independence of the Malay States these men hoped to found, yet by adopting it there was a reasonable expectation of obtaining such measure of recognition as, in fact, they did obtain. Whatever they may have fought for at first, the leaders were fighting now for their own safety. From their point of view their policy was a wise one. The Spanish force in the Philippines could not be increased until the chances of the campaign in Cuba permitted the withdrawal of troops from that island. Until troops could be withdrawn from there it would be impossible to compensate for the diminution of the effective strength of the army in the Archipelago caused by [ca]sualties and disease, which Gen. Primo de Rivera said amounted to nearly 40 per cent a year, a drain which would be inevitably increased by the necessities of guerrilla warfare, forcing the divisions of the command into smaller and ever smaller detachments, difficult to supply, and with diminution in size exposed to increasing danger of attack by a hostile population. And then Aguinaldo probably reckoned upon an increase in his force from the acts of retaliation which accompany guerrilla warfare, and, which, when permitted by subordinate commanders, are so ill advised, for every village which is burnt and whose people are allowed to remain unfed sends its men to join the guerrilla bands. But Gen. Primo de Rivera had commanded before in the Philippines, where he was personally popular, and knew the country well. He saw the

[77]

expediency of treating with humanity the population not openly engaged in hostilities, and by degrees won it over to himself and the Spanish cause, enabling him to fight Filipinos with Filipinos.

He himself said (46) that it was not sufficient for an army to triumph over guerrilla bands; to conquer the support of the country itself is necessary. Unless this is obtained, even when the country is occupied by soldiers, the war continues and grows. It is not sufficient to kill and to destroy; a desert is not necessarily at peace. A people who have risen in arms submit only of their own will, and only when the majority has been induced to believe that their property and their lives are safer in the hands of the leaders of the conquering army than in the hands of the leaders who have called them to the field.

In the month of July, 1897, no actions of importance were fought. Miguel Malvar exercised command over the Batangas insurgents, while Llanera was the principal chief in Central Luzón. In August Spanish troops had to disperse insurgents in Cavite Province, showing that the fires of insurrection were still smoldering there. Aguinaldo and Llanera made repeated attacks upon the town of San Rafael, Bulacán, but were repulsed, while in Batangas the insurgents had to be driven from an intrenched position near Lake Taal. In Laguna bands of insurgents armed with Remington and Mauser rifles went about attacking small towns and isolated "haciendas," but were usually overtaken and dispersed. On September 4 some 5,000 insurgents attacked Aliaga, Nueva Écija, and the small garrison there succeeded in holding its position only owing to the exhaustion of the attacking force. There were engagements in Pampanga, Tayabas, Laguna, and Batangas provinces, and a serious plot was discovered in Manila. By October the zone of guerrilla activity had spread to Pangasinán, Tarlac, Nueva Écija, and as far as Principe Province.

By this time the necessity of additional troops to take the place of those unfit for service was apparent. As the governor-general was not able to obtain troops from Spain, he was compelled to again resort to native volunteers, who, indeed, he said were to be preferred to the raw recruits which had been sent from the Peninsula. These by a decree of October 16, 1897, were called for from the provinces of Luzón, the Visayas, and the Christian parts of Mindanao. The decree called for two classes of volunteers --local and mobilized. The local volunteers were to be employed in the defense of their own towns and for patrol service. When in service they were to receive the same pay and allowances as native troops. The mobilized volunteers were to be armed, equipped, and fed by the Government, and were to act in combination with the regular troops. They were to receive slightly greater pay and allowances than the native troops, and those who remained in the ranks for more than six months were to be entitled to certain privileges, including exemption of themselves and their first-born sons from military service, exemption from the payment of taxes in kind, and from payment for “cédulas" or certificates of identity. Land bounties were provided for both classes of volunteers, and medals to commemorate their serv-

[78]

ice. The call for volunteers wa[s] everywhere responded to with enthusiasm. Gen. Primo de Rivera says that he used all possible precautions to see that these volunteers were volunteers in fact, for only then could he feel secure of their fidelity. When 22,000 men or both classes had been enrolled enlistment was stopped. According to the governor-general there were only 5 desertions from this force prior to his departure from the islands, when he left 4,400 men of the mobilized militia. [45] Thus by degrees the devotion of the people drifted away from the insurgent leaders, who were forced to adopt measures of spoliation to live, and in December Gen. Primo de Rivera assembled a force of 8,000 Spanish soldiers, with which he invested the insurgent stronghold of Biac-na-bató, where were assembled Aguinaldo and many of his leaders.

In order to obtain this force the governor-general replaced the Spanish troops with volunteers in the positions from which the former had been withdrawn. The archbishop of Manila cooperated in the investment by placing at the disposal of Gen. Primo ,de Rivera between 20,000 and 30,000 men to carry supplies to the besieging army. These men were adherents of the church and were led to offer their
services through the exercise of the influence of the archbishop upon the parish priests. In fact, the rapidity with which volunteers were obtained was probably largely due to the influence of the parish priest, and as these volunteers were of great value to Spain in crushing out the embers of the insurrection it is evident that the friars had given another reason for their hatred by the class of natives represented by Aguinaldo. It must have been evident to them that they still stood between them and their control of the masses of the people. Their attack upon the Spanish clergy the following year was largely inspired by the desire to succeed to their influence upon these masses, an influence which the followers of Aguinaldo desired to exert and to exert untrammeled and alone.

Read more.

Ileto, Reynaldo C. Excerpts from The Diorama Experience: A Visual History of the Philippines. Makati City: Ayala Foundation, 2004. 84-93.

[84]

Katipunan Initiation Rites
Manila, 1892

The arrest and exile of Jose Rizal convinced many Filipinos of the need for more radical measures to attain equality with, if not independence from, Spain. Andres Bonifacio, an admirer of Rizal and a member of La Liga Filipina (the Philippine League), proceeded to organize a secret society named Kataastaasan Kagalanggalang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan (The Highest and Most Venerable Association of the Sons and Daughters of the Nation). The Katipunan, as the KKK was commonly referred to, was a small confraternity, numbering only three hundred from 1892 to 1895. It drew its inspiration from European Freemasonry as well as from confraternities or sodalities approved by the Catholic Church.

Bonifacio was a native of Tondo, a warehouseman, apart-time actor in vernacular dramas or komedya. Although proficient enough in reading Spanish, he wrote and spoke Tagalog almost exclusively. In his writings, he spoke of history and revolution in terms that the common people could understand. This is evident in his manifesto, Ang Dapat Mabatid ng Mga Tagalog (What the Tagalogs Should Know).

Bonifacio pictured the pre-colonial past as one of great abundance and prosperity. Everyone -- men and women, young and old -- Could read and write in their own language. Good relations were maintained with Japan and other neighboring lands. But the Spaniards came and seduced the natives into becoming their allies.

[85]

The relationship with Spain was sealed by means of a pact which, Bonifacio wrote, "consisted of taking blood from each other's veins, mixing and drinking it as a sign of genuine and wholehearted sincerity in pledging not to be traitorous to their agreement. This was called the 'Blood Compact' of King Sikatuna and Legazpi, the representative of the King of Spain." This pact marked the beginning of the "fall" from an age of pre-Spanish wholeness into a dark age of oppression.

Bonifacio spoke of the people's duty to redeem the country in order to bring forth a condition called kalayaan. While routinely translated as "independence," the meaning of kalayaan runs deeper: it stems from the word layaw, meaning childhood bliss, bodily pleasure, and the satisfaction of necessities. The revolutionists coined the term kalayaan to define independence not just in terms of political autonomy from Spain but also as a general condition of well-being, abundance, and happiness -- a return of the golden age.

This proved to bean attractive appeal to the working classes of Manila and its environs. After Bonifacio's manifesto and similar writings appeared in the newspaper Kalayaan in mid-1896, the Katipunan's membership rose sharply to 30,000, and by early 1897 this had grown to hundreds of thousands.

The Katipunan's ideology was brought home to each member through the society's initiation ritual, an adaptation of the Catholic Easter Vigil ceremony enhanced by Masonic symbols. In a dark room with only a single point of illumination (patterned after the Easter candle), the neophyte was made to answer a series of questions, like those asked in baptismal ceremonies. However, instead of repudiating the devil in order to be reborn in the Catholic Church, the new Katipunero had to repudiate the dark age of friar domination in order to be reborn in a new community of the children of the Motherland (Inang Bayan).

The final step of the ritual was the signing of membership papers with the Katipunero's own blood. This signified not just his or her willingness to shed blood, or even to die, in freeing the Motherland but also the repudiation of the original blood compact between Sikatuna and Legazpi. The new blood compact would unite the sons and daughters of the Motherland who would call each other kadugo, "of the same blood."

While effective in ensuring commitment to the cause owing to its underlying themes of death and rebirth, the Katipunan initiation rite was too cumbersome and time-consuming as mass mobilization went fully underway in 1897. It was soon replaced by a simple oath-taking ceremony.

Aguinaldo abandoned the secret society mode of organization altogether when he formed a revolutionary government. Nevertheless, the Katipunan form of organization with its associated rituals survived in many areas under little-known leaders, sometimes assuming the characteristics of religio-political sects. And during the difficult guerrilla war with the United States, Aguinaldo himself would attempt to revive the Katipunan in order to keep the spirit of resistance alive among the lower classes.


[86]

The Revolution Against Spain Begins
Manila, 1896

The Manila Katipunan was composed of workers, servants, petty clerks and traders, militiamen, and even seamen in cargo ships who spread the society's message to other parts of the archipelago. Some Filipino workers returning from abroad joined as well.

[87]

Candido Iban and Francisco del Castillo, who worked as seamen and divers in Australia, were lucky enough to win in the Australian lottery and brought their winnings back to Manila. Joining the Katipunan in 1895, they donated four hundred pesos of their prize of one thousand pesos for the purchase of a printing press, which was used to print the newspaper Kalayaan, They then returned to Capiz to organize the Katipunan among their province mates.

Most wealthy and prominent Filipinos stayed away from the Katipunan. They saw it as a movement of the lower-middle class and gentes ordinarias (commoners) that lacked the armaments and skills to overcome Spanish state power. Bonifacio, however, managed to implicate the "better classes" in various ways in order to secure their financial and professional help. Even after Rizal refused to join, for example, his name and portrait were incorporated in Katipunan ceremonies.

After the secret society was exposed on August 19, 1896, Manila and other major towns became the scene of a massive manhunt in which about five hundred prominent Filipinos were arrested and tried for conspiracy and sedition before a special court. Spain's overreaction to the Katipunan's discovery lost her the allegiance of many among the indio and mestizo elite and their families who were unjustly persecuted.

The Katipunan's numerical strength lay in the suburbs of San Francisco Neri (today's Mandaluyong), San Juan de los Montes, and the barrios beyond, where the predominantly farming population had been recruited into the society. In one such stronghold, Balintawak, Bonifacio secretly gathered his men for the inevitable confrontation with the Spanish Army.

One of Bonifacio's close associates at Balintawak was an old remontado (rebel) named Laong, who wore a salacot (gourd) hat ornamented with silver, with a knob of the same metal. The missionaries labeled remontados those indios who had abandoned the towns and the Christian faith to live outside the control of Spain. Laong is said to have "attracted, catechized and initiated out-of-hand" many peasants in the fields surrounding Balintawak. He was one of those privileged to carry a revolver, of which the Katipunan had precious few. Laong led a group of remontados and peasant fanners in an attack on the Chinese and their stores in Caloocan and other places in the vicinity.

[88]

Propertied Filipinos, including most ilustrados, would certainly have frowned upon such actions perpetrated by the "rabble," as Bonifacio's motley followers were sometimes called.

At Balintawak, the Katipunan code, which had been deciphered by the Spanish authorities, was changed. From there, the Katipuneros moved to Barrio Kangkong and eventually to Barrio Pugadlawin. At Pugadlawin, Bonifacio asked his men whether they were prepared to fight to the end. They all responded in the affirmative. Bonifacio then urged everyone to tear up his or her tax certificate (the infamous cedula personal), a symbolic gesture signifying the end of servitude to Spain. They did so amidst cries of "Long live the Philippines! Long live the Katipunan!" The gatherings at Balintawak and Pugadlawin were also occasions for communal meals, which brought the "children of the Motherland" together prior to battle.

As the Pugadlawin scene clearly shows, the Katipuneros were armed mostly with bolos and knives. Despite the defection of a few native militiamen with their arms, the Katipunan was no match for the Spanish forces. After a major defeat in Pinaglabanan, Bonifacio retreated to the hills of Morong province (now Rizal). Montalban was of special significance to him because it was in the cave of Pamitinan, abode of the legendary King Bernardo Carpio, that he and his associates had solemnly declared the independence of the country in April 1895. Perhaps it was the example of the remontado Laong that inspired Bonifacio to admit that in the case the Katipunan failed, he would remain an outlaw and never return to the Spanish fold.


[89]

The Execution of Jose Rizal
Manila, 1896

Jose Rizal had been exiled to Dapitan in Mindanao because of suspicions that he was a revolutionary. But when he applied to serve as a volunteer physician in Cuba, the application was approved. His plan was to sail for Spain and go from there to Cuba. Before he could reach Spain, however, orders reached the ship's captain that Rizal was to be arrested and sent back to the Philippines.

[90]

When Rizal was thrown into prison in November 1896, one of the first things he did was to design and send to his family a little sketch of "The Agony in the Garden," beneath which he wrote, "This is but the first Station." With him in his cell were a Bible and a copy of Tomas a Kempis's On the Imitation of Christ. By sending his family the Biblically-inspired sketch and note which would later come to the attention of more and more people together with his poem Mi Ultimo Adios, Rizal was obviously patterning his final days upon the familiar story of Christ's passion and death.

The publicized trial was a farce, but it fitted the scenario perfectly. The prosecutor called Rizal "the soul of this rebellion" whose countrymen render him "liege homage and look up to him as a superior being whose sovereign commands are obeyed without question." The Office of the Governor General submitted a document to the court that described Rizal as "the great agitator of the Philippines who is not only personally convinced that he is called to be the chosen vessel of a kind of redemption of his race, but who is considered by the masses of the native population to be a superhuman being."

Faced with such charges, Rizal could only plead that he had nothing to do with political affairs from July 1892 to June of that year and that he was opposed to the armed conspiracy. But the Judge Advocate General refused to allow publication of Rizal's manifesto condemning the uprising because, in effect it "said in substance: 'Let us subject ourselves now, for later I shall lead to the Promised Land.'" At the trial's end, news of Rizal's impending execution quickly "spread everywhere, producing a deep impression."

Rizal refused to be brought to the execution site in a military wagon, as was customary. He preferred to walk instead. Whether he intended it or not, everything about

[91]

his final hour was public, subject to rumor and interpretation. Entering the square formed by a company of soldiers who were his executioners, Rizal maintained an "amazing serenity," taking firm steps as if on a stroll. A Spanish doctor, wondering at his calmness, took his pulse and found it perfectly normal.

Despite his objections, Rizal had his back to the firing squad, but he was prepared with his special stance and suddenly twisted around in death, to fall face upwards. And sure enough, after uttering loud and clear his last words, "Consummatum est!" which was followed by a barrage of musket fire, Rizal lay dead facing the breaking dawn.

Rizal's mode of death, publicized in the Spanish and vernacular newspapers and repeated by word of mouth, was an event that could be comprehended at least by all Christian Filipinos. It enabled a greater number of people, regardless of regional, linguistic, and class differences, to discover a common identity by empathizing with Rizal and even following his example. It sparked the rapid growth of the Katipunan and religio-political sects in Luzon and the Visayas during the early months of 1897. A common feature of these diverse movements was their rallying cry, "Viva Rizal!"

The 1898 Republican government further encouraged the interpretation of Rizal as a national martyr. Toward the end of 1898 and in January 1899, the revolutionary newspapers La Independencia and El Heraldo de la Revolucion carried descriptions of the commemoration of Rizal's death in various towns.

Rizal himself had said, "the day the Spanish inflict martyrdom... farewell, pro-friar government, and perhaps farewell, Spanish government."


[92]

Court Martial of Andres Bonifacio
Cavite, 1897

The Katipunan uprising began in Manila and was fairly quickly suppressed, but in the surrounding provinces, events progressed in different ways, depending on the specific characteristics of each locale. The Katipunan leaders in Cavite tended to come from merchant and landowning families that had come to dominate municipal politics. Most had a Spanish education and the mayors (gobernadorcillos), in particular, could boast of some experience in warfare through leading their local police forces against bandit gangs. They were better situated to win battles against Spanish forces and liberate some towns, while Bonifacio was suffering one setback after another in the vicinity of Manila.

As Santiago Alvarez of San Francisco de Malabon writes of the experience of independence during the latter days of September 1896: "The people were truly happy, free to enjoy life in all sorts of ways. Food was plentiful; all things were cheap; there were no perversities, no robberies, no thefts, no pickpockets. Everyone had love for his fellow men, and in every place the Katipunan's teaching of brotherly love held sway." Rumors of the victories of Emilio Aguinaldo, a former mayor of Kawit, soon spread to other locales. A foreign journalist described people from Manila, Pasay, and Morong towns, "thousands of them, men and women, young and old, carrying their possessions, hurrying to place themselves under the Little Republic of Cavite." Early in December, Bonifacio, whose wife Gregoria de Jesus had relatives in Cavite, accepted an invitation to transfer his operations there.

Upon arriving with his wife, his brothers, and twenty men, Bonifacio found himself caught in the crossfire between two rival Katipunan factions, the Magdalo and the Magdiwang, and became

[93]

identified with the latter. The Tejeros convention, held on March 22, 1897, was an attempt to solve these internal problems. A revolutionary government replaced the Katipunan society, and Aguinaldo, the head of the Magdalo, (in fact Magdalo, or Magdalene, was his nom de guerre) was elected president. The new government took over the house that served as the Magdiwang headquarters and placed a trooper at Bonifacio's door to curtail the Supremo's activities.

Andres Bonifacio's defeat at the Tejeros election was facilitated by comments of the opposition that he lacked education, could not handle Spanish, and was not truly a republican because people in the streets hailed him as "Hari ng Katagalugan" (King of the Tagalogs), not to mention his use of the controversial title "Supremo." Some went to the extent of calling him a leader of bandits called "Katipungoles" and derided his alleged claim that the mythical Bernardo Carpio would come down from Mount Tapusi to help his struggling forces.

All of these criticisms actually point to Bonifacio's ability to render the struggle meaningful to the common people and the disdain with which many members of the "better classes" regarded such behavior. One criticism seems valid though: Bonifacio was a poor military strategist compared to the likes of Aguinaldo.

Perhaps owing to the unfair and insulting manner in which the Magdalo leaders treated him, Bonifacio refused to accept the results of the Tejeros election. He gathered his loyal followers and left with his wife and two brothers, intending to return to his hideouts in Morong. Aguinaldo, interpreting this as insubordination and a cause of disunity in the revolutionary camp, ordered the arrest of the Bonifacio brothers. In the skirmish that ensued, one of Bonifacio's brothers, Ciriaco, was killed and the other brother, Procopio, wounded. Andres was brought back to Naic, a prisoner of the revolutionary government. He and Procopio were court-martialed, found guilty of sedition, and sentenced to death.

The final decision was left to Aguinaldo, and there is a document proving that Aguinaldo commuted the penalty to indefinite exile. But perhaps his fellow commanders overruled him. Andres and Procopio Bonifacio were executed by a platoon of soldiers under Major Lazaro Macapagal's command in Mount Buntis, Maragondon, on May 10, 1897. The question of ultimate responsibility for this act, which demoralized a great number of Katipuneros, still remains unresolved.

Read more.

Richardson, Jim. "Ileto's Indeterminacies." 2005.

Pasyon and Revolution and other pieces by Ileto, it is not entirely flippant to suggest, might be seen as akin to the pasyon itself, as texts capable of generating multiple, even contradictory, meanings. These diverse meanings stem not just from the diverse interpretations of individual readers, but also from Ileto’s own inconsistency.

Perceptions or empirical realities?

Ileto, it has been said (BfB, 287), is interested principally in perceptions rather than behavior or attitudes, and indeed this statement can be supported by a host of quotes. The tenets of traditional empiricist historiography, Ileto maintains, - cause-and-effect, objective truth, common sense, the author-centric fixation of meanings etc. - are outmoded, and need to be rejected in favor of structuralist and phenomenological approaches that focus on collective discourses, mentalities and perceptions.

On the other hand, Ileto by no means forswears addressing traditional concerns. When analyzing the popular movements of the period 1840-1910, he makes innumerable statements about the character, attitudes and behavior of individuals as well as collectivities. This, one might argue, smacks strongly of what he scorns in other passages as fuddy-duddy, old-style history. He indicates, for example, that his purpose in examining literature like the pasyon, awit and poems is largely instrumental; he is seeking to complement conventional sources and to shed fresh light on the trajectories and ideologies of "concrete struggles", not merely on how they were perceived (P&R, 14-5; CI, 95; 103).

Bonifacio's "real" character and intentions: chimerical and irrelevant or sufficiently knowable and relevant for the historian to offer a view?

This inconsistency is illustrated very clearly when Ileto discusses the KKK Supremo, Andres Bonifacio. He claims that, "like a ‘text’, Bonifacio cannot be pinned down to a particular meaning and truth. He could only operate within the prevailing social structure and mode of discourse of his time" (BTSS, 25). Ileto wishes to call attention not to “the historical content of Bonifacio's work but its form and language” (P&R, 103, emphasis added). “Bonifacio's psychological make-up”, he writes, “is never discussed in [my book] Pasyon and Revolution”..…Whether or not Bonifacio intended (his trip with other Katipuneros to Mount Tapusi in 1895 to evoke associations with the legendary giant Bernardo Carpio) "is irrelevant to the web of meanings in which his gestures were located" (CI, 96). "Whether Bonifacio was a Mason or a Catholic is irrelevant here…. " (P&R, 103)

On the other hand, Ileto by no means forswears imparting "facts" and judgments about Andres Bonifacio. "They called him an ignoramus, an outsider from Tondo, a poor military strategist, a Mason, a monarchist, a tulisan (bandit) even. But beneath these accusations, most of which are valid...." (P&R, 137, emphasis added).

Bonifacio's "real" character and intentions: closer to the ilustrado propagandistas or to the Tagalog millenarian tradition?

Having succumbed to the temptation to proffer "facts" and judgments, Ileto gives a portrayal that is not just ambivalent - as indeed might befit Bonifacio's character - but self-contradictory. It is tempting here to jest that Ileto gets hoisted by his own post-modernist petard. Due to an excess of theoretical purity, in other words, he is so reluctant to "privilege" one contending "truth" or "meaning" (as divined either by contemporary observers or by historians) over another that he accepts and endorses a variety of "truths" and "meanings", even when they appear mutually exclusive. But presumably this cannot be the case, because the post-modernist purist would always present contending views as the perceptions of others rather than adopting them as his own. The real source of contradiction, it appears, is the opposite of theoretical purity. Ileto cannot, in the end, entirely shake off the shackles of traditional historiography or abjure the view "from above".

(a) Close to the propagandistas

Ileto, contends Glenn May (IH, 143), "essentially eliminated the Propaganda Movement from the history of the Philippine Revolution, linking Bonifacio not to a reform program shaped by European liberal ideology but to a tradition of home-grown popular uprisings." Perhaps this overstates the case. Ileto criticizes those who he says have convinced "themselves of the essentially bourgeois ideology of the Katipunan as a whole" (BTSS, 26), but he does not deny that the ideology of some or all of the Katipunan's leaders might be termed "essentially bourgeois". The foundation of the Katipunan he likewise describes as having been "excessively" attributed to ilustrado influence, but he does not deny that influence altogether (P&R, 98). The middle class origins of the leadership in both city and countryside, he acknowledges, are "obvious" (BTSS, 26). Historians, he accepts, have been right to assume that Bonifacio's manifesto "Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog" was "inspired by the writings of ilustrados like Rizal" (P&R, 103).

So, the Katipunan did have some ancestry in the Propaganda Movement and 1896 was in some degree the culmination of a nationalist tide that stemmed from heightened Westernization (P&R, 97). The primitive-to-modern construct adopted by previous historians, Ileto thinks, exaggerates these linkages and conceals the linkages with the folk millenarian tradition, but he does not totally reject the conclusions drawn from this construct, and even acknowledges the "usefulness" of the construct itself for certain purposes (CI, 100).

The pasyon language, Ileto writes, is outside the subject, in society, delimiting the individual construction of meaning for those immersed in its world. The "ilustrados, on the other hand, could stand apart from it and 'use' it" (CI, 96, emphasis added). The Katipunan supremo, Ileto suggests in some passages, belonged with the ilustrados in this regard. He and "other Filipino nationalists of some education", for example, are seen as finding in the Bernardo Carpio story "a popular perception of events on which to hinge their separatist ideas" (P&R, 126, emphasis added). Similarly, "Bonifacio was so adept at tapping popular feelings to serve his revolutionary ends that he was unavoidably incorporated into the folk view of events" (P&R, 137, emphasis added). Surely the reader must infer from these passages that Ileto has concluded Bonifacio's nationalist, revolutionary ideas and ends were somehow more "modern" than the ideas and ends of the Tagalog masses.

(b) Close to the Tagalog millenarian tradition

And yet, as Glenn May suggests (IH, 155), Ileto does situate Bonifacio firmly in the Tagalog millenarian tradition. By this I presume May means not merely that Bonifacio’s personality and appeals were so perceived by sections of the "pobres y ignorantes" (which is indisputable, and not in the least incompatible with the position that "Bonifacio was close to the propagandistas"), or that he consciously tailored his appeals to a pasyon-attuned audience (almost certainly he did), but that he actually shared in large measure the millenarians' world view.

That Ileto does take this latter view can again be supported by a number of quotes. “There was something about Bonifacio's mentality that a believer in enlightenment liberalism like Carlos Ronquillo found disturbing, and decried as a ‘dark underside’” (BTSS, 28, emphasis added). Bonifacio, like the millenarians but apparently unlike Aguinaldo, believed that spiritual preparation was as important as military preparation in gaining victories on the battlefield (P&R, 176). His downfall at the hands of the Caviteño elite can be traced to his pre-occupation with "sacred ideals" and moral transformation. He conceived of national unity as each citizen's rebirth in a society of liwanag (P&R, 135-7).


The pasyon idiom: politically neutral or radical?

No reliable evidence, Glenn May concludes (IH, 161-3), links Bonifacio to the pasyon and the Philippine millenarian tradition. Again, I presume the issue here is whether Bonifacio actually shared the millenarians' world-view. If so, I believe May’s verdict would still hold good even if all the “Bonifacio texts” of dubious provenance turned out to be genuine.

The pasyon, says Ileto, cannot be regarded as an "ideology", an "articulation of ideas", an "inspiration" or a "cause" (CI, 95-7). To argue otherwise is to confuse structure with content. Ileto might even object to May’s formulation “pasyon tradition" (IH, 155). Rather, says Ileto, the pasyon offered units of meaning; it was a language, an idiom, a modality of social discourse.

The pasyon story, Ileto initially observes, can be construed politically from diametrically opposed standpoints. On the one hand Christ may be seen as a subversive figure, a man “poor and lowly" who attracted his followers mainly from the common people, drew them away from their families and from subservience to their wealthy masters, gave them special powers and formed them into a brotherhood that proclaimed mankind's salvation. But alternatively the scriptures might be used to inculcate loyalty to Spain, Church and the status quo; to encourage resignation to worldly injustice and suffering by promising the poor, meek and humble their reward in the afterlife. Pasyon language might equally be employed to define either a conservative, orthodox religious fraternity or a radical heresy (P&R, 15).

As his discussion moves on to the popular movements themselves, however, Ileto all but forgets these crucial points and increasingly delineates the pasyon idiom as inherently radical, as properly belonging to the dissident tradition alone. When discussing the early 1900s, for example, Ileto says that for Macario Sakay and other leaders of the revived Katipunan "nothing was more infuriating than the abuse of the term kalayaan. The word was alienated from its original, full meaning by collaborators and plain politicians who sought to justify their behavior to a populace with fresh memories of the revolution….One can imagine the surprise and disbelief of the revolutionaries at such co-optation of their language by collaborators in the towns"(P&R, 219-20, emphasis added). Ileto might counter this point by saying he was representing Sakay's views rather than his own, but at the very least it is clear that he strongly empathizes with those views. In any event, if Sakay and his colleagues were so indignant about pacification rhetoric, why did they twice succumb to it? In 1901 they accepted positions in a Nacionalista Party founded on a platform of peace, order and independence "in opportune time…under the protectorate of the United States", and in 1906 they were persuaded to surrender after the ilustrado politician Dominador Gomez had promised them that the establishment of a Philippine Assembly would be "the gate of kalayaan". Partly, Ileto notes, the surrender showed regrettable naïveté. Nevertheless, he suggests, it also reflected the idea found in the dissident folk tradition that kalayaan could not be realized until Filipinos had proven themselves worthy of it (P&R, 240-2).

The pasyon idiom: the rightful property of the Tagalog masses or pretty much ubiquitous?

But the notion that moral upliftment was an essential prerequisite for liberty, of course, was not confined to the dissident tradition. It is a recurrent and prominent theme in the works of the propagandistas. The liberties he desired for the country, Rizal wrote in his manifesto condemning the revolution, "I made conditional on the education of the people, so that by means of learning and work they would have their own personality and make themselves worthy of (such liberties)".

The language and structures of the pasyon, it can be demonstrated, were employed by the elite before 1896 as well as subsequently. Ileto himself makes this point, but periodically fails to keep it in mind. "Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog", he notes, is ordered in a Lost Eden/ Fall/ Redemption sequence - a structural feature of the pasyon. "Is this merely Bonifacio," he asks, "or have we not begun to discuss the masses?" (CI, 104). But the same "Lost Eden" theme, Ileto acknowledges elsewhere, can frequently be found in the writings of Rizal and other ilustrados (NLE, 133).

This brings us back, finally, to the distinction Ileto makes between those whose construction of meaning was delimited by pasyon language (the "masses") and those who could stand apart from it and “use” it (the elite) (CI, 96). How do we know where to draw the line between these two groups? How do we know whether an individual employing pasyon language and structures actually shares mass perceptions? We don't. Ileto, once again, seems ambivalent and inconsistent on this point himself, for in certain instances he suggests that members of the elite did not always "stand apart" from mass perceptions and beliefs. He contends that, "for Rizal", martyrdom by firing squad was "the culmination of his pasyon" (P&R, 312, emphasis added). Aguinaldo was not only "an effective orator in the traditional idiom of struggle", but to protect himself against misfortune reportedly added to his entourage an individual with potent special powers.

But in Ileto's view others who definitely did stand apart from Tagalog folk culture, like Governor General Harrison, could employ pasyon structures unwittingly, and evoke a passionate response from a Tagalog audience almost accidentally (OC, 100). This is because Harrison too came from a Catholic background, Ileto might counter. What then, about the lengthy passages on "liwanag" in the Tagalog translation of the Koran, it might be asked - elements of the pasyon idiom can be found wherever you look for them.

If Glenn May is right that Jose P. Santos "made the crucial linguistic choices" (IH, 161) when crafting a Tagalog version of "Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog", it therefore seems to me that those choices would have been accorded a deep significance and resonance by Ileto whatever they had been.

Indigenous categorization: valuable or let's not bother?

As May very aptly observes: "In Pasyon and Revolution, Ileto adopted a text-building strategy that might best be described as discursive blurring - by which I mean that he constructed his text in such a way as to blur important distinctions and link things that should not necessarily be linked" (IH, 146). The trouble with Ileto's one dimensional "from below" approach, to put it slightly differently, is that all the various movements he studies finish up cast in the same millenarian mould. Instead of suggesting criteria that might replace the orthodox, elite-defined constructs, it appears, the perception categories of folk Christianity reduce the political spectrum to a monochrome blotch.

At one point Ileto suggests he may offer alternatives to the elite-defined constructs: "'That religious/secular categories can be applied to 19th century Philippines is not self-evident and can be done only within critical limits. Or better still, why not derive categories from within the socio-cultural milieu itself?”(CI, 99). But once more he cannot make up his mind, because he also half-agrees with Foucault that any system of categorization amounts to an attempt to domesticate what should be exotic and unique. "For Foucault, the task is one of disordering, destructuring, unnaming - an extreme view, yet so relevant to our present situation" (BTSS, 27). This latter view must be the one upon which he finally settled, because the projected alternative categorization has not so far materialized.


Abbreviations

BfB Glenn Anthony May, The Battle for Batangas: a Philippine province at war (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991)

BTSS Reynaldo C. Ileto, "Bonifacio, the Text and the Social Scientist", Philippine Sociological Review, 32 (January-December 1984), pp.19-29.

CI Reynaldo C. Ileto, "Critical Issues in 'Understanding Philippine Revolutionary Mentality'", Philippine Studies, 30 (First Quarter, 1982), pp.92-119.

IH Glenn Anthony May, Inventing a Hero: the posthumous re-creation of Andres Bonifacio, (Madison: Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin, 1996).

NLE Reynaldo C. Ileto, "Outlines of a Non-Linear Emplotment of Philippine History" in Lim Teck Ghee (ed.), Reflections on Development in Southeast Asia (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 1988), pp.130-59.

OC Reynaldo C. Ileto, “Orators and the Crowd: Philippine Independence Politics, 1910-1914” in Peter W. Stanley (ed.), Reappraising an Empire: new perspectives on Philippine-American History (Cambridge, Mass.: Committee on American-East Asian Relations of the Department of History in collaboration with the Council on East Asian Studies, Harvard University, 1984), pp.85-113.

P&R Reynaldo Clemeña Ileto, Pasyon and Revolution: popular movements in the Philippines, 1840-1910 (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1979).

Read more.

Fast, Jonathan, and Richardson, Jim. "The Katipuneros: Revolutionary Leadership in City and Province." In Roots of Dependency: Political and Economic Revolution in 19th Century Philippines. Quezon City: Foundation for Nationalist Studies, 1979. 67-74, 129-30.

[67]

9

The Katipuneros: Revolutionary Leadership in City and Province

Rizal's view of the lowly character of the Katipunan was widely shared in ilustrado circles. In the opinion of Felipe Calderon, a plantation-owner and successful lawyer, the insurrection was “organized by the most ignorant element of the people.”¹ The first Filipino historian of the Katipunan, the propagandist Isabelo de los Reyes, stressed in a pamphlet published in 1900 that the revolutionary association was a “plebeian society,” whose members "belonged to the workmen and peasant classes" and among whose founders "there was not a single rich man, nor one of a learned profession."² Behind such observations lay either distaste or condescension. Later accounts, however, have often echoed this uncomplicated analysis of the Katipunan's composition more approvingly, presenting the insurrection as a salutary popular reaction against ilustrado gradualism and prevarication. The elaboration of this argument forms the central theme, for instance, of Teodoro Agoncillo's The Revolt of the Masses, which since its publication in 1956 has been generally accepted as the most authoritative study of the subject. The Katipunan, Agoncillo asserts at the outset, was a "distinctively plebeian society."³ Objectively, he writes, the "middle class" reformists had proven themselves "the bulwark of the Spanish reactionary party,” too concerned with their own position and consequently too cautious to make any real impact on the nature of colonial rule.⁴ Through their failure to provide effective leadership, their inability to understand the common people's aspirations and their snobbish aloofness they had won "the hatred of the masses" and direction of the nationalist cause had passed into other hands."⁵ The sentiments of the Katipuneros, Agoncillo agrees with Isabelo de los Reyes, were that "where there are learned men everything is brought to naught by discussions.” For this reason, they "did not want to admit the learned" into the association.⁶

Apart from their more militant and immediate commitment to separation from Spain, to what extent did the Katipuneros' ideas and aspirations differ from those of writers such as Rizal, Lopez-Jaena and del Pilar? Historiographical opinion on this question has undergone an evolution similar to that on the place of the Katipunan within Philippine society. Having observed that the association had been organized "from below,” many ilustrados felt that the revolutionaries had departed from the enlightenment liberalism of the propagandists. The Spanish accusation that "upper class

[68]

Filipinos" were the true financiers and directors of the Katipunan was clearly unfounded, Felipe Calderon asserted, because the association was "socialistic."⁷ Florentino Torres, a prominent magistrate, testified that "the socialist character of the revolution of 1896… is a patent and positive fact."⁸ The ultimate goal of the Katipuneros, according to Isabelo de los Reyes, was the establishment of a "communistic republic."⁹ Such comments sowed the seed of historical orthodoxy. The officially approved chronicler of the American occupation, James LeRoy, saw in Katipunan propaganda "an element of resentment toward the wealthy" and expressed his agreement with the judgment of Calderon.¹⁰ The Filipino historian, Gregorio Zaide, in his monograph on the association, accepts without comment that the Katipunan's final objective was the "communistic republic" mentioned by de los Reyes.¹¹ But again it is Agoncillo's The Revolt of the Messes that develops the hypothesis at greatest length. The Katipunan, Agoncillo writes, was "fundamentally a mass idea based on utopian soclalism."¹² While the "middle classes" wanted to preserve their privileged position in Philippine life, the masses, symbolized by the Katipunan, wanted to overthrow the existing social order.¹³ Hostile to the "landowning class," Agoncillo asserts, the association aimed to abolish the basis of cacique power through the implementation of agrarian reform.¹⁴ Independence achieved and the grip of the "ruling class" destroyed, it would establish an economic democracy.¹⁶

Despite the weight of historical opinion behind them, the interpretations of Katipunan composition and purpose outlined above present a seriously distorted picture of the revolutionary association's character. Over-simplication and looseness of terminology have often compounded their error. One major source of confusion, pointed out by the historian Cesar Majul in a comment on the remarks of Florentino Torres, is that the mass character of the revolution per se has occasionally been taken as evidence of a "socialist" nature.¹⁶ Some observers have failed to appreciate, in other words, that although class and ideology are clearly related, they are nevertheless essentially distinct. To avoid repeating this mistake, therefore, and for the sake of greater clarity, the respective questions of composition and purpose will here be discussed individually.

The customary point of departure for proponents of the thesis that the insurrection was organized by "the most ignorant element" of the Filipino people has been the figure of Andres Bonifacio, popularly commemorated as the "Great Plebeian,” founder of the Katipunan and its President at the outbreak of the 1896 revolution. Agoncillo, for instance, despite his own evidence to the contrary, contends that Bonifacio was "almost illiterate" and "belonged to the lowest class."¹⁷ Even from the scanty information available on Bonifacio's life, it is certainly clear that the Katipunan Supremo was not of the "lowest class" of Philippine society.

The first of six children of Santiago Bonifacio, a tailor, and Catalina de Castro, a Spanish mestiza, he was born in the district of Tondo in 1863. His father had at one time served as the district's teniente mayor.¹⁸ The circumstances of the family are not recorded, but the parents were able to send Andres to private tutors in the locality and provide him with a sound elementary education.¹⁹ His studies were supplemented in the home, it is said, by a

[69]

"learned and patriotic aunt."²⁰ However, his formal schooling was curtailed when he was orphaned at the age of fourteen and obliged to start work to help support his younger brothers and sisters. While still young he made and sold walking sticks and paper fans and, being a gifted calligraphist, designed advertising posters.²¹ Seeking more regular employment in his late teens, he joined Fleming & Co., a firm dealing in goods such as rattan and tar, afterwards transferring to another foreign commercial company, Fressel.& Co., where he remained until the outbreak of the revolution. Although traditionally presented as the decisive verification of Bonifacio's lowly proletarian credentials, the Supremo's occupational status in these two firms has apparently never been precisely determined, descriptions of his various positions ranging from "night watchman"²² and "warehouse-keeper"²³ through "clerk messenger"²⁴ to the distinctly less modest appellations of "agent"²⁵ and "broker".²⁶ Whatever the exact duties involved, however, employment in the capital's foreign houses offered good opportunities for advancement, and was much sought after. "The fathers of many who at this day figure as men of position and standing,” commented a British observer of Manileño society, “commenced their careers as messengers, warehousekeepers, clerks etc. of the foreign houses."²⁷

Circumstantial evidence that 8onifacio's fortunes were indeed on the rise is provided by his marriage in 1893 to Gregoria de Jesus, the daughter of a gobernadorcillo of the town of Caloocan, a few miles north of Manila. His bride's upbringing had been far from impoverished. Looking after family interests with her sister "to enable our two brothers to study in Manila", Gregoria recounted later in a memoir, "I had to go out in the country to supervise the planting and harvesting of our rice and to supervise our tenants and laborers and also to pay the wages of my father's workers on Sunday mornings."²⁶ It is also worth noting that although Gregoria's father hesitated before consenting to the marriage with Bonifacio, his initial reluctance was not based on any suggestion that his daughter's intended partner was beneath her station or that she would find it difficult to adjust to a less comfortable way of life. His objection, Gregoria recalled, was that Bonifacio was a freemason and therefore an enemy of the Church and likely to fall afoul of the authorities.²⁹ This points to another inconsistency in the view of the Katipunan leader as a simple plebeian. The majority of Filipino masons in the late nineteenth century were men of some substance and education, and masonry constituted the principal organizational focus for the domestic following of the expatriate ilustrado propagandists. When Rizal, himself a mason, returned to the Philippines in 1892 wishing to launch a new association for the "study and application of reforms" it was to the leading officers of Manila's lodges that he first turned for assistance.³⁰ The association resulting from this initiative was the Liga Filipina. According to Agoncillo, it "personified the middle class", to whom "it was inconceivable that the unlettered masses should be given the privileges of their respectable group.”³¹ In establishing the Liga, he asserts, the intellectual and wealthy gradualists "set up a sort of caste system from which the unlettered commoners were contemptuously excluded."³² Yet Bonifacio was one of Liga's founding members.

The foregoing discussion is not intended to infer that Bonifacio belonged

[70]

to the same social stratum as men like Rizal. Educationally he was excluded from true ilustrado status by his unfinished schooling, and financially he probably was one of the least affluent of the original Liga members. But the relative modesty of Bonifacio's circumstances in this company should not disguise the fact that he occupied a position closer to the centre of the social pyramid than to its base, closer to the petty-bourgeoisie than the proletariat. His principal associates in the early Katipunan moved in much the same milieu. Among those who joined Bonifacio in founding the Katipunan in July 1892, for instance, was Teodoro Plata, then a court clerk in the Manila district of Binondo and later at the court of first instance in Mindoro. Plata was a first cousin of Gregoria de Jesus and subsequently married one of Bonifacio's sisters.³³ Together with Bonifacio and Plata in the first Katipunan "triangle" was Ladislao Diwa, a court clerk in the district of Quiapo, Manila. From his home province of Cavite, where his father was a master carpenter in charge of a workshop at the Spanish naval yard, Diwa had first come to Manila as a working student. After graduating from San Juan de Letran he enrolled in law at the University of Santo Tomas, where he first encountered Bonifacio, then clandestinely distributing propaganda literature to the students. The two became firm friends and for a while Diwa lived as a boarder in Bonifacio's house.³⁴

Elected president of the first supreme council of the Katipunan established late in 1892, was Deodato Arellano, brother-in-law of Marcelo H. del Pilar and himself an active figure in various groups that supported the expatriate writers and worked for the reformist cause at home. When the Liga Filipina was launched by Rizal, he was chosen council secretary. Arellano worked as a clerk in the arsenal of the Spanish artillery corps.³⁵ His successor as President of the Katipunan Supreme Council, elected in February 1893, was Roman Basa, who occupied a similar clerical position in the Spanish naval headquarters. Introduced to the association by Ladislao Diwa, a town-mate from San Roque in Cavite, Basa served as Katipunan president for two years, finally being replaced by Bonifacio himself.³⁶ During his incumbency a number of organization changes were made that sought to improve and systematize recruitment to the association, including the formation of district branches known as popular councils. Assigned to head the popular council of Santa Cruz, Manila, was Restituto Javier, son of a Tondo property owner and compadre and fellow-employee of Bonifacio.³⁷ Assigned to build Katipunan support in the Manila district of Trozo was a half-brother of Javier, Jose Turiano Santiago, who also held the position of secretary to the Katipunan Supreme Council. A graduate of Santo Tomas, Santiago made a living as an accountant and commercial agent.³⁸

Aside from Santiago and Ladislao Diwa, at least two other Supreme Council officers -- Pio Valenzuela and Emilio Jacinto -- had attended the Islands' only University. Valenzuela, whose parents "belonged to the local aristocracy" of Polo, Bulacan, was a fourth year medical student when he joined the Katipunan. Another compadre of Bonifacio, he served as fiscal and physician on the Council.³⁹ Jacinto, who had enrolled at Santo Tomas after graduating from San Juan de Letran, was first elected to the Supreme Council in 1895, soon after his nineteenth birthday. Despite his youth, he thereafter

[71]

became the closest of all Bonifacio's associates and the association's leading publicist and theoretician. To comply with the Katipunan principle of using only the vernacular, it is interesting to note, Jacinto had first to make himself proficient in Tagalog. The son of a well-known Tondo merchant, he had grown up more accustomed to using a corrupt form of Spanish then current among those Manileños "who had some visible means of livelihood and those who pretended to be among the ilustrado,"⁴⁰

The antecedents, education and careers of men like Plata, Diwa, Arellano, Basa, Javier, Santiago. Valenzuela and Jacinto thus indicate that none of the most prominent Manila-based Katipuneros, any more than Bonifacio, could be classified as either “ignorant" or typically proletarian. On the contrary, the most striking link among those named is that they all occupied intermediate positions in Philippine society, more especially positions which brought them into direct contact, in a variety of contexts, with the institutions, policies and representatives of Spanish colonial rule. Those who had studied at the clerically-administered colleges and university felt, as Rizal had a decade earlier, that despite the prestige attached to attending such institutions the instruction they provided was anachronistic in both style and content, an affront to Filipino dignity and aspirations. Bonifacio and Javier, as employees of a foreign business firm, could witness at first hand the difficulties and frustration caused by the restrictive and complex legislation that surrounded overseas trade. The trend toward greater protectionism, they would be aware, not only endangered the chances of trade-based prosperity but also posed an immediate threat to the living standards of Filipinos in all walks of life by raising the prices of basic imported commodities. Plata and Diwa, court clerks, and Arellano and Basa, employees of the military, had an inside view of the actual machinery of colonial administration and control. The prejudice, corruption and injustice that pervaded the insular bureaucracy would form an integral part of their daily experience. In the absence of information on the individual motives underlying the separatist commitment of the Katipunan's directors, therefore, their common proximity to the educational, economic or administrative aspects of Spanish sovereignty itself seems to offer a partial explanation. The main burden of colonial rule may have fallen on less fortunate shoulders, but few were better placed to understand its workings and consequences than the leading Katipuneros.

In provincial areas where the Katipunan gained support the association's leaders occupied a position very much comparable to that of their counterparts in the capital. Again they belonged to intermediate social strata, and again they lived and worked at the interface between colonial power and the population. Many already held positions of prestige and influence in their respective towns prior to gaining distinction as revolutionists. Several were members of the principalia, the group formally recognized as the leading citizens of a town from whom the chief functionaries of pueblo and barrio government were elected. Others worked for the principalia as secretaries and interpreters. School teachers were also well represented. As a correlation between contact with the colonizers and revolutionary involvement existed in geographic as well as personal terms, the strategic position of Katipunan leaders at the forefront of local affairs and conflicts is perhaps best Illustrated by the example of Cavite, a

[72]

province immediately south of Manila where both the secular and clerical aspects of Spanish rule were particularly conspicuous, and where the Katipunan gained its firmest organizational foothold.

Before reviewing some of the personalities who headed the Katipunan in Cavite, however, it is necessary to refer briefly to the structure of the colonial local government apparatus with which a large proportion were associated. The principalia who administered the affairs of each town and its related outlying settlements traced their origins to pre-Spanish community leaders whose authority had been recognized by the colonizers and utilized as the cornerstone of a system of indirect rule. From the conquest until the eve of Spanish rule the two key functionaries of this system were the cabezas de barangay and the gobernadorcillo. At the foot of the bureaucratic ladder and the immediate link between government and people, the cabezas de barangay had jurisdiction over a barrio or other unit of equivalent population. By far their most important function was tax-collection, first in the form of tribute and later as a cedula payment. In addition they were in charge of assigning the adult males within their jurisdiction to local public works projects in compliance with the requirement that every year each man should render forty days labor service to the community. Until 1893, it was past and present cabezas alone who constituted the principalia. As such, by a process of indirect election, they chose one of their number to hold the office of gobernadorcillo, known after 1890 as capitan municipal.

The prime duty of the gobernadorcillo was to supervise and coordinate the work of the cabezas with regard to tax collection and the assignment of community labor, but he had besides a wide range of additional responsibilities. These included the maintenance of peace and order; the exercise of judicial authority in petty civil and criminal cases; administration of the postal service; upkeep of the local jail; providing for the needs of travelers; and ensuring that the inhabitants had gainful employment and were good Catholics. To assist him in these multifarious tasks the gobernadorcillo had a host of elected, appointed and drafted assistants, among whom might be mentioned the tenientes mayors, fellow principales, variously designated to look after police matters, the boundaries of cultivated lands and the branding of livestock; a corps of cuadrilleros or constables staffed on a rotation basis from among the townsmen; and a directorcillo, usually a person with some college education and a knowledge of Spanish who worked in a paid capacity as interpreter and municipal clerk.⁴¹

Subsequently by far the most famous of the Caviteño principales who played a leading role in the Katipunan was Emilio Aguinaldo. In March 1897 Aguinaldo was to be elected president of the Revolutionary Government that succeeded the Katipunan as the directorate of the insurrection. His father, Aguinaldo recounted in his Memoirs, had been "regarded as one of the learned of the times and a brilliant lawyer."⁴² He was also a landowner and had served several times as town gobernadorcillo. After his elementary education, Emilio enrolled at San Juan de Letran, joining a number of brothers and sisters already studying in Manila. Before completing his college course, however, he returned to his home town of Cavite Viejo to help his widowed mother manage

[73]

the family interests. Aguinaldo first entered the ranks of the principalia at the age of seventeen, becoming a cabeza de barangay, he later recalled, primarily because his mother saw the position as a means of avoiding military conscription.⁴³ After about eight years as a cabeza, in January 1895, he succeeded his elder brother Crispulo (who was also to become a revolutionary general) as a capitan municipal of his town. Emilio joined the Katipunan later the same year, travelling to Manila for initiation by Bonifacio and taking the nom de guerre of Magdalo, a name subsequently also applied to the Katipunan council which incorporated Cavite Viejo and other municipalities of eastern
Cavite. In late 1896, once the guardia civil had been cleared from a number of these towns, the Magdalo council was reorganized as a sub-provincial insurgent government, headed by a form of cabinet.⁴⁴ Elected as Magdalo president at this time was Baldomero Aguinaldo, a cousin of Emilio. Also a native of Cavite Viejo, Baldomero had attended the Ateneo Municipal and the University of Santo Tomas. Prior to the revolution he had worked in various capacities for the municipal bureaucracy, holding in succession the positions of registrador de titulos, directorcillo and justice of the peace.⁴⁶ At least two of the Aguinaldos' principal associates in the Cavite Viejo Katipunan, Candido Tirona and Santiago Dario, served under Emilio as cabezas de barangay.⁴⁸ Tirona, interestingly enough, came from a family long regarded as the chief rivals of the Aguinaldos in Cavite Viejo politics, but as more vital matters claimed their attention as well as that of their respective followers the petty factionalism of the past was set aside.⁴⁷ Shortly after the revolution began, Tirona was acclaimed as Emilio's successor, under revolutionary conditions, as capitan municipal. He was also appointed Minister of War in the reorganized Magdalo council. Another former cabeza in this council was Pio del Pilar, later a celebrated general.⁴⁸

In addition to Crispulo and Emilio Aguinaldo, a third member of the Magdalo Cabinet, Vito Belarmino, had had experience of the senior office of pueblo government, having held the post of gobernadorcillo in the town of Silang. His background was remarkably similar to that of Emilio Aguinaldo. His father, too, had in his time presided over the town tribunal and he also had for a time attended San Juan de Letran. Belarmino's formal education also had been cut short, in his case by recurrent outbreaks of cholera that disrupted life in the capital in the early 1880's. Prior to his election as gobernadorcillo he gained a wide knowledge of Silang affairs both as a cabeza and secretary of the tribunal.⁴⁸

Principales and men of comparable, social position also dominated the leadership of the Magdiwang, the Katipunan council that in the early months of the revolution acted as the sub-provincial insurgent government in the municipalities of western Cavite. Elected Magdiwang president was Mariano Alvarez, capitan municipal of Noveleta, the town in which the council was originally based. An uncle of Bonifacio's mother-in-law, Alvarez was one of the oldest of the revolutionary leaders of 1896, having been born in 1831.⁵⁰ Prior to joining the Katipunan his association with the cause of reform had spanned over at least two decades. In the same way as Emilio Aguinaldo and Vito

[74]

Belarmino, he had acceded to municipal office virtually as a matter of family tradition, his father having served as Noveleta gobernadorcillo. His other qualifications for office, education at one of the friar-administered colleges in Manila and an apprenticeship in town politics as directorcillo, also conform to a now familiar pattern.⁵¹ By profession a school teacher, Alvarez was one of many of this calling who were active in the Cavite Katipunan. A second school teacher in the Magdiwang cabinet was Artemio Ricarte, a graduate of Letran and the Jesuit Escuela Normal.⁵²

As in the Manila sections of the Katipunan and in the Magdalo council in eastern Cavite, a number of Magdiwang leaders were linked by ties of kinship. Santiago and Pascual Alvarez, a son and nephew of Mariano, respectively held the posts of Magdiwang General-in-Chief and Secretary-General.⁵³ Two brothers from an "Illustrious family" of the town of Maragondon, Emiliano and Mariano Riego de Dios, both men with an extensive formal education, respectively occupied the positions of Minister of Commerce and Brigadier-General.⁵⁴ Completing the Magdiwang cabinet were Ariston Villanueva, a past gobernadorcillo of Noveleta, as Minister of War; Mariano Trias, a sugar planter and graduate of Letran, as Minister of Welfare and Justice; and Diego Mojica as Minister of Finance.⁵⁶

In one important respect the urban Katipuneros differed significantly from their provincial counterparts. The contrasting backgrounds of Bonifacio and Aguinaldo illustrate this point fairly well. However prominent Bonifacio might have become in the various merchant houses for whom he was employed, by the very nature of their operations advancement to positions of senior responsibility in such firms was all but precluded. Moreover, Bonifacio did not own land which was still the standard measure of wealth and power in the Islands. Aguinaldo, on the other hand, was an important landowner in his district and accordingly, had no social superior in his cultural and political milieu. Simply put, the advancement of Bonifacio's career depended largely upon his willingness and ability to carry out orders: Aguinaldo's class matrix demanded that he give them.

[129]

[Notes]

(1) Calderon, Felipe G., "Memoirs of the Philippine Revolution” in Galang, Zoilo M. (ed.) Encyclopaedia of the Philippines (Manila, Exequiel Floro) 1957, Vol. XV, p. 215.

(2) de los Reyes, lsabelo, La Religion del “Katipunan"(Madrid, Tip. Lit. de J. Corrales) 1900, pp. 30, 37.

(3) Agoncillo, Teodoro, The Revolt of the Masses (Quezon City, University of the Philippines Press) 1956, p. 1.

(4) Ibid, p. 283.

(5) Ibid, p. 282.

(6) de los Reyes, Isabelo, La Sensacional Memoria de Isabelo de los Reyes sobre la Revolution Filipina de 1896-97 (Madrid, Tip. Lit. de J. Corrales) 1899, p. 80, quoted in Agoncillo, Op. Cit. p. 106.

(7) El Renacimiento, August 11 and 18, Sept. 1 and 18, Oct. 1, 1906, quoted in LeRoy, Jamas A., “The Philippines 1860-1898 -- Some Comment and Bibliographical Notes” in Blair, Emma H., and James A. Robertson, The Philippine Islands 1493-1898 (Cleveland, Arthur C. Clark Co.) 1903, Vol. III, p. 185.

(8) Florentino Torres evidence submitted before the Second (Taft) Philippine Commission Report, p. 191.

[130]

(9) de los Reyes (1899) Op. Cit. p. 78; (1900) Op. Cit. p. 37.

(10) LeRoy, Loc. Cit.

(11) Zalde, Gregorlo F. History of the Katipunan (Manila, Loyal Press) 1939, p. 12.

(12) Agoncillo, Op. Cit. p.115.

(13) Ibid, pp. 107, 287.

(14) Ibid, pp. 107, 284-85.

(15) Ibid, pp. 116, 307.

(16) Majul, Cesar Adib, The Political end Constitutional Ideas of the Philippine Revolution (Quezon City, University of the Philippines Press) 1967, p. 135.

(17) Agoncillo, Op. Cit. pp, 283-84.

(18) Eminent Filipinos (Manila, National Historical Commission) 1965, p. 63; Zaide, Gregorio F. Great Filipinos in History (Manila, Verde Bookstore) 1957, p. 105. Constantino, Renato, A Past
Revisited (Manila, Tala Publications) 1976, p. 162.

(19) Agoncillo, Op. Cit. p. 66; Manuel, E. Arsenio, Dictionary of Philippine Biography (Quezon City, Filipiniana Publications) 1955, Vol. I, p. 253.

(20) Zaide, Op. Cit. p. 14.

(21) Agoncillo, Op. Cit. p. 66.

(22) Taylor, John R.M., The Philippine Insurrection Against the United States (Pasay City, Eugenio Lopez Foundation) 1971, Vol. 1, p. 62. This is the description used in Taylor's introduction.

(23) Olegario Diaz, Commander of the Manila detachment of the Guardia Civil, "Report Upon the Insurrection Against Spain," Oct. 28, 1896. In Retana, Wenceslao E. (ed.), Archivo del Bibliofilo Filipino (Madrid, X Minuesa de los Rios) 1897, p. 342.

(24) Agoncillo, Op. Cit. p. 66.

(25) Ibid, p. 66.

(26) de los Santos. Epifanio, The Revolutionists: Aguinaldo, Bonifacio, and Jacinto (Manila, National Historical Commission) 1973, p. 85. De los Santos, born in 1871, was studying in Manila at the time of the revolution. The essays on Bonifacio and Jacinto were first published in 1917-18.

(27) Foreman, John, The Philippine Islands, third ed. (London. Kelly & Walsh) 1906, p. 258.

(28) de Jesus, Gregoria, "Mga Tala ng Aking Buhay,” in Alzona, Encarnacion (ed.) Julio Nakpil and the Philippine Revolution (Manila, n.p.) 1964, p. 166.

(29) Ibid, p. 166.

(30) Guerrero, Leon Ma., The First Filipino (Manila, National Historical Commission) 1971, p. 315.

(31) Agoncillo, Op. Cit. p. 106.

(32) Ibid, p. 282. Here again Agoncillo seems to be following the account given by Isabelo de los Reyes, C.f. Sensacional Memoria, Op. Cit. p. 80.

(33) Manuel, Op. Cit. pp. 351-53.

(34) Ibid, pp. 154-56.

(35) Ibid, pp. 59-61.

(36) Ibid, pp. 92-94, Zaide, Op. Cit. p. 4.

(37) Manuel, Op. Cit. pp. 234-35.

Read more.

De Jesus, Gregoria. "Mrs. Andres Bonifacio's Letter to Emilio Jacinto Re Bonifacio's Arrest." In Revolt of the Masses: The Story of Bonifacio and the Katipunan, by Teodoro A. Agoncillo (Quezon City: University of the Philippines Press, 2002 [1956]), 394-8.

[394]

Appendix H:

Mrs. Andres Bonifacio's Letter to Emilio Jacinto Re Bonifacio's Arrest

Sila (ang mga taga Magdalo) ay nagdaos ng isang lihim na pulong at pinagpasyahang usigin siya at siya'y hamunin sa isang kagalitan, at kung siya'y mamuhi ay pagpapatayin sila o sila'y disarmahin at gapusin, (A. Bonifacio) na kasama ang kanyang mga kawal. Ng dumating ang mga kawal, sila ay nagpadala ng pasabi sa aming bahay na galing sa malayo, na isalong namin ang mga armas. Hindi namin inaalumana'y sila ay dumating, at ng sila'y malapit na sa aming bahay, kanilang kinubkod ang bahay at ang kanilang koronel ay pumanhik. Siya'y lumapit at itinanong kung saan siya patutungo; sumagot ang koronel at sinabing sila'y nagmamanmang patungo sa Indang; at sila'y naparaan sapagka't sila'y hindi pa nagaalmusal. Kanyang itinanong ang aming kalagayan at sinabing marahil ay kapos na kami ng mga pangangailangan. Sinabi naming hindi kami kinakapos at mabuti ang lagay namin dito kay sa Indang sapagka't may nagbibigay sa amin ng bigas na pinawa. Sumagat ang koronel: Mabuti ang kanilang kalagayan sa bayan sapagka't sila'y tumatanggap ng bigas na galing sa Naik, at kung iibigin ma'y magsama na tayo. Siya (ang aking asawa) ay sumagot: Ano ang aking gagawin sa Indang samantalang masama ang tingin

[395]

sa akin ng ating mga kapatid? Hindi na ibig man lamang na makita pa silang muli. Pagka sabi nito'y naghari sandali ang katahimikan, pagkaraa'y sila'y nag-agahan. Sila'y nagpaalam pagkatapos at sinabing gumagabi na at nangakong sila'y magbabalik na kasama ang kanilang mga kawal at dito maghahapunan. Samantalang sila'y umaalis, ang kanilang ginawa't pagdating sa labas ng aming kublihan upang iutos na iyon ay ipinid samantalang nagbibigay ng atas na ibinigay na sino mang sumuway ay makakapalit ang buhay. Yto ang utos ng ibinigay sa naturang kublihan na kanilang binantayan na kasama ang ilang kawal. Ng ang aming mga tauhan na kumukuha ng racion sa labas ng kublihan ay dumating. tinanggihan silang paraanin ng mga bantay. Pag karaa'y ipinagbigay alam ng mga taong di pinaraan ng mga bantay, at sa gayo'y nalaman namin kung ano ang nangyari. Tangi rito'y kanilang dinisarmahan ang aming mga kasamahan sa labas at kinuhang lahat ang mga lalaki. Dahil dito'y hinabol sila ng aking asawa upang itanong sa kanila kung bakit sila'y nagaasa1 ng gayon, nguni't sila'y hindi niya inabutan at yaong kasama nila ay nagbalik at naghintay na sila'y magbalik din upang itanong sa kanila kung sila'y gumagawa bilang pagsunod sa kanilang oficial. Sumapit ang gabi sa kanilang paghihintay. Kanilang inagaw ang mga babae at mga kasangkapan, ngunit isa sa mga babae ay nakatakas at nakapagsabi sa aming kawal na ang aming mga babae ay pinagdudukot. Ybig sanang umalis ng mga kawal upang humingi ng paliwanag, nguni't sila'y aming pinigil kaya't hindi sila lumayo sa labas ng kublihan, at sila'y naghintay na lamang doon. Ng kanyang malaman ang nangyari sa kanyang mga kasamahan, siya'y nagutos at nagpabalitang siya'y humihingi ng isang pagpupulong ng mga oficia1 sapagka't ang wika niya hindi nararapat na magkaroon sila ng pagaalit. Sinabi nila sa mga tagapagbalita na tumangi silang makipagpulong at mga punlo ang dapat na magkaroon ng karapatan na lumutas ng mga suliranin. Ang inutusang tagapagbalita ay nagbalik at ngayon ay naririto at buhay. Ng magmamada1ing araw ay nakarinig ng mga putok. Sila'y aking ginising at ng sila'y lumabas nasalubong niya ang isang kawal na nagsabi sa kanya na sila'y dumarating na napakarami at sila'y malapit na. Ng sila'y malapit, sila'y nagpaputok ng mabilis, at patuloy ang kanilang pakikihamok at kami'y kanilang kinubkob. Siya, sa kabila ng ganitong pangyayari, ay nagutos na huwag magpaputok ang kanyang mga tauhan; at ang aming

[396]

tao ay sumigaw: mga kapatid, huag kayong magpapaputok; sabihin ninyo kung ano ang inyong kailangan. Hindi sila nakinig; at ng kami ay nalalapit, kanilang pinaputukan ang aking asawa, at ng siya 'y nalugmok, siya'y kanilang pinagsasaksak at pinalo ng kulata ng kanilang baril. Ang aking bayaw na si Ciriaco ay inagaw ng dalawang tao at binaril hanggang sa mamatay. Si Procopio ay kanilang iginapos at pinalo ng rebolber. Kanilang inilagay ang mga sugatan sa hamaka at kanilang dinala sa bayan. Ng makita nilang ako'y lumabas sa pinagtaguan, ang oficia1 ng mga kawal ay tumakbo sa aking dako at pinipilit na sabihin ko kung saan nakatago ang salapi ng Cavite o ng Tesoreria. Kinuha nila ang aking revolver at ang kaunti naming salapi. Pagkatapos ay iginapos nila ako sa punung kahoy at pinipilit nilang ipagtapat ko sa kanila kung saan nakatago ang salapi na kanilang sinasabing nailak namin. Ang magkapatid ay makasasaksi sa bagay na ito, gayon din ang mga naninirahan dito na siyang nagdadala ng pagkain sa amin buan buan. Ng hindi makuha sa akin ang kanilang hinahanap, dinala nila ako sa Tribunal ng Indang at doon ay inalagaan ko ang lalaking sugatan ng kanilang hinubaran, pagkaraang kunin nila ang kanyang damit at siya'y kanilang balutin sa isang kumot. Ng ako'y lumapit, bahagya ng napagpala ko siya sapagka't ibig nilang gapusin ako at dalhin sa Naik, nguni't sa pakiusap ng iba ako'y pinalaya. Ng umaga, dinala kami ng mga kawal at kami'y pinagbalikbalik sa mga bayan ng Indang, Marigundong at Naik. Ay! mga kapatid ko. Ng kami'y bagong dating iniwan kami sa kusina ng bahay, sa paliguan ng mga pare at kami ay ipiniit sa tila tapunan ng mga bilango at tila hindi maaaring maabot ko pa siya, at ng ako'y magpumilit ay inilagay ako sa isang silid na may pagbabawal na makipagusap kahit kanino. At kanilang sinabi na kami ay pasasaksihin, pinakiusapan ko ang lahat ng General na bigyan kami ng justicia at kanilang sinabi na kung kanilang magagawa ay kanilang sisikaping bago kami pasaksihin ay tawagin ang ibang Puno at kami ay litisin sa gitna ng bayan sa harap nila. Sila'y pumayag sa aking pakiusap at sinabing ito'y makatarungan at sinabing ito'y hindi ginawa, at pagkaraan ng mahigit na isang Lingo, kami'y dinala sa Maragundon at kinunan kami ng mga patotoo ng ikatlong araw. Kanilang sinuhulan si Pedro Giron at kanilang tinuruang mabuti ng kanilang ibig ipasaksi sa kanya na siya (ang asawa ko) ay nag utos na silang lahat ay patayin.

[397]

Siya'y sumangayon sapagka't siya'y pinangakuan ng ililigtas, at bilang katuparan nito, siya'y pinaalis pagkatapos na siya'y makasaksi. Kaya, ng hilingin ng aking asawang humarap sa kanya, kanilang sinabi na si Giron ay napatay sa Naik. Bakit siya kasama nila ngayon? Ng matapos ang paglilitis, ipinagutos alinsunod sa kanila, ni Capitan Emilio na barilin ang asawa ko sa loob ng 24 na oras. Hindi man lamang nila pinahintulutang makapagtanggol sa kanyang sarili. Nakalipas ang ilang panahon at siya ay pinatawag; nguni't pagkaraan ng mga apat o limang araw ay iniutos ang pagpapatapon sa kanya. Nakalipas ang ilang araw, at ng ibigay ang hatol, itinanong sa ilan sa mga Puno kung ang laman ng hatol ay siyang katotohanan na kanilang sinagot na huag akong makinig sa bulungbulungan, at upang patotohanan ito, ang hukom na siyang may hawak ng usapin ay lumapit at sinabi sa akin huag akong mag alaala sapagkat wala pang nangyayari, at pagkatapos ay dumating... isang utos sa Capitang Kastila na sa ikatlong araw, ika walo ng gabi, samantalang malakas ang ulan, kanilang ilalabas na sapilitan sa bahay ang aking asawa. Hinanap ko ang komandante Lazaro Macapagal na siyang kumuha sa kanya, iyong tumupad ng mga utos na huag ang maysakit hanga't hindi tumitigil ang ulan o ilabas sa kinabukasan na ng umaga. Hindi niya gagawin ang gayon sa matuid na alinsunod sa kanya, ay utos ng kanyang Puno; nguni't sinabi niya sa akin na paroon ako sa bahay ni Capitan Emilio at makiusap sa kanya. Ako'y naparoon na kasama ang dalawang babae. Halos kinailangan namin na lumakad na apat-apat sa gitna ng dilim ng gabi at sa gitna ng malakas na ulan samantalang tumatawid kami sa ilog. Dumating kami sa bahay ni Emilio nguni't hindi kami makaakyat agad sapagka't kami ay basangbasa. Ng kami ay makapanhik si Emilio ay nagtago sa kanyang silid at sila'y pinagbilinang sabihin sa amin na siya'y maysakit at namamahinga; nguni't napansin kong siya'y nagigising at nakikipagusap kay Jocson. Ng si Jocson ay lumabas at lumapit kay Pedro Lipana na nagsasabing siya'y kalihim ni Emilio, siya'y lumapit sa akin at itinanong kung ano ang aking kailangan. Ipinakiusap ko na kung maaari ay huag lamang ialis ang maysakit hangang kinabukasan. Siya'y tumangi kaya't ako'y umalis upang makabalik; nguni't samantalang ako'y nananaog sinabi niyang maghintay kami at kami'y bibigyan ng sulat para sa mga tanod. Pagkasulat ng liham, kanyang ibinigay sa dalawang kawal na pinag utusang

[398]

samahan kami. Kailangang antalahin siya sa Tribunal at ako nama'y ikulong sa aming pagbabalik ng malayo sa bahay ng Pangulo. Nakipagtalo ako nguni't sinabi nilang babarilin ako at magbuhat sa sandaling iyon ay hindi pinahihintulutan ang sinomang lumapit sa akin. Ng tanghali ng sumunod na araw kanilang inilabas ang dalawang magkapatid; sa gawing hapon ay nagkaroon ng labanan sa labas ng bayan na malapit sa kinaroroonan ko at pinawalan nila ako. Ng ako'y makalaya naparoon ako sa kabilang ibayo upang siya'y hanapin, at nakasalubong ko na ang mga kumuha sa kanya. Dala nila ang mga damit na aking napaglimusan at ang gamot at ang kumot na aking ipinagbalot sa aking bayaw.

Ng aking hingin ang kanilang kinuha, kanilang sinabi na iniwan nila sa bundok, sa bahay ng isang tenyente. Ytinanong ko kung bakit dala nila ang mga damit sinabi nila sa akin na sinabi niya sa kanila na dalhin ko sa kanila ang damit na yaon. Ay! mga kapatid. Sila'y hinanap ko sa mga pook na kanilang itinuro at ng ako'y dumating sinabi sa akin na sila'y nasa ibang bundok na lubhang mataas. Dumating ako sa mataas na bundok na sinabi nguni't siya'y hindi ko nakita. At kami'y nagpatuloy ng paglalakad. Ay! mga kapatid. Kami'y hindi nagtigil ng paghanap sa kanya sa loob ng dalawang Lingo na nagpapahinga lamang kung gabi. Sapagka't hindi ko siya natagpuan at wala namang makapagsabi ng kanyang kinaroroonan, aming sinundan ang mga kawal nguni't ang mga kawal na ito'y nagkaila at kung anu anong pook ang itinuturo sa amin. Binuo na namin ang aming loob at ang aming balak ay makabalik ng sabihin sa amin ng isang amain ko ang katotohanan sapagka't siya ang nagbigay ng pagkain sa pook na hinintuan ng pangkat ng manunudla bago nila inialis sila.

Mapalad pa rin ako, mga kapatid, na manatiling buhay pa pagkaraan ng lahat ng aking dinanas. Kami'y nagpalibotlibot sa loob ng isang buan na walang kinakain kundi saging na hilaw. At kung ang aking kasamahan ay nagtagumpay na makuha sa pamamagitan ng kawangawa, ng isang dakot na bigas, kanilang isinasaing ito at ibinibigay nila sa akin. Ang damit ko sa katawan ay sira-sira na at napakarumi na hindi na masusunog kung ito man ay sigan.

(Lagda) Gregoria de Jesus
Lakanbini

Read more.

De Jesus, Gregoria. "Nostalgia." In Julio Nakpil and the Philippine Revolution, ed. and trans. Encarnacion Alzona. Manila, 1964. 177-81.

[177]

Nostalgia

The original poem in Tagalog has no title, but after reading it, we believe it can very well be titled Nostalgia. Perhaps Gregoria de Jesus, its author, had no time to polish it. Oriang, her pet name, is written at the end.

The following is an English version of it done by Professor Teodoro A. Agoncillo of the University of the Philippines.

Darling, ever since you left
Body and heart have been ill at ease
Slow is the flow of the blood in my veins
More so when I remember your kind treatment

Deep has been my sorrow
At your untimely departure and leaving me bereft
I had fears for what you will meet on the way
And, too, for your safety
I go to the window to peek

That in food you might be wanting
Hours you might pass in hunger
Dire illness might overtake you
About which you always complain to me.

Where will this situation lead
The body is too small for the deep sorrow
Uneasy am I when myself I enjoy and eat
When seated and standing my thoughts are of you

At the same time saying, "Suffer, my body,
To you happiness is yet incomplete
Comfort is just beginning to come
When, at once, I thought of leaving you."

And at night I lie me down on the mat
Sleepy eyes at once will close
In my sleep you are my dream, my Sweet,
Tears I could not control fall down

In the morning I rise slowly
My hand holds my aching heart
Into the dangerous place you had gone

After peeking I would go out
To the low dining table
When I see the place where you used to sit
My breast would break, my breathing slow

I keep my sorrow to myself
I could not express to my companions
You have made my heart suffer
Your sweet parting word, "Suffer, my love."

[178]

To me your sincere advice
Look for happiness and console your heart
I enjoy myself for a moment, then at once I cease
I think what had happened to you

My head I would bow, my tears would fall
I become uneasy, my walk slow
I enter the small room, carefully I prepare
The clothes I would wear when I leave

You will forget this pitiable one
Whose life will cross the sea
Sickness at departure, to suffering I go
Your day of happiness will rise in the end.

I'm leaving like the smoke
When the white goes up, I'm like a cobweb
My only advice, remember, my love,
Do not tear our secret open

Farewell to you who love so well
Master of my heart and half of my body.
Farewell now this one you treated so kindly
Farewell, loved one, to you farewell

With happiness to you I bestow
The handkerchief that wipes away tears
If perchance I meet with misfortune, my life ends
Dead though I may be yet will I meet with you

Today, 31 August 1897. -- 0riang


"Gladly to you I will offer
The narrative poem when I sailed the seas,
Read for a moment and don't be impatient
So you'll know its contents."

There was once, in Pasig, a couple in love
The girl thought of sailing the sea,
She called a calesa, at once she rode in
And she went at once to the barrio of Bangbang.

After resting at once she was invited
By an acquaintance of long standing
Without much ado she accepted in order to cure
Her fever, the malaise she was feeling.

Upon going up the house she at once told
The one who extended the invitation, who was weak,
The latter stood up and prepared the bed
And said to her: "Do go to bed."

[179]

When she lay down imagine her sadness:
Sorrow her mat, lament her pillow;
Grief her covering, so weak she could not move,
The tears in her eyes she allowed to flow

In the morning, at the break of dawn,
She ordered one of the companions
To go out immediately
To look where the loved one had gone

The one ordered set out at once
In search of the loved one spoken about
Not long after she returned,
To her she appeared with joy.

Slowly she told her:
"Banish now your uneasiness,
Your loved one and darling is,
It seems to me, all right and safe.

This one to whom she was talking
Set her mind at ease;
She told her companion
To look for a vehicle they would ride in.

Slowly they walked again
Her illness has not diminished
And they stopped at a store
Near the river which was a resting place.

When they had stopped there came
An acquaintance from whom they would seek information,
With difficulty she stood up and at once approached
And asked where he came from.

In the course of their conversation she mentioned
The dangers the loved one passed through,
Her past grief at once returned
And deepened, and her breathing became difficult.

Not long after there came also
Five treacherous enemies;
Her heartbeat became faster
Because of the sufferings experienced.

The vehicle arrived and she wanted to board it
She could not lift her feet, as if with weight
She wanted to turn back, but was undecided
Because her other companions were already on board.

Her condition made her look like a child
And had herself earried to the barge,
Inside she rested
And then she climb to the top

[180]

Here she sat and spent the whole night
In the cold dew and under the moonlight
She suffered the said coldness,
The town she loved she refused to desert.

What shall she do even if she weeps
Nothing will come out of her lonely love
When she looked back, when she cast her eyes
She found herself in the middle of a wide sea.

The fast sailing was no little matter
The beloved town at once was left behind,
When she remembered the loved one left behind
Her breast would burst, her life would ebb.

When she reached the middle of the wide sea
Slowly to the cabin she went down
She lay down on the mat
And she wept ceaselessly.

It was not long when morning came again
The boat stopped at the town of Biñan,
They hired a banca and then they boarded it
And asked that they be brought to San Pedro Tunasan.

When she arrived here needless to say
All offered grief and happiness
The said grief was no other than
Innuendoes reserved for her.

Happily they told her
Banish your grief,
"Though I wish, my Love, to banish grief
I cannot for I'm surrounded by sorrows."

Needless to say in the morrow
They had someone from Pasig sent;
Her sorrows deepened all the more
Always uneasy and weak.

"Slowly I bring out the picture you gave
Tears will flow, then look intensely at you
Accompanied with my sighs
With the words, 'Suffer all this.'

After looking at you the picture will be covered
And hidden in the place where it was taken
She would wipe the tears from her eyes
Her heart's grief she could not hold back.

"If I look for happiness, I'm ignored
The pain of my heart predominates
No one but you are the cause
The balm of your medicine to me you apply."

[181]

"In you lies the joy that will make me happy
In you lies the sorrow that will make me cry
In you also lies the good treatment
And in you lies my eternal happiness."

If one thinks of marriage
Serious and difficult if one thinks of it ,
When the moment of trouble comes
At the short separation, sorrow sets in.

San Pedro Tunasan, September, 97 -- Oriang

Read more.

Bonifacio, Andres. "Huling Paalam ni Dr. Jose Rizal." In The Writings and Trial of Andres Bonifacio, trans. Teodoro A. Agoncillo and S. V. Epistola (Manila: Antonio J. Villegas; Manila Bonifacio Centennial Commission; University of the Philippines, 1963), 78-80.

[78]

Huling Paalam ni Dr. Jose Rizal

Pinipintuho kong Bayan ay paalam
lupang iniirog ng sikat ng araw
mutyang mahalaga sa dagat Silangan
kaluwalhatiang sa ami'y pumanaw.

Masayang sa iyo'y aking idudulot
ang lanta kong buhay na lubhang malungkot;
maging maringal man at labis alindog
sa kagalingan mo ay aking ding handog.

Sa pakikidigma at pamimiyapis
ang alay ng iba'y ang buhay na kipkip
walang agam-agam, maluwag sa dibdib
matamis sa puso at di ikahapis.

Saan man mautas ay di kailangan,
cipres o laurel, lirio ma'y putungan
pakikipaghamok at ang bibitayan
yaon ay gaon [?] din kung hiling ng Bayan.

Ako'y mamamatay ngayong namamalas
na sa kasilanganan ay namamanaag
yaong maligayang araw na sisikat
sa likod ng luksang nagtabing na ulap.

Ang kulay na pula kung kinakailangan
na maitina sa iyong liwayway
dugo ko'y isabog at siyang ikinang
ng kislap ng iyong maningning na ilaw.

Ang aking adhika sapul magkaisip
ng kasalukuyang bata pang maliit,
ay ang tanghaling ka at minsang masilip
sa dagat Silangan hiyas na marikit.

Natuyo ang luhang sa mata'y nunukal,
taas na ang noo't walang kapootan,
walang bakas kunot ng kapighatian
gabahid man dungis niyang kahihiyan.

[79]

Sa kabuhayang ko ang laging gunita
maningas na aking ninanasa-nasa
ay guminhawa ka ang hiyaw ng diwa
pag hingang papanaw ngayong biglang bigla.

Ikaw'y guminhawa laking kagandahang
ako'y malugmok, at ikaw ay matanghal,
hininga'y malagot, mabuhay ka lamang
bangkay ko'y masilong sa iyong kalangitan.

Kung sa libingang ko'y tumubong mamalas
sa malagong damo mahinhing bulaklak,
sa mga labi mo'y mangyaring ilapat,
sa kaluluwa ko halik ay igawad.

At sa aking noo nawa'y iparamdam,
sa lamig ng lupa ng aking libingan,
ang init ng iyong pag hingang dalisay
at simoy ng iyong pag giliw na tunay.

Bayaang ang buwan sa aki'y ititig
ang liwanag niyang lamlam at tahimik,
liwayway bayaang sa aki'y ihatid
magalaw na sinag at hanging hagibis.

Kung sakasakaling bumabang humantong
sa kruz ko'y dumapo kahit isang ibon
doon ay bayaang humuning hinahon
at dalitin niya payapang panahon.

Bayaan ang ningas ng sikat ng araw
ula'y pasingawin noong kainitan,
magbalik sa langit ng boong dalisay
kalakip ng aking pagdaing na hiyaw.

Bayaang sinoman sa katotong giliw,
tangisan maagang sa buhay pagkitil;
kurig tungkol sa akin ay may manalangin
idalangin Bayan yaring pagka himbing.

Idalanging lahat yaong nangamatay,
nangagtiis hirap na walang kapalaran
mga ina naming walang kapalaran
na inahihibik ay kapighatian.

Ang mga bao't pinapangulila,
ang mga bilanggong nagsisipagdusa,
dalanginin namang kanilang makita
ang kalayaan mong ikagiginhawa.

[80]

At kung sa madilim na gabing mapanglaw
ay lumaganap na doon sa libinga't
tanging mga patay ang nangaglalamay,
huag bagabagin ang katahimikan.

Ang kanyang hiwaga'y huag gambalain
kaipala'y maringig doon ang taginting,
tunog ng gitara't salterio'y magsaliw,
ako, Bayan, yao't kitay aawitin.

Kung ang libingan ko'y limot na ng lahat
at wala ng kruz at batong mabakas,
bayaang linangin ng taong masipag
lupa'y asarolin at kanyang ikalat.

Ang mga buto ko ay bago matunaw
mauwi sa wala at kusang maparam,
alabok ng iyong latak ay bayaang
siya ang babalang doo'y makipisan.

Kung magka gayon na'y aalintanahin
na ako sa limot iyong ihabilin
pagka't himpapawid at ang panganorin
mga lansangan mo'y aking lilibutin.

Matining na tunog ako sa dingig mo,
ilaw, mga kulay, masamyong pabango,
ang ugong at awit, pag hibik sa iyo,
pag asang dalisay ng pananalig ko.

Bayang iniirog, sakit niyaring hirap,
Katagalugang kong pinakaliliyag,
dinggin mo ang aking pagpapahimakas;
diya'y iiwan ko sa iyo ang lahat.

Ako'y patutungo sa walang busabos,
walang umiinis at verdugong hayop;
Pananalig doo'y di nakasasagot,
si Bathala lamang doo'y haring lubos.

Paalam, magulang at mga kapatid
kapilas ng aking kaluluwa't dibdib
mga kaibigan bata pang maliit
sa aking tahanan di na masisilip.

Pag pasalamatan at napahinga rin,
paalam estranherang kasuyo ko't aliw,
paalam sa inyo mga ginigiliw,
mamatay ay siyang pagkagupiling.

Read more.

Bonifacio, Andres. "The Cazadores." In The Writings and Trial of Andres Bonifacio, trans. Teodoro A. Agoncillo and S. V. Epistola (Manila: Antonio J. Villegas; Manila Bonifacio Centennial Commission; University of the Philippines, 1963), 11-12.

[11]

The Cazadores*

The cazadores were sent here
allegedly to eradicate lawlessness,
but it is not fight they seek,
but chickens and cattle to steal.

The people who are living in peace,
to the Spaniards they are sent,
anything they see that can be eaten,
they grab like hungry ones.

They comb the whole house
for money which they pocket,
so also are the jewels and chosen clothes,
as unto the chick snatched by the hawk.

To the women they find,
their first greetings are shameful,
they do not respect even so little
the spotless honor the women possess.

And the tomatoes, watermelons,
melons and other things for sale,
nothing remains because of the grabbing
of the Spaniards.

*Cazadores, literally, hunters. In the Philippine setting, the cazadores were Spaniards charged with the duty of maintaining peace and order. As such they aided the guardias civiles (civil guards) and tne municipal police force in the enforcement of laws.

[12]

All the milk vendors they see
promptly are scolded,
and the hare-brained [Spaniards] gulp [the milk],
and so nothing is spared [by the Spaniards].

The name "cazadores" is a misnomer,
it should be "sacadores" instead,*
for the promontory is far and distant,
indeed they are known to be greedy and cowardly.**

*Bonifacio made a good play of words in the use of "cazadores" and "sacadores", utilizing metathesis to drive home his point. Sacadores means extortionists, from the wordbase sacar, to sack, to extort.

**The last line of the original reads: "mandi halatan malakaw at duwag". The line, at first glance, seems meaningless, owing to the use of the words "mandi" and "halalan", which do not exist in the Tagalog lexicon. But "mandi" must have been a typographical error, and should read "mandin", while "halatan" should read "halatang", from "halala", known or that which is seen through.

Read more.

Constantino, Renato. “Historical Truths from Biased Sources.” In The Philippine Insurrection Against the United States: A Compilation of Documents with Notes and Introduction, by John R. M. Taylor. Pasay City: Eugenio Lopez Foundation, 1971. ix-xii.

[ix]

Historical Truths from Biased Sources
by Renato Constantino

History continues to be enriched by new discoveries and new analyses. New truths are unfolded by developing viewpoints that reflect man's changing outlook and goals in each historical stage. There is no source, no matter how biased, that does not yield a bit of historical truth. No attempt at misrepresentation can escape ultimate exposure when a people who make their history critically examine the roles of individuals and groups in particular epochs. It is with this attitude that one should read John Roger Meigs Taylor's The Philippine Insurrection against the United States: A Compilation of Documents with Notes and Introduction.

Like the old chronicles written by Spaniards, Taylor's history is biased in favor of the colonizer but rich in data and revelations essential to a rediscovery and reassessment of Philippine history. The period Taylor covers is still relatively unknown to a majority of Filipinos. What we know contains so many distortions that it has produced attitudes which impede the correct handling of current problems.

A thorough study of the past will produce a new consciousness of the present. This new understanding will lead to a clearer view of the future which necessarily involves an alteration and a transformation of the present. It is time, therefore, to accelerate our rediscovery of history in order that we may profit from it. More and more, we are experiencing a tension between our consciousness and the reality of our existence. A study of our past as it really happened will reveal that this discrepancy is the result of a carefully developed set of assumptions that took firm root in our consciousness and became a tremendous force distorting our national life and preventing us from correctly assessing present reality.

We see our present with as little understanding as we view our past because aspects of the past which could illumine the present have been concealed from us. This concealment has been effected by a systematic process of miseducation characterized by a thoroughgoing inculcation of colonial values and attitudes -- a process which would not have been so effective had we not been denied access to the truth and to part of our written history. As a consequence, we have become a people without a sense of history. We accept the present as given, bereft of historicity. Because we have so little comprehension of our past, we have no appreciation of its meaningful interrelation with the present.

We lost our history for the first time when the Spaniards, with their fanatical belief in the superiority of their civilization, destroyed the tan-

[x]

gible manifestations of our pre-Spanish culture. At a time when we were proving to the world the reality of our nationhood and our capacity for self-rule by ousting a colonial master and resisting the aggression of another, we lost another part of our history. Our records were captured from us. Tons of “insurgent” records were shipped to Washington, there to remain unread for over half a century except by those to whom permission was granted by the U.S. Adjutant General of the Army. Thus this phase of our history is still relatively unexplored. We have fragments of knowledge about this period from the writings of those who have seriously endeavored to elicit the truth from the inadequate materials at hand, but on the whole we are still relatively ignorant of what really happened. This ignorance has been compounded by our acceptance of a version of our history consonant with colonial policy.

John Roger Meigs Taylor graduated from West Point in 1889 and was commissioned as captain ten years later. Cited for his service during the Boxer Rebellion in China, he was subsequently assigned to the Philippines to collect military intelligence material. Taylor himself gives us the background for the instructions regarding the shipment of the Philippine "State papers" to Washington:

In 1899 General Otis, Military Governor of the Philippines turned over to me, in Manila, several boxes of original documents which had just been captured from the insurgents and directed me to go over them and select and translate such material therein as would inform the War Department and through it, the Senate of the real character and purposes of the movement against the United States. I carried out these instructions.

In 1901 I returned to the United States and was ordered to report to the Adjutant General to act really as a channel of communication between the War Department and certain Senators who were defending on the floor of the Senate, the conduct of the administration with respect to the Philippines. By verbal orders I was assigned to temporary duty in the Insular Bureau. There, in 1902, I suggested that in place of depending upon my recollection and personal knowledge of the situation and papers which recorded it, it would be well to write a history of the relations of the United States with the Philippines and in default of anyone else, I suggested that I should write it. The Secretary of War agreed to this and the authorities in the Philippines were ordered to forward all captured Insurgent records to the Insular Bureau for my use…

In the Army's view, Taylor's acquaintance with the captured documents of the Revolution made him the person best qualified to defend the military administration in the Philippines. Mounting criticism in the United States of the government's imperialist venture made such a defense imperative. It was therefore as a "quasi-lobbyist" that he was assigned to Washington and it was this assignment that caused him to decide to write “a history of the relations of the United States with the Philippines." His project readily received official approval and the Army extended him all cooperation. All captured documents were loaned by the Army to the Bureau of Insular Affairs where Captain Taylor was detailed indefinitely until he completed his project.

Taylor worked conscientiously on the voluminous historical material -- an estimated three tons of records -- and on June 30, 1903 he was able to
[xi]

report that the documents he had selected for translation and examination were in 2,034 folders. Each folder contained from 1 to 12 documents. He had read and analyzed about 12,204 items.

He began his arduous task of translation and annotation in 1902 and completed it in 1906. The first volume contains an introductory narrative with 105 translated exhibits. It begins with an account of the origins of the revolt against Spain and ends with the pact of Biac-na-bato. The second volume continues the narrative for the period 1898 to 1902 describing the relations between Aguinaldo and Dewey and the progress of the war .The remaining three volumes contain 1,430 exhibits. However, when the galley proofs of Taylor's painstaking work were ready, William Howard Taft who was then Secretary of War ordered the publication withheld and, while giving Taylor permission to correct the proof of the documents, he instructed the author to leave the history "for our correction." One wonders what "corrections" of our history he intended to make. Taft who was then running for President limited himself to this curt statement: "One of the things I do not wish to do is to have the matter published before Congress meets, or rather before the election, for I don't care to give it out as an election document." Prof. John T. Farrell, who wrote an enlightening account of the Taylor project and its suppression, hints at a possible motive for Taft's decision:

Should the educated Filipinos, who made up the loyal and pro-American faction, have had reason to consider themselves insulted, and should the out-and-out independence party in the Islands have gained an issue out of the publication of a work from the insular bureau, which was anything but complimentary to the quondam insurgents' motives and conduct during the period of revolution, a serious crisis might have followed and one which would have seriously embarrassed the administration.

Taylor's history, for all that it reflects the American point of view may indeed have proved controversial at the time. For one thing, it furnished data on the tactics and purposes of those Americans who had been charged with the task of suppressing the Filipino movement for independence. Taft who despite his image as the friend of the Filipinos was in reality a shrewd, far-sighted imperialist might have wanted to "correct" certain parts that exposed too clearly America's real intentions toward the Philippines. For another, Taylor's history uncovered certain unpalatable truths about some leaders of the Philippine Revolution against Spain and the resistance against America. Many of the ilustrado leaders were then already collaborating enthusiastically with the Americans and were being built up by the latter as leaders of the Filipino people under the new dispensation.

When Taft was elected President there was a renewed attempt to have the Taylor work published. The manuscript was unfortunately submitted to James LeRoy, Taft's former private secretary who was himself writing a book on the same period but based largely on secondary sources. As a consequence, the Taylor book was not published while LeRoy's book was published posthumously in 1914. Farrell writes on this point:

[xii]

To one who has had the opportunity to compare the Taylor history with the work of LeRoy which was published in 1914, it is obvious that the invalid (LeRoy) in Fort Bayard Hospital must have been considerably shocked when he read, in December, 1908, something based upon original sources which was so much at variance with what he himself was writing, and which, in turn, was based mainly upon American and Spanish published literature, especially upon reports of government officials, plus his own first hand experience in working with Filipinos.

"The Americans in the Philippines" by LeRoy became an "authoritative" work in Philippine history, whereas Taylor's work remains to this day largely unread. No one knows just how many galley sets were completed. According to Farrell, there is a very well preserved set in the files of the Bureau of Insular Affairs and the Library of Congress has one too. One set went to the headquarters of the Philippine Constabulary, another was sent to the Archives of the Philippines during the administration of Governor Wood, and still another to the library of the University of Michigan. The microfilms of these galleys constitute the basis of this printed work. Although scholars have worked on these microfilms, the tediousness of micro-reading has undoubtedly hampered scholarship. For the first time, scholars can read this work with the convenience of reading printed matters.

But these microfilms contain only part of the thousands of original documents known as the Philippine Insurgent Records which were filed in the Archives in Washington until, by a legislative act of July 3, 1957, they were turned over to the Philippines. No one knows how many documents were lost or are unidentifiable for these documents suffered many physical transfers and a great deal of reclassification had to be made. At present they are still in process of classification in the Philippine National Library. The complete set of these records can be found in Microscopy No. 254 of the U. S. National Archives.

Taylor's anti-Filipino bias and the circumstances under which his work was undertaken detract from the value of his work. However, his access to the original documents gave him valuable information not open to others. This gave him certain insights into the motivations and behavior of the leaders of the Philippine Revolution which deserve serious study. On the whole, however, this publication of Taylor's “The Philippine Insurrection against the United States" has been undertaken primarily to make available to Philippine scholars a part of the voluminous file of original documents of the Philippine Revolution. It is hoped that similar projects will be undertaken in the near future so that Filipinos may have easy access to that part of their history that has been withheld from them for so many years.

Read more.

Ileto, Reynaldo C. "History and Criticism: The Invention of Heroes." In Filipinos and their Revolution: Event, Discourse, and Historiography (Quezon City: Ateneo de Manila University Press, 1998), 203-37, 279-82.

[203]

9

History and Criticism: The Invention of Heroes

The nationalist "invention" of Andres Bonifacio, though brought to the limelight by Glenn May in 1997, is an issue that begins for me in the early 1980s. Soon after the publication of my book, Pasyón and Revolution, I found myself engaged in a polemic with a University of the Philippines colleague concerning a relatively minor episode in Philippine history: an excursion that Bonifacio and eight fellow Katipuneros made to the mountains of Montalban and San Mateo in April 1895.¹

1984: Reading Andres Bonifacio

In our history books, the motive for this activity is derived from a statement by one of the Katipuneros that they were looking for a safe haven to retreat to in case of difficulties in the lowlands.² I argued that there was more than a pragmatic side to the Katipuneros' excursion. For one thing, they are said to have climbed Mount Tapusi and entered the cave of the legendary Tagalog folk hero, Bernardo Carpio. As I show in the first essay in this volume, the Historia Famosa ni Bernardo Carpio is one we know to have been Bonifacio's favorite. In fact, in his copy of the awit he penciled in what he imagined to be the local equivalents of the names and places in the text. The mountains of Montalban was the general area where Bernardo Carpio was believed trapped and

[204]

from where he would some day descend with an army of liberation. Could Bonifacio have suddenly forgotten this as he and his group arrived in the area? Or, to ask an even more pertinent question, how did the inhabitants of the area who, we are told, came in to be initiated into the society interpret the event?

Other details complicate a singular, "common sense" explanation. Bonifacio is said to have written on the walls of the cave: "Long live Philippine independence." If the Tagalog original of this slogan is reconstructed, it turns out to be something like Mabuhay ang kalayaan ng bayang Pilipinas! which can also be translated as "May the [condition of] freedom of [Mother] Filipinas come alive." Katipunan manifestos and rituals, and even later anticolonial plays like the well-known Kahapon, Ngayon at Bukas, freely manipulated the idea and imagery of the mother country (Inang Bayan) rising from her grave or at least her incarceration. I believe the Katipunan expedition was itself a symbolic event, a scattering of signs of the approaching time of liberation. The possibility of such an interpretation already existed in the popular expectation of their slumbering king finally awakening in his cavernous prison. The analysis might even be extended to the image of the risen Christ emerging from his tomb, an image all Christianized Filipinos were familiar with. The Katipunan entry, then, into Bernardo Carpio's cave has various levels of meaning, one of which points to the assimilation of the Katipunan enterprise into the larger body of myths floating about the region.

Milagros Guerrero dismisses the above arguments to the extent of calling it the work of a creative fictionist rather than a historian. This opens up the question of what the proper activity of a historian is. It concerns methodological limits and therefore justifies a more detailed examination. What do the objections consist of? Paramount among them is my alleged use of "doubtful evidence" to deduce the political motivations of Bonifacio. This particular objection can be broken down into two aspects. One is my use of awit literature, as well as other unfamiliar texts like songs, dreams, legends, and even pictorial seals, as evidence. I am told that in using literature as well as, by implication, those other "doubtful" sources we "need to have incontrovertible proof that

[205]

the slice of life they portray actually happened." The other aspect
concerns the need for evidence of Bonifacio's political motivations, his "internal psychological state," his "truth," to come to light before conclusions can be made about the significance of the mountain-climbing event.³

Evidence is the bread and butter of historians, and some have even claimed recognition on the basis of nothing more than the ownership or control of such. Written documents are considered a privileged means of access to some past reality, sometimes naively equated with that reality itself which the collectors thereby get to "own." Fine, if only they knew how to utilize these documents fully. What is often missing in this obsession with the documentary is an awareness of the relationship between language and the world, the nature of document as text.

To take a concrete example, the objection to my use of the Bernardo Carpio awit is that it refers to a world that is fictive, unreal, and therefore "literary." The events therein did not happen in the Philippines; the awit therefore is not history. There appears to be a conceptual confusion here. It originates from viewing the awit merely as a fanciful representation of some past reality. Its "literariness" is regarded as a hindrance to the faithful reproduction of this past. Enter the historian who, armed with a more "scientific" language of representation, sorts out fact from fiction: yes, those kings and princes did exist, but Bernardo Carpio himself is a Spanish legendary figure; those events could not have happened in the Philippines; the Filipino belief in King Bernardo is a manifestation of a false consciousness, itself an effect of colonial role. All these points appear to be valid. If awit are viewed in this way, then there is certainly no point in treating them seriously as historical texts.

There would be no cause for dispute if historical documents were mirrors of our society. Can documents, being linguistic productions, be identified with fixed referents, the "facts" in contrast to fiction? There are problems with this "common sense" view, as we will explain later. Let us discuss first what seems on second thought to be obvious: that certain social classes and sectors have been favored by the written word. Colonial officials, friars, explorers and travelers, ilustrados, the native clergy, revolutionary offic-

[206]

ers, mestizos, principales and as a whole, men, are the principal subjects of our archival records. Histories centered around them have been and will continue to be important in providing some kind of framework for our national past, and a justifiable pride in the achievements of a Burgos, a Luna, a Rizal, and so forth. But where are the ordinary people, the pobres y ignorantes, the so-called masses, and the women, about whom the archives are largely silent? A dependence on proper documentary sources amounts to a capitulation to the "tyranny" of the Philippine archives.

Guerrero certainly does not dispute the need for a history from below. In her work on the revolution she demonstrates how peasants throughout Luzon rose against the republic in response to abuses by government officials and the local elite which made it seem like "Spanish times" all over again!⁴ What her documentation cannot reveal, however, is how the masses perceived and thought through their condition. Colonial and elite records can be read with the aim of reversing the process by which the activities of rebels or subalterns were distorted by those who observed and wrote about them. For every interpretation of "terrorism" or "banditry" there is a body of suppressed data that can be recovered by a creative rereading of the colonial source.⁵ This, of course, is nothing new to many of us. Sakay is too obviously a patriot despite the label ladron, or bandit, plastered all over him. Too often, however, a colonial discourse is simply transformed into a "nationalist" or "progressive" one, with little being revealed about the masses themselves. What did Sakay really mean to those who sympathized with him? What meanings were generated by his appeals for a continued struggle and his mode of death?

The emphasis since the late sixties -- at least in student circles -- on "learning from the people" has heightened our awareness of the relative autonomy of the masses' thoughts and perceptions. The belief that unity of action can be obtained by enlightenment imposed from above, has given way to an acceptance of differences. As those who go to the countryside to conduct "mass work" usually discover, the masses' comprehension of their condition is just as real as the "brute facts" of their material existence. Even today, so-called superstitions, feudal customs, fanaticism, and

[207]

other survivals of a premodern past are discovered in the most unlikely places and, as a glance at our weekend magazines will show, are the object of great interest. If these phenomena exist today, we can imagine what it must have been like at the turn of the century.

Those who want to pursue this matter will want to consult the classics of Philippine history for their antecedents. Sadly, however, they won't get very far, for these books basically provide an account of the Filipino people's emergence from a dark age of colonial rule. Superstition, ignorance, fanaticism, timidity, and the like are the ideological features of this dark past. Instead of an articulation of the categories of meaning implicit in them, subjects of this sort are simply given a negative sign and generally dismissed. The archives, again, are partly at fault for not providing direct access to popular mentalities. Sharing the blame, however, must be the view that only educated, middle-class Filipinos thought, while the masses were kept mesmerized by the fanfare and spectacle of pop culture with its irrational, sentimental, and escapist attributes. This view, applied to popular religion, originates from ilustrado propaganda against the friars, which was transformed into a general statement about society.⁶ The problem is analogous to that of the historiography of Indian nationalism which, according to Ranajit Guha, "has been dominated by elitism -- colonial elitism and bourgeois nationalist elitism."⁷ This denial to the masses of any substantive role beyond that of implementing the thoughts of those above them, rears its head in the very way Philippine history has been conceived within an uncritical, linear, and developmentalist framework, an ilustrado legacy that underpins even the most anti-ilustrado of texts.⁸

The current problematic of the masses' role in Philippine history thus forces us to turn to unconventional sources. Symbols, rituals, epics, and other aspects of culture can tell us how people who otherwise could not write diaries and reports, publicly manifested their thinking. The shape of a house, dance movements, poetic conventions -- these are all clues to how people organize their experience of reality. Works previously assigned to the realm of "literature" gain a wider range of use, particularly in sociocultural analysis.⁹ Yet these sources hardly provide us with facts. If we

[208]

are to use literature, Guerrero argues, we "need to have incontrovertible proof that the slice of life they portrayed actually happened." After all, it is the documentary aspect of the text that the historian is trained to latch onto. In this mode of analysis, the text is situated in terms of its factual or literal dimension, how it refers to empirical reality and conveys information about it. Working in this mode, we would ask how the Bernardo Carpio awit corresponds to its Spanish model or to actual events and personalities in medieval Europe.¹⁰ The historical reconstruction of the Katipuneros' ascent of Mount Tapusi, on the other hand, would not stray beyond repeating what the documents said.

Or what the authors said. Corollary to the above is the view that a text can only tell us about the mind of its author. The truths and meanings of a text, produced at the time of its creation, are simply waiting to be discovered by literary critics and philologists. Thus any attempt to connect the text to its "outside" -- such as the thinking and gestures of Bonifacio or the behavior of the Katipuneros -- is regarded as frivolous. This is merely a symptom of one of the canons of Philippine scholarship today: the notion that text and society can be separated, that the former belongs to the realm of the imaginary, the individual creation, while the latter is real, even capable of statistical verification. The latter is deemed, in the final analysis, to "produce" the former. Perhaps this is the reason why, in the growing number of studies of folk literature or literary history that are appearing, "history" plays the role of introductory background to, or causal explanation for, "literature." The latter is subjected to classification procedures, thematic analyses, and author-centered readings that more or less assure the status of a text as nonevent, a static receptacle of truths and facts rather than a moving force. This approach now appears "self-evident," "universal," and "common sense" to many. But looking back at the history of historical thought, how obvious it is that "rules," "canons," criteria of true and false, cause-and-effect, etc., reflect not timeless truths but the epistemic character of particular ages.¹¹

Roland Barthes has a simple explanation for the typical historian's anxiety about "the facts." It's all part of the prestige of "this happened," another consequence of a certain historical con-

[209]

ditioning of western man. When history was trying to establish itself as a genre in its own right in the nineteenth century, it took as a guarantee of "truth" the abundance of concrete details in a carefully constructed narrative that was deemed to express "reality" out there. It was this attraction to the "reality effect" that also led to the popularity of the realist novel, the diary, the documentary, and photography. Today, this nineteenth-century aspiration towards an objective and realistic historiography is seen as part of that complex of myths peculiar to western culture "at a time when it was trying to deal with the social pressures caused by the impact of industrialization on institutions and beliefs peculiar to feudal social systems and agricultural economies."¹² The enlightenment drive to approximate reality through reason coincided with establishing the "facts of history," which meant that literature, which seemed to undermine the ideal of factuality, had to be kept at arms length.

Authorcentrism, too, can be traced to a certain historical conditioning. It could stem from our own bourgeois conceptions of personal property, individual works, and the private control of meaning. Michel Foucault traces back to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Europe the beginnings of a preoccupation with writing as an expression or even extension of an author's individuality. The value attributed to a text began to depend on information such as author, date, place, circumstance of writing, and so forth. Without an author to shoulder the responsibility for truth, evidence was not "reliable."¹³

It is authorcentrism that seems to lie behind the insistence that my first duty should have been to probe into the origins (i.e., the authorial circumstances) of the pasyón, religious rituals, folk beliefs, awit, and the like. We can raise at least two objections to this approach. First, can meaning be controlled at the moment of writing? How could "personal authorship" thrive in a situation where works, stories, poems, and other writings freely borrowed elements from each other, were transmitted orally, and were therefore subject to creative alterations; in short, where works were seen as part of a collective enterprise, expressing not an individual point of view but a general outlook? Second, how far back should one go in the search for origins, when any "origin" is already the outcome of

[210]

a prior event? Doesn't this preoccupation with ultimate origins, absolute ground, in fact reveal a metaphysical rather than some disinterested "scientific" outlook? Barthes goes as far as to link the notion of the unitary or author-determined meaning of a text to two forces: Protestantism and capitalism. He sees in a certain attitude towards the text (including the "properly" historical) the same impulse that brought forth notions of the individual's personal relationship to God and the personal commitment to acquire and accumulate money.¹⁴

Unfortunately, the "documentary" approach to sources has come to be identified with the historian's "proper" activity. For any text, whether this be awit, personal memoir, or proceedings of a trial, has also its "performative" or "work-like" (to borrow a term from Heidegger) aspects. The "performative" aspect of a text refers to how it does things with words that brings about a change in the situational context; how it engages the reader -- the past audience as well as the historian or critic -- in a recreative dialogue with the text.¹⁵ The Bernardo Carpio awit was written within the limits of a prevailing system of conventions. Already, at the moment it was composed, the author (whose identity remains problematic) was in a relational situation to an imagined audience. Furthermore, the
publication of the work meant that it took on a life of its own, moving through its nineteenth century readership and engaging it in thinking about self-identity, control of loób, relationship with kinfolk and patrons, stages of the life-arc, love, utang na loób, revenge, and even, as we saw in the earlier essays in this volume, freedom from domination by a foreign power. Textual analysis makes available the units of meaning which the historian, working equally with conventional sources, can use to restore the play of meanings between text, and ever-present context. We can say that meanings were generated outside the awit, with the participation of its mass audience, and in relation to nineteenth-century social and material conditions.

Reading texts in the above manner, the historian gains some idea of how human actions are defined and limited, or the range of possible meanings in an event. Not that we should cease scouring texts for facts and ordering the data in cause-and-effect chains, but when we are recovering a Philippine history "from below" and

[211]

faced with an apparent scarcity of records by and pertaining to the masses, do we have any choice? In undertaking a new reading of Bonifacio's favorite awit in relation to events of the war against Spain, we are in effect identifying possible structures of meaning that informed both popular mentalities and that of the Katipunan's founder. We can state with virtual certainty that the ascent of Mount Tapusi was more than a search for a safe haven, for the event was thoroughly imbedded in "culture."

This stress on social significance is related to another criticism of my reading of the Mount Tapusi affair: the absence of direct evidence that Bonifacio had the intentions and motivations I seem to have ascribed to him. History, Guerrero reminds us, should deal with the "articulation of conscious experience"; it is dangerous to draw inferences about Bonifacio's psychological state.¹⁶ But is it Bonifacio's psychological or internal state that we are after? Must we limit our investigation to the consciousness of individuals, of the "great men" who changed the course of history?

Philippine historical writing has traditionally put a premium on the utterances and personalities of national heroes. This may be the fault of the archives as well as the hagiographic tradition that serves certain needs. But there are other traditions: "Men make their own history," Marx once said, "but they do not know that they are making it." Social science today bears the imprint not only of Marx but also of Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic revolution. Saussure proceeded from a simple insight: the distinction between parole and langue, the everyday speech of individuals and the underlying grammar, or linguistic system which unconsciously structures utterances and which is by nature "social."¹⁷ Must we forever attempt to link the "speech" of Bonifacio and the "Katipunan to conscious motives? The present dispute began when I broke out of the preoccupation with "Bonifacio's truth" to probe into the social meanings generated by the events of 1896, whether Bonifacio intended them to happen or not.

In fact, Philippine historiography in the last decade (i.e., the 1970s) has largely removed the individual from center stage. Renato Constantino's A Past Revisited (1975), with its insistence on economic and class explanations, has eroded much of the cult of

[212]

pesonality-centered history.¹⁸ There is now a "new wave" of structural explanations of the economic, sociological and demographic sort, recently summarized by John Larkin (1982) and which can be sampled in the collection, Philippine Social History (1982).¹⁹ Key events in our past, so these works maintain, were made possible by changes occurring beyond the pale of individual intentions, or "conscious experience." These historians have made more efficient use of the archives, exploiting the abundance of land transfer records, economic transactions involving local compressors and foreign capitalists, colonial reports, census-type data, and the like. The relative lack of personal correspondence, diaries, and autobiographies is no longer regarded as a handicap.

This particular enrichment of Philippine historiography is not, however, without its limits. We recall how Larkin, in his book on the Pampangans, explained the appearance of the charismatic leader Felipe Salvador in terms of the rise of export agriculture and deteriorating landlord-tenant relations in Pampanga.²⁰ We do not know, however, from his work how Salvador managed to mobilize peasants from varied linguistic groups in central Luzon to join the Santa Iglesia. Writing in the Philippine Social History volume, Guerrero merely reiterates Larkin's explanation of the Santa Iglesia while emphasizing the local elite's abuses that triggered such phenomena.²¹ One senses the limit of their "methodology" when the consciousness of the Santa Iglesia cannot be articulated in a specific cultural milieu; when the rationale for their acts is preconceived rather than demonstrated -- the assumption being that Salvador (or Bonifacio, for that matter) was really "just like us." The peasants were oppressed and so they quite naturally rose up in arms? Salvador's "interests" were no different from those of budding capitalists, except that cultural factors made him a bit more "fanatical" or "religious" or "emotional" as "men of the masses" are deemed to be? This outlook takes an extreme form in the writings of David Sturtevant. A pioneer in the study of popular traditions of Philippine protest, Sturtevant nevertheless paints his rebels as pathological failures reacting rather "irrationally" to stresses and strains in rural society and the economy until more rational and properly political leaders appear. Moving to more fa-

[213]

miliar ground, we can cite Constantino's reference to "mystic mumbo-jumbo" in otherwise comprehensible peasant revolts as a sign of the limits of his analysis.²²

What characterizes the above works is the absence of any real attempt to understand the masses on their own terms, and the consequent reliance on colonial and elite-nationalist representations of the masses' behavior. The boom in "objective" socioeconomic analyses of the Philippine past may be taking for granted the deeply ingrained, behaviorist assumptions of social science models such as "patron-client ties" and archaic notions of language, textual analysis, human motivations, and the role of the unconscious.²³

Predictably, anyone who engages in an alternative history based on "fragments" will incur the wrath of the empiricists. For a history that prides itself in being "objective" displays its character by the amount of unambiguous, documented statements of fact it contains. Not surprisingly, Guerrero says that I am treading "dangerous ground" when I "evaluate the collective mentality during the revolution largely by indirection." Is there any choice for us? To combat the "tyranny of the archives," to avoid that lapse into silence about the masses while waiting in vain for conventional documents to surface, "indirect" methods must be resorted to. This is nothing new. Claude Levi-Strauss once cited the Annales historian Lucien Febvre's work on sixteenth-century thought for its constant reference to "psychological attitudes and logical structures" which "can be grasped only indirectly because they have always eluded the consciousness of those who spoke and wrote."²⁴

No matter how "dangerous," looking into the "collective mentality" rather than "Bonifacio's truth" is another way of removing the individual from center stage. Its basic premise is that, just as Copernicus decentered man and his planet from a privileged place in the universe, man is decentered from his own meanings. The conscious subject is displaced from the center of social activity. Just like a "text," Bonifacio cannot be pinned down to a particular meaning and truth. He could only operate within the prevailing social structure and mode of discourse of his time. There were limits to what could be thought. Within such limits, however, there

[214]

was also play: Bonifacio's writings, speeches, and gestures were texts which generated meanings which he may not have intended. Ultimately it is the notion of text that leads us to justifiably circumscribe Horacio de la Costa's advice, reiterated by Ed de Jesus, that students skirt the subject of Rizal and the revolution in order to do socioeconomic history.²⁵ The present dispute about the Mount Tapusi affair is a good example of what I mean. Half a century or more of scholarship on the revolution has actually domesticated a subject matter which, in itself, ought to be strange and full of surprises, a product of a different time and sociocultural milieu. We have all come to identify Bonifacio and the Katipunan with a stock repertoire of meanings, and I suspect that the sense of indignation provoked by my reading of the subject comes from the simple fact that it is unfamiliar. It fails to reiterate the contours of the "thing itself" that Agoncillo and others have "objectively" laid down.

The difficulty, to once more address the question of "methodology," originates from a simple faith in the transparency of all historical phenomena. It is supposed that in the course of a historical narrative -- the story of Bonifacio and the Katipunan in this case -- what appears to be "strange" and opaque to reason can be rendered susceptible to understanding by ordinary, informed common sense: the standards of universality imposed by present consensus. Nietszche's admonition of nineteenth-century historiography still rings true for our times: What the much touted "objectivity" of the academic establishment amounted to, he said, was simply "the measurement of the opinions and deeds of the past by the universal opinions of the present... They call all historical writing 'subjective' that does not regard these popular opinions as canonical."²⁶ When Bonifacio is somehow linked to "primitive" and "superstitious" beliefs in a slumbering king who would one day descend from Mount Tapusi at the head of a liberating force armed only with anting-anting, the effect can be disconcerting. For the established "truth" is that Bonifacio was a radical nationalist who led a movement that was far advanced in a developmental sequence from "primitive" to "modern." But what is elided by this construct? I have suggested that the Katipunan, whatever ancestry it

[215]

had in the Propaganda movement and masonry, of necessity absorbed the characteristics of earlier cofradías and samahan, and the potency of existing religious symbols and linguistic usage.

A well-meaning friend once complained to me that her grandfather was a Katipunero who believed in liberal principles, so how dare I suggest that the "fanatic" Valentin de los Santos (of Lapiang Malaya fame) carried on the Katipunan tradition! In reply I would ask, do we really know Ka Valentin or, for that matter, the Katipunan? Every scholar is convinced that he or she has pinned down the Katipunan's true nature. Jim Richardson writes: How could Bonifacio "who read Victor Hugo and spoke of Reason... be allied with a rustic prophet (Ruperto Rios) who professedly spoke with European emperors, climbed to heaven up a rope and kept independence in a magic box?"²⁷ The problem with Richardson and coauthor Jonathan Fast is that they think they have pinned down the ideology of the Katipunan because of their careful research into the rise of the capitalist economy that preceded it.²⁸

The Katipunan leadership's middle-class origins, urban or provincial, are all too obvious. This leadership, however, also sought to mobilize lower-class Filipinos in an armed struggle. Why was it, to a great extent, successful? If we can accept the view that the Katipunan subalterns were not simply blind followers, we can go on to ask what it was about the gestures of some of their "lower-middle class" or "plebeian" leaders (notably Bonifacio) and the language of their manifestos, that proved so efficacious. Without a sensitivity to the range of meanings that could be generated by words or ideas like kalayaan, kasaganaan, kaginhawaan, damayan, katuwiran and kaliwanagan -- and images like independence jumping out of a box (mother country rising from the grave, of course!) -- it is no wonder Richardson and Fast were able to convince themselves of the essentially bourgeois ideology of the Katipunan as a whole.

However, let us not blame foreign scholars when expert "Tagalists" are guilty of the same thing. In our universities, as we all know, schools of thought and factional groupings have played a great part in determining which kinds of history are "in" and which ought to be purged. Instead of constructing and defending

[216]

the "correct" (or, more ominously, "official") version, should we not perhaps reflect upon the function of historical studies in the first place? When first published, the well-known works of Agoncillo and Constantino simultaneously reflected current thinking about the revolution and added new, "unfamiliar" dimensions to it. The problem is that these have become classics, reduced to certain stock anticolonial and/ or antifeudal meanings, self-evident "truths" which, unless brought alive by those who practice new modes of reading, no longer have the revolutionizing effect they once had. The aim of historiography, Michelet once said, was "resurrection," to restore to "forgotten voices" the power to speak to the living. Once these voices are drained of their strangeness and mystery as once-vital forces, they cease to move the present to action. When once-vital events in our past become reduced to unquestionable truths and facts, they have been "domesticated."

Historians can no longer bask in the confidence that all they need in order "to do research" is a lot of documents (living informants included) and rare books plus some rudimentary training in historical detective work such as submitting the evidence to cross-verification, being fair to all sides, getting at the facts. The culturally specific sources of their own analytic or sorting categories must be recognized and evaluated. How, for example, do the dichotomies primitive versus modern, superstitious versus rational, religious versus secular, backward versus forward, or even regional versus national, draw their aura of factualness from their place in the culture of westernized, educated Filipinos? How do they draw their legitimacy from the social prestige of the groups who may have employed these categories as an ideological weapon in the past? What are the configurations of power in our society that conspire to institutionalize certain favored constructions of our history? Historians today, rather than clinging to the security of past practices, should be asking themselves such questions. They should be recovering what has been ignored or swept under the rug in past works, letting this "excess" challenge the dominant "truths" and thus preventing history from becoming, in Nietzsche's words, the "harem of a race of eunuchs." For Foucault, the task is one of disordering, destructuring, unnaming -- an ex-

[217]

treme view, yet so relevant to our present situation.²⁹ In the nineteenth and early twentieth century, to climb the mountains of San Mateo -- the so-called Montes de la Libertad -- was a demonstration of one's exceptional valor. It was in achieving this singular feat that many tulisanes -- a term which literally translates as "bandits" but, according to Teodoro Kalaw, carries past connotations of instigador revolucionario -- became enshrined as heroes in the folk memory.³⁰ As we saw in the second essay, Jose Rizal, whose extraordinary powers and eventual martyrdom endeared him to many an unlettered villager, was rumored to have climbed the mountain, entered Bernardo Carpio's cave and proven his intelligence and inner control to the trapped king. With the outbreak of hostilities against Spain, the gentes ordinarias of the region joined the fray expecting their King Bernardo, with only one foot left chained, to finally break free and descend from Mount Tapusi to aid his people. Even today, I have heard peasants and artisans in Batangas and Quezon provinces (which are quite a distance from San Mateo) speculate about the meaning of nag-uumpugang bato (lit., "two rocks colliding"), the mountain where Bernardo, now in the company of the patriots of the revolution, still lives until the next war when they all will return.

There is behind all these "folk1oric" details a coherent view of the world, not consciously articulated and, at least until their discovery of Gramsci, ignored by the intellectual class. In fact, there has hardly been any place in our histories for such mental categories. To illustrate this point, we need only go back to when the dispute regarding Andres Bonifacio actually began. In 1897 Carlos Ronquillo, the personal secretary of Emilio Aguinaldo, in his "history" of the Katipunan uprising castigated Bonifacio for raising false hopes that an army would descend from Mount Tapusi "to lead his whole army." "This plain falsehood," writes Ronquillo, "was a deception or morale booster (pangpalakas loób) perpetrated by Bonifacio; because at the appointed hour neither men nor arms arrived from Tapusi. Up to now we do not know where this mountain is."³¹

When I posited a connection between the Katipunan ascent of Mount Tapusi and the Bernardo Carpio myth, I lacked the assur-

[218]

ance of such a direct statement as Ronquillo's. Yet, other signs, made intelligible by the use of literature as a historical source, pointed to the same thing. And there is something else, even more important, that Ronquillo's account reveals: As early as 1897, this nationalist, revolutionist and historian, a believer in enlightened liberalism, was already decrying the "dark underside" of Bonifacio's mentality, adding it to the litany of faults (the assumption of "kingship" being one of these) that he felt justified Bonifacio's execution at the hands of Aguinaldo and the Caviteño elite. Things are different now, you say. Bonifacio's unswerving patriotism has been given just recognition since the appearance of Agoncillo's book. But is the angry bolo-waving Bonifacio and his followers, contrasted with the effete likes of Rizal, all there is to it? Have we, perhaps, constructed this Bonifacio to suit our own needs and desires? Despite the nationalist and revolutionary badges conspicuously displayed by some of our vociferous intellectuals, I suspect that it is Ronquillo, not Bonifacio, that lurks within them.

1997: Heroes and Mythmakers

Thirteen years later, I find myself dissecting a book that raises some of the older issues regarding the construction of Bonifacio as a revolutionary nationalist. I would not be surprised if Inventing a Hero: The Posthumous Re-creation of Andres Bonifacio was published deliberately during the centennial of the Philippine revolution. At the very moment that the nation remembers and celebrates the individual who initiated the event, Glenn May asserts that this hero was, in fact, "posthumously recreated and the six individuals who did the recreating [were]: Manuel Artigas, Epifanio de los Santos, Jose P. Santos, Artemio Ricarte, Teodoro Agoncillo, and Reynaldo Ileto."(4)³² Professor May teaches history at the University of Oregon and is the author of other books on the Philippine-American war and American colonial administration. As a professional historian, May employs a familiar strategy in his critique: the questioning of

[219]

evidence and sources, a rather old-fashioned but very persuasive weapon. Among his sensational discoveries is that Bonifacio cannot have authored the texts attributed to him, that most of his personal correspondence was "probably forged."

May relentlessly assails the questionable methods of Filipino historians and memoirists. At least one is accused of having "consciously dissembled" (i.e., "camouflaged, disguised, masked, concealed") while "more than one altered evidence." Teodoro Agoncillo, late professor of history at the University of the Philippines, is said to have dealt with historical evidence "in demonstrably peculiar ways" (peculiar: strange, weird, not according to accepted rules). Artemio Ricarte, a participant in those events whose memoirs offer some of the most detailed accounts is dubbed another "re-creator" whose "influential narrative bears little resemblance to reality." Ricarte, in short, was a liar.

There is, to May, an obvious explanation for this posthumous recreation of Bonifacio: politics, or more precisely, the politics of nation-building engaged in by historians all of whom were, in their respective days, "prominent, outspoken nationalists, deeply committed to the ideal of Philippine nationhood." A reconstructed and sanitized Bonifacio "served a vital political function as a symbol of Philippine nationalism and a model for Filipino youth." This "explains the liberties they took with historical evidence and other deficiencies of their scholarship." The following passage clearly evidences May's conviction that "politics" is inevitably linked to "invention." It also reveals, in its proliferation of "ifs" and "mights," that May's conclusions are foregone -- "if" these Filipinos were nationalists, they must have written bad history:

For if, as I suspect, the historical Bonifacio may have mattered less to them than their nationalism -- if, that is to say, they cared less about the 'documentable' particularities of Bonifacio's life than the contemporary uses to which their reconfigured hero might be put in the present -- they might have seen nothing wrong with embellishing a bit. If the ultimate goal was re-creation, the inclusion of footnotes was very much beside the point. (34) [italics mine]

[220]

Some commentators have responded favorably to the book, but there has been more condemnation than approval. Passionate negative reviews have appeared with titles like "The Ugly American Returns" and "The Repeated Murder of Andres Bonifacio." Many Filipinos have reacted with anger and deep hurt.³³ And why not? The book strikes without mercy not necessarily at Bonifacio but at the way Filipinos -- particularly those of the "nationalist", "patriotic,” and "anticolonialist" varieties -- have remembered, reconstructed, and disseminated the past. It suggests that the centennial is a big sham because Filipinos have spent the last hundred years manipulating or inventing historical evidence in order to have a revolution worth celebrating. In the introductory pages, May tries to allay suspicion that he is gunning for Filipinos by stating that the problem is a universal one: "History invariably serves a political function; nationalist historians around the world wave the flag… Hence, the general historiographical matters I touch on in my examination of the Bonifacio myth are hardly unique." May points out other cases where "supposedly priceless historical documents have turned out to be certain or probable forgeries." Of direct relevance to the Bonifacio controversy is the universal genre of "heroic biography,… invariably hagiographic in nature," produced by Americans, Latin Americans, Africans, and all. An extreme case is the invented hero Stalin, alluded to by May as the Bonifacio of the Soviets. "Indeed, it can be argued, and sometimes is, that all historical writing, including the most esoteric, has a political dimension, even if the writers do not acknowledge (or may not be aware of) it." This is a most telling point, but apparently there are exceptions.

May, in fact, seems to already know who the guilty ones are. Aside from the nationalists, he mentions other types of historians who use their work to promote political objectives, among them being certain Marxists, conservatives, liberals, environmentalists, feminists, and postmodernists. (6) Now this would include among the "bad guys" practically anyone who writes within the framework of an "ism," a theoretical standpoint, an ideological perspective. May, however, claims to be beyond such "isms," describing himself as one who deliberately avoids fancy theories and sophis-

[221]

ticated readings because he merely wants to expose a scandal and get the facts about Bonifacio straight. As he puts it, "my discussion of these writings will strike some readers as pedestrian and theoretically innocent. I intend it to be exactly that."(44) Most thoughtful readers who encounter statements of this sort would already suspect that it rests on still another "ism," however ill defined or obfuscated in the text.

I will not deny that the Bonifacio we know today has mythological dimensions, and that there are problems with how the centennial has been celebrated. I do not dismiss outright the claim that the six Filipino writers May targets are implicated in various ways in the creation of a mythic Bonifacio. What I object to, mainly, is May's own act of dissembling and concealment in the book, his naive claim to be standing outside the controversy, describing the world as it really is. He wants the book to be seen as an attempt to clear the path of mythological obstacles so that he can access the "real" and human Bonifacio. Yet, the very nature of historical inquiry, as anyone attuned to contemporary debates in the field should know, cannot but limit May himself to producing still another representation of Bonifacio -- perhaps drab and unheroic, perhaps more authentic, but a construction nonetheless. One positive effect of the book is that it reminds us of the relational, dialogical -- even combative -- aspects of any historical reconstruction.

The Filipino nationalist "mythmakers" are the villains in the book because they "introduce and circulate inventions." However, the very act of identifying and criticizing the "bad guys" is dependent on a notion of the "good guys."³⁴ The "other" of the mythmakers are the supposed truth-seekers, the professional historians. Of necessity, then, the first chapter of the book has a long section in which May projects himself as the "other" of the devious, dissembling nationalists. On page three he says: "For the next three years, I spun my wheels. I continued to do research, spending many hours alone with my refractory Tagalog texts…" In describing his attempt "to find a path through the documentary/scholarly forest," May portrays himself as taking up the professional historian's lonely quest for truth, which lies in the docu-

[222]

ments themselves rather than the perspectives brought to bear upon them. The hero of the book is the historian himself.

Now this image of the dedicated investigator who uncovers a scam is, I suspect, what makes May's book attractive to some. In a society whose citizens routinely suspect and accuse politicians, bureaucrats, and even departmental colleagues of corruption, pork-barrelling [sic], and the manipulation of facts, it is easy to get behind a crusader from the outside who will set things straight -- someone from the United States, no less, which is still perceived by many Filipinos as the place where the standards of the professions are set. On the other side of the equation one can explain the book's attractiveness in terms of the American public's thirst for sensational exposes, feeding orientalist fantasies about crime, such as Asian gangs dealing in illicit merchandise. Here we have the author blowing the whistle on what amounts to a Filipino nationalist clique of pseudoscholars telling lies, if not forging and hawking documents behind the hallowed walls of the academe.

An alternative and more productive way of reading May's book is to forget about May the savior and source of light, and instead see him as letting off a salvo, an artillery barrage, in a long- drawn battle over the terrain of Philippine national history. "Andres Bonifacio" is an effect of the ongoing battle which involves the nationalists, the colonialists, and all their successors. By thereby shifting our perspective we can ask such questions as: What kind of history of the revolution does Glenn May and his cohorts uphold? What is the color of their flag?

When May starts to give the reader a background to the revolution (12), it is obvious that he regards the socioeconomic approach as the way to go. This has been the approach favored by most U.S.-trained Philippine historians like Alfred McCoy, Norman Owen, Michael Cullinane, and Ed. de Jesus. They do not necessarily agree with May's critique of the Bonifacio biographers, but they definitely signify the "good guys" in the conflict. In their kind of history, the colonial archives are privileged. In fact, if May had his way, nearly every historical source that is not written down and stored in a proper archive would be made suspect. The privileging of colonial archives is an essential stratagem in the present war.

[223]

May, for example, questions practically everything we claim to know about the details of Bonifacio's youth. Zaide is faulted for citing newspaper articles: these are not proper archival sources, such articles are "clearly not works of original scholarship." Agoncillo is assailed for relying on only a small number of written sources about Bonifacio's youth. We know, however, that
Agoncillo interviewed many people who knew Bonifacio. To May these are next to useless! Bonifacio's sister Esperidiona was interviewed several times by Esteban de Ocampo. But where is the transcript? asks May. How do we know the interviews were not made up?

May argues that the relative absence of proper archival records -- records, by the way, that can be freely accessed by the socioeconomic historians -- facilitated the mythmaking:

This sparse documentary record -- something that appeared to have posed formidable obstacles to the recovery of the past -- actually made it easier for nationalist historians to invent the man. Unhampered by existing documents, they were freer to attribute certain ideas and personal characteristics to Bonifacio, to explain away the apparent human flaws, and, in the process, to create a suitable national symbol.(17)

It is entirely legitimate for May to push for the kind of history he favors, namely socioeconomic and demographic history based on parish records and colonial reports. It is also reasonable for him to criticize Agoncillo for not using certain archival collections (such as the Philippine Revolutionary Papers and the archives of the
Spanish religious orders), and for relying on oral interviews for much of his reconstruction of Katipunan history. The problem is that May attempts to establish a binary opposition between archival sources (which he privileges) and oral sources whose provenance is difficult to trace. He posits a dichotomy between authentic records (i.e., official, reliable, written, archived) and inauthentic records (i.e., in private hands, oral, biased, probably tampered with). It just so happens that for May the authentic records lie mostly in colonial archives, easily accessible to him.

[224]

Agoncillo knew that Filipinos were disadvantaged in histories that privileged archives. He often spoke of the tyranny of the colonial archives, how they only spoke of the indios in relation to Spain and Spanish official surveillance. That is one reason why Philippine history to Agoncillo begins in 1872, when native voices start to proliferate in the written records. He believed that, aside from captured records in their custody, the official archives would not have revealed as much as interviews of survivors of the revolutionary period. Revolt of the Masses relied heavily on oral information, which to May is "Agoncillo's most distinctive methodological quirk -- his seemingly unqualified faith in interviews” and the main source of the book's “striking weaknesses.”(131)

Those who attempt to write women's history will sympathize with Agoncillo's criticisms of the colonial archives. How effectively can we retrieve women's past when men largely penned the so- called reliable archival sources? Women's history relies much on the use of “unofficial” records, oral interviews, creative readings of men's writings, and is currently informed by feminist or, worse, “postmodernist” theory. By May's reckoning, then, feminist historians should turn out to be just as bad as the nationalists.

The oral sources or interviews pertaining to Bonifacio are criticized by May because they were conducted half a century after the events. People would by then have forgotten or distorted -- deliberately, he insinuates -- certain details of the past. Most historians have in fact used the sorts of records Agoncillo used, but May belittles Agoncillo's ability to properly use the data in his sources. Agoncillo is pictured as a “home-grown” scholar, largely uninitiated to western scientific methods of history. Moreover, he is accused of being essentially biased, not just because of his nationalism, but by virtue of his kinship ties to the second wife of Aguinaldo, a major informant. In all sorts of ways May assumes the position of the modern, liberal, scholar (rational, objective, freed from particularistic ties) vis à vis the preprofessional, and coincidentally brown-skinned, Agoncillo.

Underlying Glenn May's doubts and anxieties about oral sources is, I think, the question of access to the historical or native “other." One thing we all knew about the Philippine social histori-

[225]

ans back in the late 1960s and the 1970s was that they considered it unimportant to be fluent in a Philippine language; after all, their targets were the Spanish and American archival holdings. And so because of language barriers, May could not in fact have conducted oral history extensively or effectively. In his one attempt, an extensive interview of a Philippine-American war veteran
named Benito Vergara, May relied on an interpreter and assumed that the translation into English was entirely transparent.35 In contrast, Agoncillo was himself a Tagalog writer and poet. He could communicate at a deep level with his informants. From them he could, and did, wean out details, even deep sentiments, about the events of 1896-97. In contrast, I doubt if even with all the documents at his disposal May could have written a book like Agoncillo's The Revolt of the Masses, which required extensive interaction between the historian and informants. So May' s valorization of the [colonial] archives has also something to do with the problem of an outsider's access to the indigenous world. The archives can be regarded as privileged memory machines of elites, both colonizer and native.

Let me now turn to one of the highlights of the book: May's discovery of a sensational trade in forged documents. Much of the book has to do with examining the authenticity, validity, or legitimacy of the sources used to construct Bonifacio's biography and the history of the 1896 revolution. While oral history is regarded as suspect, certain written documents are alleged to be fakes.

May notes first of all that the writings of Bonifacio are in private hands, not locked up in some state or church archive. So immediately his suspicions are raised. For example, take the letters of Bonifacio which used to be owned by Epifanio de los Santos and his son Jose P. Santos. Why are there differences in penmanship, May asks, even though the signatures are the same? "Santos may have known, or strongly suspected, that the documents in his possession were bogus and wanted to cover up that fact." May then embarks upon a hypothetical scenario of what I call "the grand coverup." I stress the word "hypothetical" because despite all his demands for hard proof in making historical statements, he himself is unable to say for sure that what he alleges is true. Readers, in

[226]

fact, should note the extraordinary number of times in which May uses variations of the word "probably" in his analyses of texts and scenarios.³⁶

It all starts with the observation that not all of Bonifacio's letters were penned by the same person. May himself hints at a simple explanation for this: that different scribes (escribiente, secretary) penned Bonifacio's letters, which he himself signed. But this explanation is glossed over; May instead asserts that the documents had "major defects" which Santos may have tried to rectify through forgery. It is interesting to trace the drift in May's arguments and style of presentation. What starts out as a hypothetical scenario -- he admits that his conclusions are circumstantial and speculative -- ends up reading like a reconstruction of real events. The reader gets seduced into thinking that a major trade in forged documents has actually been exposed. In subsequent chapters May boldly refers back to this hypothetical scenario as a real event. Anyone who skips the middle chapters will not realize that the whole issue is shot through with doubt.

May speculates that Santos knew the documents he had were forgeries and so transcribed them so that they looked more authentic. May's argument, however, when examined closely, is not all that convincing. For example, he says that the "originals" used goal-focused verbs which were not characteristic of older Tagalog, or the Tagalog of Bonifacio's time. So Santos is supposed to have transcribed the sentences to make the verbs actor-focused (e.g., "Tinanggap ko ang sulat" becomes "tumanggap ako ng sulat"). However, May himself undermines his argument by admitting that Marcelo del Pilar used goal-focused verbs as well. So, in fact, the allegedly forged original letters also conform to a nineteenth-century stylistic practice, albeit less common. Maybe Santos wanted to transcribe them in a way that he felt modern readers would feel more comfortable with. I myself have transcribed nineteenth-century texts and subtly altered sentence constructions to make them more readable.

"In the end," says May, "the accumulated weight of the evidence -- the unbelievable stories about the provenance of the documents, the inconsistencies in penmanship, and the defects in the

[227]

Prose -- seems to indicate that the Bonifacio letters are probably fabrications."(79) Unbelievable?... to whom? Penmanship?... there could have been different escribientes writing. Defects in prose?... Marcelo del Pilar wrote in the same style. And despite all his arguments, May can only conclude that the letters were probably fabrications. The most he achieves in this chapter is to undermine the credibility of De los Santos and Santos, to plant the seeds of doubt in the reader. I would argue that this is in fact his aim -- to show that these Filipino nationalists cannot be trusted.

The theoretical positions that undergird May's work become a bit clearer in his discussion of Bonifacio's personality. Why this interest in personality? He says: "Agoncillo' s picture of the early Bonifacio is almost certainly too flattering."(p. 126) The Bonifacio of the Manila phase was depicted by Agoncillo (based on his interviews with survivors) as a calm and charismatic leader who inspired his followers to rise in revolt. It was only when he became embroiled in Cavite local politics that he became impulsive and rather irrational. May disputes the view of Agoncillo and others that Bonifacio's personality was affected by the changing circumstances and environment.
Despite his claims otherwise, May is not neutral about Bonifacio. He embraces Santiago Alvarez's suggestion that even before Bonifacio went to Cavite he "manifested many of the same traits of personality that later led to his downfall: hypersensitivity, extreme irritability, and volatility." May also disputes Pio Valenzuela's claim that his depiction of Bonifacio as being temperamental was due to testimony taken under duress. What is the pattern in May's own "critical judgement" [sic] of the differing testimonies? What makes him so sure that Bonifacio was ruled by his emotions -- easily offended, a hothead, volatile? The stakes are high on this issue: If Bonifacio can be proven essentially temperamental, he is therefore unfit for national hero status.

May is unable to offer "hard proof" of Bonifacio's temperamental nature; I don't think anyone can, for that matter. His argument feeds, however, into another narrative upheld by critics of the revolution -- certain upper-class Filipinos, colonial rulers included -- that the Katipunan was not a rational movement, that it

[228]

was led by a fanatic Bonifacio, and that it needed the leadership of a more calculating individual such as Aguinaldo. May's view also feeds into the orientalist representation of Filipinos (especially the indios) as ruled by emotions and therefore needing guidance from more advanced tutors. Just look at any description of indios in Spanish and early American writings, and chances are you will be told that the indios or the taò are still ruled by emotions, and therefore need western disciplining and tutelage.

But another problem here is that May has an either/or, static, essentialist view of personality types. Individuals have to be located within a rigid personality category. In this case, Bonifacio should fit into the category "emotional" rather than "rational." Therefore the heroic, charismatic Bonifacio who only became emotional when things got bad for him, is an invention of the nationalists. To May, Bonifacio was never calm and heroic. He did not change, as Agoncillo alleges; he was always an irrational leader and thus his downfall was deserved.

May's views about the behavior of nationalist writers and the personality of Bonifacio are fortified by his views about Filipino politicians. In connection with his critique of Artemo [sic] Ricarte's memoirs (another useless nationalist document, he concludes) May takes a close look at the famous "Tejeros Assembly" of history schoolbooks. This, he says, was really a gathering of politicos with revolutionary pretensions at Tejeros in early 1897 to resolve the problem of leadership through elections.

His first conclusion about that historic event is that the elections were rigged, marred by irregularities. So what's new, he asks? "Such was the norm in Philippine local elections during the final decades of the Spanish regime and such is often the case in Philippine elections today."³⁷ Ricarte is accused of concealing the intrigues that took place; he wanted it known that he was given the position of captain general due to high regard by others, not because of political shenanigans. "One thing we know for sure about Ricarte is that his public image was very important for him," May states in all innocence. But Ricarte's whitewashing of the truth makes his account flawed and unreliable; "Ricarte the defiant was, in reality, Ricarte the deceitful."(99) Quite a devastating conclu-

[229]

sion, considering that I have used the memoirs myself and find much of it accurate. How does May know the real Ricarte? He doesn't, but he makes the reader doubt Ricarte's nationalist credentials; baka político lang siya, maybe he was just playing politics, one can hear the murmurings. The "real" Ricarte also happens to conform to colonial representations of the native. Check out May's first book, Social Engineering in the Philippines, and you will find an earlier statement of his view that Filipinos were not prepared to run the country by themselves because even their best leaders were inept, ambitious, and patron-client oriented.³⁸ And so American tutelage was needed.

To May, the Tejeros Assembly must have been a typical dirty election in the Philippines. But lacking reliable sources (because the available ones -- firsthand native accounts -- are mostly "tainted" as far as he's concerned) May draws on his earlier work on elections under Spanish rule to paint a scenario of what must have happened in Tejeros. The electoral participants

would have been expected to conduct themselves as they normally did in electoral contests. That is to say, they probably consulted with each other, lobbied, cajoled, threatened, conspired, drew up slates of candidates, and made deals. Some may have engaged in ballot tampering. In the aftermath of the voting, as might have been expected, too, the defeated or dissatisfied cried foul, charging their opponents with all sorts of nasty behavior.(101)

Behind May's treatment of Filipino elections is the discourse of democratic development, which has tied Filipino political development to American tutelage. A male, liberal enlightenment fantasy of rational politics is posited as the norm which Filipinos failed to reach, therefore their politics -- as in factional and then nationalist politics -- is shabby, pretentious, forever lacking. What is missing is a discussion of Filipino political behavior on its own terms. Instead, May encodes the Philippine data in terms of rather dated social science paradigms about "underdeveloped societies." In fact, the problem goes back much farther, to an orientalism that

[230]

presumes that the Philippine case must be the binary, negative, opposite of the developed west.³⁹

Typically, May's imagined scenario subsequently operates as a real event: "The elections at Tejeros were, after all, only elections." The people at Tejeros would have acted like astute Filipino political operatives" engaging in "electoral politicking, arm twisting, and dirty tricks."(110) May gives these leaders the essential attributes of the prepolitical and corrupt Oriental; they are transformed into one-dimensional beings. They are typically corrupt,
authoritarian-leaning, nonideological Filipino politicians. The ghost of Marcos helps to promote this view.

So those leaders at Tejeros were just ordinary Filipino power-grabbers but nationalist historians, May laments, always like to portray heroes as conducting themselves "with the sort of dignity that, in their view, such a moment deserved," in order to build national pride in accomplishments of past leaders. May has a point, but we can go the other extreme of forgetting that, despite their principalía origins, the participants at the Tejeros Assembly also
called themselves revolutionaries. In May's account we lose sight of the fact that a war was raging all around those leaders. It wasn't "only elections." Those leaders had lost brothers and cousins to Spanish bullets. It was an election in a time of revolution.

May tries to show that Bonifacio got what he deserved, Philippine elections being what they are: "Bonifacio was unhappy, but that was to be expected: electoral contests in the Philippines invariably led to bad feelings." Since the archetypal premodern Filipinos are supposed to be driven by emotion, not reason, we are told not to take seriously Ricarte's allegations that Bonifacio had been wronged. Instead May suggests that Bonifacio (being basically emotional) was a bad loser in a typically rigged election. Again, the idea is to demolish by innuendo another account sympathetic to Bonifacio. Instead of presenting various possible scenarios, May is inclined to dismiss or at least undermine any pro-Bonifacio position.

So who are the Bonifacio sympathizers? Let me return to the theme of Glenn May's "bad guys." To him the nationalist historians can be characterized as "pro-lower class, anticolonial, and anti-

[231]

upper class" and so they posthumously recreated Bonifacio in order to obtain all these attributes in a hero. May recoils from the nationalist position because it appears to be the antithesis of his own views about Filipinos. He has always viewed Philippine society in patron-client terms.⁴⁰ The lower class cannot be anti-upper class because they are beholden by all sorts of traditional ties to their superiors. And most Filipinos were quite happy with what colonial rule offered, especially American tutelage. So it pains May that a character like Bonifacio might actually have existed, and that a lot of Filipinos have come to believe so.

What readers of the book may not realize, because it is dissembled by May, is that the current controversy is a replay of much older ones dating from the time of the American occupation but reaching the height of intensity during the 1950s and 1960s. Let us take a close look at the following statement by May:

For at least four decades, the nationalist school has dominated the Philippine historical establishment. It is not surprising, therefore, that the only challenges to the existing orthodoxy have come from outside the establishment. Joaquin does not hold an academic post in the Philippines… Fast and Richardson are foreigners. Nor is it surprising that such challenges have been studiously ignored by the establishment.(51)

First, we notice that the "other" is collapsed into the same. May stereotypes "the nationalist school," so that it can be "othered." In fact, Nick Joaquin has a following among nationalist scholars, while Fast and Richardson were aligned with Constantino, who is also embraced by nationalists. Internal debates and bitter controversies are hallmarks of Filipino nationalist scholarship. Ever fond of essentializing Filipinos, May wants Filipino scholars portrayed as a more or less homogenous, reified, group (bound by an "ism" -- in this case, nationalism}. By reifying them as the irresponsible "other," May makes it appear that by his intervention as a responsible historian (who, by coincidence, happens to be a white American male), he is opening up the field for the first time. There

[232]

is in fact no "school." Even the external critics of the nationalists hailed by May also positioned themselves within those debates.

Returning to the quote, May says that the nationalist historians have dominated for at least four decades, therefore since at least the mid-fifties. What was the other kind of history against which the "nationalist school" was established; what used to dominate before the so-called nationalists mounted the challenges of the late 1950s? Do I hear names like Gregorio Zaide, Conrado Benitez, the good followers of the David Barrows and Dean Worcester schools, Horacio De la Costa? There was obviously a contest over history, and what is hidden in May's book is his position in this struggle. We cannot understand the vehemence of May's attack until we appreciate the extent to which American colonial discourse dominated historical writing until the 1950s when it was assailed by a new generation of postcolonial writers and scholars. We cannot fully understand this book without glancing at, say, Lewis Gleeck's earlier salvos in the pages of the Bulletin of the American Historical Collection, formerly housed in the U.S. Embassy.

In the present hero-mythmaking controversy, the flip side of the coin is the Rizal debate, in which Americans and Filipinos alike clearly figured. Manuel Artigas, Epifanio de los Santos, Jose
Santos, and others were keeping one tradition alive at a time when Rizal, approved by the Americans, was the national hero. As we saw in the previous essay, Bonifacio was not a dominant figure in history books until the 1960s. Overshadowed by Rizal, he was a hero of some Katipunan veterans associations and troublesome anticolonial movements from the time of Macario Sakay (himself an ex-follower of Bonifacio who was labeled [sic] a bandit). Rizal on the other hand was the sort of hero that could more easily be recruited into the American colonial project. May himself states that the Bonifacio of the nationalists is an invention to counter the Bonifacio "excoriated by foreign writers and home-grown enemies… Here was a worthy national hero, an attractive revolutionary alternative to the reform-oriented Rizal."(47)

Where does May fit in all this? Only way into the book does he allude to the tradition from where he comes: American colonial historiography. "Agoncillo was also controversial. An outspoken

[233]

nationalist, he was critical of both colonial rule and colonial historiography." This is a muted reference to Agoncillo's "other" -- colonial historiography -- which is practically ignored throughout May's book. By raising the question of [American] colonial historiography earlier, May would have had to state his subject position in relation to it. This would have been a more productive stance instead of posing as a disinterested "fixer," a hero amongst the mythmakers. For what we can easily overlook is that, in relentlessly undermining Bonifacio's authorship of every piece of writing attributed to him, in ruthlessly cutting down every pro-Bonifacio work around, May is himself engaged in that 1900s-vintage conflict over heroes.

May asserts that his "aim here is not to discredit Agoncillo… but, if we are ever to understand Andres Bonifacio and the revolution he led, we must first jettison prevailing views of the man's personality"[.](114) In fact, as I have suggested, the kind of Bonifacio May would produce after clearing the ground would hardly be a neutral figure, if there ever was one. His aim is precisely to discredit Agoncillo and the University of the Philippines (U.P.) History Department (Diliman campus), a breeding ground of nationalist and anticolonial scholars. May reveals in his earlier polemic against Renato Constantino (which I refer to in the previous essay) how his students at the U.P.-Manila campus, where he taught as a visiting Fullbright [sic] professor in 1980, remained diehard adherents of the Agoncillo-Constantino construction of history despite his efforts at reeducation. This was a time of student activism and martial law, when the revolution and its heroes were being read, interpreted, appropriated, and even manipulated by the present. The American professor's intervention was no less a part of that politically charged scene.

Glenn May's politics is clearly revealed in his overall treatment of Philippine historiography. As pointed out earlier in relation to the Tejeros election, a male, liberal enlightenment fantasy of rational politics is posited by May as the norm which Filipinos have failed to reach. Therefore, their politics, as in "nationalist" politics, is shabby, pretentious, dishonest, and lacking. It is a prerational and rather infantilized politics where the participants are ruled by

[234]

their passions and kinship relations. We can detect a homologous relationship between this evolutionary and developmentalist narrative of politics and May's linear construction of the writers of Philippine history.

At the lower end of May's schema is Manuel Artigas y Cuerva, easily the least developed because he was an ordinary, Spanish-educated clerk without any formal training in the discipline of history. Proof of this is that Artigas did not use proper citations, and saw nothing wrong with relying on hearsay rather than authentic documents for his Bonifacio biography. At the other end of the spectrum is Glenn May himself -- the professional, nonpolitical and unbiased scholar. Somewhere in-between is Teodoro Agoncillo, who wrote in English (as well as Tagalog) and held a chair in history, but was a literary person supposedly untrained in the canons of historiography (although I remember him discoursing on his favorite historian, Benedetto Croce); in any case, Agoncillo's "nationalism" let him down.

Occupying a somewhat ambiguous position in May's schema is the sixth and last of his Filipino subjects, Reynaldo Ileto. U.S.-educated and now Australia-based, Ileto appears to be the most "developed," described as "to some degree a product of a foreign intellectual environment, and in that regard… a very different historian from [the others], none of whom had such an intense exposure to outside intellectual influences." Early in the book, May remarks that the "problem" of Bonifacio's invention can be blamed on the slowness with which Euro-American traditions of history established themselves in the Philippines. Ileto represents for him one end-result of the American colonial project to educate the Filipinos. That Ileto nevertheless produced a "flawed work" is due to his having written in the service of "independence and national unity" as "a participant in this nationalist discourse." Ileto is also pictured as having been, "to some extent, a victim of the mythmakers."(165)

The elements of May's book are organized around or between two poles: one negative, undeveloped, backward, unhistorical, and Filipino, and the other pole being positive, developed, modern, historical, and Euro-American. Even the sources of history are organized along these lines. Most of the Filipino writers he criti-

[235]

cizes seem to have depended on sources which are oral, unauthenticated, mostly unauthored and therefore unreliable. On the other hand, "scientific," modern historians like May are associated with the use of written, archived, catalogued, authenticated, authored, and implicitly objective source materials.

What happens, though, if we move beyond such binary oppositions and hierarchies, which after all reflect a certain manner of thinking which we call “postenlightenment"? The most positive and productive moments in May's book are precisely when he identifies the dark features of Filipino nationalist writings. Jose P. Santos, for example, describes how documents of the Katipunan pertaining to Bonifacio survived several fires, floods, termites, and even the Huk rebellion; “Ang mga kasulatan ukol kay Bonifacio ay parang himalang muling nakaligtas." The documents are likened to religious relics or anting-anting, having the power to survive disasters.⁴¹ May uses this as further proof that such writings, having a fantastic, even laughable, quality about them, cannot possibly be authentic documents.

This to me raises the much more interesting question of what Katipunan texts meant in relation to the social field in which they circulated. What was the status of writing at the turn of the century? The production, circulation, and conservation of historical memories through oral means is another exciting theme that May draws our attention to, even if he regards orality as a less effective -- in fact, a rather primitive -- mode of conserving and transmitting memories. There is also the whole question of who really authored the letters and other documents attributed to Bonifacio, which raises the broader issue of how the idea of authorship, which is another effect of the rise of capitalism and private ownership in the late eighteenth century, was handled by Filipino writers in the early twentieth century.

A final example of the productive aspects of May's book can be found in his discussion of Pasyon and Revolution. According to May, Ileto adopted a textbuilding strategy that might be best described as "discursive blurring -- by which I mean that [Ileto] constructed his text in such a way as to blur important distinctions and link things that should not necessarily be linked."(146) One conse-

[236]

quence of this is that Ileto mistakenly blurred the distinction between the Katipunan and the Colorum. May expresses dismay at this collapsing or blurring of the clear lines demarcating a religious, backward, premodern and nonrevolutionary movement (the Colorum) from a supposedly secular, forward, modern, and revolutionary movement (the Katipunan).

What, in fact, Pasyón and Revolution sets out to do is to shift the study of the revolution away from the enlightenment/modernist foundations on which it had developed at the hands of the nationalists. The irony in May's critique of Filipino nationalist historiography is that its own foundations lie squarely in the discourse that underpins nationalist historiography itself. Contrary to its claims of being above politics and beyond discourse, May's book merely adopts a different subject position in relation to the same discourse. It reconfigures for the twenty-first century the same lines of conflict over the meanings of the revolution that first appeared during the early American colonial period.

Let me recapitulate those early events. When Aguinaldo declared independence and organized a government in 1898, it was with the intention of establishing a nation-state and joining the ranks of the progressive Euro-American nations. Republican leaders like Aguinaldo, Mabini, Ricarte, and Malvar believed that there was a genuine impulse for liberty among the general population, and that they, as the better-off and educated, were articulating such sentiments into a nation-state. The United States, however, in collaboration with some Filipino ilustrados, upheld the view that the revolution was a purely cacique phenomenon, and that the "poor and ignorant" rank and file were blind followers of their bosses. American "tutelage" was deemed by them necessary in order to defeudalize society and turn the masses into modern citizens. The Philippine-American war was therefore anchored in a fundamental question: whether the revolution was a "revolt of the masses" or a "revolt of the elites." If it was the latter, then the U.S. Army was not suppressing a genuine revolution; the Filipinos were but an oriental version of the American Indian tribes which needed to be subjugated. The whole program of "benevolent assimilation" in fact rested on this presumption.⁴²

[237]

While Glenn May's book has appeared just in time for the centennial of the revolution of 1896, I think it really is more suitable for another centennial: February 1899, the outbreak of fighting between the U.S. and Filipino forces. For what May is criticizing is not so much that Bonifacio is an invented hero, but that he was invented as a popular hero. His dispute with Agoncillo concerns not so much Bonifacio as it does the U.P. professor's theme of a "revolt of the masses." The problem he sees in Ileto's work is that it moved "the locus of nationalism from the dominant elites to the common people."(165) May's "take" on the revolution and the Philippine-American war is that it was a "revolt of the elites."⁴³ His book, then, is not so much about Bonifacio and the sources for his biography, as about the effects of the Philippine-American war and the subsequent American impact on -- and nationalist responses to -- how Filipinos would remember and transmit their memories of the revolution.

[279]

Notes to Essay 9

"History and Criticism: The Invention of Heroes"

The first part of this essay was originally published as "Bonifacio, the Text, and the Social Scientist," Philippine Sociological Review 32 (Decem-

[280]

ber 1984): 19-29. The second part originated as lectures at the University of Hawai'i (Center for Southeast Asian Studies, September 1997) and at the Ateneo de Manila University (February 1998).

1. My book, Pasyón and Revolution, was published in 1979 by the Ateneo de Manila University Press, Q.C.

2. Teodoro Agoncillo, Revolt (1956), 70; Gregorio F. Zaide, The Philippine Revolution (1968), 98.

3. Milagros C. Guerrero, "Understanding Philippine Revolutionary Mentality" (1981).

4. Guerrero, "Luzon at War" (1977), chapters 3-4.

5. See Ranajit Guha, "The Prose of Counter-insurgency" (1983), 1-42.

6. See Agoncillo, Revolt, 49; Agoncillo and Guerrero, History of the Filipino People (1977), 106-7.

7. Ranajit Guha, "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India" (1982), 1.

8. I develop this argument in "Outlines of a Nonlinear Emplotment of Philippine History" (1997).

9. In this regard historians owe a great deal to the pioneering studies of anthropologist Clifford Geertz (see Ronald Walters, "Signs of the Times" [1980]).

10. See Damiana Eugenio's approach in "Awit and Corrido" (1965).

11. For example, such a common-sense distinction as the "literary" versus the "historical" derives from changing notions about language and the anxious efforts of nineteenth-century historians to align their work with science and factuality (see Hayden White, "Historicism" 14 [1975] and "The Discourse of History" [1979]).

12. Roland Barthes, "Historical Discourse" (1970), 153-55.

13. Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?" (1977), 125-27.

14. Roland Barthes, "The Death of the Author" (1977), 142-43; Terence Hawkes, Structuralism and Semiotics (1977), 119-20.

15. Dominick LaCapra, "Rethinking Intellectual History" (1980), 250ff.

16. Guerrero, "Philippine Revolutionary Mentality," 249.

17. See Nancy Streuver, "The Study of Language" (1974).

18. Renato Constantino, A Past Revisited (1975).

19. John A. Larkin, "Philippine History Reconsidered" (1982); McCoy and De Jesus (1982).

20. John A. Larkin, The Pampangans (1972), 235-39.

21. Milagros Guerrero, "The Provincial and Municipal Elites of the Philippines during the Revolution," in McCoy and De Jesus, Philippine Social History (1982), 156, 179. Brian Fegan's contribution to that volume ("The Social History") is one of the few that grapple with the actual cat-

[281]

egories through which people experienced the changes around them (see pp. 107-8, 115).

22. A Past Revisited, 267 and passim.

23. The problem is certainly not confined to Filipinists. Keith Thomas, author of Religion and the Decline of Magic, replying to a critique by Hildred Geertz, admits that historians, though equipped to handle underlying social structures, are much less accustomed to searching for "invisible mental structures, particularly the mental structures underlying inchoate and ill-recorded systems of thought, which are only articulated in a fragmentary way" (see "An Anthropology of Religion" [1975], 106).

24. Claude Levi-Strauss, "Introduction: History and Anthropology" (1967), 24.

25. Ed. C. de Jesus, The Tobacco Monopoly (1980), x.

26. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Use and Abuse of History (1874),37.

27. Jim Richardson, "Revolution or Religious Experience?" (1980).

28. Jim Richardson and Jonathan Fast, Roots of Dependency (1979), 70-84.

29. See Hayden White, "Foucault Decoded" (1973), 50.

30. Teodoro Kalaw, Cinco Reglas de Nuestra Moral Antigua (1947),20.

31, Ronquillo, Ilang Talata, 6, 21.

32. The numbers in parentheses correspond to page numbers in Inventing a Hero. The book, published in 1997 by the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison, has a Philippine edition put out by New Day Publishers.

33. For a published compilation of critiques of May's book, see Bernardita Reyes-Churchi1l, ed., Determining the Truth (1997).

34. I am indebted to Betty Holt for helping me think through this crucial point. She particularly drew my attention to parallel issues in feminist historiography. Australian National University doctoral students Theresa Millard and Mike Poole also contributed their thoughts on Glenn May's peculiar style.

35. Glenn May, "Private Presher and Sergeant Vergara" (1984), 57. 36. A good example is May's treatment of Epifanio de los Santos who, he admits, may have been right about his details concerning the titles in Bonifacio's library:

But the opposite is possible, too. De los Santos's discussion of Bonifacio's reading habits and preferences is less than convincing, and his entire treatment of Bonifacio's early years should be viewed skeptically. If it is true, as I have intimated, that de los Santos's account of Bonifacio's life may have been embellished, what possible motive could he have had for doing so?" (33, my emphasis).

[282]

The whole argument is based on a possibility that he asserts. Later on in the chapter, this possibility magically gives way to certitude. Later chapters build on such rhetorical slides.

37. This paraphrases his conclusions in "Civic Ritual and Political Reality" (1989).

38. Glenn May, Social Engineering (1980).

39. Surprisingly, American writings on their Philippine colony have not been subjected to the same sort of critical reading that has been applied to French and British writings since the appearance of Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978). For an overview of the philosophical issues surrounding the critique of orientalism, see Robert Young, White Mythologies (1990). It might be well worth exploring how "America" constituted itself in relation to its Philippine colonial "other," and how this is reproduced in some scholarship.

40. For example, note his description of Benito Vergara: "Here was a man who was not interested in fighting, who was not especially interested in Philippine independence, but who fought all the same. Why? The answer lies in the nature of his society. He fought because he was a client and his patrons asked him to fight" ("Sergeant Presher and Private Vergara," p. 57).

41. For stories of the appearance, disappearance, and survival in fires of the writings of Bonifacio and Jacinto, see Nepe (pseud.), "The Thirteen Miraculous Escapes of the Bonifacio Document" (1927).

42. These views are developed in Reynaldo Ileto, "Knowing the Philippines" (1988).

43. See the introduction to May's Battle for Batangas (1993). The "revolt of the elites" subtext explains why May is sympathetic to any account that does not portray Bonifacio as a man of the masses. It is otherwise puzzling why May upholds Nick Joaquin's essay on Bonifacio as a model when it displays even less scholarly attributes (such as footnotes and proper documentation) than Agoncillo's book.

Read more.

Bonifacio, Andres. "The Last Appeal of the Philippines." In The Writings and Trial of Andres Bonifacio, trans. Teodoro A. Agoncillo and S. V. Epistola. Manila: Antonio J. Villegas; Manila Bonifacio Centennial Commission; University of the Philippines, 1963. 9-11.

[9]

The Last Appeal of the Philippines*

Mother, in the east is now risen
the sun of the Filipinos' anger
that for three centuries we suppressed
in the sea of suffering and poverty.**

We, your children, had nothing to shore up
against the terrible storm of suffering,
the Philippines has but one heart,
and you are no longer our Mother.

*Katapusang Hibik ng Pilipinas.

**"Sa dagat ng dusa ng karalitaan" in the original, which is absurd. "Dusa at karalitaan" are the words most frequently used by poets in describing sufferings.

[10]

Other mothers cannot compare with you:
your children's comfort are poverty and sorrows,
when they, in appealing to you, prostrate themselves,
your proferred balm is exceedingly painful.

The Filipinos are bound tightly,*
they but moan when kicked, boxed, and hit with the butt of of the gun,
they are tortured with electric wires, hung like an animal,**
is this, Mother, your love?

You order them imprisoned and thrown into the sea,
to be shot, poisoned to eradicate us,
to us Filipinos is this the decision
of a Mother affectionate to her vassals?

We suffered all this even unto death,
we are almost dead yet you don't stop your punishmen,
so that when you throw us into our graves,
our bones are broken, our flesh smashed.

The Philippines has not received any legacy
of comfort from the Mother, nothing but sufferings;
our suffering continues, patents abound,
new charges and imposts are made.

Various ways of cheating us are devised
at the same time compelling us to give in,
we pay for illumination,
although we do not see even one light.

The land and the house we live in,
the field and farm so wide,
and so also the trees and plants --
to the Spanish priest we pay taxes.

Aside from this, the rest
need not be recited, O Mother Spain,
we follow all this to the last breath,
still, the Filipinos are considered bad.

You, O negligent and malevolent Mother,
we are no longer yours whatever happens,
prepare, then, Mother, the grave
where many dead bodies will find rest.

*In the original, the first word of the line is "Gapuring", which has no meaning. The word must have been Bonifacio's error in spelling, and must have been "Gapusin", which fits with the meaning of the second and third lines.

**We took the liberty at translating "makinahi't" (makinahin at) as "tortured with electric wires". Some of the veterans of the Revolution and many old men and women testified that during that time to be tortured with live electric wires was described as "makinahin".

[11]

In the world today will explode
guns and cannons like lightning,
the terrible storm of blood that will flow
from their bullets in the struggle.

It is no longer necessary that Spain be pitied
by the Filipinos, O traitorous Mother,
it is our glory to die,
it is your glory if you defeat us.

The Philippines bids you farewell, Mother,
Mother, farewell, this one who is suffering,
farewell, farewell, pitiless Mother,
farewell now, the last appeal.

Read more.

Schumacher, John N. Excerpt from Response to "The Making of a Myth: John Leddy Phelan and the 'Hispanization' of Land Tenure in the Philippines," by Glenn Anthony May. Philippine Studies 52.3 (2004), 314.

[314]

Response: John N. Schumacher, S.J.

Glenn May is not a historian ready to repeat without question the domnant or accepted histoncal orthodoxies, no matter how impressive the list of predecessors who have done so. He has shown it in more than one of his books, most notably in his book on Andres Bonifacio, Inventing a Hero. Though I myself cannot accept all his conclusions in that book, unfortunately his arguments were for the most part not met here with solidly-based counterarguments. Rather, several of those who had personal stakes of one kind or another in the orthodoxy imposed by Teodoro M. Agoncillo answered him with few solid arguments and much personal vilification. Well-known historians used such epithets as the "ugly American returns" (Guerrero and Villegas 1997), or marred argumentation with highly-charged emotion and a kind of reverse racism of "white" vs. "brown-skinned" (Ileto 1998, 224, 231), or edited a book of essays by historians, most of whom had already joined the attacks on his scholarship, while regretting she could not find anyone to take the other side (Churchill 1997, v), though it seems she did not look very far. What resulted was an attempt to dismiss his book without trying really to answer his whole sequence of arguments. As one who read the original manuscript, and while pointing out a number of defects, recommended it positively to a university press for publication, hoping that it would lead to a real scholarly discussion among historians in the Philippines, I was badly disappointed. I have yet to see any solid refutation of such key points raised by May as the dubious role of Epifanio de los Santos, and the even more dubious activity of Jose P. Santos...

Read more.