6 a roosters egg in benedict anderson under three flags
TRANSCRIPT
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7/26/2019 6 a Roosters Egg in Benedict Anderson Under Three Flags
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UNDER THREE FLAGS t {
policemen and other "security" personnel. the metropolitan police I :
t
================ ================
. . . ; - . - ~ ~ ~ . . . f A reporters that the danger came not from Communists, or even from i
fanatical Muslims, but rather from anarchis ts. At almost the same moment , a f E _ E
monument to the anarchist Haymarket Martyr s was erected in Chicago. The 1\. 47
New York Times
smugly remarked that "only no_w have the passions
1S
SEM
llllfficiently subsided" for this inauguration to take place. It is true, America 1
Prologue: The Rooster's Egg
really
is
a continent.
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R r t
~ ~ ~ E
~ ~ z 7 ~ E M
In 1887, at the Exposici6n Filipina in Madrid a 23-year-old indio named
lsabclo de los Reyes. living in coloni al Man ila, won
a
silver medal for
a
huge Spanish-language manuscript which he called El folk-lore filipino.
He
published thi s
te
xt in unwitting tandem with co
mpatriot
Jo
se
Rizal
(then aged twenty-five), who,
after
wandering around Northern Europe
for some time, published his incendiary first novel,
Noli me tangere.
in
- Berlin
that
self-same year.
This book
helped e
arn
him
martyrdom in
1896
and. later, the permanent status
of Father of
His Country and Fir_t
Filipino.
Who
was lsabelo'l
1
He was
born
on July
7, 1864
in the still-attractive northern Luzon
archiepisCopal coastal town
ofVigan-
-which faces Viet
nam
across the South
China Sea- to parents of the Ilocano ethnic group, the vast majority of
whom were,
in
tho
se days,
illiterate.
His mother
Leona
Ho r
entino, however,
was evidently a poet
or
some quality, so that
at
the Madrid and later
expositions her poetry was displayed for Spaniards, Parisians, and people
I . Although J ;abelo had a long and hooorable career- aspects
of
which will be
discu55ed in the final chapter of this book- no remotely adeqjl.ilte professional
biography yet exists. The
ac
count of
his
youth that follows is drawn rrom the work
of
his eldest son, Jose de los Reyes y Sevilla, Bioxrufl/t del Smack>r /salwlo tit los .
Rl yes
.r
Florentino, Padre de los Ohrero.r v Prodcmwdor de Ia Jglesiu Filipino
l u d e p l i e u t (Manila:
Nu
eva Era, 1947), pp. 1- 6: Jose
L.
Llanes, The
Lije c{
Senutor lsabclo de los Reyes (monog
raph
reprinted from the Weekly M a g < ~ z i n e of
the Munila Chronicle, July 24
and
31.
and
August 7. 1949). pp. 1- 6: and the entry
under his _name in National Historical Institute, Filipinqs in Histor.1 vol. 2 (Manila:
NHI 1990), pp. 137-
9.
.
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- \ q
1 \
I I f o ,., J ,.,.,,:
t
1 alwlo
cle
los
R
erl s
(seated.
riRI
II
).
in
St
L o u i s . ~ This accomplishment did
not
save
her
marriage,
and
the s ix
year-old lsa belo was
entru
s ted
to
a rich relative. Mcno Crisologo. who
later
put
him
into
the
grammar
sc hool
attached
to the local seminary
run
by the
August
inians.
t
appear:;
that ab
usive behavior by the Peninsular
Spanish
friars
a r o u ~ e
in the boy a
hatred of
the C
ath
olic religious
Order
s which
persisted all his life
and
had
serious consequences for his career. In
8HO aeed
sixteen . he esc
aped
to
Manila
, where he quickly acquired a BA
at
the ~ l e ~ i o
de San
Juan de
Letran;
after
that, he studied Jaw, history
and
palaeograpl1y
.
at
the ancien t (Oorninican) Pontifical University
of Samo Tomas,
then the
only university in all
of
Ea
st and Southea
st Asia.
. 2. A
cc
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THE
NEW SCIENCE
The question, naturally, is why? What was the meaning of
el./ 1/k-lore
for a
clerically educated native youth in the 1880s? Much can be learned l'rom the
Introduction
and
lirst pages of his youthful masterwork.
3
There lsabelo
described rotk-lorc. albeit with some hesitation, as a ci< ncia nueta (a new
science), perhaps consciously echoing Giambattista Vico's Sien:a Nueva,
which. thanks to the efforts of
M
ichclet and others, had burst on the trans
European scene
in
the mid-nineteenth century. lsabelo explained
to
his
readers, in both the Philippines and Spain, that the word ''folk-lore''
which he translated ingeniously as ef saber popular had only been invented
in
1846
by the English
antiquarian
William Thoms, in
an
article published in
the London
Athenaeum.
The firstfolk-lore society in the world had been
organized in London as recently as
1878-a
mere six years before he started
his own research.
4
The French had followed suit nationally only in JgR6
just as lsabelo was starting to write. The Spanish typically had been caughl
intellectually napping; when their
turn
came. they had no thought hut
to
incorporate the Anglo-Saxon coinage into Castilian as elfolk-lore. lsahelo
was
starting to
position himself alongside pioneering Britain,
above
and
ahead of the tag-along Peni nsular metropolc. He was like
a
fast
surfer on
the
crest
of
the wave
of
world science's beetling progress; something never
previously imaginable for any native
of
what he himself called this remote
Spanish colony on which the light of civilization only tenuously shines.''
5
This position he reinforced in several instructive ways.
On the one hand. he was quick to mention in his Introduction that some
of
his research had already been translated into
German-then the
lan
guage of advanced scholarly thinking -and published in Ausland and
i/nbus.
which
he
claimed were the leading European
organs
in the field.
L l folk-lore .filipino
also judiciously discussed the opinions of leading
Anglo-Saxon contemporaries
on
the status of the ciencia
n11e1 a,
politely
suggesting
that
they were more serious
than
those
of
Peninsular Spanish
.folklorista.L He must also have enjoyed commenting lhat
Sir
George
Fox
had been in conceptual error
by
confusing folklore with mythology, and
3. References hereafter will
be
mainly to
the
original text. published in
Manila
in
l R9 by
Tipo-Lithografia
de Chofre y C. Where rdevant, comparisons will he made
.wilh
a recent reprint combined with an English
translation by Salud
C. Dizon
and
M
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___
cou ld no longer understand one another-opening the way for a much
needed international discussion, in which the Anglo-Saxons appeared both
more modest and more practical.
At
the
other
extreme were those Spanish
folklo[ists who were merely sent imental collectors of vanishing customs and
conceptions for some future museum of the past. lsabelo made clear what he
himself though t
fo
lklo re was about, and how he saw its social value. In the
fir
st
place, it offered an opportunity for a reconstruction of the indigenous
past that was in the Philippines by any other means. given the
absence of pre-spanish monuments or inscriptions.
and
, indeed , the near
absence
of
writlen records. (
When
Rizal tried to
do
the same thing later.
he
saw no other way to proceed
than
to read between
the
lines of he work ofthe
best of the Spanish administrators of the early
Conquest
Serious
research
on
customs, beliefs, superstitions, adages. tongue-twisters. incanta
tions and
so
on would throw light on what he referred to
as
the " primitive
religion of t
he
pre-Spanish past.
But-and
here
the
young I ocano sharply
distinguished himself from amateur costumhristas he also underlined the
importan
ce of comparisons.
He
confessed that before the completion of his
research he had heen sure that the neighboring Tagalogs and llocanos were
ra:as distintas (distinct races) on account of their diiTerenl langlJages.
rhysiognomies, behavior and so on. But comparison had prov.ed to him
that he had been wrong and that
the
two ethnicities clearly derived from
a
single source.
The
implication of the title Elfolk-lorefilipino was
that
further
research would show that all the indigenous inhabitants
of
the archipelago
had a common origin. no matler how many languages they now ,o;poke or
how different their present customs and religious affiliations. All this meant
that,
contra
the colony's clerical historiographers, who began their narratives
with the sixteent h-century Spanish conqtJcst, the real history of the archi
pelago
and
its
pucblofpuehlos
(here he hesitated often) stretched far
fmther
.
back in time, and thus could
no
t be framed by coloniality.
THE RICHES OF LOCAL KNOWLEDGE
On t_
c t ~ c r hand--and
here Jsabelo radically distanced himself from many
of
h1s
Pcnmsulaf colleagues
-the
new science
could not and
should
not
h
confined to sentimental excavations of the quaint. El.folk-lore filipino is
ahove a
ll
the study of he contemporary. in particular what he had termed
cl
saber popular. (Today, we would use the term "local knowledge".) This saher
was real knowledge, not lore, with
its
musty, antiquarian connotations.
He
offered the hypothetical example of a
sellaje
(wlld man. perhaps
a
savage) in
the .forests near his home region of South locos who might any day
(acctdenta\ly, lsabelo said) discover that a certain local fruit provided a
better antidote to the cholera bacillus
than
that currently manufactured at
the instance of the Spanish medical scientist Dr Ferran.
9
The framing for
such claims was the absence of serious scientific knowledge about almost
everything in the Philippines.
for
example,
Flora
e
Filipinas,
a new compi
lat ion by some Augustinian friars, was very far from complete.
1
The
indigenes had a much deeper knowledge or"medicinal plants, of nora and
fauna, of soils and climatic varia tions than did the colonialists, and th is huge
reservoir of knowledge, contained in t
he
soher popular, was still unknown to
the
world.
The
Philippines thus appeared
not
merely as a region
conta
ining a
mass
of
exotica
unknown to
Europeans.
but
also
as
the site
for
a significant
future contribution to mankind, springing from what the common peorle
knew, in their own languages, but of which Spanish had no conception. t
was exactly the unknownness of the Philippines that -gave its folklore a
future-oriented character
that
was necessarily absent in
the
folklore of
Peninsular Spain.
t
was also, however, the living specificity
of
the Ph-ilip
pines that positioned it to otTer something, parallel
and
equal to
that
of
any
other
pai i, to humanity. This is the logic that would much later make the
United Nations both possible
and
plaus ible. So far, so clear.
Too
clear.
probably.
For
fsabelo's text, ut1dcr the bright
li
ghts of its major themes, is
not without its shadowy o m p l i t i o n ~ We might provisionally think
about
them under three rubrics.
First,
what
was lsabelo to himself'?
To
begin
with,
it is necessary
to
underline an amb iguity within the Spanish word filipino itself. Dur
ing
lsabclo"s
youth
this adjective had two distinct senses in common parlance:
ll) belonging to, located in, originating from, Las Islas Filipinas; (2) creole,
of the locally bornbut pure Spanish social stratum . What it did not mean
is what
filipino
means today, an indig.enous nationality-'ethnicity. One can
see how much things have changed over the past century if one compares
just one sentence in lsabelo"s Introduction with its recent translation
into
American by two Philippine schola rs. lsabelo wrote: Para recoger del saco
ro to Ia organizaeion del Folk-Lore regional filipino, juzgue
oportuno
.conteslar al revistero del Comercio y, aprovechando su indirecta, aparente
sostener
que
en Filipinas habia personas ilustradas y estudiosas
que
pudieran acometer
Ia
empresa .
11
This
literally means:
To
save
the
organization
of
the
Folklore of
the
r'eg
ion
of the Philippines, I
judged
it
the
right
moment to rebut the view of El Cmnercio s reviewer, and, taking
advantage of his insinuati
on,
I pretended (presumed??) to maintain
that
9. Dizon--lmson, p. 24.
10
/hid.,
p. II . The editors say that the book, a compilation by various hands
and edited by Fr. Andres Naves. wa s published in Manila in 1877 by Plana y C
II. EFF. p. 13
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in 't Ie Philip pines there exist enlighte ned [iluslrttdliS]
and
studious
persons capable
of undertaking
the task.'' The published
translation
completely anachroni.'>tic-has: I tried to defend the establishment of
Filipino Folklore by answering the/accusation of the columnist of
/
Comercio,
by
bravely stating that there are indeed Filipino scholars ready
and capable of undertaking the task.''
11
Where Isabelo was thinking of a
sort of global folklore which included the regional portion of he h i l i ~ p i n e
l s l a ~ d s and spoke of enlightened persons in the Philippines- no cthnicity
spcc1fied -- he translators have
omitted
.. egional to create
a
folklore of
the Filipinos, and substituted for "enlightened persons the novci Filipino
scholars.
FOREST
BROTHERS
In EJ falk-lore f i / i p i ~ w lsabelo did not describe himself as ' 'a Filipino,
b e c ~ u s e the nahonaltst usage was not yet familiar in the colony. Besides,
un
fi tpmo ~ a s then exactly what
he
was not: a creole. He did, however. describe
h1mself m other ways: s ~ m e t i m e s for example, as an indigene (out never by
the
contemptuous
Spamsh term indio), and sometimes
as an
llocano. In
a
r c m a r k ~ b ~ e passage
he
argued: "Spellking of patriotism, has it not frequently
heen
sa1d
m
the newspapers that, for me. only llocos
and
Jlocanos are good?
E v e r y ~ n e serves his
puC blo
to his
own
manner of thinking. 1believ; 1am
here
contnbutmg to
the illumination
of
the
past
of
my
O\\'n
pueblo ..
F lsc-
~ h e r : however:
he
insisted that so strict had been his objectivity that he had
s a c ~ r ~ c e d
to ~ c 1 e n c c the afTections of the llocanos, who complain that
1
have
p ~ b h c r z c d the1r least attractive practices." Luckily, however, I have re
ceived an e n t h u s i ~ s t i c re.sponse from various savan ts
fsabios]
in Europe, who
say .that, by settmg as1de
a
misguided patriotism, I have offered signal
services to locos, mi patriu admada, because I have provided scholars with
a b u J ~ d a n t materials for ~ t u d y i n g its prehistory and other scientific topics
relatmg
to
th1s provmce [si
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"':hich ha
ve
a
clear
po
liticC'tl
char
ac
ter. First,
there is th
e
poss
ibility--the
hope--- of local cultura l renaissance . With a certain
sly
prudence, lsabelo
allowed Asto ll to speak. on
his heha
lf:
Perhe
of
the folkloric r i a l s gathered by D. Alej;md ro Guichot and
D. Luis Montoto
in
Andalusia, by D. Eugenio de Olavarria y Hu
arte
in
Madr
id. hy
D J ~ s e
Pcre1 Ballesteros in
Catalon
ia, by
D
Luis Giner Arivau in Asturias, by
Constghcre Pedroso with his
T m d i { o
p o p 1 1 / m ' ~ portuf Ui : (/Y
in Portugal. as
well
as
others. I have drawn up the following list
of
superstitions which I believe were
15.
EFF.
P- 15. Juan Luna (
185
7-99), whom we shall meet again. was a fellow
llocano who h e ~ < ~ r n c the most famous native painter
of
the Spanish
co
lonial era. His
T ~ e l ~ e u / 1 ~ t / l c u p ~ l r u won the second medal at the IS8t Fine Arts Exposition in
Matlnd, h1s
Spolwrmm
a go
ld
medal at the same venue in 18 4. and his 11 e mfr of
L:_pt
m
t? a gold med?l at the Barcelona Fine Arts Exhibition in
1
888
.
Feli ll Resurrec
Con Httlalgo y_ Padtlla_ ( l853 1913) was o nly slightly less successful. Hidalgo WHS a
Tagalog,
born
m Mamlu and raised there like Luna.
introduceo here hy the
Sp
aniards in past centuries. The list should not surprise
unyonc.
i vc
n that in the early days of Spa
nish
do
l1'lina
tion
the
most ridiculous
e .
111
heliefs lfas c r e e c i t L ~ mcis
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had easy analogues
in
the bi7.arreries of Iberia , Italy, Central E urope
even England. '
The third aim w ~ s political self-cri ticism. lsabelo wrote that he was trying
to show, through
h1s
systematic display
of el
sahl r
popular.
those reforms in
the 1 d ~ ~ s and ~ v e r y d a y practices of the pueblo that must be undertaken in a
s e l f c n t t ~ a l spmt.
He spoke of his work as being about something much
more
senous than mocking my
pai.ran(Js,
who actually will Jearn
to
correct
t h c m s e ~ v e s once they see themselves described.
In this li
ght. folklore would
be a
~ m r o r
held up before a people, so that, in the future they could move
slcadtly along the road toward human emancipation.
It
is clear then that
lsabelo was
wri
ting ror one and a half audiences Span
ards h ' 1 '
1 . , w ose anguage
1e
was
usmg. a_d h i ~ own puebln whose language he was not using. and of
whom only a tmy mmorily co uld read his work.
. Where did lsabelo positi
on
himself in undertak ing this task? At this
Juncture we finally come to perhaps the most interesting part of our enquiry.
For
most
of
the .hundreds
of
pages
of
his book. lsabelo spoke as
if
he were
not an llocano
hm
self. or. at least, as
if
he were standing outside his people.
The
llocanos almost always appear
as
thev ., not
we
" F . . . 1 .
"TI . . , . . 1 examp e.
1erc rs
a.
beliefamong los llocanos that fire produced by lightning can only
be cxtmgurshcd
by
vinegar,
not by water.
Better sti
ll
:
Los iiocanos no pueden
d ~ m o s
perfecta
idea
acerca
de
Ia
naturale7.a de
los
man= k'k d.
.
.. ang
1
Y
J(.'en que no son demonios
, scg(m.
Ia
idea
que
)Qs cat61icos
henen de los
denwn
ios
.
The llocanos cannot give us a
complete
idea
about
the
ll
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. C . 1 ~
1 :hr.ee ill-fitting sil uatio
ns
therefo re Outside they cannot give
us
a
complete idea); Inside there
is
no Spanish
equivalent of huri-han):
and
Outside Inside even
thou
gh I am an lloca
no
myself, l do not underst
n
d Ihis
llocano-/anguage refrain;
but I
am telling this to yo u, " not
to us ).
COMPARATIVE
RE FLECTIONS
From
the
end of
the
eighteenth century down to our haggard own. folklore
st udies. even
if
not always selfco nsciously defined as such. have p roved a
fundam
ental re
source
to
nationalist
movem
ents. In
Europe
, they provided a
powe
rful im
pu
lse for the development
of
vernacular c
ultur
es linking espe
cia lly
pe
asa ntries. a rtists and intellectuals,
and
bourgeoisies in their compli
.ca ted
stru
ggles against the forces
of
egitimacy. Urban composers foraged for
folk songs.
urban poets
captured and tra n
sform
ed the styks and themes of
folk poetry.
and
novelists
turned
to the depiction of folk countrysides. As the
newly imagined national com muni ty headed
towards
the magnetic future,
nothing seemed
more
valuahlc
than
a useful and
authentic pa
st.
Printed vernacu lars were almost always central.
No
rwegian folklor ists
would write in New
Nors
e ' (against Danish and Swedish) to recu perate
the
No rwegian sober popular; Finns
would
write in Finnish. not Swedi sh
or
Russian; and
the
pattern would be rei terated in Bohem ia. H ungary, Rtnna
nia,
S c r b
~ a .
and so on
. Even where this
was
no
t
en
ti rely tile
case
:.- a slr ik.ing
exa mple is the frish revivalist movement which operated both
through
Gae lic
and through a colonially imposed English well understood by
many
Irish
men and women -- the ultimate object was na tio nal self-ret rieval. "awak
en
ing and liberation.
At first sight. lsabelo's .
endeavor
s trikes
one
as quite different, as
he
was
wri_ing
as
much as anyth
ing for non-nationals, an d in an imperial languagc,
winch perha
ps
3 perce
nt of the
indios
of
the Philippines unders
tood
, a
nd
maybe only I
per
cen t
of
his fellow llocanos
co
uld follow. I f in Eu
rope
folklorists wrote mostly for their
paisanos,
lo show them their
com
mon and
authentic
origins, e l o wrote mostly
for
the early globalizing world he
f
ou
nd himself within - to show how lloca nos and other indios were fully ab le
lUld
eager
to enter that
world,
on
a basis
of
equality
and au tonomous
cont
ribution.
~ c l o 's
study
also marks his
country off
from the many ne1ghboring '
colomes rn the Southeas t Asian region.
In
these ot her colonies, most
of what
we can informally classify as
folklor
e s tudies" was ca rried on by in telligen t
colonial officials with too much time
on
the ir
hands
in an
age
still innocent of
radio
and televisi
on;
they were i
ntended
ma inly
to
be
of us
e to
the
colonial
rul
ers
, not
to the
studied p
opu
lations themselves. After independence
w : ~ s
achieved , these ex-colonies' folklore studies have _led a ~ a r g i _ n ~ l :xistence.
while they have done significantly better . n the p o s t c o _ l o n a . l I O e s W ~ Y
shou ld this have been
so
?One possibl e answer is that m a ll
t ~ c
o t ~ c r col omes
there survived a
substa
ntial written r
ecord
from precolomal
umes
-roy_ l
~ : h r o n i
Buddhist cosmologies. monastic records, Sufi tr a
cts
,
court
_
ht
eratures . etcetera . . a nd
it
was th ese, more than folkl?re. that provtded
a b o r i ~ t i n a l i t y and glorious authenLicity when- natienal.rst movement.,. got
way.
The rem
ote Philippines h
ad no
tradi io_n_of ~ e r f ~ l .
n t r a i J
and
literate
states.
an
d
nad
een
so
tn
ii1ly
tou
ched by
l a m
and
Bud
dh
_sm
t
ha
t
most of
the ir)habitari,_s
we
re ,Ch_risliani
zcd
r e ~ a r k a b \ y Jtlt\e
violence. Seen f ~ o m th is (ollclore
co-Old
substi _ncie
nt
grande
uc
An ot her, maybe
better
, answer lies in
the
na ture
of
m e t e ~ n t h c c n t u r y
I b e r i a ~ imperialism.
Spain
and
Portugal,
once the
great
tmpenal c e n ~ e r s
of
the
world
.
ha
d
been in
decli
ne sinc
e
the mid
-sevcnlecnth_
entury.
W1th t
he
loss
of
l atin America, the Spanish empi re
had
been drasttcally reduced - ..
to
Cuba, Puerto Rico.
the
Philippines. and Rio de Oro. _Throughout _
he
nineteenth ce ntury, Spain was rent by the mos t violent ~ n l e r n a l _
c o n f l
as it struggled to make the trans
ition from
feudal to rndustnal
modernity.
In
the
eyes
of
many
or
its own
inhabitants. Sp
am_was a c k ~ a r d
supe rstitious. and ba rely industrializing. This
t a n d t ~ g
was wtdcly
shared not
only
in Eu r
ope
generally.
but
al
so
by the
young
m tellectua ls
the residual Spanish colonies .
(Thi
s is why lsabclo was
p ~ o u to
have
writings pub lished in Germ
any,
while
his
la
ter
eq uivalents mother col omes
ten ded to seek
publication
in their own'' imperial m e t r ~ p o l e s Pr
og
r
ess
was thus the nag of an Enlightenment
Jlustwci
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7/26/2019 6 a Roosters Egg in Benedict Anderson Under Three Flags
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abroad, they might acquire some English and German as well.) Nowhere
.does
one
detect any marked avers ion or distrust towards this Rom ance
language
so
heavily mar'(ed by Arabic, the
common
vehicle
of
both
reaction and enlightenment. Why this should have been so is a very
interesting question. One answer is surely
that
, in complete contrast to
almost all of Latin America. ~ p a n i s h was never even close to being a
majority language in the Phi lippines. Dozens of mainly oral o c a l ~ ~ u a g e s
flourished then, as indeed they do today;
n o t h i ~ g
in lsabelo's writing
suggests that he
thought of
Spa nish
as
a deep
m e n a ~ e
to
the
futur
e
of
Ilocano.
Furt
hermore, Castilian
ap
peared
to
him as the necessary linguist ic
vehicle for speaking not only to Spain
but
also, through Spain, to all the
.centers
of
modernity, science, and civilization. It was more
an internationa
l
/ l a n ~ J a g e
than it was a colonial one. l is
s t r l k i ~
-that lsabelo never
considered the possibility
that,
by writing
in
Spanish. he was somehow
betraying
hi
s
pueblo
or had been sucked into a dominant culture. I think the
reason for this seemingly innocent stance is that, in the 1880s, the future
status
of
tas Islas Filipinas was visibly unstable,
and
some kind
of
politi
ca
l
emancipa tion was looming
on
the horizon.
This instability
had
everything
to do
with local circumstance
s,
but it was
ultimately grounded in the emancipation of L1tin America mo
re
than half a
century earlier. Spain was the only big imperial power that lost its empire in
the nineteenth century. Nowhere else in the colonial world tlid the coloni
ze
d
have such examples
of
achieved liberation before
th
eir eyes. Here one sees a
situation wholly different from that of the twentieth-century New World,
. where Spanish became the
eternal majoritarian master over all the
\ indigenou s languages in Latin America, and over an equally ete rnal ''
op pressed minority in tlie United Stales. No emancipation visible on the
horizon in either case.
Nonetheless, as indicated ahove, there are instructive reticences in lsabe
lo's
youthful work. marked by the uneasy pronominal slippages between
and they ue and you.
He was alw;tys thinking about two audiences, even
when writing for one and a halt: The worst of me;, is tiie wretdi who
is
ot
endowed with that noble
and
S lered sentiment which they call patrioti
sm:
he wrote. Spanish was not for him a national language, merely international.
But was there a national language to which it could be opposed? Not exactly.
The
local languages with the largest numbers of spcakcrs--llocano in the
north,
Taga
l
og
in the middle, and Cebuano in the south- were all relatively
small minority languages, and only just starling to burst into print. Was there
a clear-cut p fri to which his own language could be attached? A hypothe
tical llocano-la nd? He never spoke of it as such. Besides. there were those
Aetas and lgorots, with their own languages. who were his hermanos. There
were also those Tagalo.gs who, his investigat ions had shown him, were not a
race distinct from the llocanos; but he knew, as the discoverer of this truth.
that as yet few Tagalogs or llocanos were aware of it. Thi s state of fluidity
thus led him
ba
ck, at twenty-three years old, to the obscurely bordered
culture out of which he grew,
and
which he sensed he
had
partly outgrown,
11ocaJ1o popular
n o w t ~ d g e .o.r
culture_ titus came to
.Young
p a t ~ i o t as
something .to_ e. v ~ t i
i a t ~
from the ~ i d ; as " I V ~ ~ 1 9 ..
x ~ n e ~ c e d
from within, to tie displayed to the whole world, but also.somethmg l.o
e
r r e c t e d _ : : o f
co
.urse:
y
the llocanos themselves. His mother tongue.
llocano, thus became something to be translated, yet partly untranslatable.
And at some points
it
even slipped quietly away beyond the sunlit horizon of
the Enlightened young bilingual himself.