"La Leyenda Negra" Revisited and Our Hispanic Heritage (updated Oct 2010)

The Roman Amphitheatre at Merida (Teatro Romano de Merida, built 18 B.C.) - still used for concerts and other festivals


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WHAT WE FILIPINOS SHOULD KNOW: Many baby boomers like me have earned several college units/hours of the Spanish language. However, due to our learned or conditioned bias against Spain and the Spaniards, we have not built on this language; which in retrospect is our great loss. Spain surely carries so much history about us Filipinos, as a people and a nascent nation.

Personally, I began to appreciate the importance of learning the Spanish language only after I decided, given my years of conscious prejudice against anything Spaniard/Spanish, to visit Mexico City in 2001. It was a pleasant surprise, encouraging me to learn more about Spain, the former colonial master of Mexico, most of Latin America and our homeland. 


Thus during the winter of 2003, I did a 3-week backpacking trip to Spain concentrating on its southern/Andalusian region which for almost eight centuries was ruled by the Muslims (visited mainly Sevilla, Granada and Cordova),  It was a real eye opener about the Spanish people and their history, their relevance to our Filipino world. 


In September 2005, I again went backpacking for more of Iberia, and this time traveled to Portugal (Lisbon, Belem, Evora, Porto and Coimbra; and northern Spain (Santiago de Compostela and Salamanca). I saw myself returning for more of the Spaniards and Spain, 


In 2007, I swung back to Barcelona to search and take a picture of a hotel Jose P. Rizal stayed in 1882 according to a plaque on its main entry --which I accidentally, unbelievably and happily stumbled upon in 2005: before its present look, the now newly renovated and still elegant Hotel Espana at the city's Old Quarter [first opened in 1859].  


Hotel Espana is located on carre Sant Pau, just a few meters from the famous boulevard Rambla and Liceo Theatre. I also went to visit the beautifully situated Monasterio de Montserrat about 30 minutes from Barcelona by taking a train, then the 5-minute scenic ride on a  (1938 Nazi-built system) cable car up the mountain where it is located.  


Last February 2010 I went to check out the Extremadura region, specifically the [ancient Roman] cities of Caceres and Merida.  I feel like going back since I have spent only 2 weeks and was heavily rained out to go for more exploration BTW, this is one region that produce a reason for my daily love during my backpacking trips to Spain: the best of the jamon iberico.


This least developed and difficult southwest region of Spain gave birth to several of the famous Spanish conquistadors like Hernan Cortes, Francisco Pizzaro (and several Pizzaro kins), Hernando de Soto, Balboa, etc. I suspect the hardships of the time drove these men, who were mainly fighters, to seek adventure and riches outside the Iberia.

Pardon me for indulging. My point is that we so-called educated Filipinos, past, present and future ones, have and are continually kept ignorant of so much of our national history by not knowing the language of the Spaniards, who discovered our islands for their western world; -- set foot in the islands now known as the Philippines (phrase suggested by a reader) -- and ruled our homeland for almost 400 years. 


I think and believe that we gravely deprive ourselves of relevant historical and cultural knowledge; that not knowing much of our Spanish past --especially before our American colonization-- contributed greatly to our not knowing and understanding ourselves as Filipino individuals and ergo, failing to become a unified people and true nation.

A friend forwarded to me the below article, a very interesting and an instance of very rarely discussed topics. I agree with columnist Bambi Harper when she alluded that our former American master, through the imposed Americanized educational system --then and continued even now-- which along with the good the Americanized system gave us, also has created or developed in our Filipino minds an automatic distaste and bias against Spain, its language and our Spanish heritage.

In retrospect, of course, that our former American colonial master contributed to this biased conditioning is understandable; as all victors highlight their greatness or goodness that only give birth to their (American) self-righteousness, while they simultaneously highlight only the evils of their defeated enemies (Spanish).

It behooves every thinking Filipino, especially if given the opportunity, to learn the language, thus facilitate relearning our Spanish history, which by itself is personally, intellectually enriching; but most importantly to discover "hidden gems" in our Spanish heritage -- the good stuff from the Spaniards and Spain -- and to attain a better understanding of ourselves as a people in our struggle for true nationhood. 

“The HISTORY of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and the agreed myth of its conquerors.” - Meridel Le Sueur, American writer, 1900-1996

“Colonies do not cease to be colonies because they are independent” – Benjamin Disraeli, British Prime Minister (1804-1881)

"During times of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary." - George Orwell

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'La Leyenda Negra' revisited
First posted 05:46am (Mla time) Dec 24, 2005 
By Bambi Harper, Inquirer

TEN years ago, Dr. William Summers made his first trip to Manila to conduct research on Filipino music prior to the American era. Since little scholarly research had been published in any language on this topic, he was naturally intrigued. Visiting the different archives, he concluded that "very little music survived and that no individual or team of individuals in Manila had any interest in this 333-year period."

Dr. Fernando Zialcita of the Ateneo de Manila University, in an e-mail on Dr. Summer's lecture on the subject at the university, said Dr. Summers had noted that the many achievements of Filipinos during the Spanish period were overlooked or denigrated and that there was "a nearly complete cultural erasure of music from this time."

Those of us who advocate preservation of architecture, like Zialcita, have a similar problem. Zialcita claims that churches are routinely depicted as "the product of slavery and forced labor" and ancestral homes of the 19th century are described as "Spanish" and not really Filipino, being "Spanish in style" and the home of the "oppressive elite."

Going back to Dr. Summers, during the next eight years that he was doing research in Manila and Bohol province (where he discovered the great 18th-century "Misa Baklayonan"), he had the distinct impression of a condemnation of the Spanish period. "The obvious and powerful elements of Hispanic culture that remain highly visible were never acknowledged," he noted.
Had he observed the older parts of our cities and towns, he would have seen that not only were they not acknowledged but the colonial layout and the ancestral homes were being destroyed.
"How could it be possible that no one voiced the fact that the Philippines is a Hispanic country?" he asked.

Music not being my field, I can only accept his conclusions that there is a definite view that holds that "Filipino music culture is indigenous, solely in the oral tradition, rural and perhaps tribal." If there is Western influence, it isn't Filipino.

Believing there's a deliberate attempt to erase Spanish culture from our lives, Dr. Summers decided to analyze the historical sources of this prejudice, which is known as "La Leyenda Negra" ["Black Legend"]: "the depiction of Spain and the Spaniards as bloodthirsty and cruel, greedy and fanatical, in excess of reality." (Nationmaster.com Encyclopaedia) Of course, there is the opposite"Leyenda Rosa" that views Spain through rose-colored glasses. Both expressions are the results of thinking in terms of things being purely black or white, "and not propitious for a neutral historical analysis except of folkloric perceptions."

Whatever the reasons for rejecting this part of our culture, we've come out the poorer for it. In effect, we've thrown the baby out with the bath water.

In December last year, Summers presented a synopsis of his findings in a talk he gave at the Ateneo, which I unfortunately couldn't attend. He traces the prejudice back to the Propaganda Movement's"vicious, anti-friar propaganda, ca. 1880, and the second, the northern, Teutonic version imposed by the US invasion forces and occupation government after 1898."

(If we compare it to recent events, we would be able to see how the Ferdinand Marcos regime has been depicted as the most horrible in all our history while the succeeding one, led by a saint, was the coming of the kingdom. Using that kind of simplistic propaganda makes one administration look much better than it actually is and its failings are overlooked.)

The Americans systematically encoded the black legend in governmental and educational agencies. In this manner, people in general were brainwashed into rejecting the idea that both were basically exploitative colonizers. Many feel that the US perpetrated the legend to justify their actions against Spain. 


Even up to the present, they say, evidence of the Black Legend exists in movies like Steven Spielberg's "Amistad." Even pirates of the Caribbean are presented as romantic figures (in the movie of the same title), when in reality they were incredibly cruel and no more than criminals. To this day, the legend lives on, "seriously distorting both the teaching of and research on the history of the Filipino people."

Summers believes that if this prejudice is unmasked "it will be possible to forge in the future a significantly revised historiographical model for use in teaching and research on the history of the Philippines and most especially the history of the Filipino people." (I can almost tell you now: Don't bet on it. Patterns of thinking have been so deeply inculcated that I cannot see how they can be altered in the near future.)

The Spaniards, by the way, were their own worst enemies. The Black Legend started in 1552, when Bartolome de las Casas, formerly bishop of Chiapas, published "Brevissima Relacion de la Destruycion de las Yndias," which has been described as "a powerful and lasting indictment of Spanish behavior toward Indian populations in the New World." (How the good friar could have described it as brief is weird; the work is 4,000 pages long.).


Naturally, the Protestants picked up Las Casas' condemnation with alacrity and used it to argue for a greater non-Spanish European presence in the New World and, of course, for their own imperialistic designs.

A word of advice to the reader then for the new year: Never accept anybody's word at face value. Always look further into their motivations, especially if they happen to be politicians!
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Comments at bambiharper@yahoo.com

Source: http://news.inq7.net/opinion/index.php?index=2&col=58&story_id=60970 

Why the Philippines is Standing Still - F. Sionil Jose

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“There is no literate population in the world that is poor; there is no illiterate population that is anything but poor.” – John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006)



“The true Filipino is a decolonized Filipino.” – Prof. Renato Constantino (1919-1999)

Many of us Filipinos -who had lived for 2 generations or so -have repeatedly heard and read the claim that after WW2 we Filipinos and/or our homeland were second only to Japan. I believed so; though I think we were actually referring to the more urban areas at the time, in particular Manila, where most national government offices, public services, light industries, higher education, banking and commerce were located; while most of the countryside and islands, were mainly devoted to agriculture, if not idle lands, many of which were/are privately owned by absentee hacienderos. 

Sionil Jose talks about why we were left behind by our erstwhile more backward and poorer Asian  neighbors. He mentions that our damaged culture. He speaks of elitism, which we can say is essentially that of an aristocratic-socioeconomic elite, of the foreign and/or mestizo elite, who also comprise the so-called educated elite, who looked up to their foreign masters (the Spaniards then, the Americans later) and looked down on the native Filipino masses/common tao. 

We still have these mestizo elite, throw the Spanish-Chinese, American or other foreign hybrid. To these elites, we can throw in the nouveau riche, many "who got it made" through thievery from  odious debts and government revenues, beginning with the Marcos Dictatorship and its successive regimes, all seeing the government coffers as their source of personal wealth formation. 


The OCW-OFW remittances have been extremely useful to the ruling regimes and their support systems (the military, technocrats,cronies etc.). These remittances serve at least dual purposes: to provide a bigger government pot to steal from and simultaneously create a social safety-relief valve to a potentially explosive situation if the educated, politically unconnected masses were kept within the homeland without decent livelihood/employment. The regimes dupe and sweeten OCWs/OFWs by calling them "heroes."



Sionil Jose puts our supposed avoidance of manual labor as part of the Spanish heritage. To this I can only add that he must be referring to the members/descendants of this elite and those who are wannabe-elites. He demonstrates his elitist self when he charges that we Filipinos are lazy. I have lived long enough to appreciate and learn that we native Filipinos are not lazy, whether one is educated or not. Of course, just like with any nationality or race, there are lazy individuals. I find Sionil Jose deficient in understanding, if not quite ignorant, of what poverty is all about.



Sionil Jose refers specifically to the slum people as lazy and he makes me wonder:

• Does he understand the fact that many of these people may have existed in generational poverty [I am not referring to situational poverty which is a shorter time and is caused by circumstance (i.e. death, illness, etc.).] 
• Does he understand the fact that many of these people, while growing up, are much more likely than non-poor children to suffer developmental delay and damage, to drop out of school, and for the poor girls to give birth during their teen years? 
• Does he understand the fact that poverty is caused by interrelated factors: parental employment  status and earnings, family structure and parental education? 
• Does he understand the fact that an individual brings with him the hidden rules of the class (i.e. impoverished) in which he was raised -patterns of thought, social interaction, cognitive strategies, etc. which may/may not help him leave his state of poverty?

Sure we know that one can get out of poverty through education and relationships. We know some reasons to leave poverty: it is too painful to stay, a vision or goal, a key relationship or a special talent or skill. We have seen these all happen by individual effort but it would be much better and the opportunities wider if the government -whose main job is to provide human progress to its citizens- performs its main job.



Sionil Jose blames our inward-looking nationalism with regards to industrialization then, now mostly gone thanks to IMF/WB imposed removal of tariff and exchange control, with consequent devaluation and uncontrolled profit repatriation by foreign companies, the cheap buy-out of our domestic companies, now worsened by the WTO rules and agreements signed by our technocrats without the knowledge and understanding of the populace. I wonder what he was referring to. 



Until the Marcos Dictatorship, our industries were mostly classified as light-manufacturing, chemical, food, textile, assembly and a few others. I have worked for several years in a chemical company owned by a native Filipino family and it was a technologically progressive, professional and treats its employees better than its competitors. Sure, it used the BOI-classified  "preferred industries" to gain some tax incentives. Thus it ventured to new chemical manufacturing to satisfy local and export markets. What's wrong with looking out for our own when a serious study of how the developed nations became such was precisely to their decades long, inward-looking nationalism for a start and competing/looking out only when strong enough. and even to the present, such advance nations still do inward-looking practices, i.e.  protectionism in certain industries and sectors of agricultural production while they demand absolute free-trade from the poorer countries like ours.



Sionil Jose may be correct if referring to say,our sugar industry which was essentially owned and operated by the aristocratic-oligarchs who were conspicuously living it up with inefficiency since they were guaranteed for a long time to export under the American quota system with a higher than world market price (thanks to Cuba turning communist) while exploiting their workers and sacadas under slavish conditions. While I was in SMC-Corporate Planning I wrote a sugar industry analysis which indicated how badly this industry was - like milking a cow to death or using a machine to obsolescence.



Any nationalist program for industrialization should be to produce necessities first, to satisfy the domestic market first, to make use of best available technology, if possible to make use of domestic substitutes as raw materials, etc.. Of course the reversal to the traditional, narrow nationalism exploited by the aristocratic elite (or any new elite) shall not be allowed under a truly nationalist leadership.. An actively nationalist government control and participation, if necessary, shall be applied. Obviously such a program can materialize only when the prerequisite, significant portion of native Filipinos have developed into true Filipino nationalists, into decolonized Filipinos, as Renato Constantino wrote about it. 



This active and courageous nationalism is a sine-qua-non for the leaders and citizenry, given that the forces behind globalization will exert forms of pressure. i.e. media, economic isolation and even military blockade/force, to equate nationalism with "communism" as they have done so in the past, to have it their way. As to Claro M. Recto and Lorenzo Tanada, they may have been against agrarian reform in their earlier years, but both realized in their later years that land reform is an imperative to nationalist industrial development of the homeland, i.e. Prof. Constantino wrote of "The Making of a Filipino" about the ilustrado Recto. For Tanada, his change is greatly indicated by being a founder of BAYAN, a nationalistic coalition movement that calls for agrarian reform among others. 



Sionil Jose said we did not implement land reform and mentioned land reform in Japan and Taiwan. He did not define who "we" is.  

• Did he forget or not know that in Japan it was the Americans, specifically Gen. Douglas MacArthur who imposed land reform (the same Douglas MacArthur we Filipinos with naïve sentimentality remember and look up to like a demigod)? 
• Did he forget or not know why the Americans never implemented land reform in our homeland while they were still the colonizers? 
• As for Taiwan, then General/President Chiang-Kai-Shek, a nationalistic strongman/dictator, was driven and aided by America to implemented land reform and pursued heavy industrialization.

I add that the two countries at the time profited from the Cold War, i.e. Communism versus Capitalism. America wanted to showcase both Japan and Taiwan versus Communist China.  Furthermore, the active roles of their respective, although dictatorial, governments to educate the populace for nationalism was instrumental in consolidating them (nationalism was already in existence in Japan at the turn of the 20th century; nationalism was pursued by the Chiang's Kuomintang Party on their displacing the local Taiwanese).



I do not read fiction and so have not read any of Sionil Jose's famous fictional stories, though I have read one of his social commentaries. I find him always criticizing the Spaniards but not the Americans as former colonizers. I get a feeling he has friends in the States and have noted that he has been receiving accolades and awards from American literary societies  for his writings. He does not bite the hands that feed him.  So I have some understanding where he is coming from. 



Re education for change, education for Filipino nationalism is imperative. Not just plain education for a career or profession, to help repair our damaged culture; a nationwide nationalist education is possible but may be improbable without going through a period of a bloody nationalist revolution, which many of us, who profit from (or want to be part of) the status quo, are fighting against its happening now with our colonized minds and JUSMAG/American-trained military.


Below is F. Sionil Jose's article.


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F. Sionil Jose: why the Philippines is Standing Still

INQUIRER.net

Posted date: July 15, 2008

In one of the luncheons he hosted recently for clients of the Rizal Commercial Banking Corp., Ambassador Alfonso T. Yuchengco asked the National Artist for Literature Francisco Sionil Jose to share some of his observations of the current scene. This is the paper Mr. Jose read on that occasion: What did South Korea look like after the Korean War in 1953? Battered, poor, but look at Korea now. In the Fifties, the traffic in Taipei was composed of bicycles and Army trucks, the streets flanked by tile-roofed low buildings. Jakarta was a giant village and Kuala Lumpur a small village surrounded by jungle and rubber plantations. Bangkok was crisscrossed with canals, the tallest structure was the Wat Arun, the Temple of the Sun, and it dominated the city's skyline. Rice fields all the way from Don Muang Airport - then a huddle of galvanized iron-roofed bodegas, to the Victory monument. Visit these cities today and weep - for they are more beautiful, cleaner and prosperous than Manila. In the Fifties and Sixties we were the most envied country in Southeast Asia. Remember further that when Indonesia got its independence in 1949, it had only 114 university graduates compared to the hundreds of Ph.D.'s which were already in our universities. Why then were we left behind? The economic explanation is simple. We did not produce cheaper and better products. The basic question really is: why we did not modernize fast enough and thereby doomed our people to poverty. This is the harsh truth about us today. Just consider these: some 15 years ago a survey showed that half of all grade school pupils dropped out after grade 5 because they had no money to continue schooling. Thousands of young adults today are therefore unable to find jobs. Our natural resources have been ravaged and they are not renewable. Our tremendous population increase eats up all of our economic gains. There is hunger in this country now; our poorest eat only once a day. But this physical poverty is really not as serious as the greater poverty that afflicts us and this is the poverty of the spirit. Why then are we poor? More than ten years ago, James Fallows, editor of the Atlantic Monthly came to the Philippines and wrote about our “damaged culture” which, he asserted, impeded our development. Many disagreed with him but I do find a great deal of truth in his analysis. This is not to say that I blame our social and moral malaise on colonialism alone. But we did inherit from Spain a social system and an elite that, on purpose, exploited the masses. Then, too, in the Iberian peninsula, to work with one's hands is frowned upon and we inherited that vice as well. Colonialism by foreigners may no longer be what it was, but we are now a colony of our own elite. We are poor because we are poor - this is not a tautology. The culture of poverty is self-perpetuating. We are poor because our people are lazy. I pass by a slum area every morning - dozens of adults do nothing but idle, gossip and drink. We do not save. Look at the Japanese and how they save in spite of the fact that the interest given them by their banks is so little. They work very hard too. We are great show-offs. Look at our women, how overdressed, over-coiffed they are, and Imelda epitomizes that extravagance. Look at our men, their manicured nails, their personal jewelry, their diamond rings. Yabang - that is what we are, and all that money expended on status symbols, on yabang. How much better if it were channeled into production! We are poor because our nationalism is inward looking. Under its guise we protect inefficient industries and monopolies. We did not pursue agrarian reform like Japan and Taiwan. It is not so much the development of the rural sector, making it productive and a good market as well. Agrarian reform releases the energies of the landlords who, before the reform, merely waited for the harvest. They become entrepreneurs, the harbingers of change. Our nationalist icons like Claro M. Recto and Lorenzo Tañada opposed agrarian reform, the single most important factor that would have altered the rural areas and lifted the peasant from poverty. Both of them were merely anti-American. And finally, we are poor because we have lost our ethical moorings. We condone cronyism and corruption and we don't ostracize or punish the crooks in our midst. Both cronyism and corruption are wasteful but we allow their practice because our loyalty is to family or friend, not to the larger good. We can tackle our poverty in two very distinct ways. The first choice: a nationalist revolution, a continuation of the revolution in 1896. But even before we can use violence to change inequities in our society, we must first have a profound change in our way of thinking, in our culture. My regret about EDSA is that change would have been possible then with a minimum of bloodshed. In fact, a revolution may not be bloody at all if something like EDSA would present itself again, or a dictator unlike Marcos. The second is through education, perhaps a longer and more complex process. The only problem is that it may take so long and by the time conditions have changed, we may be back where we were, caught up with this tremendous population explosion which the Catholic Church exacerbates in its conformity with doctrinal purity. We are faced with a growing compulsion to violence, but even if the communist won, they will rule as badly because they will be hostage to the same obstructions in our culture, the barkada and the vaulting egos that sundered the revolution in 1896, the Huk revolt in 1949-53. To repeat, neither education nor revolution can succeed if we do not internalize new attitudes, new ways of thinking. Let us go back to basics and remember those American slogans: A Ford in every garage. A chicken in every pot. Money is like fertilizer: to do any good it must be spread around. Some Filipinos, taunted wherever they are, are ashamed to admit they are Filipinos. I have, myself, been embarrassed explain for instance why Imelda, her children and the Marcos cronies are back, and in positions of power? Are there redeeming features in our country that we can be proud of? Of course, lots of them. When people say for instance that our corruption will never be banished, just remember that Arsenio Lacson as mayor of Manila and Ramon Magsaysay as President brought a clean government. We do not have the classical arts that brought Hinduism and Buddhism to continental and archipelago Southeast Asia, but our artists have now ranged the world, showing what we have done with Western art forms, enriched without own ethnic traditions. Our professionals, not just our domestics, are all over, showing how an accomplished people we are! Look at our history. We were the first in Asia to rise against Western colonialism, the first to establish a republic. Recall the Battle of Tirad Pass and glory in the heroism of Gregorio Del Pilar and the 48 Filipinos who died but stopped the Texas Rangers from capturing the President of that First Republic. Its equivalent in ancient history is the Battle of Thermopylae where the Spartans and their king Leonidas died to a man, defending the pass against the invading Persians. Rizal - what nation on earth has produced a man like him? At 35, he was a novelist, a poet, an anthropologist, a sculptor, a medical doctor, a teacher and martyr. We are now 80 million and in another two decades we will pass the 100 million mark. Eighty million - that is a mass market in any language, a mass market that should absorb our increased production in goods and services - a mass market which any entrepreneur can hope exploit, like the proverbial oil for the lamps of China. Japan was only 70 million when it had confidence enough and the wherewithal to challenge the United States and almost won. It is the same confidence that enabled Japan to flourish from the rubble of defeat in World War II. I am not looking for a foreign power for us to challenge. But we have a real and insidious enemy that we must vanquish, and this enemy is worse than the intransigence of any foreign power. We are our own enemy. And we must have the courage, the will, to change ourselves. “May the Lord watch between you and me when we are absent one from the other.” – Genesis Source: http://globalnation.inquirer.net/mindfeeds/mindfeeds/view/20080715-148544/F._Sionil_Jose:_why_the_Philippines_is_Standing_Still

The Truth About the Spanish Language in the Philippines

WHAT WE FILIPINOS SHOULD KNOW: Note: Bold and/or underlined words are HTML links. Click on them to see the linked postings/articles. Forwarding the postings to relatives and friends, especially in the homeland, is greatly appreciated.

To write or read a comment, please go to http://www.thefilipinomind.blogspot.com/ and scroll down to the bottom of the current post (or another post you read and may want to respond) and click on "Comments."


Although I can not completely verify -for lack of time- the accuracy of all the various historical claims and statistical data in the below article, I post it because this article is very interesting, provides us a different (some new to me - pardon my ignorance) spin and contains some truths (it even touches on the numbers issue of Filipino casualties during the Philippine-American War). And in recent months, in this blog, I got seriously interesting conversations about our national language issue.

Frankly, I still believe and think that native Filipinos should re-establish the school learning of Spanish to gain FULL knowledge, appreciation and understanding of our roots as a country and people. I now find it unfortunate that after earning 21 units in Spanish, I have almost completely forgotten the Spanish language for lack of use, except during my travels to the Iberian Peninsula.

- Bert.

See also (cut & paste these URLs):
http://thefilipinomind.blogspot.com/search?q=spanish+language

http://thefilipinomind.blogspot.com/2008/01/language-problem-prof-renato.html

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THE TRUTH ABOUT THE SPANISH LANGUAGE IN THE PHILIPPINES
by Don Guillermo Gómez Rivera
Member, Academia Filipina de la Lengua

Though it is true that all the inhabitants of the Philippine Islands never had Spanish as their mother tongue, it is however unjust to state that this language was never spoken in the Philippines on a national scale.

The mere fact that Spanish began to be the official language of the Philippine Islands from 24 June 1571 – day of the founding of Manila as the capital city of the Filipino State under the Spanish Crown – until 1987, the year of the promulgation of then-president Corazon ("Cory") C. Aquino’s questionable constitution – puts in an absurd light all those who say this language was never spoken in the Philippines.

It was the official language for so many centuries, which means that it was the language of the judiciary, of the legislature, and of the public writs and official and judicial publications in this Archipelago. It is likewise undeniable that there exists a body of literary works, in effect, a literary tradition, by Filipino authors written from 1593, the year the first printing press was founded in these islands, until the present. All the above is proof that the Spanish language was spoken in the Philippines – and not to the disputed extent that the questionable North American documentation has told us. We say "questionable" because it is a fact that the U.S. colonialists have had a "language agenda" in favor of English since 1898 and against the Spanish language, which they look upon as a latent obstacle to their linguistic objectives and economic empire to this day.

Let us now examine the statistics. It is true that when the Philippines had a population of just a little over four million and a half (4,500,000 persons), Agustín de la Cavada y Méndez de Vigo pointed out that those who spoke Spanish did not exceed 2.8% of the cited population. However, this book of statistics was published in 1870, just seven years after Queen Isabel II had decreed (1863) the establishment of the public school system in all the Islands, whose medium of instruction was predominantly Spanish, with the most important languages of the Archipelago serving as auxiliary educational vehicles.

By the year 1898, when the Philippines separated from Spain, the percentage of Spanish-speaking Filipinos must have already increased considerably. And if, in fact, the increase in the number of Spanish speakers had not grown in greater proportions and with a larger extension in all these islands from the extant 2.8% in 1870, the Filipino delegates at the constitutional convention in Malolos, Bulacán in 1898 would not have declared Spanish as the first official language of the Philippine Republic, just as was established by the Malolos Constitution.

Neither would the Filipinos in the Aguinaldo government have used Spanish in all their proclamations and official publications, including the newspaper "La Independencia." José Rizal, a polyglot who knew seven languages including Tagalog, would not have written his most important works in Spanish; he would have written them in English and Tagalog – but no, José Rizal wrote it all in Spanish for his countrymen who, naturally, could read him in this same language.

In a book published in 1908 by the Typographic College of Santo Tomás in Manila, entitled General Geography of the Philippine Islands, whose author is the Very Reverend Father Fray Manuel Arellano Remondo, the following information is found on page 15: "The population decreased due to the wars, in the five-year period from 1895 to 1900, since, at the start of the first insurrection, the population was estimated at 9,000,000, and at present (1908), the inhabitants of the Archipelago do not exceed 8,000,000 in number."

The referenced "first insurrection" was the one that took place on August 29, 1896 against the Spanish government. In that case, the population of the Philippines totaled nine million inhabitants. The North American census of 1903 and of 1905 mention that the Spanish speakers of this archipelago have never exceeded in number 10% of the population during the final decade of the 1800’s. This means that 900,000 Filipinos – 10% of the nine million cited by Fr. Manuel Arellano Remondo – spoke Spanish as their first and only tongue.

Aside from these 900,000, Don Luciano de la Rosa, the defense lawyer of those who were taken to court for libel because of the editorial in the newspaper El Renacimiento entitled "Aves de Rapiña" (Birds of Prey), published in 1907, concluded – in a study we cited in the book Filipino: Origin and Connotations (Manila 1960), "...that 60% of the Filipinos" in his time "had the Spanish language as their second tongue." If we add to this 60% the preceding 10%, we have 70% of the Filipino population as making daily use of the Spanish language between 1890 and 1940.

Recent studies by Dr. José Rodríguez Ponga indicate that at the time of the withdrawal of peninsular Spaniards from the country, a total of 14% of the population were Spanish-speaking Filipinos (i.e., 14% of 9,000,000 or 1,260,000). Fray Manuel Arellano Remondo, upon informing us that "the population was reduced due to the wars," undoubtedly refers to the casualties of the war between the First Philippine Republic of 1898 and the United States of America. This reduction of the Filipino population is pointed out by another source, this time North America, as representing "one-sixth of the Filipino population." (1.5 million).

The historian James B. Goodno, author of the Philippines: Land of Broken Promises (New York, 1998), provides us with this important figure on page 31. If we are to believe that a sixth of the Filipino population perished as a result of the massacres perpetrated by the U.S. military invasion between 1898 and 1902, the victims would in fact be equivalent to one and a half million. This historical fact is nothing less than genocide committed against the Filipino people, precisely those who were Spanish speaking.

If today it can even be said that Spanish was never spoken in the Philippines, that result is the very evidence of the genocide perpetrated during the Filipino-American War which lasted until 1907 – including the armed resistance against the U.S. led by the second president and general of the Filipino Republic of 1898, Macario Sakay de León. President Sakay assumed the leadership after the capture and house arrest of President Aguinaldo, but in 1906 he was deceived through the false offers by Filipino politicians (who began to believe in North American "benevolence"), of amnesty and a seat in the future National Assembly. He was quietly hanged in 1907 in a manner that was unfair and totally criminal, in comparison to the Spaniards’ treatment of the case of José Rizal. The second president of the Philippine Republic was criminally hanged.

The above-mentioned Don Luciano de la Rosa informs us that "it is no surprise that a huge percentage of these casualties should have been Spanish-speaking Filipinos, since they were the ones who best understood the concepts of independence and freedom and those who wrote works in the Spanish language on said ideas." This is why Padre Arellano Remondo’s book is the one that provides us with the following statistical data for the first decade of the 1900’s, in these terms: "6th. Population.

The official census of 1903 resulted in the following global figures: 7,635,426. Of these, the civilized or Christians were some 7,000,000, and 647,000 were uncivilized or non-Christians" (op. cit., p. 15). The same 1903 Census states that Spanish mestizos comprised 75,000 or scarcely 1% of the population. The implication was that the latter were those who predominantly spoke Spanish; "Spanish mestizo" was understood to mean that the father was a peninsular Spaniard and the mother a native. Not counted as Spanish-speaking were the children of marriages between Spanish mestizos and natives, who in fact were twice as many as the cited 75,000 mestizos.

Neither were the descendants of Christianized Chinese accounted for, many of them mestizos who were a mixture of Spanish, native and Chinese, and who made up the most numerous group and spoke Spanish as their primary language. The natives who made up the creole-speaking communities (Chabacano) of Cavite and the suburbs of Manila’s Extramuros (Ermita, Pacô, Binondo, San Miguel and Quiapo), as well as in Zamboanga, Cotabato, Davao, Joló and Basilan in Mindanao, very easily would have added another 500,000 persons. In 1916, writer and lawyer Don Tirso de Irrureta Goyena made the following observation in his book, Por el Idioma y Cultura Hispanos (For Hispanic Language and Culture), Santo Tomás University Press, Manila, 1917: "There is a minority of Filipinos, descendants of Spaniards, for whom Spanish is naturally their own and -- one would almost say -- their only language. There are a few localities where pure-blooded native Filipinos, for example Cavite, San Roque, Caridad, Zamboanga, and even many of those who live in Manila and in other important capital cities, that likewise [sic] speak no other language apart from a more-or-less adulterated Spanish.” "And the North American mestizos are a miniscule minority, in many of whose descendants one finds a curious phenomenon, of their having adopted Spanish or one of the native languages, leaving English completely aside." (Op. cit., p. 30)."

In the Eighth Annual Report of the Director of Education David P. Barrows, dated 1 August 1908 (published by the Bureau of Printing, 1957), one finds the following observations regarding the Spanish language: "Of the adult population, including persons of mature years and social influence, the number speaking English is relatively small. This class speaks Spanish, and as it is the most prominent and important class of people in the Islands, Spanish continues to be the most important language spoken in political, journalistic and commercial circles" (p. 94). This observation points out that the country’s adult population, which included persons of mature age and social influence, "had Spanish as their language, and thus Spanish continues to be the most important language spoken in all business, political and journalistic circles."

This observation confirms the statement by the attorney Don Luciano de la Rosa on Spanish being the second language of 60% of the total Filipino population during the first four decades of the 1900’s. What is most curiously significant is that the alleged alphabetization or education in English in the public schools established by the North Americans beginning in 1900 tended to produce a larger number of Spanish-speaking – not English-speaking -- Filipinos.

For this reason, the Director of Instruction Mr. David P. Barrows himself, alarmed and almost indignant, wrote the following (Emphasis ours): "It is to be noted that with the increased study and use of English, there has been an increased study of Spanish. I think it is a fact that many more people in these islands have a knowledge of Spanish now than they did when the American Occupation occurred" (op. cit., p. 96)." After asking for more funds to be allocated to a budget item for "night schools," which meant redoubling the teaching and imposition of English on Filipino children and adults in order to not leave them under the influence of the predominant language which was Spanish, Mr. Barrows, much in the manner of consolation for himself and his superiors in Washington, D.C., wrote that Spanish, through certain measures adopted against it, would tend to disappear in the long run because the Filipinos would be far from the Spanish-speaking countries and therefore would have no support from the latter in their desire to preserve their Spanish language: "But in spite of these facts, it is believed that the use of Spanish will wane. It is unsupported by Spanish-speaking countries adjacent to us" (op. cit., p. 96). From this observation one may well glean the white Anglo-Saxon policy of deliberately isolating the Filipinos from the Hispanic world that they belonged to.

On the other hand, the aide memoir – report submitted by Don Carlos Palanca to the Schurmann Commission in 1906 -- indicates the following: "...apart from the eight Tagalog provinces described as Spanish-speaking, there are another eight provinces which are equally Spanish speaking." (From Tulay, a weekly publication of the Chinese-Filipino community in Manila, 10 October 1999, article by historian Pío Andrade.)

Aside from these 16 Spanish-speaking provinces, the referenced article states, Don Carlos Palanca mentions five other provinces where "Spanish is little spoken." The data provided by Don Carlos Palanca were considered "of great weight" by the Schurmann Investigative and Legislative Commission because they came from the wealthiest Chinese Filipino in the Islands who was the head of the powerful Chinese Businessmen’s Association, which in turn had an up-to-date compilation of data on the local market it served.

Another revealing source on the extent to which Spanish was spoken in the country is the Report of Henry Ford in 1916 to the United States president. Although the 1903 Census prepared by the U.S. government gave it to understand that Spanish "is spoken only by 10% of the Filipinos," the observations of the referenced Ford Report give the lie to this statement. It states: "There is, however, another aspect in this case which should be considered. This aspect became evident to me as I traveled through the islands, using ordinary transportation and mixing with all classes of people under all conditions. Although based on the school statistics it is said that more Filipinos speak English than any other language, no one can be in agreement with this declaration if they base their assessment on what they hear...Spanish is everywhere the language of business and social intercourse...In order for anyone to obtain prompt service from anyone, Spanish turns out to be more useful than English...And outside of Manila it is almost indispensable. The Americans who travel around all the islands customarily use it." (The Ford Report of 1916. No. 3. The Use of English, 365-366.)

As we have already pointed out through the observations in 1908 of Education Director Mr. Barrows, the preponderance of Spanish continued to alarm the Americans since their agenda of imposing the English language on the Filipino people was in danger of failing. They had been quite certain that it would be possible to impose English in just ten more years after 1916, the year the alleged Jones Independence Law was passed. But Henry Ford himself, in 1916, was the second voice to sound the alarm. He did so in the following terms: "In the meantime, the use of Spanish, instead of declining in the face of the propaganda promoting English, seems to spread by itself. This fact has merited the attention of the government.

The Education Director’s report for 1908 says in page 9: Spanish continues to be the most prominent and important one spoken in political, journalistic and commercial circles. English has active rivals as the language of trade and instruction. It is equally probable that the adult population has lost interest in learning English. I believe it is a fact that many more people now know the Spanish language than when the North Americans sailed for these islands and their occupation took place...

The customary prerequisite for dispatchers is for them to know English and Spanish. Through the great upsurge in numbers and circulation of newspapers and publications, there is much more reading matter in Spanish than before... "There is an uncontestable meaning behind that fact that in all these islands there is not one Filipino newspaper published in English. All the native newspapers are published in Spanish and in the vernacular. La Vanguardia, the Manila newspaper with the largest circulation, has its section in Spanish and in the vernacular, and the majority of the island newspapers follow this practice.

The Philippine Free Press, the newspaper with the largest circulation under North American control, is printed in English and in Spanish, and all the rest of the North American newspapers use Spanish in conjunction with English. The only newspaper that is under total Filipino control that also uses English is the revolutionary organ, The Philippine Republic, which is published in Hong Kong. It is in English and in Spanish, its objective being to reach North American readers in the interest of promoting Filipino independence.

"The report of the Education Director in 1908 attributes the obstacle in the propagation of English to the action of the government in extending the time during which the use of Spanish in official documents would continue to be allowed. The Director says on page 30 of his report: ...The date set for English to become the language of the courts was rolled back to January 1, 1911. This measure, though recommended by the fact that a larger number of judges and lawyers are insufficiently trained in English, has had an unfortunate effect on public confidence in the final adoption of English as the government’s official language.

"Nevertheless, the Education Director expresses the belief that the ascendancy of Spanish is only temporary. He said, The new generation, which will take over the affairs of these islands within the next ten years, will not use Spanish for its day to day purposes and its influence shall be decisive. Spanish will cease to be the language of the courts on January 1, 1911. It is quickly ceasing to be the vehicle for administrative correspondence. It is probable that its use as the language of the legislators will be delayed even further...”

This was said five years ago, but the events since then have not confirmed the forecast. The use of Spanish as the official language has been extended up to January 1, 1920. Its generalized use seems to be spreading even more. "The natives acquire it as a living language. They hear it spoken by those who lead in the community, and their hearing is accustomed to its pronunciation. On the other hand, these people have practically no phonetic basis for acquiring English, and the result is that they learn it as a language of books instead of learning it as a living language. English becomes valued as an important qualification for getting employment, particularly in the government service, but it is certain that to date it does not show the least tendency of becoming more important than Spanish or the vernacular language of daily use" (op. cit.).

One of the important aspects of the Ford Report is the desperation on the part of the white Anglo-Saxon Protestants before the continuing use of the Spanish language in the Philippines. This desperation is the reason behind the following "legal" measures that were taken against the Spanish language in these islands. The Ford Report continues: "The archive on the official action as regards language demonstrates a series of steps of surrendering before the continued use of Spanish, brought on by the stress, or the difficulties of necessity.

The original intention was to impose [its] rapid substitution by English. "Law No. 190 of the Commission made provision for English to be imposed as the official language of all the courts and their archives after January 1, 1906. Law No. 1427 extended that period to the 1st of January, 1911. "Law No. 1946 extended that period to January 1, 1913. By Executive Order No. 44, dated 8 August 1912, the legal prerequisite was amended and ended up being nothing more than an expression of preference for English.

This instructional document is included herein (Annex B). "The impossibility of substituting Spanish with English in the judicial process and the provincial and municipal governments is such that there even exists the probability that, even if the English language is declared as the official one on January 1, 1913, Spanish will continue to be used because of official connivance. "This abnormal situation was terminated by a law passed on February 11, 1913. This law provided that, while English is the official language, Spanish shall also be an official language until 1 January 1920. (See Annex C.) "No indications exist at present that Spanish can be discarded in 1920 or in another future year, since, as has been seen, its position as an official language is most certainly established." (Ford Report of 1916, No. 4. Increasing use of Spanish, pp. 366 and 368; No. 5. Legislation as to Language. Pages 368-369.)

These complaints against the preponderant use of Spanish by the Filipino people confirm what was always an evident agenda on the part of the North Americans to quietly exterminate the Spanish-speaking Filipino population of Manila and outlying areas, under the pretext of a "war of liberation" in 1945 against the Japanese. Two veritable instances of genocide occurred (1899-1907 and another in 1945, whose subsequent results we can still see in Circular No. 59, Series of 1996, issued by the current "Commission on Higher Education" (CHED), which denies the most minimal provision for a regular curriculum of Spanish instruction, making this language optional together with Arabic in the university "education" canon of the Philippines today.

The preponderance of the Spanish language does not merely constitute proof of its daily and official use by the immense majority of the Filipinos in the 1900’s and the 1920’s, but until the 1930’s, when the Hollywood movie industry found an important Filipino market for its Spanish-language movies. The Manila magazine Excelsior in its July 1930 issue criticized the practice adopted by the offices of Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer in Manila of returning to the U.S. the Hollywood movies produced in Spanish. The return was done to support the U.S. authorities in Manila in their genocidal campaign to suppress Spanish in the Philippines.

The article entitled "Talkies in Spanish" of the referenced monthly magazine published on Potenciana Street in Intramuros says: "...with respect to the cultivation and diffusion of Spanish in the Philippines, a vigorous protest from the Círculo Cervantino, Círculo Escénico, Asociación Talía, Cultura Hispánica, Peña Ibérica and other institutions and centers of learning whose names are not mentioned here, against the practice of Metro-Goldwyn-Meyer of not showing Spanish-language movies and returning them (that is, without premiering them in the Philippines first, as was the objective of their dispatch to these Islands) to the United States. "

They describe this procedure as unfair, since, in view of the fact that 40% of the older and young generations speak the language of Cervantes much better than that of Shakespeare, there is no reason whatsoever to impose only English on them, against all the rules of equality. Even more, forgetting that the Company in question, forgetting that Spanish culture and civilization in this country have put down deep roots in the Filipino soul and that it can easily, without harm to itself, satisfy this respectable percentage of the island populace. [MGM is] moved by misguided egoism or by an even more faulty concept of economy, if it considered that Spanish-language movies are enthusiastically accepted by the Filipino public, as was demonstrated, according to the protesters, by the recent film from MGM entitled "Gay Madrid," shown in Cine Ideal, which had a run of several weeks, to full audiences, setting a new record."

After commenting on MGM’s violation of the "so noisily vaunted Democracy" the article ends with the following paragraph (Emphases ours): "We trust that [the Company] will bring them back and we shall once more see movies in the Cine Ideal that are completely filmed and spoken in Spanish, as happens in other moviehouses that are not so exclusivist, but that cater to the public’s desire to see Spanish-language pictures" (op. cit., p. 11). After the terrible Second World War, through the American bombing of Manila and the provincial capitals, the 1950 Census still stated that the Spanish-speaking Filipinos made up 6% of the population, for which reason the legislature passed two laws providing for 24 units of Spanish and Filipino literature as part of the university curriculum, since Spanish continued to be official, together with English and Tagalog.

But then came the ominous 1987 Constitution of President Cory Aquino that suppressed the official status and regular teaching of this language in Filipino schools. Despite these measures, there are still almost 500,000 Filipinos who speak Spanish, outside of those who speak creole, who number over a million people in the provinces of Zamboanga, Basilan, Cotabato and Cavite. These Spanish-speaking survivors could be strengthened through a well-thought-out program to restore Spanish on the part of the Spanish government, through the Spanish Agency for International Cooperation and the Instituto Cervantes of Manila. Will they do it? Because if they do, Spain and Latin America will have a new friendship base in the Asia of the future.

Revised and corrected in Metro Manila, 14 November 2000. We would appreciate your comments. Join our campaign for restoration. Email us at: ggr_flamenco@hotmail.com Original article was in Spanish, free translation from the Spanish by Elizabeth Medina. This English version of the article was emailed by Mr. Andreas Herbig, andreas-herbig@gmx.de

Source: http://filipinokastila.tripod.com/truth.html