Pamitinan and Tapusi: Using the Carpio legend to reconstruct lower-class consciousness in the late Spanish Philippines

Abstract

Reynaldo Ileto, in his classicPasyon and Revolution, sought the categories of perception of the Filipino ‘masses’ that guided their participation in the Philippine Revolution. Among the sources he examined was the Carpio legend, which he unfortunately subsumed to the separate, elite Carpioawit(Tagalog poem). Through a detailed examination of the legend's historical and geographical context, with its invocation of two locations, Pamitinan and Tapusi, I arrive at a different understanding of lower-class consciousness than Ileto. Rather than a counter-rational expression of peasant millenarianism, the legend of Bernardo Carpio was a ‘hidden transcript’ celebrating the history of social banditry in the region.