Philippine History Research Articles

Agustin Martin G. Rodriguez’s Repentance and Rebirth at the End of Life as We Know It

Philippine Studies: Historical and Ethnographic Viewpoints is an internationally refereed journal that publishes scholarly articles and other materials on the history of the Philippines and its peoples, both in the homeland and overseas. It believes the past is illuminated by historians as well as scholars from other disciplines; at the same time, it prefers ethnographic approaches to the history of the present. It welcomes works that are theoretically informed but not encumbered by jargon. It promotes a comparative and transnational sensibility, and seeks to engage scholars who may not be specialists on the Philippines. Founded in 1953 as Philippine Studies, the journal is published quarterly by the Ateneo de Manila University.

Leisure of Internally Displaced Marawi Families

Family is a strong foundation of a successful nation and participating in leisure activities contributes to a happy and functional unit of society. However, in unfavorable situations, there are families who were drastically displaced in order to survive such as the Marawi siege which had brought massive internal displacement in the history of the Philippines. Using ethnographic research fieldwork methods, this study examined and explores how family leisure is exercised in unfamiliar territories among internally displaced Marawi families and the impacts it had on family leisure experiences in three key concepts: space, activities, and time. The findings revealed that displacement enforced unique constraints on leisure, such as those related to the overlap of work and leisure time and space, limited finances, preference for money accumulate overspending on leisure, have led internally displaced families to discontinue some previous practices, and pursue passive and home-based leisure activities. Displacement, however, also led families to be resilient, adapt to new leisure activities, and contributed to the development of new family leisure values. The family's solid perspective on the role of leisure in strengthening family bonds trumps the limitations and challenges set by current circumstances.

The Teleserye Story: Three Periods of the Evolution of the Filipino TV Soap Opera

The essay chronicles the history of the teleserye or the Filipino TV soap opera, one of today’s transnational televisual products making waves in different parts of the globe. It covers three periods—the period of transition from radio to TV (1962 to 1986), the period of competition (1986-2000), and the period of transformation (2000-present). Traversing through 60 years of the form’s enduring presence in Philippine television, it traces the format’s beginnings as it was introduced to the medium in a highly volatile social environment, and assesses its continued flourishing in democratized, contemporary times and consequent entry into the highly competitive global drama market, where it serves both foreign and its very own Filipino diasporic audiences. The essay echoes the abiding thesis of my studies about the cultural history of the teleserye—that the form is indeed the drama of Filipino life. As domestic, serial form, the teleserye’s intimate relation to the Filipino everyday ultimately makes it reflective of the country’s life and times, its evolution interconnected with the ebb and flow of Philippine history. These are illustrated by representative texts from the said periods, as well as key contexts that unravel the evolution of the form, now gleaned from a global, as well as diasporic context.

Autopoetics, Market Competence, and the Transnational Author

Although materialist analyses have critiqued the institutionalization of postcolonial studies and its emergence in global capitalism, only few have addressed the role of creative writing in standardizing migrant novelistic production to what Mark McGurl has designated as ‘program fiction’ whose trademark is the practice of “involuted self-reference”. In filling this gap, this paper looks into Gina Apostol’s writings and their reception by international audiences as exemplary of the cultural capital of program fiction. While Apostol’s autofictions/ficto-criticism points to the influence of creative writing in her novels — she studied under John Barth in the MFA program in Johns Hopkins University, this context is overlooked when metropolitan readers construe her work as postcolonial literature. I argue that Apostol’s textualist renderings of Philippine history is an act of ventriloquism whose metropolitan success is a symptom of the auratic authority of postcolonial studies in the First world literary marketplace.

The Panditas of the Philippines, 17th - Early 20th Centuries

The article explores the panditas and their role and function in Philippine history, examining selected depictions in Spanish and English sources from 17th century until the early 20th centuries. As precolonial figures that illustrate the link of the Philippines to the broader Malay world, the panditas gradually acquired and embodied Islamic elements into their amorphous identity and practice, ultimately becoming figures of knowledge, spirituality, and culture in Muslim communities. By examining representations of the panditas, the article aims to problematize their place in the historical record, as figures of supposedly false religion, primitive civilization, ethnographic interest, occultism, and military regulation, and point to a dynamic history of Islamic communities that adapted, absorbed, and localized religious tenets in varying degrees, so that pre-Islamic figures like the panditas would have a place in new contexts and be understood as Islamic in their own distinctive way.

Tropical Faustian: Nick Joaquin’s Spenglerian Imagining of Colonial History in the Post-Authoritarian Philippines

This article discusses how Philippine writer Nick Joaquin applied the ideas of Oswald Spengler in his historiography, notably the collection Culture and History (1988), his contribution to the post-authoritarian renegotiation of a national history fraught with colonial conflict and loss. This article argues that Joaquin adapted Spengler’s ideas, proposing the presence of a “Faustian” Filipino soul formed during the Spanish-colonial period, to a contradictory effect. It allowed him to assert a national identity that challenged the dichotomous ways in which Philippine history was conventionally conceived, but it also reintroduced Eurocentric and homogenizing schemes, reinforcing existing hegemonies in the postcolony.

Readings in Philippine History: Course Review, Best Practices, and Challenges among Higher Education Institutions

History is essential in the curriculum. The Readings in Philippine History (RPH) syllabus and instruction should be advanced. However, curricular changes and the pandemic affected the instruction. Thus, this study reviewed the course specification and syllabus of RPH among higher educational institutions in Kabankalan City, Philippines. Anchored on the CHED recommended syllabus in RPH, the study reviewed the course and determined the areas for improvement. Likewise, it identified the best practices and challenges. Using a descriptive design and employing purposive and stratified sampling, 269 external reviewers, teachers, and students reviewed the study. The mean, frequency count, rank, and percentage distribution were employed in data analysis. Generally, the course adheres to the standard. However, the main issue is students' learning readiness and the misalignment of teachers' specialization. Thus, a strong foundation on Philippine History among the students is necessary to ensure quality. Also, the retention of qualified teachers is essential in advancing the instruction.

Nostalgia and Self-Fashioning in Retana's Recuerdos de Filipinas (1907-1909)

Wenceslao Retana’s intellectual passion for the Philippine archipelago led to the foundation of Philippine bibliographical studies as well as the recovery of dozens of little known but highly relevant primary sources of Philippine history. Previous scholars have noted the abrupt sea change in Retana’s portrayal of the Philippines and the Filipino people after 1898. During the period that the archipelago remained a colony of Spain, it was not difficult to find harsh criticism in his texts, but he later made efforts to reconcile with the Spanish-speaking intelligentsia of Manila. In this context, Retana serially published a Recuerdos de Filipinas between 1907 and 1909 in the pages of El Renacimiento (1901–1910), where he reminisced about his early stay in the Philippines from 1884 to 1886. This study examines the circumstances that led to the publication of this memoir whose existence remained unnoticed by previous Retana scholars. Likewise, this paper will explore the discursive strategies and the underlying ideological assumptions implicit in the text. It concludes that the Recuerdos de Filipinas served to restore Retana’s previously damaged public image by presenting a kindly, nostalgic, and slightly naive view of his own youthful experiences in the Philippines.

Spatializing Differences

Abstract Mapping of “ethnic” or “racial” groups in the Philippines was an enterprise that was taken up through the direct interventions of the two colonial polities in Filipino history—Spain and the United States. The objective of mapping race or ethnicity in the Philippines was to identify the location of native racial groups for ethnological and administrative purposes. This article intends to explore the relationship between mapping and the scientific conceptualization of race during the changeover in colonial rule by examining two ethnographic maps, specifically the “Blumentritt Map” (1890) and the Atlas de Filipinas (1899). Maps are complex artefacts that can be read on various levels. Thus, the spatializing effects of mapping can extend well beyond the documentation of a geographic reality and capable of altering historical narratives and sociopolitical experiences.

Towards a “Filipino” Video Game: Teaching Filipino Culture and Identity for Video Game Development

This paper uses the author’s experiences of teaching the Filipino module of a multidisciplinary video game development class as a case study in teaching Filipino culture and identity as an element of video game development. A preliminary definition of “Filipino video game” as having Filipino narratives and subject matter, made by Filipino video game developers, and catering to a Filipino audience, is proposed. The realities and limitations of video game development and the video game market in the Philippines is also discussed to show how the dominance of Western video game industry, in terms of the dominance of outsource work for Filipino video game developers and the dominance of non-Filipino video games played by Filipino players, has hindered the development of original Filipino video games. Using four Filipino video games as primary texts discussed in class, students were exposed to Filipinomade video games, and shown how these games use Filipino history, culture, and politics as source material for their narrative and design. Issues of how video games can be used to selfexoticization, and the use of propaganda is discussed, and also how video games can be used to confront and reimagine Filipinoness. The paper ends with a discussion of a student-made game titled Alibatas, a game that aims to teach baybayin, a neglected native writing system in the Philippines as a demonstration of how students can make a Filipino video game. The paper then shows the importance of student-made games, and the role that the academe plays in the critical understanding of Filipino video games, and in defining Filipino culture and identity.

20th Century Western Visayan Millenarian Representations: The Case of “Emperor” Flor Intrencherado in the Local Press, 1925-1929

20th Century Western Visayan Millenarian Representations: The Case of “Emperor” Flor Intrencherado in the Local Press, 1925-1929

Atmosfera Rizaliana: Metonymic Journeys of Storm Tropes in José Rizal’s Writing on the Philippines

Stormy weather appears in recurrent instances across the literary and political oeuvre of José Rizal, a nineteenth-century figure who is one of the most significant and well-known personages in Philippine history. This paper analyzes the manner by which he describes storms in a few of his personal and political works, and observes that there is a deployment of metonymic logic that undergirds not only the texts, but a variety of other movements across the nineteenth-century cultural, technological, and political landscape. The metonymic logic of storm tropes are, in this sense, not only a productive literary modality in understanding weather representations during the Philippine fin de siècle, but also become illustrative of political and historical developments during the period. Based on this overarching logic, the paper articulates the possibility of understanding global climate and climate change as a series of interconnected and associated postcolonial and ecocritical experiences that are able to figure the world at large through an alternative expansion. This paper also investigates previous critiques that categorize the Rizaliana’s weather as romantic, and interrogates the assumptions that are deployed in such categorizations – and what they might mean for Philippine postcolonial ecocriticism and its climate imaginaries.

Phonography Culture

Phonography Culture

Rice, Culture and Ideology

Rice played different roles throughout Filipino history. A magical item in ancient times up to Middle Ages, rice transformed to a consumer product whose consumption reflects the stratification of the Filipino society. From a central cultural element in the Philippines islands rice was gradually downgraded to a side cultural detail due to its commodisation, urbanisation, industrialisation and the Green Revolution. However, in our times rice started to play a new role of cultural artefact referring to invented traditions having little in common with ancient culture of the islanders. Besides, it became a tangible sign of ideological movement against the Green Revolution.

Restoring Asia to the Global Moment of 1898

ABSTRACT This article explores the global moment surrounding 1898 to see the way in which the spectre of Japan was rapidly transforming the European imperial powers’ understanding of the region and revealing to them an emerging geography of political affinity then stitching together pockets of Asia. Intra-Asian connections/affinities antedated the appearance of Western interests, were sustained during the long period of Spanish rule, and infused the anti-colonial nationalist movement that culminated in the Philippine Revolution. American Empire: A Global History follows most of the traditional Philippine and American literatures on the period of high imperialism in failing to acknowledge the importance of the Asian setting. While Hopkins's move to bring the larger insular American empire into a single focus is novel and deeply important, the immediate, regional Asian setting of this moment in Philippine history – and American history – should also be restored.

Multiple migrations to the Philippines during the last 50,000 years

Island Southeast Asia has recently produced several surprises regarding human history, but the region's complex demography remains poorly understood. Here, we report ∼2.3 million genotypes from 1,028 individuals representing 115 indigenous Philippine populations and genome-sequence data from two ∼8,000-y-old individuals from Liangdao in the Taiwan Strait. We show that the Philippine islands were populated by at least five waves of human migration: initially by Northern and Southern Negritos (distantly related to Australian and Papuan groups), followed by Manobo, Sama, Papuan, and Cordilleran-related populations. The ancestors of Cordillerans diverged from indigenous peoples of Taiwan at least ∼8,000 y ago, prior to the arrival of paddy field rice agriculture in the Philippines ∼2,500 y ago, where some of their descendants remain to be the least admixed East Asian groups carrying an ancestry shared by all Austronesian-speaking populations. These observations contradict an exclusive "out-of-Taiwan" model of farming-language-people dispersal within the last four millennia for the Philippines and Island Southeast Asia. Sama-related ethnic groups of southwestern Philippines additionally experienced some minimal South Asian gene flow starting ∼1,000 y ago. Lastly, only a few lowlanders, accounting for <1% of all individuals, presented a low level of West Eurasian admixture, indicating a limited genetic legacy of Spanish colonization in the Philippines. Altogether, our findings reveal a multilayered history of the Philippines, which served as a crucial gateway for the movement of people that ultimately changed the genetic landscape of the Asia-Pacific region.

Fool’s Gold: Fakes, Frauds, and Fallacies in Philippine History by Bob Couttie

Reviewed by: Fool’s Gold: Fakes, Frauds, and Fallacies in Philippine History by Bob Couttie Francisco Jayme Paolo A. Guiang BOB COUTTIE Fool’s Gold: Fakes, Frauds, and Fallacies in Philippine History. Vol. 1. Quezon City: Central Books, 2020. 213 pages. Fool’s Gold: Fakes, Frauds, and Fallacies in Philippine History, volume 1, is an interesting work that unravels historical misconceptions that are commonly believed to be true. Bob Couttie, the book’s author, is an independent scholar who completed courses in forensic science at the University of Strathclyde; forensic psychology at The Open University in Milton Keynes, England; forensic science and criminal justice at the University of Leicester; military ethics at the University of New South Wales Canberra; and antiquities trafficking and art crime at the University of Glasgow. His interest in Philippine history is evident in articles in his blogsite, Bob’s Histories and Mysteries. Most noteworthy is Couttie’s book Hang the Dogs: The True Tragic History of the Balangiga Massacre (New Day, 2004), a scholarly work that introduces provocative ideas about the history of the Balangiga incident during the Philippine–American War. Fool’s Gold is printed and published by Central Books, although it can also be ordered online through a dedicated Facebook page and the author’s blogsite. Couttie offers his readers a very timely work in light of the recent surge in fake news, disinformation, and cases of negative historical revisionism that are used to advance certain political interests. The author recognizes this premise early in the book: “Falsehood has been weaponised as never before and democracy and freedom and the welfare and future of everything we know and care for is under threat. It is a war on truth” (xi). A distinct feature of Couttie’s work lies in its primary aim, which is to promote reasoned argument and critical thinking by revisiting “a range of popular, often outdated, misconceptions about Philippine history” (xi). Hence, Fool’s Gold is a scholarly work that does not only rectify erroneous or misleading information but also provokes readers to have a nuanced appreciation of [End Page 319] history. In line with this idea, the author explains that “If we apply that critical thinking skill to everything we hear, read or watch then we will be better armed against the falsehoods that seek to influence us and persuade us to be complicit in our own imprisonment and oppression” (xi). To expose “fakes, frauds, and fallacies” present in existing historical knowledge, Couttie thematically divides the book into four sections that deal with various topics across Philippine history. His bias toward the history of the Philippine–American War is evident in the first section, “War Stories,” which includes seven chapters. Couttie revisits and clarifies fascinating historical facts, such as the identity of Lewis M. Johnson, the “Colonel of Artillery” who served as the lone American signatory in the Philippine Declaration of Independence (3–29), and the contradicting statistics on the supposed death toll in Samar during the Philippine–American War (67–75). The succeeding five chapters are lumped under a section titled “Myths and Legends,” in which the author interrogates timeless debates in Philippine history. These discussions include Renato Constantino’s assessment of José Rizal as an American-sponsored hero (144–70), the story of Princess Urduja and its place in Philippine lore (111–33), and even Pres. Ferdinand Marcos’s ambitious anti-typhoon rocket program (134–42). Couttie probes into manufactured historical truths in the three chapters that comprise the third section, “Fakers All.” Most intriguing in this section is the author’s examination of the Tallano wealth, which Marcos purportedly acquired prior to his political heyday. The last section, aptly titled “And Finally,” is composed of a single chapter, “Kill the Chocolate Biscuit” (205–9), which deals with the controversy of the Hispanic chocolate biscuit brand Filipinos. Indeed, Couttie leads his readers into a dense narrative that is composed of multiple layers of inquiries that identify historical falsehoods and misconceptions. The discussions are thoroughly pursued through an examination of essential literature and relevant primary documents. Ending Fool’s Gold with a section on the history of chocolate as beverage and delicacy during the Spanish colonial period is...

Living Carriers in the East: Chinese Cargadores in Nineteenth-Century Manila

Although the history of the Chinese in the Philippines is generally well known, what has not been probed is the way working-class Chinese lived and conducted their trades amid restrictive colonial policies. Using previously unexplored archival materials, this article examines the lives and circumstances of Chinese cargadores (stevedores and transporters) within the urban and commercial milieus of Manila during the nineteenth century. Chinese cargadores were regarded as highly dependable workers, but were treated, because of their ethnicity and numerical strength, as both marginal and dangerous, needing to be strictly regulated and disciplined by the Spanish colonial state. KEYWORDS: CHINESE • MANUAL LABORERS • PHILIPPINE HISTORY • NINETEENTH CENTURY • SPANISH COLONIALISM

Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper by Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez

Reviewed by: Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper by Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez Thea Quiray Tagle VERNADETTE VICUÑA GONZALEZ Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. 219 pages. What can minor stories uncover about the intimacies of US empire? University of Hawai'i at Manoa Professor of American Studies Vernadette Vicuña Gonzalez's second monograph, Empire's Mistress, Starring Isabel Rosario Cooper, breaks decisively with historiographical conventions to address this question using provocative and refreshing methods uncommon to Philippine studies and Filipino American studies. Focusing its attention on Isabel Rosario Cooper, a biracial Filipina child star-turned-bodabil (the Philippines's homegrown version of vaudeville) performer in Manila who reinvented herself multiple times over, Empire's Mistress rewrites the life story of a mysterious and contradictory woman footnoted in history as "Gen. Douglas MacArthur's mistress" and makes a critical feminist intervention into now familiar histories of US imperialism in the Philippines. To understand Gonzalez's masterful contribution to transpacific Filipino history and cultural studies, it is important to situate this book alongside other interdisciplinary scholarship that similarly attends to the intimate labor of empire building and the sexuality of race in the US. The essays in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History (Duke University Press, 2006), edited by Ann Laura Stoler, come to mind immediately, along with Lisa Lowe's The Intimacy of Four Continents (Duke University Press, 2015), of which an article-length version appears in Stoler's [End Page 481] edited collection. These texts assess comparatively and relationally the ways in which policing indigenous, mestiza, and colonized women's sexualities and intimacies was central to settler colonial and imperial nation-building projects in North America, South Asia, and Southeast Asia. Like these texts, Empire's Mistress also recognizes colonized women's intimate labor (which includes flirting, sex, and seduction) with imperial men as survival strategies that reveal the profound sexual and racial violence at the heart of empire (17). The first half of the book, in particular, illuminates the ways both Cooper and her mother, Josefina, navigated the shifting terrain (both literal and metaphorical) of the "New Filipina" in the Philippines and the US during the Philippines's modernizing and transitional period between Spanish and American colonial rule and during the archipelago's immediate postindependence period. And in its focus on early–to mid–twentieth-century Filipina women's history as national history, Empire's Mistress is a standout text among Filipino studies scholarship by US-based academics, of a kind along with Denise Cruz's Transpacific Femininities: The Making of the Modern Filipina (Duke University Press, 2012) and Genevieve Clutario's articles and forthcoming monograph. How Gonzalez tracks this story through the Cooper archives—or, more accurately, despite the lack of archives—is what truly distinguishes this manuscript from the other aforementioned works, which hew closely to historiographical methods of uncovering lost or buried materials in order to tell different stories. What Empire's Mistress does, instead, is to write into the absences, elisions, and lies of the archive to imagine motivations for Cooper's actions far more complicated than the dominant narrative of her as simply or only the Filipina paramour of famed US General MacArthur. It utilizes a method described by scholar and writer Saidiya Hartman as a practice of "critical fabulation," articulated in her 2008 essay "Venus in Two Acts" (Small Axe, 2008:1–14) and more fully fleshed out in her latest book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (W. W. Norton, 2020: 13, xv), which speculates on the practices of "minor figures" of black women as "radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live." Within the pages of Empire's Mistress, Cooper emerges as a "dangerously desiring subject," a woman who refuses to be captured or contained by the colonial archive, and whose "choices illuminate how people adapted and survived in conditions not of their own making, and in circumstances that were designed to wear away their dignity and humanity" (6–7). Writing across [End Page 482] genres, geographies, and temporalities, Gonzalez creates a "shadow narrative of archival detritus, fabrications, second takes and other...

Correlates of Filipino Students’ Perspectives on Filipinizing the Philippine History Curriculum, Language Preference and Demographics

Correlates of Filipino Students’ Perspectives on Filipinizing the Philippine History Curriculum, Language Preference and Demographics