THE HISTORIANS TASK IN THE PHILIPPINES
INTRO:
-Political or religious controversy is rarely conductive context for an introduction to
serious history
1949-Catholic bishops opposed the use of government funds to publish Rafael Palma’s
biography of Rizal because of the Books Anti-Catholicism
-A study of Rizal’s writings led to a sharing of Rizal’s convictions on the centrality of
historical perspective for a real understanding of the problems of the present.
-For a young American undergraduate seminarian recently arrived in the Philippines and
anxious to become familiar with Filipino thought, history, and culture
-Rizal’s insistence on the need for Filipinos to understand their own past if they were
effectively to shape their future struck a sympathetic note.
-It was Rizal’s consciousness of the need to know his people’s past that made him interrupt
his work on El Filibusterismo, which to point toward a solution to the country’s problems
exposed in the Noli me tangere.
-Before planning for the future, as he insisted in the prologue to his edition of Antonio de
Morga’s Suecos de las Islas Filipinas, one must unveil that history which had been hidden
from the eyes of Filipinos by neglect or distortion.
-Driven by this purpose, he spent long months in London’s British Museum, copying out
painfully by hand Morga’s account as the basis for his pictures in the past
-Spanish rule had failed to fulfill its promises of progress for Filipinos
-Thus in the light of their past, the present lamentable state of the Filipinos provided moral
legitimation for the struggles to come.
-Three centuries of Spanish rule, for all its fault, had not been completely disaster.
RECOVERING THE PAST:
-The relevant Filipino past is not merely pre-Hispanic period Rizal naturally undertook to
illuminate.
1872-There was no Filipino history
-With access t oday to an enormously wider archival documentation, not to speak of the
resources afforded by such cognate disciplines as archeology, linguistics, and anthropology,
a great deal can be learned about Filipino society during both the Pre-Hispanic and the
Hispanic period.
-Even with the meager resources at his disposal in the nineteenth century, Rizal had shown
that Spanish chronicles could be minded beneath the Hisponcentric outlook of this
resources.
-William Henry Scott, the distinguished investigator into so many facts of the Filipino past,
has entitled one of his works “Cracks in the Parchment Curtain.”
-The chroniclers may have aimed primarily to narrate the exploits, devotion, zeal and
hardships of Spanish missionaries, but they could not help but speak indirectly of the
sixteenth- century Filipinos the missionary succeeded in converting or failed to persuade.
-For the latter often reveal as much of the writers point of views and biases as they do of
the people he professes to describe.
METHOD IN HISTORY:
-Few historians today would maintain the nineteenth-century view that history is a science
with laws as rigorous as those of the physical Sciences.
-Arriving at the “facts” demands that the historians should demonstrate in detail how he
bridges the gap between the documentation and the conclusions he draws from it.
-Reynaldo Ileto's Payson and Revolution and other writings have demonstrated that such
“documents” are fruitful source for the historians.
-One may be convinced that religion is irrelevant to life.
-Another who sees religious history in terms of apologetics will be unlikely to perceive the
social and economic factors in religious movements.
-History never delivers ready made answers. But the historian’s questions may shed new
light on his people’s problems of the present.
-Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution and other writings have demonstrated that such
“documents” are a fruitful source for the historian.
-The Christianization of the island mostly took place in the second half of the nineteenth
century.
FORMATIVE HISTORY:
-An unfortunately disproportionate amount of the total research into Philippine history has
been devoted to the Revolutionary and the American colonial periods.
-Some modern historians have pointed to the Negros hacenderos’ embracing American
rule as typical of the elite betrayal of the Revolution.
-But, as even a casual reading of the history of the Recoleto mission work in Negros during
the preceding half- century makes clear, Negros was one of the most atypical of Philippine
region.
-The Christianization of the island mostly took place in the second half of the nineteenthcentury.
NATIONALIST HISTORY:
-The prototype of all these was the eccentric and ingenious lucubrations of Pedro Paterno
at the turn of the century on the supposed pre-Hispanic past.
-Paterno distorted genuine documents. But more harmful were the early twentieth-century
forgeries of Jose Marco on pre-Hispanic Philippines, the Povedano and Pavon manuscripts
with the infamous code of Kalintiyaw.
-This however, did not prevent a popular college textbook from republishing the code in
the 1970s
-Nor did it prevent older studies based on Marcos pseudohitory from being republished in
1979, thuse perpuating further the distortion of the Pre-Hispanic past.
-Not satisfied with having provided a spurious national past for the pre-Hispanic period,
Marco also wrote series of suppose works of Fr.Jose Burgos.
-Such attempts to make history “nationalist” as those of
-The latter rightly rejects the colonalist and elitist approaches to national history.
1986- The so-called Code of Kalintiyaw, in particular, found its way into history textbooks
for generations until it was exposed by William Henry Scott in his Prehispanic Sources for
the History of the Philippines.