When all is said and done, what is a Filipino? How do you identify him in a lineup that
includes an Indonesian cabinet minister, a Hongkong taxi driver, an Indian guru, a Neopolitan monsignor, a banderillo from Seville, and a
Puerto-Rican bus boy from New York Hilton?
Can one do so simply from Bertillon measurements, skin coloring, shape
of nose, and the presence (or absence) of the Mongolian eyefold? Or does one have to resort to more intangible
indications, “mindset”, “spiritual profile,” or whatever is the currently
fashionable term for speculations not subject to measurement and hence more
enticing to the essayist, as being more difficult to dispute?
Allow this essayist to attempt the latter option – the line
of least resistance for one who, after four years in the hard-driving,
task-oriented West, has returned to the shade of his native mango tree to
recover in a supine position his Filipino identity.
This particular mango tree happens to be within sight and
sound of the sea; and so the first thought that comes to one is that Filipinos
were in the beginning a sea-faring people.
They had to be, for how else could they have populated an archipelago? There are, of course, those earlier
Filipinos who came dry-shod (or
barefoot) over the land-bridges of some forgotten ice age. But even they, who claimed for themselves the
proud title of Lords of the Land, will admit upon reflection that the Filipino
identity begins with the sea-faring Malay, the adventurer who named his
settlement on sheltered beach or river-mouth, as a matter of course, after his
sailing vessel, his barangay.
Barangay: the name today of a community of peasants – of
landlubbers. Which is a puzzlement. Where on earth (or sea) did the seamen
go? Before the Spaniards came, they were
still there; very much so. We have fleeting
glimpses of them trading from Batangas to Sabah to Malacca; a triangular trade,
as economists are at pains to inform us, except that these venturesome spirits
did not hesitate to protract one or the other side of the triangle. Coasting, it would seem, up to the Malay peninsula
and down the Indian subcontinent, they ran before the wind to Madagascar, where
as a result, people still speak a sort of Tagalog called Malgache.
Even after the Spaniards came the seamen survived – after a
fashion. If the Filipino Muslims of the
south were able to successfully to resist Spanish domination, it was in part
because their light swift caracaos
were more than a match for the lumbering Venetian galleys of the colonial
government’s interisland fleets. And the
historian Delgado goes on record that if the Spaniards officered the fabulous
Manila galleons, those who built them, and sailed them, and manned their guns,
and sent Dutch raiders yelping back to Batavia with their tails between their
legs, were Filipinos.
Nevertheless, the fact remains that Spanish colonial rule
made Filipinos, as a rule, turn their backs on the sea and face inland; changed
them (a sea-change) from seamen to peasants.
Perhaps this was a gain; a step forward in development. For this is a rich land; after centuries of
erosion by tropical typhoons, a land fantastically fertile even today, a land
capable of producing “tatlong ani sa isang taon” – three rice harvests a year –
as the signboads set up by an enterprising mayor in my part of country
proclaim.
At any rate, what the Spaniards initially contributed to our
national development was to make us more conscious of the potentialities of our
soil in various ways; by teaching us, for instance, as did the Dominicans in
Zambales, to substitute the Andalucian plough for the “sticks hardened in the
fire” with which
we used by turns to repel hill men on the warpath and plant rice in the
paddies. Moreover, the employment of the carabao as a work animal in addition
to being (as Pigafetta, Magellan’s Boswell, observed) a mere mount and status
symbol of the datu class – a
pre-Spanish Hispano-Suiza, in effect – was probably a Spanish insight. And then it was the first bishop of Filipinas,
Salazar, who persuaded us to build in stone, personally prospecting for the
best adobe as far up the Pasig as Makati; and it was his Jesuit friend
Sedeño, who drew the plans and supervised the building of the first walls of
Intramuros.
That these innovators were missionary priests may be surprising,
but really should not be. The laymen who
came to the Philippines with and after the conquistador
Legaspi – soldiers, adventurers, bureaucrats – became immediately absorbed in
the risky but extremely profitable galleon trade of which Manila became the
center. This consisted in buying from
the Cantonese sampan traders cheap
(or what they thought cheap, poor fellows) Chinese silks, brocades, and
bric-a-brac and selling them dear (or what the poor fellows thought dear) at
the annual Acapulco fair, the galleons returning – unless intercepted by some
British privateer – laden by Mexican silver (most of which went to China). Enough remained, however, to make the public
fountains in Manila flow with red wine instead of water whenever a galleon hove
safely home, enough to replenish the coffers of the obras pias – the colonies’ charitable fund, which also functioned
as its merchant bank – and thus enable it to underwrite next year’s
voyage. But most of all, enough to keep
the dons glued to Intramuros, thus
leaving the rest of the country to the management of missionaries.
What the missionaries did with this island people in the course of
three centuries may be simply told. They
made it for the most part Christian, and did such a good job of it that the
Philippines may still be called with justice “the only Christian nation in the
Far East.” We take this phenomenon a
little too much for granted. It deserves
the tribute of some wonder, and social scientists and theologians – a cordial
collaboration, one hopes - should make an effort to find an
explanation. It will probably elude
them; but even that would be something gained.
One of the most attractive features of this Christianity, at least
that of ordinary Filipinos – “folk Christianity,” as it is sometimes rather
superciliously called – as the way it has taken to itself some of the basic
insights of our pre-Christian beliefs, not exactly giving them the key to the
Kingdom, but extending to them, in a sense, the citizenship of the Gospel. The perception of our ancestors that the
great God – Laon, the Ancient of Days
– is best approached through the mediation of intercessory powers, has become
absorbed among us into Christian communion of saints, that is why our
Christianity is so colorful.
The town and barrio fiesta takes it origin from it; the Santacruzan and Flores de Mayo, Tres Reyes, and the observanses of Christmas,
Longinus and the observances of Holy Seek.
But more than that it gave rise to the whole corpus of folk art and folk music: the awit musicologists have been for sometime been collecting on tape,
and the santos foreign visitors
blithly bear home with them, not because they are particularly devoted to the
saints these images represent, but because the craftsmen who made them were,
and because they were, received the grace to make them not only works of piety
but works of art.
There were, of course – and there are – two significant minorities
who resisted Christianization: the Muslims in the south and the Chinese
everywhere. That Muslim Filipinos found
it impossible to accept Spanish colonial rule was, it must be admitted, as much
the fault of Christians as much as of Muslims.
Christian Filipinos fell heirs to the mortal enmity between “Moro” and
“Catolico Romano” generated by the Spanish reconquista,
the martial epic whereby the Spanish Christians recovered their homeland from
the Moros. Our moro-moro play is witness to the fact.
These vicarious conflict was compounded by three local casus belli. First, the Muslim states of island Southeast
Asia, having been deprived by the Portugese and Dutch of carrying trade in
their own seas, found a lucrative alternative to large-scale slaving raids on
Visayan islands, where the colonial government had conveniently gathered the
scattered barangay settlements in easily accessible town near the
seashore. The grimly efficient military
campaign by which the Americans kept Mindanao and Sulu part of this nation; the
campaign that made a name for Generals Pershing and Wood and for the only gun
that could stop the Moro juramentado
dead on his tracks: the Colt .45. Third,
the unplanned, unregulated migration of Christian farmers and loggers into
Mindanao, the “land of promise,” creating disputes over what was public land,
what private, as fruitful in gunfights and gunfighters as the saga of the
American Wild West.
The Chinese were unassimilable for a different reason. The Nan Yang Chinese, those who migrated to
the South Sea, not only came from a culture more advanced technologically, but
were, in general, enterprising, industrious and dexterous folk, not a little above
sharp practice when the occasion offered.
They had to be, to survive. But
they did more than survive. They made
themselves indispensable. Indispensable
to the colonial rulers – Spanish, Portugese, Dutch, British – as artisans,
tradesmen, contractors, compradores. But
no less indispensable to the peasantry, for whose products they found a market and
to whom they brought (for a price) the pans and ploughshares, the needles and
hairpins peasants cannot produce themselves.
Every small-town Filipino includes among his boyhood memories the
Chinese rice or copra dealer sitting Buddha-like beside his bodega door,
sitting and smiling there, not only for hours but seemingly for centuries; and
the more agile Chinese sari-sari
storekeeper marking up on the wall the cup of soy sauce mother sent you to buy
on credit.
The Chinese became, in short, a Filipino middle class, but one
incapable of definition in Western terms; a middle class sui generis, small but cohesive, alien but essential. Their essential role in the colonial society
depended, in fact, on their being both cohesive and alien. As such, they earned the mistrust of the
European and the resentment of the indio;
mistrust and resentment tempered by their inability to imagine a state of
affairs without the Chinese in the middle.
The Philippines (as usual) played a curious variation of this
basic Southeast Asian theme. Owing to
the Spanish government’s decision not to admit Chinese women into the colony,
the Chinese who chose to settle permanently here took Filipina wives, thus
creating a Chinese-Filipino mestizaje. It was from this blending of the oldest and
the youngest cultures of East Asia that many of the leaders of our national
movement came. In lieu of a catalogue,
suffice it to recall the the paternal great-grandfather of Rizal, our national
hero, sometimes referred to as the “Great Malayan”, was pure Chinese.
It also served, naturally enough, to gentle our attitude toward a
certain tolerance – roughened a bit, it is true, by coarse, peasant humor. The Chinaman, in fact, became one of standard
clowns in the intermezzi of our
moro-moro plays, as the satirical folk songs, “Magtigil ka, intsik bejo,”
vividly recalls.
At any rate, our Chinese problem really began when, in the late 18th
and early 19th centuries, we began to produce a middle-class of our
own – a rather large segment of which, ironically enough, consisted of
Chinese-Filipino mestizos. This incipient middle class of landowners,
merchants and professionals soon came into competition with the “intermediary” Chinese
community; a competition that extended with compound interest from the colonial
into the national period, giving rise to such concrete issues as, in the fairly
recent past, “Chinese control of the retail trade,” and in the even more recent
past, “overstaying Chinese”.
The ultimate answer to this question of unassimilated minorities,
Muslim and Chinese, is faily simple.
They must be assimilated – or, more precisely, integrated – into the
natonal community. The problem is
how. The problem is process. #
