1 The Historian’s Task in the Philippines Political or religious controversy is rarely a conducive context for an introduction to serious history. Such a context, nonetheless, provided my own introduction to the study of Philip- pine history. In 1949, Catholic bishops opposed the use of govern- ment funds to publish Rafael Palma’s biography of Rizal because of the book’s anti-Catholicism. One could easily have gotten caught up in the instrumentalization of history to score debating points in that controversy and gone no further. Fortunately, one of my professors in the seminary, though not himself a professional his- torian, was a scholar with a sound historical sense. He organized for our class a philosophy seminar on Rizal’s life and thought, not to provide ammunition for the controversy, but to understand Rizal and his role in Philippine history by going back to his letters, novels, and other writings in their original languages. A study of Rizal’s writings led to a sharing of Rizal’s convictions8 Historian’s Task on the centrality of historical perspective for a real understanding of the problems of the present. For a young American undergradu- ate 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. My subsequent doctoral studies in history and the succeeding years of historical research, writing, and teaching have only con- firmed the main thrust of Rizal’s insight. I could hardly have found a better introduction to Philippine history than through the life and writings of that most historically minded of all Filipinos of his, and perhaps even of our own, time—Jose Rizal. It was Rizal’s consciousness of the need to know his people’s past that made him interrupt his work on El Filibusterismo, which was to point toward a solution to the country’s problems exposed in the Noli me tdngere. Before planning for the future, as he insisted in the prologue to his edition of Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas, one must unveil that history which had been hidden from the eyes of Filipinos by neglect or distortion. Having acquired an understanding of their past, Filipinos, Rizal hoped, would be able to “judge the present” so that all together might “dedicate [themselves] to studying the future.” 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 picture of the past. He dug through old missionary chronicles that would help him expand on Morga’s narrative. Thus he would show his countrymen that, from a Filipino point of view, Spanish rule had failed to fulfill its promises of progress for Fili- pinos. Indeed, in some respects they had even retrogressed under Spanish rule. Thus, in the light of their past, the present lamen- table state of the Filipinos provided moral legitimation for the struggle to come. But beyond that, the knowledge of their past: nurtured a consciousness of being a people with a common origin and a common experience constituting the national identity around which the future nation could arise. But for all the care with which Rizal combed the chronicles and the acuteness with which he recaptured from a Filipino point of view the events they narrated, he was ultimately a self-trained historian, and a part-time one at that, as he lamented in letters to his friend Ferdinand Blumentritt. Despite his care to document his interpretation on individual points and the illumination he gave to the period, the book as a whole proves too much. Three centuries of Spanish rule, for all its faults, had not been a complete disaster, Historian’s Task 9 Rizal himself was the best proof of that. But he had succeeded in taking a new look at that Filipino past and uncovering the roots of what was good and bad in contemporary Filipino society. Above all, he was able to share with his people a sense of national identity, which, as he once wrote Blumentritt, “impels nations to do great deeds.” Anyone who first studies Rizal's historical writings and then reads Andres Bonifacio’s call to his fellow Filipinos in his “Ang dapat mabatid ng mga Tagalog,” will recognize that Rizal’s hope that his edition of Morga would lay a foundation for the building of the nation was not in vain. Bonifacio, Jacinto, and other Filipinos of the Revolutionary generation found much of their literary and nationalist inspiration in Rizal’s writings. Every Filipino historian can share the basic goals Rizal thought capable of achievement by history—understanding of our past, cultivation of our national identity, and inspiration for the future. Their achievement, however, is not without obstacles. Recovering the Past The relevant Filipino past is not merely the pre-Hispanic period Rizal naturally undertook to illuminate. It will not suffice today, even less than in his time, to skip over the Spanish colonial period on the grounds that there was no Filipino history before 1872. Such an allegation, if meant seriously, betrays more a lack of method than a lack of history. Even with the meager resources at his disposal in the nineteenth century, Rizal had shown that Spanish chronicles could be mined to get beneath the Hispanocentric out- look of these sources. With access today to an enormously wider archival documentation, not to speak of the resources afforded by such cognate disciplines as archeology, linguistics, and anthropol- ogy, a great deal can be learned about Filipino society during both the pre-Hispanic and Hispanic periods. William Henry Scott, the distinguished investigator into somany facets of the Filipino past, has entitled one of his works, “Cracks in the Parchment Curtain.” There is, he says, a documentary curtain of parchment which, at first sight, conceals from modern view the activities and thought of Filipinos and reveals only the activities of Spaniards. But many “cracks” in that parchment, allow the percep- tive investigator to glimpse Filipinos acting in their own world. Or to change the metaphor, much can be learned about Filipino life and society by reading between the lines of Spanish documents. The chroniclers may have aimed primarily to narrate the exploits,10 Historian’s Task devotion, zeal, and hardships of the Spanish missionaries, but they could not help but speak indirectly of the sixteenth-century Filipi- nos whom the missionary succeeded in converting or failed to persuade. Those unintended references are often much more en- lightening to us than any number of explicit analyses of Filipino society. For the latter often reveal as much of the writer’s point of view and biases as they do of the people he professes to describe. It is necessary, however, to know how to put the questions to the documents if they are to give us the answers we look for in them. The Formative Century An unfortunately disproportionate amount of the total research into Philippine history has been devoted to the Revolutionary and the American colonial periods. That is not to say that it has not been fruitful in itself, or that these periods are undeserving of intensive study. The problem is not what has been done, but what has not been done—to lay the necessary foundation for the understanding of the Revolutionary period. For instance, much attention (though little serious study) has been given to the agitation concerning the friar lands. But relatively little has been done to explore the much bigger growth of the nonfriar haciendas—Spanish and Filipino—and the impact on Filipino life of the general nineteenth-century commer- cialization of agriculture. To take another example, some modern historians have pointed to the Negros hacenderos’ quickly embrac- ing 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 regions. The Christianization of the island mostly took place in the second half of the nineteenth-century. Consequently, the island was only organ- ized into fixed settlements during the same period. Hence, whether or not the Negros hacenderos were typical of the Filipino elite (and there are good reasons for doubting it), Negros society as a whole was quite different from other regions, even nearby Iloilo. And unless history is believed to be made only by elites, then the whole of a society must be studied. To illustrate the point, most of Ioilo’s socioeconomic elite were close relatives and associates of their counterparts, and like the Negros hacenderos, many of the Iloilo elite soon went over to the Americans, But the war continued in Panay well into 1901, long after Negros was flying the American flag. The differences in response was not due to different elites, but Historian’s Task 11 to a different society below them—the provincial principales, the Filipino clergy, the wider population. Again, the response of Panay, particularly in its religious aspects, was also different from that of the Tagalog region. Considerable differences in this respect like- wise marked individual Tagalog provinces among themselves. A real history of the Revolution, including the war against the Americans, is still to be written—one that will study the Revolution not just as it took place in Cavite and Malolos or Luzon, but in all the regions of the Philippines. Such a history will show the different degrees and kinds of nationalist response in different regions. It will explore the variations in different socioeconomic classes of regional societies and the political, economic, religious, cultural reasons for these differences. But, such a history of the Revolution will not be possible until further research on a regional basis has been done on the century before the Revolution. Method in History Can history be objective? Obviously it is always written from a point of view. Documents are not self-interpreting, and, therefore, need a human interpreter—the historian. Being human, he brings with him not only his viewpoint, but also his biases and prejudices. The latter the historian should rid himself of, once he recognizes them. Sadly, this is often not the case. But that it is impossible to write without having a point of view is certainly a truism. Few historians today would maintain the nineteenth-century view that history is a science with laws as rigorous as those of the physical sciences. But if “scientific history” in that sense is a myth, the valid use of critical historical method is not. This method in its simplest terms, requires the historian to base himself on documen- tation and to draw the evidence for his assertions or interpretations from the facts found in documents. But not only what constitutes a “fact” but also what constitutes a “document” needs definition. Arriving at the “facts” demands that the historian should demon- strate in detail how he bridges the gap between the documentation and the conclusions he draws from it. If that is so done that other historians are able to verify this process, we can speak of scientific method though reasoned disagreement may exist on the evaluation of the evidence or even its selection. “Documents,” on the other hand, need not be limited to those emanating from government offices or even to memoirs and letters. Other types of documents, though not relating “historical facts,” tell us much about the facts of people’s ways of thinking or their12 Historian’s Task perceptions of reality. These include literary works, books of prayers, even folk art. Since such “documents” are even less self-interpreting than the more conventional ones, their successful use depends even more on the historian’s ability to put the proper questions to them. Though historians may argue about the technicalities of determin- ing the exact meaning of such manifestations of popular thinking and values, Reynaldo Ileto’s Pasyon and Revolution and other writings have demonstrated that such “documents” are a fruitful source for the historian. It is in knowing how to put questions to a document and knowing what questions to put that the historian’s point of view makes a difference. One may be convinced that religion is irrelevant to life. Thus, he will not put to his documentation the questions which might reveal that religious values are stronger than economic factors in moving people to revolutionary action. Another who sees reli- gious history in terms of apologetics will be unlikely to perceive the social and economic factors in religious movements. By the same token, a historian’s nationalist commitment, if not too narrowly conceived, ought to make him put new questions to the past. History never delivers ready-made answers. But the historian’s questions may shed new light on his people’s problems of the present. Nationalist History In one sense, writing history from a nationalist point of view is to be expected from every Filipino historian who loves his country. Indeed, why should he bother to research into his country’s history except for the belief that a more profound and exact knowledge of the past will help to build the future? But various types of “nation- alist history” have obstructed, instead of promoted, the national cause. The prototype of all these was the eccentric and ingenious lucu- brations of Pedro Paterno at the turn of the century on the sup- posed pre-Hispanic past. He tried to show that everything good that he found in nineteenth-century Filipino society, even Christianity itself, was the fruit of some mythical inborn qualities of the race and had existed before the coming of the Spaniards. Contemporary Filipinos like Rizal, of course, laughed privately at Paterno’s so- called history. Unfortunately, his books were not without influence on later textbook writers. 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 infa- Historian’s Task 13 mous Code of Kalantiyaw. These products of a perversely creative imagination were not only accepted but also commented on by respectable American and Filipino historians. The so-called Code of Kalantiyaw, in particular, found its way into history textbooks for generations until it was exposed in 1968 by William Henry Scott in his Prehispanic Sources for the History of the Philippines. This, however, did not prevent a popular college textbook from republish- ing the code in the 1970s, even while adverting to its dubious (better said, nonexistent) authenticity. Nor did it prevent older studies based on Marco’s pseudohistory from being republished in 1979, thus perpetuating 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 a series of supposed works of Fr. Jose Burgos. Among these were a pseudonovel, La Loba Negra, an alleged account of Burgos’s trial, and more than two dozen other pseudohistorical and pseudoethnographie works, all furnished with forged signatures of Burgos. Though the first Burgos forgeries were already questioned before the war, these mixtures of undigested misinformation and anti-Catholic diatribes continued to be manufactured and published until shortly before the death of Marco. What is sadder for Philippine historiography is that even after I published in 1970 a detailed exposure of the forgeries, including photographs of the true and forged signatures, these falsifications of the beginnings of the nationalist struggle continue to be used as if genuine. Such attempts to make history “nationalist” as those of Paterno and Marco, and their perpetuators, are clearly futile. Reconstruct- ing a Filipino past, however glorious in appearance, on false pre- tenses can do nothing to build a sense of national identity, much less offer guidance for the present or the future. More persuasive, at least at first glance, has been the “nationalist history” of the 1970s. The latter rightly rejects the colonialist and elitist approaches to national history. But it likewise finds inadequate “objective” studies of recent professional historians because these allegedly do not involve themselves in the total effort to free the Filipino from his colonial mentality. A truly Filipimo history, it is said, cannot but be a history of the Filipino masses and their struggles. Those struggles have been carried on against Spanish oppression and American exploitation, colonial and neocolonial. They continue against the dominant classes of Filipinos who collaborate in the imperialist exploitation. We must indeed investigate the real effects of the colonial expe-14 Historian’s Task rience to free historiography from colonial myths, such as that which can see in the first half of this century only American benevolent guidance of the Filipino toward democracy and progress. This so-called “nationalist” historiography, however, allows only a one-dimensional consideration of such real and complex issues as Spanish obscurantism and American imperialism. The determinis- tie framework its imposes on the history of the Filipinos, which sees the historian’s task to be merely an analysis of how that history fits into a presumed general historical process of capitalism and impe- rialism, creates a new myth to replace some old ones. For that process has its source in a philosophical construct rather than in the events themselves. The masses, whose story this kind of “people’s history” professes to unfold, do not always think, feel, and express themselves within this constricting framework. To be sure, the historian needs a preliminary hypothesis from which to investigate the past. But if the contemporary historian is not to fall into the trap of the providentialist historians who claimed to see the hand of God or the devil in every phase of the historical process, then the hypothesis must have sufficient breadth of vision to encompass ail the facts. It must be ready, moreover, to alter itself when it does not correspond to the facts. Only the dogmatist can assert that just one way of looking at reality corresponds to the genuine consciousness of the people. A true “people’s history,” therefore, must see the Filipino people as the primary agents in their history—not just as objects repressed by theocracy or oppressed by exploitative colonial policies. It will expect to find that the Filipino people, individually and collectively, have not merely been acted upon, but have creatively responded to the Spanish and American colonial regimes; that they have assimi- lated the good as well as the bad; that they have been moved to action and to progress by their creative interaction with other cultures and not simply been the victims of cultural imperialism. A historiography which studies the real Filipino people may expect to find that religious values have not. simply led to docility and submission, but also to resistance to injustice and to the struggle for a better society. It will take seriously people’s movements that articulate their goals in religious terms, and not merely those that speak in Marxist accents. It will be able to recognize, and criticize when needed, the role religion—both official and folk varieties of Christianity and of Islam—have played in forming Filipino society. A true people’s history will refuse to treat the people as an abstrac- tion manipulated by deterministic forces. A truly nationalist history will try to understand all aspects of the experience of all the Fili- Historian’s Task 15 pino people, as they themselves understood it. It will acknowledge what is valuable as well as what is harmful in the Filipino past. There is a valid sense in which Philippine history should be written from the point of view of the masses. Historical research and writing should aim to undergird the formation of a society that provides justice and participation not only to the elites of power, but to every Filipino. Though not the task of history alone or even principally, history's contribution is to present the Filipino past that really was, in all its variety. Not all of that past will provide inspiration for a better and more just society. But by depicting the whole of reality, history will make it possible to reform and reshape that society toward a better future. The historian as nationalist can do no less.