LIBERATION HISTORYGroundwork for a Local Postcolonial Philippine History: Words, Horizons of Meaning and Liberation History in Nueva Vizcaya
by Erwin R. TiongsonThere is a sense in which historiography is an instrument of liberation.
The scholarship of the late distinguished historian William Henry Scott (1921-1993) best exemplifies the task of reconstructing and reinterpreting a still unmastered Philippine history, while transcending the myopia of colonial accounting. Historians are slowly struggling to rid themselves of the influences of colonial historiography, hoping to find in the process, as Scott puts it, "cracks in the parchment curtain" through which one may see a little more clearly the real history of the Filipinos (Scott 1982:1). It is on this same note that the beginnings of a critical postcolonial history of the old Nueva Vizcaya, a province in the northern region of the Philippines, is attempted, owing to the scarcity of verified and reexamined local histories in general, and the unavailability of an extensive and critical early history of Nueva Vizcaya in particular.
The "unmastered" Philippine history, however, is not really completely unmastered. Significantly, new perspectives themselves are being drawn from the critical sifting of the same massive colonial documentation and historiography. These current attempts at drawing fresh perspectives are rooted in a contemporary philosophical insight that views man as embodied subjectivity, that is, as an interiority always seeking an appropriate incarnation. An analysis of the implications of this insight allows us a corollary insight into language as embodied thought. Language, then, like the meaning-giving existence of each human body, should no longer be understood as simply an abstract set of symbols, but rather as that which makes incarnate the consciousness of a people.
This insight allows us to understand certain facets of prehispanic politics. For example, the refusal to seal a pact in a manner authentically binding for the native parties to the pact reveals a curious interiority: an absence of prior intent to keep the pact. For Scott (1992:8), a clear example is the case of Rajah Soliman, the local sultan at the time of the Spanish conquistador Miguel Lopez de Legazpi's founding of Manila as the Philippines' capital city. The absence of a blood compact to seal Soliman's 1571 peace pact with Legazpi indicates a more problematic absence, as Soliman's later attacks against the Spaniards would show. From the native standpoint, after all, no pact was ever made.
The case of the village Tuy, located in the province also called Tuy (or Ituy), the old name of Nueva Vizcaya is most telling. According to the 1609 Juan Manuel de la Vega account, a peace pact was indeed made in 1591.
Don Luis, having reached the river called Tuy, which is at the entrance of the said province, ordered a cross to be made there on a tree, rendered thanks to God, and took possession, in his Majesty's name, on the fifteenth of July of the said year. On the sixteenth, after having told the inhabitants of that village, which was called Tuy, that he came in order to make them friends of the Castilians, and to have them render homage to his Majesty, so that the latter might take them under his royal protection, and so that they might be instructed in matters of the faith...They swore peace after their own manner [italics mine], which consisted in Don Luis and another-a chief, who spoke for all-each taking an egg, and throwing the eggs to the ground at the same time; they said together that just as those eggs had been broken, so they would be broken, should they not fulfil their promise. [Blair and Robertson, vol XIV, 282-283]
With hindsight we know that this particular promise was kept, at least by the natives of the village Tuy present during the pact, perhaps primarily because it was made in a manner truly binding from the native standpoint. And although centuries later Philippinos may wonder how much of their interiority was lost by keeping this promise, Tuy remains a valid case in point.
Extending the insight further, any historical account may be seen as that which, knowingly or unknowingly, institutionalizes and preserves a consciousness, and in turn also unavoidably shapes the consciousness of a people. And because any account is from a particular perspective, and therefore, an interpretation, the danger of its "meaning-giving existence" becomes evident.
Words
As we proceed with the sifting of various accounts concerning the province Tuy, it is perhaps best to be responsibly aware of the various nuances of particular accounts.Prior to the 1591 Luis Perez Dasmarinas expedition, for instance, Tuy was reputed to have been, at least according to de la Vega's account, peopled by tribes that were "numerous and warlike, and were hostile," explaining the abortion of an earlier expedition led by Dionisio Capolo, a native chief from Manila (Blair and Robertson, vol XIV, 282). This also made understandable certain peripheral native reactions during the generally "successful" Dasmarinas expedition. It explains why, for instance, a native chief, also named Tuy, later "reproved the Indians severely for having made peace; and caused them to break it by hostilities," (Blair and Robertson Vol. XIV, 284). The people of the province Tuy, after all, have always been "hostile" and "warlike," and provided the last general resistance area in the main Philippine island of Luzon, during the time, and this particular hostility was quite expected.
The Dominican historians Pablo Fernandez and Jesus de Juan, in their work on the social and economic development of Nueva Vizcaya (1968:68-69) discuss in detail the strategic role of Nueva Vizcaya in securing all of the northeastern Luzon region known as Cagayan Valley, and thus the main island of Luzon, guaranteeing national security in the process. The province Cagayan was subdued much earlier, and the native Cagayan village of Lal-lo was chartered as a city (Nueva Segovia) as early as 1591. Nueva Vizcaya was then the last general resistance area in Luzon and was certainly of strategic priority.
Gomez Perez Dasmarinas, the Spanish governor-general of the Philippines in 1591, and succeeding governors-general, clearly recognized this. During Dasmarinas' term, after all, Nueva Vizcaya was important enough to merit three explorations in a single year: the Don Luis Perez Dasmarinas expedition (July 7 - August 8, 1591), the Francisco de Mendoza expedition (August 6 - September 6, 1591) and the Pedro Cid expedition (November 4 - 30, 1591). More significant, Nueva Vizcaya warranted a dangerous exploration led by Dasmarinas' own son, Don Luis. The strategic religious significance of the province is even more impressive. According to Fernandez and de Juan (85-91) it merited missionary attempts by no less than three religious orders: the Augustinians in 1591, possibly much earlier, and again in the 1700s; the Franciscans in 1594, 1600 and 1611; and the Dominicans from the 1600s onward. Fernandez and de Juan's discussion of Vizcaya's strategic importance relies heavily on the 1690 writings of Pedro Jimenez, a Dominican missionary of Cagayan in 1690, identifying the ease of commerce in Cagayan-Manila, the political safety of all Luzon, and the Cagayan-Manila missionary convenience as primary considerations in establishing Spanish rule in Nueva Vizcaya.
Even the "mere desire of making a way by land...through Ituy" remained unaccomplished, however, way into the 1700s due to native opposition (Fernandez and de Juan, 69). Antolin says:
One can see there how hard it was to open and level this new road, a feat which could not be effected up to the year 1738, due to the great opposition of the unbaptized natives, especially of those working in the gold mines [Fernandez and de Juan, 70].
This further underscores a kind of constancy in native resistance, with Nueva Vizcaya as indeed the last general resistance area in Luzon, a bottleneck of sorts in the 1500s and centuries after.
In this way we can become more wary of the possible Eurocentrism of words like "hostile" and "warlike," enabling us in the process to question the alleged misguidedness or irrationality of certain native reactions and traits.
More important, it allows us to trace even further back the beginnings of a political and cultural consciousness of selfhood. It then becomes evident that in Luzon during the late 1500s, much like in Mactan in the early 1500s, where the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan was slain, some people were critically aware of a dignity at stake in peace pacts with a foreign power. Such pacts legitimized eventual political colonization and tribute collection. In this context, "hostility" may ironically be reinterpreted as one of the first manifestations of the roots of nationalism.
Horizons of Meaning
Attempts at an articulation of prehispanic Nueva Vizcayan life are also, notably, reverse articulations of sorts, as they draw heavily from Hispanic accounts. Through the July 15, 1591 expedition of Don Luis, for instance, Tuy is finally officially explored and various pre-1591 reports, ranging from descriptions of Tuy's supposed "excellence" to, surprisingly, its alleged "barrenness," were verified. For de la Vega, the Dasmarinas expedition was aimed at "the removal of errors by ascertaining with certainty what [Tuy] contained," (Blair and Robertson, 308).From the June 1, 1592 letter of Don Luis, we then know the following about Tuy and its people, giving us today a first profound glimpse of a prehispanic Vizcayan self, caught in an almost schizophrenic tension between political awareness and chauvinism, assertion and submission:
The Indians are robust, intelligent and energetic. All the houses are large and quite well constructed. The villages contain about five hundred or more inhabitants. Two crops of rice are gathered, one being irrigated, and the other allowed to grow by itself. The land contains deer, buffaloes, swine, goats, poultry, anise, ginger, cotton, and many wild fruits. The people display more politeness and good manners than all the others. They have places set apart where they discuss public matters. They say that public affairs must not be discussed in the houses with women. When asked if they had enemies, they answered, "Yes, we would have them if we would leave our land to commit depredations. But we are not like you Castillians, who rob everywhere." They recognize no king among themselves, nor any other sovereignty than to have a chief in each village, who is over all, and whom all of that one village alone recognize. [Blair and Robertson, VIII 251]
Gomez Perez Dasmarinas, in a 1593 letter to King Philip II, later reports the following observations, in view of the results of the July 1591 exploration and the two other expeditions that immediately followed:
I am thinking of founding a Spanish settlement there. This latter I propose doing, on account of the fertility of the region, and its superior climate, as well as the robustness of the Indians, and their great vigor and intelligence. They have large villages and houses, abundance of rice, cattle, fruit, cotton, anise ginger, and other products. In that region fifteen thousand tributaries are subject to your majesty's obedience. [Blair and Robertson VIII, 254]
De la Vega's account supplies further details of prehispanic life in the Tuy region, noting, for instance, that "many little boys and girls were observed in that village [Agulan] who wore gold necklaces of as good quality as those of the moros of manila, and good enough to be worn in Madrid," (Blair and Robertson XIV, 295). In another village, Yrao, the Spanish delegation saw "chased gold necklaces," "armlets reaching to the elbow," and anklets and earrings of fine gold, (Blair and Robertson XIV, 295).
De la Vega's particular interest in native bodily accessories hardly comes as a surprise in view of De la Vega as a leading proponent of the exploration of the "Igorotte gold country."
Unfortunately, it is on a similar note that we begin to recognize the shortcomings of such a reconstruction.
Any attempt at a reconstruction of prehispanic life reaches a standstill of sorts as it begins to come to terms with the fact that it will always draw heavily from Hispanic accounts, and that a drawn "prehispanic" world is never completely prehispanic, precisely because it is already from a Hispanic period and perspective. And the dangers of a colonial viewpoint remain: potential misrepresentation, even active distortion. A critical evaluation of such historical accounts is then the rational alternative, in Tuy's case, a cautious understanding of the preceding accounts.
Native "politeness" and "good manners" may then be re-evaluated as possibly supposed, perhaps even forced, in the context of an accomplished pacification. The politeness may be not unlike that of the unyielding native chief Tuy finally begging Don Luis' forgiveness while "promising peace and the payment of the tribute in products of the land," (Blair and Robertson XIV, 285). And "good manners" allow a more extensive subjugation of Luzon, assuring total tribute collection and colonization in the process. Tuy natives displayed politeness and goodness more than all the others, most certainly, but in an altogether different context. And even the reported native intelligence, supposedly nurtured by the beginnings of a consciousness of local sovereignty, is called into question. What we have then is a profound, yet most pathetic first glimpse of a self, the colonized self, seen from the point of view of the colonizers.
Liberation History
Continuing research allows us to finally confront the problems of those relying mainly on English-language authors who in turn relied heavily on English translations of primary sources. For instance, in his Looking for the Prehispanic Filipino: Mistranslations and Preconceptions, William Scott points out a deletion in a Blair and Robertson translation of a 1693 Dominican history written by Baltazar de Santa Cruz. This history includes an account of interior wars engaged in by Christian converts of Nueva Vizcaya:Those Indians were at war continually with other people of the interior, more powerful, who greatly persecuted them, and the faith of Christ. [Scott 1992:7]
The deletion of the whole clause "for having submitted to the Spaniards and the Faith of Christ" in the Blair and Robertson translation distorts the account. For Scott it suggests an ignorance of a dominant political pattern: that the converted majority consequently became enemies of pagan natives.
This particular error leads to interesting research on "cultural minority" as a created political designation, a point Scott himself explores through a case study of the Isnegs, a tribal group in Northern Luzon (Scott, 1974). But more than that, this initiates research on the ironic dynamics of a national identity in the perennial process of becoming, dynamics which national artist Nick Joaquin studies, using the McLuhan framework, in his essay "Culture and History," (1989). The Spanish colonial regime may therefore be seen as technically responsible for the creation of a Filipino community by assimilating, through acculturation and other processes, groups that were previously independent, both culturally and politically. Meanwhile, ironically, those who struggled to preserve their prehispanic heritage became less and less "Filipino."
But while this perspective further obscures, and perhaps intensifies the continuing debate on what constitutes Filipino identity, it does offer another glimpse of what Renato Constantino (1975, 1-9) refers to as the history of the inarticulate. More important, it questions a pervasive stereotype of colonial accounting, specifically, the stereotypical view that by around 1600 everyone in the Philippines except for the Moslems of Mindanao was submissive to colonial control.
On the contrary, the fact that the passage in question is included in a Dominican history (and not Augustinian or Franciscan, congregations supposed to have participated in missionary expeditions earlier than the 1607 Dominican mission), is already indicative of continued interior resistance even long after 1600 in Tuy. And, taking after Constantino's efforts to draw the history of the inarticulate from the history of the articulate, an examination of later writings would corroborate this perspective.
The Spanish clergyman Pedro Cubero Sebastian, for example, famous in the 1600s in Spain as a world traveller, wrote the following passage in his 1668 writings on the Philippines:
To the northeast of Cagayan province (that is, to the north and to the east) are the famous and rich islands of Japan which are 300 leagues away. From Cagayan province I have been assured that, on clear days, the land of China can be seen. On this arm of the land (almost 100 leagues long by 160 leagues wide) to the east is the province of Baler that has been pacified. The midland of all these five provinces is called Ituy, inhabited by pagans awaiting conquest. [Pires & de Cevallos, italics added]
Examinations like this serve to initiate a re-evaluation of Filipinos no longer seen as mere passive receptors of colonial rule but as active and reactive determinants of their history. Even subjugations which did take place are in fact largely attributed to Filipino participation.
As a case in point, Scott (1974) postulates that had Indios conquistadores not joined Pablo de Carrion in 1581, the Dominican missionary expedition to Cagayan may have never been possible. Similarly, Scott postulates that although the account of the 1592 expedition to Tuy recognizes the efforts of the Augustinian missionaries, the efforts of the native chief Dionisio Capolo in this same expedition seems more repsonsible for to the success of the expedition.
Juan Miguel de la Vega again mentions Capolo's role in the expeditions from 1591 to 1594:
In the year 607 (sic), when the Audiencia was governing, two chiefs of the province came to the house of Don Dionisio. This man had been in all the above expeditions, where he had served with great fidelity. [Blair and Robertson XIV, 299] And Capolo's effectivity may be explained by the possibility that the first actual expedition to Tuy may be credited to him. The De la Vega account of the expedition during Santiago de Vera's term as Philippine governor-general points out that Capolo: ...returned after having gone sixty leguas from Manila-twenty more than the former expedition-on the said exploration. He reported that Indians of the country, his acquaintances, upon learning his errand, advised him not to proceed farther, for the people he was going to discover were numerous and warlike, and were hostile and would kill him. And inasmuch as he had no order to fight, and had but few men, he returned. [Blair and Robertson XIV, 282]
So "numerous and warlike" were the natives that Capolo almost lost his life in a 1595 expedition, meant to locate the Igorot gold mines. This native hostility also further grounds the contention that Tuy and other small Luzon provinces remained practically unpacified long after the year 1600, warranting more commissioning of native troops.
These native expeditions are, of course, vulnerable to contemporary reading of Philippine history as the first cases of treason, of Filipinos collaborating with a foreign power to colonize the rest of the Philippines. But consciousness of the dynamics of an evolving national identity should also caution us against normative postcolonial readings. If, taking after Joaquin, we are to argue that the Spanish colonial regime was technically responsible for the evolution of the Filipino national identity, then the accusation of treason becomes meaningless, or such an accusation remains premature, given what we have yet to know.
What we do know is this: critical historiography is slowly struggling away from a colonial framework, giving us a more honest glimpse of a history yet to be articulated. It is a history of a people who in various ways remained actively engaged in the shaping of its own destiny and identity, and "interior wars" are actualities as much as they are a metaphor of the dynamics of any history-making presence.
Concluding Notes
The critical evaluation of Hispanic accounts or available documentation, however, is a rational alternative to colonial historiography even while the dangers of a contemporary viewpoint also remain, a contemporary perspective equally vulnerable to misrepresentations and even the potential distortions of "excessive" nationalism. Contemporary paradigms are then a potential bottleneck as much as they are a "liberating" approach, as the once colonized self is re-evaluated by a now decolonized self.Yet unless one is happy with a dead end, one has also to eventually come to terms with the fact that all authentic questioning occurs only within a prior horizon of meaning. Echoing Karl Mannheim, a pioneer in the groundwork for an ideological analysis, it may be pointed out that one "who makes no decisions has no questions to raise and is not even able to form a tentative hypothesis...to search history for its answers," (89).
In this context, Spanish accounts are colored glimpses, but glimpses nevertheless, and contemporary evaluations are possibly equally colored, but yet valid evaluations.
Nueva Vizcayan history is, then, something we continue to try to understand, knowing well that it is something we may never completely understand. And every critical historiography is an instrument of liberation, in a history of a continuing struggle for liberation-in all its forms.
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