User:Jondel/Ilustrados

The ilustrados where pivotal in the development of nationalism, development of a Filipino identity and raising the consciousness of the Filipino populace. Propaganda. Jose Rizal

I want to suggest not only that nationalism is inherently conflictual, caught between dynastic/colonial modes of apprehension on the one hand and the possibilities of an egalitarian, postcolonial existence on the other, but also that the means for imagining nationhood may at times be at odds with the very nature of the images that are reproduced. I propose this not as a general theory about nationalism but as a conceptual hook for reflecting on the particular historical moment I'm concerned with: the formative period of Filipino nationalism in the late nineteenth century.

The early Filipino nationalists were a remarkable group. For the most part they were members of an emergent bourgeoisie educated in the universities of the colonial capital of Manila and European cities such as Madrid, Paris, and Berlin. They were well-traveled and multilingual, though Spanish was the preferred lingua franca. And they were all males who self-consciously referred to themselves as ilustrados, literally, "enlightened." From the 1880s to the middle of the 1890s they engaged in campaigns calling for the reform of the economic, political, and educational conditions in the Philippines. Because of the hazards of colonial censorship and threats of imprisonment, the site of their political activities eventually shifted to the more liberal Spanish cities of Madrid and Barcelona.

Known in Philippine historiography as the Propaganda Movement, their political efforts varied widely in scope. Among other things, they organized among Filipino expatriates and Europeans sympathetic to Philippine problems; wrote novels as well as philological, ethnological, and historical studies of the colony; and publicized nationalist causes in the liberal Spanish press and, from 1889-1895, in their own propaganda newspaper, La Solidaridad. Such causes initially had an assimilationist nature: the granting of Spanish citizenship to Filipino colonial subjects by way of equal application of the Spanish civil law to the colony and Filipino representation to the Spanish parliament. But as assimilationist hopes dimmed by the mid-1890s the more prominent leaders of the Propaganda Movement began to favor Philippine independence from Spain. [1]

A crucial feature of the nationalist movement was the ilustrado critique of the Catholic Church, a key institution in the history of Spanish colonialism (Phelan; Rafael). Filipino nationalists were particularly antagonized by the enormous influence of the Spanish friars whom they held as chiefly accountable for the colony's backwardness. They saw the friars as forces of reaction, and with good reason, for they regarded Filipinos as inferior to Spaniards, liberalism and learning as threats to the power of the Church, and the ilustrados themselves as subversives. It would be difficult to overstate the political and symbolic import of the Spanish friars for the Filipino ilustrados. In nationalist writings, they were seen as figures of denial and agents of exclusion, hoarders of wealth and women, purveyors of religious fetishism, and merchants of ritual practices and devotional paraphernalia. [2]

The Jesuit historian John Schumacher rightly notes that without the Spanish clergy, Filipino nationalism would have taken a different course (272-278). The friars occupied a near-totalizing significance in the minds of the ilustrados and came to represent the negative limit in the formation of nationalist consciousness in the late nineteenth century. In this sense we can think of them as mirror images of Filipino nationalists. Indeed, the intensely negative tenor of anti-friar rhetoric among the ilustrados was a way of recognizing the Spanish clergy as the source of their own divided identity. For as the Filipinos repeatedly pointed out, the friars were themselves doubled, split between spiritual and material concerns. Despite their vows of celibacy, they were accused of using the confessional to prey on the gullibility of women and thus monopolize access to their bodies and minds (Rizal, Escritos 55-65; Lopez-Jaena 203-227). As figurative fathers, they were invested with phallic authority yet were often snidely referred to by the ilustrados as "men in skirts" and "soured nurses" (Guerrero 82, 115). Representatives of Catholic monotheism, the friars nonetheless acted like pagan priests (babaylan), encouraging the substitution of faith with the fetishistic regard for an endless array of religious images among the populace. Though mortals, they behaved like gods (diosdiosan); and despite their vows of poverty, they lived lavish lives akin to that of oriental despots.

Spanish fathers were thus seen by the ilustrados as figures not only of denial but also of excess. They were imagined, that is, as going beyond their proper roles and traditional boundaries. Translating between languages and moving between cultures, the Spanish fathers seemed like retrograde versions of the youthful nationalists. The former were thought to monopolize the language of power and the circulation of money and women, thus threatening to cut the latter off from access to their own future. Given the oedipal texture of ilustrado anxieties, it is not surprising to see that the future they imagined and desired took on a specifically feminine shape.

Anderson writes, "amor patriae does not differ ... from other affections, in which there is always an element of fond imagining .... What the eye is to the lover ... language ... is to the patriot. Through that language, encountered at the mother's knee and parted with only at the grave, pasts are restored, fellowships imagined, and futures dreamed" (Imagined Communities 140). In the context of nineteenth-century Philippine nationalism, the association of language with sight and mother with nation is highly suggestive. As we've seen, Spanish fathers figured the negative moment in the production of ilustrado consciousness. Mothers, however, tended to play a far more ambivalent role in nationalist thinking. To the extent that they were imagined to be the source of the vernacular with which to articulate nationhood, real mothers tended to be conflated with figurative mothers, such as "Mother Spain" or "Mother Philippines." Ilustrado sons expressed their relationship to the "motherland" (whether Spain in the early assimilationist phase of nationalist history or the Philippines in the later more separatist period) in familial terms. Equating love of nation with love of mother idealized the former in terms of the latter. Thus could sacrifice and loss appear necessary and reasonable: These were ways for sons to reciprocate the affections of mothers, real or imagined, by acting as their protectors (Rizal, Escritos; Lopez-Jeana).

The love of country was thus far from disinterested inasmuch as it engendered, in the double sense of the term, the idea of the nation. By doing so, nationalist discourse reflected as much as it refracted domestic politics. One way of getting a sense of the complexity of interests informing amor patriae is by taking a look at some of the writings of Jose Rizal (1861-1896), undoubtedly the most prominent and articulate of the ilustrados and the national hero of the Republic of the Philippines. [3]

Library of congress, friatocracy
Following the Spanish revolution of September 1868, in which the unpopular Queen Isabella II was deposed, the new government appointed General Carlos María de la Torre governor of the Philippines. An outspoken liberal, de la Torre extended to Filipinos the promise of reform. In a break with established practice, he fraternized with Filipinos, invited them to the governor's palace, and rode with them in official processions. Filipinos in turn welcomed de la Torre warmly, held a "liberty parade" to celebrate the adoption of the liberal 1869 Spanish constitution, and established a reform committee to lay the foundations of a new order. Prominent among de la Torre's supporters in Manila were professional and business leaders of the ilustrado community and, perhaps more significantly, Filipino secular priests. These included the learned Father José Burgos, a Spanish mestizo, who had published a pamphlet, Manifesto to the Noble Spanish Nation, criticizing those racially prejudiced Spanish who barred Filipinos from the priesthood and government service. For a brief time, the tide seemed to be turning against the friars. In December 1870, the archbishop of Manila, Gregorio Melitón Martínez, wrote to the Spanish regent advocating secularization and warning that discrimination against Filipino priests would encourage anti-Spanish sentiments. THANKYOU