EMERGENCE OF THE NATIONAL-POPULAR IMAGINATION IN THE PHILIPPINES (1896-1940)

 

CHARTING THE EMERGENCE OF THE NATIONAL-POPULAR IMAGINATION IN

THE PHILIPPINES (1896-1940)

by E. San Juan, Jr.

Polytechnic University of the Philippines

We did what we ourselves had decided upon—as free people, and power resides

in the people. What we did was our heritage…We decided to rebel, to rise up and strike down the

sources of power. I said, “We are Sakdals…No uprising fails. Each one is a step in the right

direction.

—Salud Algabre, a leader of the Sakdalista Uprising, 1935

Writers are, by the nature of their chosen task, the spearhead of progress. They voice the

grievances as well as the aspirations of a nation; they document its achievements; they treasure

for posterity the worthwhile efforts of man. They are the critics of things as they are; they are the

dreamers of things as they should be; they cannot escape a large part of the responsibiility for the

shape of things to come.

—Resolution of the First Filipino Writers Conference, 25 February 1940;

Philippine Writers League

Of all theoretical concepts dominating global exchanges, nationalism has proved

the most contentious and intractable. A wise commentator from Cambridge UK, John

Dunn, has probably seized the twin horns of the dilemma underlying the phenomenon.

He diagnosed contemporary nationalism as “a moral scandal because the official ethical

culture of almost the entire world is a universalist ethical culture.” Despite this, he

locates its efficacy in its paradoxical situation: “If democracy is the resolved mystery of

all constitutions, nationalism is perhaps the resolved mystery of all boundaries in a

world which is densely practically related across boundaries—a world of international

exchange and drastically unequal power and enjoyment” (1979, 62). Precisely this

international linkages would be inconceivable without the persistence of nations, or

nation-states, sanctified in Woodrow Wilson’s proposal to affirm the right of selfdetermination

for all nations, at least those already extant, but not for peoples under

colonial rule or about to be annexed.

Dunn’s Eurocentric view seems unconscionable in light of the emergence of

socialist nation-states such as China, Cuba, Algeria, Vietnam. We understand that Dunn

was addressing the excesses of Nazi racial nationalism, while ignoring the British

Empire’s claim to moral superiority and Europe’s ascendancy over people of color in

Africa, Asia and Latin America. We need to be reminded that Rudyard Kipling’s famous

poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” was a triumphallist apology for US troops marching

into the islands and civilizing those uncouth, sullen Filipinos. Since the Filipino 

American War of 1899-1913, the yet “uncivilized” masses of Guinea-Bissau and Cape

Verde Islands, to cite just one instance, have begun to build their nation on the ruins of

the Portuguese empire in 1974, a year before the victory of the Vietnamese over the US

empire and its surrogates (Davis 1978).

President Wilson’s “14 Points” proposal came with the breaking-up of the Austro-

Hungarian Empire in 1918. It offered breathing space for tribal groups in Africa, as well

as a motive or rationale to discover a self, a political medium or state, which can

undergo a “recognizable process of self-determination”. Such aspiration is supposed to

be a political reaction to the Napoleonic conquest of Europe, but surely it preceded

Napoleon. Nations such as France or England had long realized such aspiration

“grounded in some existing sentiment of national or racial identity associated with

common territory, language or religion—to form its own sovereign state and to govern

itself” (Scruton 1982, 421). Following this model, the break-up of the Spanish Empire in

the 19th century led to the formation of Colombia, Venezuela, Chile, Peru, and Mexico

in the South American wars of independence. Led by creoles disillusioned with

theocratic colonialism, the various nationalities or ethnic communities revolted not so

much in the name of national self-determination but with the ideals of the Frencn

revolution—“liberty, equality, fraternity”—in mind.

Transitional Passages

Clearly, as Lenin once put it, we need to distinguish the “nationalism” of the

oppressed peoples against the jingoist/chauvinist “nationalism” of the oppressor nation

(Lenin 1968; San Juan 2002). This is due to the geopolitical law of unequal and uneven

development between metropolitan powers and subordinate, peripheral formations (for

a succinct formulation, see Harvey 1977). In this context, it might be heuristic to pose

the following inquiry. Was the Spanish colony in 1899, about to be annexed by the

United States, just “an imagined community,” as Benedict Anderson (1983) would label

it? Was it an artifice simply generated by print capitalism and commercial exchange

which triggered consent from the letrado minority? Or was it, in Eric Hosbawm’s (1994)

phrase, an “invented tradition”? Or was the Filipino “nation” a process of active genesis

with plural components, not ethnic purity, as the active catalyzer for the national-popular

patria? This “nation” seems to be still undergoing neocolonial metamorphosis today.

Arguably we find elements of all these in analyzing nation-formation as a

collective, heterogeneous process. Print culture certainly displaced orature and

ritualized speech-acts when the galleon trade ended in 1815 and the country was

opened to international trade. But it was not books or printed manifestoes that marked

the advent of integral if syncretic consciousness; it was a rebellion. The consensus is

that the Cavite Mutiny of 1872, the sacrifice of three priests involved in the

secularization movement ushered a widespread consciousness of shared identity.

Rizal, Mabini, and others confirm this view. Renato Constantino sums up this

conjuncture: “Where the concept of Filipino used to have a racial and later a cultural

limitation, the repression that followed the Cavite mutiny made the three racial groups—

creoles, mestizos and natives—join hands and become conscious of their growing

development as a Filipino nation” (1975, 143). Thus, it was the experience of a

“common historical fate” or destiny (Bauer, quoted in Lowy 1998, 46; see also Davis

1978) and the constellation of responses that midwived Filipino nationalism, not print

technology and its bourgeois mediators that spelled the difference.

The 1896 revolution against Spain was initially a product of Filipino creolized

ilustrados, foremost of whom were Jose Rizal, Graciano Lopez Jaena, and Marcelo del

Pilar. In Barcelona and Madrid, the propagandists collaborated on the newspaper La

Solidaridad in 1889. Using Spanish, their declared aspirations were universalistic, not

particularistic, namely: “to combat reaction, to stop all retrogressive steps, to extol and

adopt liberal ideas, to defend progress; in a word, to be a propagandist, above all, of

democratic ideas in order to make these supreme in all nations here and across the

seas” (Agoncillo and Guerrero 1970, 143). There was no mention of a common

language, distinct territory, cohesive economic unit—the prime characteristics of a

nation, not of a tribal or racial assemblage.

The Spanish colony then was an assemblage of feudal-managed haciendas,

scattered ethnolinguistic communities dominated by the Church. The secularist

reformers espoused democratic, libertarian principles. If we follow the classic Marxist

formula, they should have demanded the creation of a national market for a

homogeneous population. Even when Rizal initiated La Liga Filipina to replace the

periodical, the focus transcended the cultural or ethnic qualities of “peoples without a

history” (to use Engel’s phrase) destined to extinction or incorporation by a larger

superior group. The Liga aimed to “unite the whole archipelago into one compact,

vigorous and homogeneous body,” provide “mutual protection” and “defense against all

violence and injustice” (Agoncillo and Guerrero 1970, 156). In effect, Rizal expressed a

revolutionary aim by envisaging the creation of a separate, independent social order,

overthrowing the colonial polity.

Andres Bonifacio was one of the original members of the Liga. With the Liga

proscribed, Bonifacio and others organized the Katipunan. Using Tagalog—the native

tongue of the central provinces of Luzon—they articulated the political goal of

separation from Spain, the moral objective of individual rational autonomy, and the civic

ideal of defending the poor and oppressed. Following the credo of mutual aid and

reciprocity, the Katipunan vowed to pay the funeral expenses of it members to undercut

the exorbitant fees of the Church. It demonstrated the dialectic of universal ideals and

concrete action in the process of fashioning a new nation.

One Divides Into Two

Given the anticolonial thrust of the 1896 revolution led by the Katipunan, Filipino

nationalism from its beginning was forged from a national-popular matrix. It was national

in ascribing to the subjugated Indios, the native inhabitants, a cluster of singular

qualities: fraternal sharing of goods, commitment to promises, faith in the enslaved

subalterns’ wisdom and power to create a prosperous, free future. This is the message

of Bonifacio’s manifesto, “Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog”: “Panahun na nagging

dapat na lumitaw and liwanag ng katotohanan, panahon na dapat nating ipakilala na

tayo’y may sariling pagdaramdam, may puri, may hiya at pagdadamayan….Kaya o mga

kababayan! ating idilat and bulag na kaisipan at kusang igugol sa kagalingan ang ating

lakas sa tunay at lubos na pag-asa na mag tagumpay sa nilalayong kaguinhawahan ng

bayang tinubuan” (Agoncillo 1963, 69). From this perspective, one can infer that the

nation being formed will be rooted in the dynamic relations of oppressed, toiling subjects

who have become conscious of their collective plight and, in forging solidarity, begun to

to fashion a liberated future.

Despite the defeat of the Ilustrado-compromised Malolos Republic, and the

capture of the Katipunan-inspired General Sakay, I would argue that Filipino nationalism

preserved its national-popular kernel up to the outbreak of World War II. This implies an

organic connection between intellectuals, the pedagogical agents of knowledge, and the

the affective-feeling sensibility of the masses that can be mobilized for structural

change. The peasant majority and its offshoot, the middle stratum of craftworkers and

pettybourgois traders, supplied the organic intellectuals of the nascent body politic.

The revolution of 1896 survived in underground and legal struggles. 

Bonifacio and the inheritors of the Enlightenment tradition—Isabelo de los Reyes, Tagalog writers

Faustino Aguilar, Jose Corazon de Jesus, and Benigno Ramos, as well as the partisans

of the Philippine Writers League—continued to define the parameters of national

becoming. The anti-imperialist intelligentsia endeavored to synthesize universal

knowledge and local sentiments into a “structure of feeling” (Williams 1961) capable of

mobilizing the masses. The Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci conceived of the reciprocal

interaction between understanding (intellectual) and feeling (the grassroots

constituency) as the foundation of the emergent nation. Writers using the vernacular

proved to be the most effective builders of this shared, communicated “structure of

feeling.”

The failure of the 1896 revolution sharpened the social division of labor, with the

US occupation destroying the productive linkages of family, village and kindred

institutions. The crisis widened the division between city and countryside. Filipino

nationalists tried to resolve their historical predicament by “feeling the elementary

passions of the people, understanding them and therefore explaining and justifying

them in the particular historical situation and connecting them dialectically to the laws of

history and to a superior conception of the world, scientifically and coherently

elaborated-i.e. knowledge” (Gramsci 1971, 418). Thus the revolutionary artists’ project

of historicizing emotional patterns was translated into the task of constructing the

hegemonic (moral-intellectual) leadership of the working class, in alliance with the

peasantry, as the foundation of the emerging Filipino nation (San Juan 2015).

Folk and Proletarian Synergesis

The intellectual practice of Isabelo de los Reyes exemplifies an early attempt to

bridge thought and feeling in quest of a hypothetical nation. Only a sketch of his

complex career can be given here to indicate one example of a nation-building project

(see Mojares 2006; Scott 1982; Anderson 2005).

In 1889 Reyes launched the first vernacular newspaper in the Philippines, El

Ilocano. Pursuing the historiographic recovery embodied in Rizal’s annotations on

Morga’s Sucesos and his recuperation of native poetics, Reyes’ ethnographic

researches—El Folklore Filipino (1889) and Historia de Ilocos (1890) strove to articulate

an identity rooted in specific localities across temporal divides. But, for our purposes, it

was his prison memoirs in Spanish, La Sensacional Memoria sobre la Revolucion

Filipina (1899), and his attack on American imperialism, Independencia y Revolution

(1900), that reinscribed the Katipunan tradition in the annals of labor organizing. In

February 1902, Reyes founded the first labor union under American occupation, Union

Obrera Democratica Filipina; he also edited the first labor-union newspaper, La

Redencion del Obrero. Engaged in the debate on class and national concerns, Reyes

also operated in the ethico-ideological domain of struggle. He collaborated with Father

Gregorio Aglipay in launching the nationalist-oriented Philippine Independent Church

with trade-union members as core followers. Reyes distinguished himself at this time

by spearheading a general strike of factory workers and farm tenants against American

business firms and friar-owned haciendas for which then governor William Taft had to

call the U.S. cavalry to disperse the crowd (Zaide 1970, 461).

Class struggle nourished the national-popular organism in insurrectionary praxis,

a synthesis of economic and political activities in civic society. By deploying flexible

organizing modes, Reyes’ actualized an inchoate theory of radical nationalism that

coalesced national, class, and religious sentiments. His links with rural and urban

agitation provided the catharsis of the economic to the political, the strategic and tactical

requirements, of the campaign against colonial rule. He fused dialectically the particular

nativist elements of culture with universal notions of proletarian emancipation derived

from the socialist and arnarchist movements of Europe. It was Reyes’ activism that relocated

the emergent nation in the arena of the class war against the landlordcomprador

bloc and its American sponsors. In vindicating the ideals of the Katipunan (in

his book Religion of the Katipunan), Reyes suggested that their ultimate goal was really

a “communist republic” (Werning 2011, 88).

Reyes was a political realist, not a doctrinaire syndicalist, so that he participated

in electoral-parliamentary struggles from 1922 to 1928. While his belief in the value of

popular knowledge and other indigenous practices cannot be over-emphasized, or

made polysemous to erase the gap between the universal and particular, it would be

disingenous to overlook his dependence on the virtues of conceptual elaboration

inspired by Proudhon, Bakunin, Marx, and others in the socialist archive. Such a

“problematic indigenism’ “ (Mojares 2006, 363) needs to be dialectically configured with

his intimate associations with versatile intellectuals such as Hermenegildo Cruz who

aided Reyes in founding the first labor federation and who played a crucial role in

connecting the intelligentsia with grassroots insurgency.

Vernacular Speech-Acts

It was in this milieu that the first consistent articulation of class hopes and

nationalist sentiments received symbolic prefiguration in Lope K. Santos’ novel, Banaag

at Sikat (1906). Rendered through allegorical manipulation of typical characters, the

novel focused on the antagonism between capital and labor, with the “national question”

subsumed in the atmosphere of repressive police action and looming treacheries.

Unlike Reyes or the ilustrado Dr. Dominador Gomez, Santos was a soldier in the

revolutionary army in the forests of Laguna and Batangas. He admired Zola, Gorki,

Eliseo Reclus, and other radical thinkers. Together with Cruz, Santos edited the paper

of the printworkers’ union which carried on its masthead the Marxist slogan, “The

emancipation of the working class must be the act of the working class

itself” (Richardson 2011, 21). 

But Santos did not succumb to sectarian workerism (unlike

the US-tutored communists) since his idea of socialism emphasized chiefly moral and

legal egalitarianism. He favored a broad united front of all democratic sectors. The hero

of his novel Delfin, for example, found the U.S. Constitution filled with “socialist

aspirations” informing government policies (Santos 1959, 236). This might explain why

Santos’ book was not prohibited (on this issue, see Torres Reyes 2010; on his refusal to

commodify his novel, see his autobiography Santos 1972, 70-71.). Was Santos trying to

include the ilustrado elite in a hegemonic project of building consensus, even

confounding bourgeois liberal reforms with Marxian socialism?

In the interregnum before English became widespread and Spanish as the

language of public exchange declined, the Tagalog novel blossomed in the midst of

intense mobilization of urban workers. This affected also the pettybourgeois sector of

white-collar workers whose affairs were intimately bound with their worker friends and

relatives in city and countryside. This is reflected in the uniquely psychologized

dramatization of individual, family, and racial conflicts in Faustino Aguilar’s Pinaglahuan

(1907). The “national question” is evoked right at the outset of the plot, giving way to the

plight of the lovers and the imprisonment of the worker-intellectual Luis Gatbuhay by the

collusion of the American factory-owner Mr. Kilsberg and the cunning merchant Rojalde

(Reyes 1982, 45). Rojalde traps the heroine’s father in a scheme that leads to Rojalde’s

possession of her body, already pregnant by Luis—an emblem of the commodified

object of desire, the motherland, caged by the comprador usurper. Focusing on the

hero’s agony in prison, Aguilar’s novel registers obliquely the shock of Sakay’s

execution and the suppression of the last guerilla resistance even as echoes of the

massive May Day 1903 march still resound in the cries of protest from the impoverished

victims of the market system and the decadent feudal patriarchy.

Traditionally, the novel form in the West often dramatized the individualist quest

for a cosmic purpose and meaning in life. This quest is refracted by Santos and Aguilar

in a social-realist direction, via a mimesis of the dialectical interaction of the collective

whole and its parts. In both Santos and Aguilar’s style, we encounter a realism diverging

from the raw slice-of-life, sensational naturalism of Zola and Norris. Their models were

Rizal, Tolstoy, Hugo, and Balzac. Tagalog realism, often didactic or homiletic, sought to

“lay bare society’s causal network” (Brecht 1975, 424) in delineating the countours of

the country’s development, pointing out where the broadest solutions to the most

serious problems afflicting the majority may be found. It is an elaborate refinement of

the melodramatic historicizing realism found in Rizal’s inflammatory Noli Me Tangere

and El Filibusterismo.

The year 1907 also marked the dissolution of the Union del Trabajo de Filipinas

headed by Lope K. Santos. While engaged in union militancy, he edited the daily

newspaper, Muling Pagsilang, which serialized his polemical novel which sold three

thousand copies within the first few weeks—a sign of popular acclaim for a dangerously

provocative act for American censors (Saulo 1990, 7). These two novels deployed the

conventional romantic plot of unrequited or frustrated love as a symptomatic testimony

of how the 1896 revolution (Filipinas figures as adored paramour-cum-mother) was lost

due to betrayal, inherited inadequacies, or fatal convergence of forces beyond the

lovers’ control.

Traversing Metropolitan Boundaries

We need to contextualize these authors in the local-global-regional cross-currents

of the time. Reyes, Aguilar and Santos were all influenced by developments in Europe

at this period, from the Boer Wars (1902), the Russo-Japanese War (1904-05) and the

outbreak of the first Russian revolution (1905-06). In March 1906, the most horrendous

massacre of Moros occurred in the battle of Bud Bagsak, Jolo, where 600 men, women

and children were slaughtered by troops commanded by Gen. Leonard Wood (Tan

2002, 176}. Such non-Christian victims were not yet fully accounted for in the maturing

conscience of nationalists. But workers in Manila in the first two decades of American

rule were clamoring for Philippine independence, perhaps not having yet heard that the

“working men have no nation,” as the Communist Manifesto proclaimed (Kiernan 1983,

344). But they inhabit a place and time that determined their identities whose

physiognomy was actualized in the manifold contradictions of sociopolitical forces that

shaped the rhythm and texture of their everyday lives.

From a synoptic angle, it was the old bondsman’s struggle for recognition by the

aristocratic lord, as Hegel described it.. The ilustrado class (epitomized by T. Pardo de

Tavera and Pedro Paterno) sought modernization via assimilation to the U.S. nation;

they spoke English and joined the bureaucracy. But given the power of feudal oligarchic

instutions and practices that the US colonial regime utilized to control the dissident

population, the democratic ideals purportedly legitimizing it proved ironically discordant.

This created the space for a limited public sphere in which the intellectuals close to the

productive majority can articulate their collective passions by positing an antagonistic

image of the Filipino identity. The utopian promise of independence was translated into

a pretext for crisis that manifested in public discourse. Questions were posed: why and

how can Quezon, Osmena or Roxas speak for the exploited, impoverished nation when

they represent particularistic landlord-comprador interests? Which class can truly

represent the productive populace as “the Filipino nation”?

 

We can diagram the narrative of this conflict between the national-popular

protagonist versus the elitist politicians of the English-speaking landlord-comprador bloc

by concentrating on a few revealing instances when Filipino artists confronted the

imperative of choosing sides, specifically moments when personalistic aesthetics

clashed with ethico-political demands, precipitating a crisis of the whole body politic.

It began even before Aguinaldo surrendered to General Funston. When the

capitulationist ilustrado class defected to the U.S. colonial masters, a significant group

of intransigent intellectuals, represented by Apolinario Mabini (1969), remained faithful

to the principles of the Katipunan. They articulated the cause of the peasant-worker

alliance kept alive up to Sakay’s capture in 1907. The Moros continued their resistance

up to 1913. 

Dramatists like Aurelio Tolentino, Juan Abad, and others resorted to

allegorical modes using Tagalog for wider appeal, defying the Sedition Law of 1901

prohibiting “scurrilous libels against the Government of the United States.” Though

persecuted and censored, they conducted guerilla underground polemics. Periodicals

like the Spanish El Renacimiento and the Tagalog Muling Pagsilang opposed colonial

impositions such as the use of English as the medium of instruction in public schools. In

1908, El Renacimiento published a scathing attack on Dean Worcester, then Secretary

of the Interior, for using his office to enrich himself. Charged for libel, Teodoro Kalaw,

editor, and Martin Ocampo, the publisher, were sentenced to a jail term and fined. In

1909, Kalaw ran for delegate to the Philippine Assembly and won, testifying to the

support of a community larger than the Spanish-speaking citizens (Agoncillo and

Guerrero 1970, 298-300).

Bardic Interventions

It was only during the administration of Francis Burton Harrison and his

Filipinization of the bureaucracy that the function of articulating the popular content of

nationalism passed on to Quezon and the Nacionalista Party. In the fight against

Leonard Wood, the famous scourge of the Moros, Quezon seized the opportunity of

symbolizing the struggle for independence.

Read symptomatically, the intramural “Cabinet Crisis” 0f 1923-27 staged a battle

for hegemony in the realm of the state apparatus and its agencies. Quezon lost but

gained moral high ground when he asserted: “I would rather have a government run like

hell by Filipinos than a government run like heaven by Americans” (Agoncillo 1974, 31).

But this did not alleviate the worsening plight of the majority. In particular, the peasant

majority, severely exploited by rapacious landlords, suffered quietly until 1935. This

predatory caciquism originated from the inquitous land-tenure system that the American

administators preserved, thus keeping the economy underdeveloped and their

oligarchic parasites in power. Various quasi-religious, nativist uprisings occurred

throughout the islands, the most serious of which were led by Ruperto Rios (Tayabas),

Felipe Salvador (Central Luzon), Dionisio Magbuelas or Papa Isio (Negros), the

Pulajanes in Leyte, the Colorums during the 1920s, followed by the Tangulan

movement, the Tayug Uprising, and the Sakdalista in the thirties (Constantino 1975,

270-74)..

We need to remember that metropolitan Manila was only a narrow island in a

larger archipelago of manifold sociopolitical tensions. Aside from the synergistic workerintellectual

collaboration in the first decades of US colonial rule when novelists,

dramatists and poets played central roles, the crisis in the twenties and thirties

witnessed the shift of hegemonic struggle to the countryside. The first significant novel

dealing with the tenancy problem is Lazaro Francisco’s Ama (1929), among others.

Meanwhile, the ideological struggle to assert the popular dimension of culture as

embodied in the vernacular continued with the most celebrated practitioner of the

balagtasan nationwide ritual, Jose Corazon de Jesus, sacrificing his job as columnist in

Taliba. It seemed a deja-vu scenario.

 On Feb 21, 1930, students at the Manila North

High School boycotted their classes to protest Miss Mabel Brummit’s racist conduct.

This was a repeat of the desecration of the Filipino flag by another American teacher in

March 1921 which de Jesus used to attack imperial arrogance by denouncing uncouth

behavior: “Bago ka magturo, /dapat mong makuro, / na bawat bandila ay mahal sa puso

/ ng bumabandilang sa lupa ko tubo,/ Kung ang isipan ninyo’y baluktot at liko, / dapat

kang itapon sa banging malayo./Ikaw’y isang guro / na salat sa turo” (Atienza 1995,

194).

Nine years after, De Jesus felt compelled to intervene again. He asserted

national pride by defending the students who were expelled: “Kung ang ituturo natin

naman dito. / panay na pagyuko sa Wika ng amo, / panay na sumision at lambot ng ulo,

/ ay gagawa kayo ng lupaing hilo” (quoted in Almario 1984, 35). This form of political

engagement via “secondary orality” (e.g., the balagtasan) witnessed in de Jesus’s

intervention, evokes an aura of authority and charisma that surrounds the letrado as a

political leader found in Latin America. The Philippines shares a similar tradition in which

the practice of the spoken word “conjures together the presence of the communal and

the sacred” (Beverley and Zimmerman 1990, 16), the unlettered voice of the people

finding resonance in a nation-oriented discourse opposed to the official culture of the

educated English-speaking elite. By the end of the thirties, however, the writers using

English had become politicized by circumstances following the insurgencies in the

countryside, the post-1929 Depression, and the rise of fascism in Spain, Italy and

Germany, as well as in militarizedJapan.

Art for Whom?

Mark Twain’s satiric anti-imperialist blast, “To A Person Sitting in Darkness,” was

unknown throughout the first two decades. But the Genteel Age was ending. Filipinos

had become aware of works by John Steinbeck, Langston Hughes, Lillian Hellman,

Richard Wright, Thomas Mann, among others (Lopez 1976,9). The establishment of the

Philippine Writers League in 1939, twelve years after the 1927 founding of the Writers

Club at the University of the Philippines which fostered the school of “art for art’s sake”

led by Jose Garcia Villa, marked the convergence of the nationalist and the popular

tendencies in the discursive arena. Salvador P. Lopez’s award-winning collection of

essays, Llterature and Society (1940). may be considered the model of the praxis of the

dialectical synthesis of the national-popular posited by Gramsci for societies in

transition. Between the death of the old feudal system and the aborted birth of

capitalism, we encounter morbid cultural symptoms of the passage. The manifesto of

the League envisioned writers as “workers in the building up of culture” whose values

reject “economic injustice and political oppression”; they are urged to organize to benefit

the community (Lopez 1940, 117-18). Several members, prominent of whom was

Manuel Arguilla, sacrificed their lives fighting Japanese aggression.

In his book, Lopez cited the case of Teodoro Kalaw who quickly moved from the

Ivory Tower to the civic arena as editor of El Renacimiento. In the confrontation with

Governor Wood. Kalaw discovered that “the only true basis of lasting beauty in literature

is—power,” by which Lopez means the ”power” to speak the truth on behalf of improving

man’s condition and the defense of human freedom everywhere (2004, 297, 303).

Contrary to Herbert Schneider’s notion that the Filipino writers succeeded in capturing

“the Malayan Spirit” (1967, 587) under the twin guidance of Villa’s craftminded teaching

and Lopez’s warning against propaganda, we can argue that the nation projected by

both writers in English (such as Arguilla and Rotor) and in the vernacular reflected the

urgent demands of the peasantry and working class that constituted the nation from the

founding of the Socialist Party by Pedro Abad Santos in 1929 and the Communist Party

of the Philippines in 1930 (a year after which it was outlawed and its officers jailed). In

any case, the “Malayan Spirit” found its incarnation in a poignant story of Narciso

Reyes, “Tinubuang Lupa,” published on the eve of World War II: mourning a dead

relative, the young protagonist listens to his grandfather’s recollection of his father’s

courtship days, memory fusing with anxiety and dreams, instilling in him a profound

cathexis of love for the ancestral home, a sense of national belonging (Reyes 1954,

148).

Before the outbreak of World War II, the struggle for hegemony of the nationalpopular

concept began to engage with the problem of emancipating the “productive

forces” in the countryside. The peasantry constituted the largest mass base of the

nationalist struggle before and after the inauguration of the Commonwealth, a

transitional period before the grant of formal independence in 1946. With the

Communist Party suppressed and union activism controlled, intellectuals were forced to

pay attention to the public sphere and reconstruct the strategy of the united front of

peasant-workers. The mediation of organic intellectuals became the necessary agency

to effect the catharsis of the economic nexus to the political realm. This was carried out

in Carlos Bulosan’s stories and essays between 1933 and 1940 (San Juan 2009), in

stories by Hernando Ocampo and Brigido Batungbakal, among others(Lumbera 1982,

116).

Radicalization of the intelligentsia deepened after the 1917 Bolshevik revolution,

the global Depression after the 1929 Wall Street crash, Japanese occupation of

Shanghai in 1932, the Nazi victory in 1933, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in

1936, and Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939. Of the many versatile intellectuals who

performed that mediating role was the poet-orator, Benigno Ramos (after him, the most

illustrious was Amado V. Hernandez whose activism in the fifties and sixties is beyond

the scope of this paper; for Ramos’ influence on Hernandez, see Almario 1984). What

significance did Ramos’ poetic praxis hold for understanding the possibilities and limits

of artistic intervention in radically transforming colonial society at that specific

conjuncture?

Storm over Arcadia

The stage was set for the inauguration of the Philippine Commonwealth on Nov.

15, 1935. It is now public knowledge that the Tydings-McDuffie Law sealed the abject

dependent nature of the country as source of raw materials and dumping ground for

finished, industrial goods. With the economy and state apparatus (legal system, foreign

affairs, military, currency) controlled by the corporate interests in Washington, the

groundwork was set for stabilizing a neocolony. An oppositional movement was needed

to expose the Commonwealth fraud. Conceived by Ramos, the Sakdal party had been

campaigning against maldistribution of wealth, excessive taxes, and for the confiscation

of large landholdings for redistribution to the landless. Luis Taruc, the leading figure of

the Huk rebellion in the forties and fifties, connected that historical specificity (land

hungry peasantry) and the global actuality of that time in his memoir, Born of the

People:

It had been that way under the Spanish regime for centuries. When the

Americans came, they made boasts about having brought democracy to the

Philippines but the feudal agrarian system was preserved intact.

On the haciendas there were laborers who were paid less than ten

centavos a day. Thousands more earned less than twice that much. From ten

thousand miles away the Spreckles sugar interests in California reached into the

sugar centrals of Pampanga and took their fortune from the sweat of Filipino

labor. (de la Costa 1965, 268).

Ramos’ mobilizing organ was the weekly newspaper Sakdal, using Tagalog as

the medium of communication. It began as a vehicle of Ramos’ criticism of the Quezon

regime as composed of lackeys of American imperialism, the landlord-comprador bloc,

the Church hierarchy, and the Philippine Constabulary whose brutal treatment of

peasants sparked violent resistance. The self-righteous Stanley Karnow echoes the

Establishment dismissal of the rebel: “Filipinos thrive on abusive polemics, and Ramos’

vitriolic genius made him an instant celebrity” (1989, 273). Other groups like the

Tanggulan, a patriotic secret society founded by writer Patricio Dionisio, a former

member of the Communist-led Congreso Obrero, voiced their grievances in Sakdal,

making it a national-popular tribune of the disenfranchised masses.

In effect, the Sakdal movement replaced the official political parties as the

articulator of mass sentiments and aspirations, the grassroot “structure of feeling.” The

Sakdal program targetted the educational system glorifying American culture, the

American military bases, and the U.S. stranglehold on the economy. Their leaders

advocated “complete and absolute independence” by December 1936. In the 1934

election, several Sakdal party’s parliamentary strategy proved effective in electing three

representatives, a provincial governor and several municipal posts in provinces adjacent

to the metropoitan center of power. Ignored by Quezon and the oligarchic clique, the

Sakdalista movement mounted an uprising that spread through the provinces of

Laguna, Rizal, Cavite, Tayabas and Bulacan which the Philippine Constabulary crushed

in one day before its fire spread throughout the islands.

A few days before the plebiscite on the Constitution designed to legitimize the

Commonwealth, the peasantry staged a bloody uprising on May 2, 1935 involving at

least sixty thousand armed partisans in nineteen towns. Earlier their peaceful

demonstrations were harassed and permits for assemblies revoked. In the three towns

where the rebellion centered, fifty-seven peasants were killed, hundreds wounded, and

over five hundred jailed (Agoncillo 1970, 418). Ramos was then in Japan, negotiating

for support; eventually he was extradited and jailed. His admiration for the Japanese

ethos and achievement failed to be critical of the reactionary, racist patriotism of its

leaders then gearing up for brutal imperial conquest of his homeland (see Moore 1966).

The Sakdal leadership’s opportunist stance abandoned its mass base by

devoting itself to the propagation of the Japanese-sponsored program of “Asiatic

Monroeism” (Constantino 1975, 370). Notwithstanding its inadequacies, the Sakdal

movement performed a decisive and necessary pedagogical function: it raised the level

of political consciousness in a nationalist-radical democratic direction by connecting the

poverty of the people with the colonial system and its ideological state apparatuses

(education, media, diplomacy). Renato Constantino’s judgment assays the positive

impact of Ramos’ praxis: “The Sakdalista movement, despite its opportunist and fascistinclined

leadership, was a genuine expression of protest, and a milestone in the

politicization of the people” (1975, 370).

Unacknowledged Legislator?

Long before his Sakdal engagement, in 1912 Ramos reacted to the

Westernization of the literary tastes and standards of his milieu: “…it is not pleasing to

be told that on sounds like Victor Hugo, Zamacois, Blasco Ibanez, or any other foreign

writer. We have started to demonstrate that in our country, we have our own literary

masters” (quoted in Lumbera 1967, 311). The imposition of English has been regarded

as the most powerful instrument to commodify culture since the valorization of

exchange-value (profit) over use-value (need) transforms art and literature into saleable

goods no different from copra, sugar and hemp, the bulk of the dollar-earning export

crops. Enforced American English also fragmented the polity, dividing the educated elite

from the plebeian subalterns. Given his pettybourgeois background, Ramos as a key

translator in the Philippine Senate could have easily switched to writing in English. He

did not. In the marketplace of social media, he chose the down-to-earth idiom of the

productive forces, the working class and peasantry, and transformed himself into their

organic intellectual voice.

Earlier we noted how the orator-poet Jose Corazon de Jesus was fired from his

job for criticizing an American teacher, Miss Brummit, for insulting Filiinos. Ramos joined

his fellow writer and lambasted Quezon’s shameless public subservience to the

American colonizers, for which he was immediately fired. Ten days after, Ramos set up

 13

the periodical Sakdal, followed by the founding of the Sakdalista political party in

October 1933. Language became again, as in the first decade, the crucial arena of

ethical and ideological struggle. Given the fact that “all poetry is in origin a social act, in

which poet and people commune” (Thomson 1946, 58), Ramos’ use of the vernacular—

essentially magical and emotive—was a wager of affirming the communicative praxis of

his art. His verses reflect constellations of feeling directed and controlled by the social

ego, by necessities of his particular time and place, in order not only to interpret but to

change the entire social order (Caudwell 19370.

From his youth, Ramos depended on his audience for realizing the value of his

declamatory talent. Without the crowd of listeners and their responses, he is not an

artist; with them he became poeta revolucionario (Almario 1984, 17). He forfeited the

individualist hubris of Villa and chose the task of actualizing the popular virtues inherent

in the tradition of revolutionary Tagalog writing. Under the aegis of winning hegemony

for the plebeian citizenry, “popular” art means (in Brecht’s aphoristic lexicon) “intelligible

to the broad masses, taking over their own forms of expression and enriching them/

adopting and consolidating their standpoint / representing the most progressive section

of the people in such a way that it can take over the leadership: thus intelligible to other

sections too / linking with tradition and carrying it further / handing on the achievements

of the section of the people that is struggling for the lead” (1975, 423). I quote Ramos

”Filipinas” composed in the transitional years 1929-30 before he was expelled from the

colonial bureaucracy and committed himself to the redemption of its victims:

Kay-rami ng layak nitong aking Bayan!

Kay-rami ng dumi, kay-rami ng sukal!

Pati na ang hanging aking pagkabuhay

kung aking langhapin ay may amoy-bangkay!

Nasaan ang aking mga iniibig,

ang mga anak kong may pusong malinis?

Nahan ang panulat na namimilansik

upang ang kadimla’y mawala sa langit?

Nahan ang matapang na mga makatang

tutula ng aking puhunang dalita?

Nahan ang maraming anak na nanumpang

tutubusin ako sa aking pagluha?

Kung kahapon ako’y inapi ng Dasal

ngayon ay lalo pang kaapi-apihan.

Namatay ang aking Magiting na Rizal

at patuloy pa rin ang kanyang kaaway.

Ang mga lupa kong kinuha’t ginaga,

nahan, o anak ko, nangabalik na ba?

At kung hangga ngayo’y di mo nakukuha

 14

ano’t natitiis na ululin ka pa?

(Ramos 1998, 180)

Unlike the typical didactic and moralizing poems that were commodified in the

mass periodicals, Ramos’ poem departs by ascribing this lament of sorrows to the

maternal figure of the nation. This follows a long allegorical tradition from Hermenegildo

Flores’ “Hibik ng Filipinas sa Ynang Espana” (Ileto 1998, 11) to “Joselynang Baliwag”

and Bonifacio’s “Pag-ibig sa Tinubuang Lupa” (Maceda 1995, 209-212). The imagistic

cluster of pollution, abandonment, mourning, and dispossession suggests a miserable

predicament that cries for urgent remedy, so antithetical to the utopian pastorals of

Fernando Amorsolo and his counterparts in literature (see examples in Abueg 1973).

The tone is simultaneously elegiac and hortatory. Not only does the poem advance the

popular tradition, enriching and transmitting to the next generation the standpoint of the

masses, but it also challenges the “children” to assume leadership. The mother’s

exhortation to reclaim the stolen homeland and to stop enduring such privations

invokes Rizal, the national icon and martyr.

We observe in the structure of Ramos’ poem the dialectic between land/blood

and the ideals of sovereignty and sacrifice for collective liberation. Abstract, rhetorical

notions of patriotism and autonomy are concretized in intelligible terms (more vividly

nuanced in many poems collected by Delfin Tolentino Jr. in Gumising Ka, Aking Bayan).

The poet’s fidelity to the struggle for liberation is unequivocal and uncompromising.

While Ramos’ is generally censured for being a “traitor” by sympathizing with the

Japanese anti-US imperialism during the war—a still contentious issue that defies

stereotypical reductionism (Steinberg 1967)—there is no doubt that, on the whole,

Ramos’ poetic achievement may be taken as the most eloquent, innovative expression

of the national-democratic imagination in the first three decades of American

domination. 

Not even the eloquent “social justice” slogan of Quezon could distract from

the Sakdal’s collective dream of emancipation, as passionately voiced by Salud Algabre

(quoted as epigraph) in the vernacular. Ramos’ speech-acts effectively communicated

to a people yearning for dignity and self-determination, at a conjuncture where the

commodification of the slogan of “independence” seduced the more privileged stratum

of the citiznery whose preferred language (English) detached them from the pain, joy,

anguish, and dreams of the majority of Filipinos. This situation of subalternity has

worsened today in the neoliberal intensification of commodity-fetishism against which

progressive Filipino artists are uniting with cultural activists in other countries, just as

Rizal, De Los Reyes, Ramos, and the Philippine Writers League did in the last turbulent

century.

REFERENCES

Abueg, Efren. 1973. Parnasong Tagalog ni A.G. Abadilla. Manila: MCS Enterprises Inc.

 15

Agoncillo, Teodoro. 1963. The Writings and Trial of Andres Bonifacio. Manila: Mayor

Villegas Office and the University of the Philippines.

——-. 1974. Fillipino Nationalism 1872-1970. Quezon City: R.P. Garcia Publishing Co.

—— and Milagros Guerrero. 1970. History of the Filipino People. Quezon City: R.P.

Garcia Publishing Co.

Aguilar, Faustino. 1986. Pinaglahuan. Quezon City: Ateneo University Press.

Almario, Virgilio, ed. 1984a. Jose Corazon de Jesus: Mga Piling Tula. Manila: Aklat

Balagtasyana.

——-. 1984b. Balagtasismo Versus Modernismo. Quezon City: Ateneo University

Press.

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities. London: Verso.

——-. 2005. Under Three Flags. New York: Verso.

Atienza, Monico. 1995. Bayan Ko. Quezon City: College of Arts and Letters

Publication Office, University of the Philippines.

Brecht, Bertolt. 1975. “The Popular and the Realistic.” In Marxists on Literature: An

Anthology. Ed. David Craig. Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin.

Caudwell, Christopher. 1937. Illusion and Reality. New York: International Publishers.

Constantino, Renato. 1975. The Philippines: A Past Revisited. Quezon City: Tala

Publishing Services.

Davis, Horace.1978. Toward a Marxist Theory of Nationalism. New York: Monthly

Review Press.

de la Costa, Horacio. 1965. Readings in Philippine History. Manila: Bookmark.

de los Reyes, Isabelo. 1980. Religion of the Katipunan. Manila: National Historical

Institute.

Dunn, John. 1979. Western Political Theory in the face of the future. London:

Cambridge University Press.

Gramsci, Antonio. 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York:

International Publishers.

 16

Harvey, David. 1977. “The Geography of Capitalist Accumulation: A Reconstruction of

the Marxian Theory.” In Radical Geography. Ed. Richard Peet. Chicago:

Maaroufa Press.

Ileto, Reynaldo. 1998. Filipinos and Their Revolution. Quezon City: Ateneo University

Press.

Karnow, Stanley. 1989. In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines. New York:

Random House.

Kiernan, V. G. 1983. “Nation.” In A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Ed. Tom

Bottomore. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Lenin, V. I. 1968. National Liberation, Socialism and Imperialism. New York:

International Publishers.

Lopez, Salvador P. 1976. “Literature and Society—A Literary Past Revisited.” In

Literature and Society: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Ed. Roger Bresnahan.

Manila: United States Information Service.

——-. 2004. “Literature and Society.” In Affirming the Filipino. Ed. Ma.

Teresa Martinez-Sicat and Naida Rivera. Quezon City: University of the

Philippines Department of English.

Lowy, Michael. 1998. Fatherland or Mother Earth? London: Pluto Press.

Lumbera, Bienvenido. 1967. “”The Literary Relations of Tagalog Literature.” In Brown

Heritage. Ed. Antonio Manuud. Quezon City: Ateneo University Press.

——- and Cynthia Lumbera. 1982. Philippine Literature: A History and Anthology.

Manila: National Book Store.

Mabini, Apolinario. 1969. The Philippine Revolution. Tr. Leon Maria Guerrero. Manila:

National Historical Commission.

Maceda, Teresita. 1995. “Imahen ng Inang Bayan sa Kundiman ng Himagsikan.” In

Ulat sa Ikatlong Kumperensya sa Sentenaryo ng Rebolusyong 1896. Baguio:

UP Kolehiyo sa Baguio & Benguet State University.

Mojares, Resil B. 2006. Brains of the Nation. Quezon City: Ateneo University Press.

Moore, Barrington, Jr. 1966. Social Origins of Democracy and Dictatorship. Boston:

Beacon Press.

Ramos, Benigno. 1998. Gumising Ka, Aking Bayan. Ed. Delfin Tolentino Jr. Quezon

City: Ateneo University Press.

 17

Reyes, Narciso. 1954. “ Lupang Tinubuan.” In Ang Maikling Kathang Tagalog. Ed. A.G.

Abadilla, F.B. Sebastian, A. G. G. Mariano. Manila: Bede’s Publishing House.

Reyes, Soledad. 1982. Nobelang Tagalog 1905-1975. Quezon City: Ateneo

University Press.

San Juan, E. 2002. “Nation-State, Postcolonial Thought, and Global Violence.” Social

Analysis 46, 2 (Summer): 11-32.

——-. 2009. Toward Filipino Self-Determination. Albany: SUNY Press.

——-. 2015a. Lupang Hinirang, Lupang Tinubuan. Manila: De La Salle

University Publishing House.

——-. 2015b. Between Empire and Insurgency. Quezon City: University of the

Phiippines Press.

Santos, Lope K. 1972. Talambuhay ni Lope K. Santos, Paham ng Wike. Ed.

Paraluman S. Aspillera. Quezon City: Capitol Publishing House.

Saulo, Alfredo. 1990. Communism in the Philippines. Quezon City: Ateneo University

Press.

Schneider, Herbert. 1967. ‘The Period of Emergence of Philippine Letters/“ In Brown

Heritage: Essays on Philippine Cultural Tradition and Literature. Ed. Antonio

Manuud. Quezon City: Ateneo University Press.

Scott, William Henry. 1982. Cracks in the Parchment Curtain. Quezon City: New Day

Publishers

Scruton, Roger. 1982. A Dictionary of Political Thought. New York: Hill and Wang.

Steinberg, David Joel. 1967. Philippine Collaborationin World War II. Ann Arbor:

University of Michigan Press.

Sturtevant, David. 1976. Popular Uprisings in the Philippines, 1840-1940. Ithaca, NY:

Cornell University Press.

Tolentino, Delfin Jr. 1998. “Paunang Salita.” In Benigno Ramos, Gumising Ka, Aking

Bayan. Quezon City: Ateneo University Press.

Torres-Reyes, Maria Luisa. 2010. Banaag at Sikat: Metakritisismo at Antolohiya.

Manila: National Commission for Culture and the Arts.

 18

Tan, Samuel K. 2002. The Filipino-American War, 1899-1913. Quezon: University of

the Philippine Press.

Thomson, George. 1946. Marxism and Poetry. New York; International Pubishers.

Werning, Rainer. 2011. Crown, Cross and Crusaders. Essen, Germany: Verlag Neuer

Weg.

Williams, Raymond. 1961. The Long Revolution. New York: Columbia University

Press.

Zaide, Gregorio. 1970. Great Filipinos in History. Manila: Verde Book Store.