Asked who would succeed him, Chief Humabon of Cebu told Magellan in 1521 that he had only daughters, the oldest of whom had married his nephew, who was automatically the crown price. Innocently, the chief added that when the parents grew old, they received no honor, but the children commanded them. Magellan, a Christian, immediately reacted. He told his host that God made the sky, the earth, the sea, and everything else, and commanded us to honor our parents. Whoever did otherwise was condemned to burn in hell.
The statement pleased Humabon, who asked for teachers to explain them. Magellan had no teachers, but priests who baptize the Cebuanos if they wanted to follow the God of the Christians. Led by Humabon, several Cebuanos received Christian baptism.
Magellan also wanted to unify the Cebuanos in a confederation under Humabon as representative of the Castilian Crown. But the Portuguese navigator died in a brief skirmish off Mactan, not because the native warriors were better fighters, but simply because of egregious blunders no military commander would commit in an amphibious operation.
Forty years later, in 1565, Legazpi routed the Cebuanos who had dared him to land. Looking for the night's lodging, a soldier found the image of Santo Ni��With tears in his eyes, Legazpi knelt to receive it in his hands and led a procession to install the image in the first Catholic shrine in the Philippines. A few days later, two or three Cebuano chiefs came to reclaim the image of their god. They explained that when the rains failed, they undressed the image and placed it in the sea, threatening to drown it if it did not bring the rains back. When hordes of locusts chewed up their crops, they turned the statue around to face the wall, and warned they would not restore it to its first position, unless it drove the insects away. Invariably, the Cebuanos said, their god listened to them. From the very start, in other words, there was bond between the new arrivals and the Cebuanos.
One day, alone and unarmed, a soldier walked out of the camp. They immediately speared him to death. A squad set out and returned with prisoners, one of whom was the niece of Chief Tupas of Cebu. Learning who she was, Legazpi ordered her attendant to tell the chief to come for a parley and, if he wanted, lead the prisoners back home.
Tupaz did not come. His brother did, with six slaves to exchange for his daughter. Legazpi told the man there was not need for that. When he expressed a desire to have his daughter back, Legazpi had the girl led out. She came out, dressed as befitted her rank, a royal princess.
That totally surprised the girl's father. Never was a war captive treated so humanely. Captives, even the niece of a chief, were enslaved, or, for a high ransom, spared.
Legazpi's humanity had won the chief's brother over. He pledged friendship with the Spaniards, promising his deeds would prove it. He left his daughter behind, to go back and tell Tupas to befriend the Spaniards, or, if he latter refused, kill him, as he had men to do it for him.
These episodes are not mentioned in our history bocks. But they are a window to our pre-Hispanic culture and a key to our history. Legazpi conquered Cebu and the rest of the Philippines, not through military force, but through a new way of life based on Hispanic Christianity. Spain ruled the Philippines for more than 300 years, not through soldiers parading down the streets, but through the moral ascendancy of a Christian government. Later, a number of governors assured Madrid that, in the Philippines, a friar was as valuable as a battalion commander.
Legazpi did not come to conquer the Sunset Island, as our country was called, but to find the elusive return route to Mexico and spread the Catholic Faith. Royal instructions also told him to survey the towns, look them. If the land was inhabited and fertile, befitting for the Royal Crown to possess, and beneficial to future colonists, he could start a settlement, or a factoria or trading post, which could serve also as the base of operations for the Augustinian missionaries with him.
Legazpi's report convinced the Crown to colonize the country. But, besides Manila, Cebu, and Butuan, the Spaniards found no centers of the spice or gold trade. The Philippines was poor and royal advisers urged the King to abandon the newly found islands. But King Philip II cut short all that talk when he promised he would gladly sell his crown jewelry to build a chapel, even if only one native was baptized there.
Fortunately, the experience in South America provided a model to rule a colony at less cost to the royal treasury: the encomienda, or land trust, granted for meritorious royal service. The encomendero, or land trustee, resettled the people in permanent communities, administered justice, and taught the Catholic Faith. To do this, he could collect the tribute and demand service in the polo, or obligatory work in the public works. The tribute, not the royal funds, would support the colonial structure and the encomenderos.
Resettlement was unwelcome, for people were loathe to leave lands where their ancestors had been buried, or where they had been born or lived - until they experienced the advantages of permanent community life with the help of the plow.
The plow is a foreign tool the missionaries introduced, and we have no native word for it, but use the Castilian arado. We did have the sunduang, but it could not remove the cogon which quickly sprang up after the harvest. This forced the people to move away in search of new planting sites. But the plow dug deeper and uprooted the cogon, allowing the people to till and replant the same site repeatedly. Previously, they lived like nomads, wandering from the place to place in search of prey or new sites to cultivate. With the plow, this was no longer necessary, and the people learned to observe the time and the seasons for tilling, planting, waiting for the crop to ripen, and harvest it. The plow helped to reorganize life in time.
Colonial law was rather detailed about settlements. These should be on elevated sites, close to water and wood supplies. They should have a rectangular plaza, whose four corners corresponded to the four cardinal winds. Houses with partitions and solid walls should line the streets drawn a cordel y a regal (straight and measured) from the corners and sides of the plaza. One side of the plaza was reserved for the church, another for the tribunal (government hall), the third for the school, and the fourth for the prominent community members. This plaza complex is still found in our towns, which colonial law reorganized in space for human living.
Sociologist observe that community life imposes mutual social duties, for an exchange of specialized social roles. The planter did not have to build his house, the fisherman did not have to fight against the enemy, the soldier to weave or sew his clothes, and the iron smith to plant crops, for individual community members performed these specific tasks.
Because indigenous languages could not express the Christian mysteries, royal law decreed that all the colonies should learn Castilian. But it was easier for one missionary to learn several local idioms than for entire communities to learn Castilian. And so the native idioms were used to preach the Gospel, but when there were no local terms Christian realities, Castilian was used.
For example, "Bathal," the term for the highest local god but with lesser gods under him, was discarded for the Castilian "Dios," the one unique, supreme God. We use "sacramento," "profeta," "martir," "cuaresma," etc. Castilian borrowings were not limited to religious words, for now we say "presidente," "escueta," "sueldo," "ventana" "kursunada," etc. People deny they eat "dil⬦quot; but, yes, "lengua," the same dish with a Castilian name. And Christian monogamy was an innovation, for which we had to use terms, like "casal" from the Castilian "casar", or "familia," which has no indigenous term. These borrowings show a wide-ranging socio-economic transaction with the introduction of Christianity.
Resettlement was preliminary to the main tasks of government and evangelization. One, mutually, had to prove sincerity before receiving Christian baptism. This was never easy. Pre-Christian concepts of good and evil did not always coincide with the Christian.
Physical evil and suffering was a common experience. Over-eating or over-indulging in alcoholic drink led to unpleasant effects. Murder or theft merited quick retaliation. But they had no idea of moral evil, until they heard the story of the crucifixion.
One can easily imagine the perplexity of the people when they saw the crucifix for the first time. They had been sacrificing their best to win the god's favor, but Christ's death on the cross, God sacrificing Himself for His worshippers, and not the other way around, upset their thinking. And all that God asked was that they love Him in return. And the missionaries insisted this was so important that they had left everything just them tell this call of God. It was a novel concept, a higher, more spiritual form of religion, in which refusal to love God was morally wrong, a "sin."
This was the radical spiritual revolution that led to the Christianization of the Filipinos. And Spanish colonial policy succeeded only to the extent that the new religion transformed the Filipinos. The colonial officials were not theologians or moralists, but Philippine society was based on its moral foundations.
Not all, of course, lived according to Christian norms. Christian monogamy, for example, was hard, and we have the story of Sumuroy pf Palapag, Samar who in 1649 led a revolt that spread to northeastern Mindanao, because a priest had forced him to set aside his concubine and return to his lawful wife. Precisely, the bane of Philippine colonial society came from the isolated clusters of people who escaped to the mountains (literally, "remontados") to avoid the law.
Philippine history is dotted with uprisings, but there were local, isolated, sporadic incidents provoked by unbearable socio-economic problems, with hardly any political undertones. But the reaction of a government in panic made the Cavite mutiny of 1872 an important episode that signaled the beginning of the end of Spanish presence in the country. The GOMBURZA executions a month later reoriented the life of the 11-year old Jos頒izal, who years later recalled that were it not for 1872, he would have become a Jesuit and, instead of Noli me tangere, he would have written the opposite.
Rizal, the most perspective critic of the Spanish colonial policies, sought positive solutions to the problems of his country. He urged Spain to control. Besides, Spain could no longer stop the progress of the Philippines. Oppressing the people and keeping them poor was risky, for the poor would do anything to improve their situation. Limiting the birth rate would not succeed, either. Despite famines, epidemics, chronic wars, the local population grew. Modern steamboats, cable lines, roads and bridges had narrowed distances between the islands, the provinces, and the Filipinos were more aware of what lay beyond their horizons. Finally, Spain could not block education, for, despite all odds, the Filipinos had managed to educated themselves. In other words, to Rizal, if Spain wanted to keep its farthest colony, it must introduce, not palliatives, but substantial changes to guarantee the freedoms of modern democratic society.
In 1840, a few years before Rizal, a Spanish military officer warned his superiors of the danger facing Philippine society. There was, he wrote, widespread discontent among the people. Between the peninsulars and the criollos, there was no love lost. The first despised the second as mere "hijos del pais" (country folk) and suspected them of separatism, while the second questioned the presence of the first in a country they could not truly love because it was not theirs. The criollos were poor, had no taste for business, and few trusted them. Government posts were assigned almost exclusively to the peninsulars, not the criollos, because of a policy that official positions were better assigned to those without blood relatives in the country. The mestizos, especially the Chinese mestizos, were wealthy and educated, a number of them having been ordained to the priesthood. They had the same aspirations as those of the Indios, and generally sided with the latter against the penisulars or criollos.
To correct the situation, the report concluded, the government must reward the good and punish the bad. Education should be available to the criollos, and qualified criollos should have the opportunity to benefit from their talents. Finally, legal procedures for hiring and promotion should be scrupulously followed.
Unfortunately, Spain in the 19th century was in no position to rule a colony. The end of the French revolution had restored the Bourbons to the Spanish throne, but the king's death in 1834 occasioned the debilitating Carlist Wars between the liberals and the conservatives for power. Luckily, the very profitable tobacco monopoly in the Philippines helped Spain weather the crisis, but it severely affected the colony.
Rafael Izquierdo arrived in 1871 as the new Governor General of the Philippines. He quickly realized his arms were tied. He removed a provincial judge from Albay, who in his words, was an "immoral extortionist, who swindles and sells the government." But Madrid reprimanded him, and ordered him to reinstate the judge. Disllusioned, Izquierdo wrote to a friend, a book could not contain the grievances caused, not on him, but on "happiness of this archipelago, which could be the greatest treasure and the great resource of Spain if the government paid attention to it." It did not, the governor continued, unless to "worsen the situation," and he would not be surprised if a mutiny exploded.
This was in 1871. Early the next year, on 20-22 January 1872, as Izquierdo feared, soldiers at Fort San Felipe in Cavite mutinied. Action was short-lived, but the effects were far-reaching. GOMBURZA changed Rizal, Rizal wrote scathing novels, his novels energized Bonifacio, and the Katipunan was born.
To me, Philippine history was an effort to humanize in order to Christianize a people. It was a program originally entrusted to a clergy ordained to preach the Good News to the Whole World. Institutionalized in the modern world as the Spanish Patronato Real, or totality of prviledges and duties granted to the Castilian Crown to discover, conquer and rule, and Christianize lands outside of Europe, it needed angels to carry it out, not greedy, ambitious, narrow-minded men representing the Crown.
Colonies are self-liquidating. In due time, they develop their own identity. Whether abusive or not, colonization inevitably develops the colony. It is another question to ask who benefits from the colonial program. Distance and the poverty of the Philippines discouraged colonists from coming; but the missionary friars came. Lack of colonists made them government representatives, a role they would not have wanted, and they were the hands, feet, and eyes that formed Philippine society. That they succeeded we know, for we had people like Rizal, most perspective and his peers.
At the same time, Spain clung to the principle of authority, and failed to recognize its success. Spain refused to allow the native-born, mere "hijos del pais," even just a share in their own government. This insult, directed not any single Filipino, but at the Filipinos as a race, provoked a reaction from an entire race.
This was the psychological spark that ignited the revolution, not the emotional outbursts of our national propagandists. Emotion there was, of course, and it found expression in the scurrilous attacks on the friars, the visible agents of Spanish colonial government. But one must know how to read propaganda and distinguish fact from fiction.
A Spanish medical officer detained in Zambales during the second phase of the Philippine revolution noted that the Spanish priests received better treatment than the ordinary Spanish war prisoner. He asked a native revolutionary why, and his katipunero guard explained.
You will know. Look. The priest have taught us to be what we are. They founded schools for us. They forbade vice or vagrancy. In all bitter times we, good Filipinos, have experienced or suffered from the Spanish provincial chiefs, the priests, besides good advice, have taken our side and helped us. Now that we see bad people go against the priests, note these have been active in the provincial government, like senior scribes, court interpreters - any one wielding the pen in one word - we the good ought to do for the priests what is our obligation and within our capability.
This incident clears up the anti-friar propaganda that today unthinking Filipinos have swallowed as truth.
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