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NICK JOAEUIN
CULTUREAND
HISTORY I
Occasional Noteson theProcess
ofPhilippine Becoming
'/b sot-ln-Y^€ pususHrNc)l\\ conpoRAfloN
METRO MANI LA, PHI LIPPINES
l'hilippinc (irpyright, l9tt8hy Nick .krircluirr
l'ublishccl by Solar Publishing Corporation
All rights reserved, including the right to reproducethis book or prtrtions thereof in any form whatsoeverwithout a written permission from the author orpr,rblishcr, cxcept such portions as may be quoted inbook rcviews, articles and scholarly work with properacknowledgment.
For information, addressSolar Publishing Corporation3rd floor, Quad Alpha Centrum Bldg.125 Pioneer St., Mandaluyong, Metro Manila
CULTURE AND HISTORY / A Solar BooklsBN 971-17-0633-4
Cover design: Manny Hernandez & Allan QuebralCover art: Ben F. Cruz & Delfm PascualInside illustrations: Ramon Lugue
First year of publication: 1988Printed in the Phililtltittt,sby Markenprintilll Balugtas St., ManduluyotrgMetro Manila
250 344
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C o n t e n t s
I'CulruReAS HISTORY
page 3
ilFOOTNOTES
TO YESTERDAYpage 37
IIIOun HeaRrs
IN THE HIGHLANDS?page 47
IVCulrune HeRo:
TgE SRTTO NINO DE CEBUpage 60
VIKON, FRTRR
AND CONQUISTADORpage 70
VIBULLS
AND GEOGRAPHYpage 84
VIITue Beeres
OF ].7Ih.CENTURYMeNllapage 101
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,4. V
Cultureand HistorY
Poru,o" s are rootsin a deeper sense than the botanical one'
P-qlatoes--.qfg:"ll"fe*and--history'According to , modern German writer' Gunter Grass' the
introduction of the potato was a more important -event in the
history of the G.rt,l, people than.all the martial victories of
fi"g h*aerick the G'"ut' indeed, Gunter Grass considers the
;;;. a crucial factor in the developmet'* .of, UY111,":^]t **
Iie potato, says he, that made possibie the industrialization'of
E.rrop. and the rise of the proletariat'We can see what he means' The potato is a highly nourishing
food that is at the same time very cheap' belause.-it can be
gro*.t so quickly and etsily' The potato t !!t first "fast food"
in history, if we except the manta- that fell on the Israelites'
And the'advent of this fast food, this potato, had terrific conse-
quences. One, it rescued the Europ"u" rnutt"s from age-old
hunger. Two, it developed them into a sturdier working class' (We
,l*uly, think of the German, for example' as a big stout man;
and this solidity is largely the result of potatoes'-though German
beer also helped.) Tt-r.", more and *Lt" p"ople were released
from farm work and became available for factory labor' Four'
industrial progress meant more income for the masses' better
homes and schools, and increasing political Power' ,Five' the
.i.i"S standard of living in turn produced an art) a literature'
a science and a technology that have made European culture
supreme in the modern world'It can U" urgrr.J therefore that the image today of the
European u, u t igttif civilized, cultured and progressive indi-
vidual can be tru"?J'bu.k, pu'ily at least' to the coming of the
Dotato.But now let us bring in a counter-argument' Let us imagine'
say, a German chauvinist who is rabidly anti-Potato' For him'
the potato is not a boon but a bane' For him' the potato is
something that should never have been allowed to change
Europe blc.use it is so foreign and exotic' For him' the potato
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is t, or:nna, r:ulturr: what tlrr: .p1lk. was r() Acrarn ancl r,)vr:,because, by cating <ll' the potato, ihc ()erman, the F)uropean,lost something of his
'riginar nature, with the result thatEuropean culture today is a deviation from a pristine original:the true European is the European before the introduction ofthe potato.
But how restore that uncorrupted original?our imaginary Gerrrian chau,inist demands the aborition
of the potato.At once, of course, we see the flaw in his proposal. Aborishing
the potato will not restore European *., to his pre-potatocondition. why not? Because from the potato have come suchdevelopments as industrialization, democratization, moderniza-tion, and so forth. And these developments have so radicailyaltered European man that he wourd stirl remain what he hasbecome even if he stopped eating potatoes altogether.
In other *or{}'pe1u-t-o*9$- pre. the culture anl histo_ry thatcgnnifEEca;r-c
2"1.1 . Nt(:h ,oAQl rtN
and history are the llowing waters that rnake it impossiblc tostep into the same river of' identity twice.
'I'he trouble is that whcn wc say culture, we only meanreligi<ln and politics and art and literature. That's too narrowa view of culture. The saltcellar ls culture. Fork-and-spoon rsculture. Beef-and-cabbage is culture. The guisado ls culture.And so when we say that our original culture was pervertedby an alien culture, we should understand precisely what wemean. And what do we mean? That we were perverted by thesaltcellar, by fork and spoon? When we say that the Westbrought us nothing but evil, do we mean that beef is evil, thatcabbages are evil, that the guisado is evil? And if we lamentthat our art or our music is not "truly" Philippine because ofalien influences, shouldn't we also bewail that our fields andour gardens are likewise not "truly" Philippine because offoreign additions? I-he Filipino farmer who raises corn andcamote and calabasa, and the Filipino gardener who plants liliesand roses and cadena de amor, are just as great a traitor to"true" Filipino culture as the Filipino painter who has learnedfrom Picasso or the Filipino scientist who works in the lightof the Einstein Theory.
If I were to say that we were damaged by being forced tolearn a foreign religion we didn't understand and found hardto understand, a great many Filipinos would heartily agree. Butthese same Filipinos would surely froth in the mouth if I wereto argue that Filipinos shouldn't be made to learn, say, elec-tronics, because electronics is a foreign technology we don'tunderstand, that we find hard to understand, and that mightdamage our identity. Which is quite true. Electronics is rightnow altering our culture, is right now altering us. If we saythat Christianity is evil because it changed our culture, shouldn'twe also denounce the transistor radio as evil because it ischanging our culture, altering our identity?
. Identity is such a problem for us because we are of twominds about it. On the one hand we say that we must change,we must leave the past behind, we must move forward, wemust update. On the other hand we insist that there is a fixedprimeval Filipino identity to which we must make our way back.And at the same time we are asking: "What ls the identity ofthe Filipino today?"
Everybody thinks that is a question impossible to answer.Actually the answer is very easy and very plain.The identity of the F'ilipino today is of a person asking
what is lris idcntity.'l'hal is rrot :t Irivolous illlsw('r _. ir you'll rcalize .irrst by
(:lrl,'l'lrlllr ANI) tlls'llllll' ' t{5
thinking o[' thc tribcs in the Philippines todity to which thcquestion ol' a nalional identity would never o(:cur' because
identity for them is defined by the tribe. However, the tribalrituals that define the tribal identity do show'an understandingof the question which we have yet to learn. For, in tribal ritual,identity is not a being but a becoming. Identity is a process -which is why the rituals that define it are called rites of passage.
When a boy of the tribe turns twelve or thirteen, the men
of the tribe tell him that the Big Crocodile is demanding hisforeskin. The frightened boy runs to the womenfolk, who weepand wail over him and try to hide him. But finally he is draggedaway by the menfolk and circumcised. He is given a new name
to impress on him that he has outgrown one identity and takenon another. He is no longer Totoy the child; he is now Totongthe young man. And he learns that the most shameful thinghe can do is to want to return to his former identity, to wantto be a child again who, when scared, can run and hide amongthe womenfolk. He will undergo other rites of passage whenhe becomes a husband, when he becomes a father, and so forth.
The idea expressed in all this is that a human being mustkeep growing and that the process is irreversible. Only theretarded have a fixed identity. Normal people must undergothe process of change and they cannot be allowed to return toa foetus position until they die. Then they are buried in a
foetus position, the position of their original identity.I wonder if in the debate over the Filipino's original identity
there is not an unexpressed desire to return to the foetalposition - a desire, one might say, to de-circumcise ourselvesand reassume the simpler identity of the child. The pagan
tribesman would call such a desire shameful; the Christianwould call it the sin against the Holy Ghost; but certain militantsof today would call it nationalism when it's the exact oppositeof nationalism. Nationalism is a very complex and advancedstage of political development, something that occurs late inhistory, and only after clan and tribe have been outgrown. So
how can we say we are being nationalist when we advocate areturn to our pre-1521 identity when that was a clan identity,a tribal identity? To recapture our pre-1521 identity, we wouldfirst have to abolish this nation called the Philippines.
Yes, I know the counter-argument. I know that it's beingargued now that this nation already existed before l52l underanother name: Maharlika, or Ma-i, or Three Islands, or whathave you. Alas, it just isn't true. It's absolutely not true thatwhat is now the Philippines was known to the ancicnl (lhinese
ls Ma-i. 'l'ht (lltint:st' may hav<' ktrowtt, s:ly, lht' islarrcl rlf
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Mindrlro, or tlrc islunrl ol' Marirr<lu(lu(., or llarl ol' Luzon, asMa-i, but it's atrsolutcly irnpossiblc that wht:n tht-'y said Ma-ithey mcant what we now know as thc Philippines, for the simplereason that the Chinesc really knew very little about us andalmost nothing about our geography, as their olo maps hilariouslydemonstrate.
Nor is it possible that the term Three Islands, if such aterm did exist, referred to a Philippines composed of Luzon,the Visayas, and Mindanao, for the simple reason that Luzon,the Visayas and Mindanao do not compose three islands butover 7,000 - and the habit of regarding the Philippines asthree-in-one did not develop until Luzon, the Visayas andMindanao had become the Philippines; that is, after 1565. Infact, if Formosa and Borneo had remained part of our politicalgeography, as they were for a time, it would now be perfectlynatural of us to think of the Philippine archipelago as beingcomposed of five islands, not three, and we may now be arguingthat, even before 1521, we were known in Asia as the Five Islands.
There is nothing inevitable about geography. Geography ismostly politics - and what politics has created, politics canchange, as the Americans changed their geography from theoriginal Thirteen Colonies to a continental expanse extendingfrom ocean to ocean. The Philippines was not ipso facto thearchipelago we know today; our geography was a politicalcreation and was still changing, or being changed, up to thel8th century. You can't change geography? Nothing is easierto do! For the last 200 years, for example, Australia has beenpart of the Western, not the Eastern, Hemisphere; and today.it has so changed its geography again that its nearest neighborin Asia is not Indonesia but Japan. Cuba was part of Latin-America until 1898, when it became part of Gringo America.Today Cuba has become so rnuch apart of Communist geographythat Havana is now far closer to Moscow than to Washington.
What I dislike about the saying that you can't changegeography is the fatalism it implies: the determinist doctrinethat environment is destiny. Environment is what you make ofit and destiny is how you react to your environment: whetheryou try to overcome it, or just resign yourself to it. Youremember tlre saying about Lincoln: that he was a great mannot because he was born in a log cabin but because he gotout of it. What of geography is not politics is mostly a stateof mind, as the Cubans are currently being conditioned to think<>f Havana as a suburb of Moscow, or as we are now beingbiddcn to think of ourselves as a part of Asia - arr idea that,I think, wc should rc.jcct, ftrr thc sirnplt' rcas()n that Asia had
(:lrt,'t'trilti ANlr llls'l'ollY o 247
evcr rt'jt:t:lr:tl us. 'l'hink of all tht: t:t:trlttrit:s lx:lilre 152 l. Were
we part of Asia then? Were we ever part of'Asia? 'l'hink of allthe movements in Asia during those centuries: the proliferationof Hindu rnysticism, the appearance of the Buddha and hisfollowers, the development of Zen Buddhism and the Kung Fu
disciplines in China and Japan, the spread of the Asian culturesthat resulted in fabulous empires in Cambodia, in Korea, in
Java, in Malaya, and the universal use of the Chinese calendarand Chinese chopsticks, and oflndian art and Indian technology.Were we ever involved in those movements? Did we even knowabout them? And why were we still in the dark of pre-historywhen all Asia was exploding with history? Why? Bgcause Asia
passed us over, because Asia snubbed and ignored us, because
Asia disdained us. We were nothing to Asia but a market forthe cheaper Chinese porcelains and a supply source of the slave
trade of the Indies.And now !t e are told that we feel such a stranger in Asia
because of our Western colonial history. Bull! To the pre-1521.Filipino, India and China and Japan would have been as alien,as bizarre, as the landscapes of Venus or Mars. Neither of the
cultural geography, nor of the political geography, nor of the
spiritual geography of Asia was the pre-hispanic Philippinesever part of. And that's the plain reason why we didn't, andwhy we don't even now, feel at home in Asia. We can't come
home to Asia because Asia was never home to us.
If we belonged anywhere before 1521, it was not to Asia
but to the world of the South Seas, when it was still untouched
by both Asia and the lVest. Few Filipinos today would rememberAmerican actress Dorothy Lamour, she of the sarong. But when
the first Dorothy Lamour sarong movies were shown in thiscountry in prewar days, Filipinos experienced what can onlybe called the "shock of recognitign" - the kind of of instantidentification that we don't feel when we go to China or Japanor India. Nowhere in continental Asia can we behold the localsc€ne and exclairn: "This is us!" How can we, when we \^'ere
never Hindu or Confucianist or Buddhist or Shintoist? But inTahiti, in Samoa, even uP in Hawaii, what survives of the
aboriginal culture arouses in the Filipino some deep ancestralemotion that makes him cry out: "This was us!" And there
indeed it is: the Philippine past that we think to seek in Asia.
We won't find it there. The music of Asia is not our ancient
musicl the folklore of Asia is as foreign to us as Eskimo folklore;and the art of Asia is mostly inaccessible to us. But one look
at the art of the South Seas and we recognize the pre-hispanic
art that sttrviv<'s in lgorot i<tulpturc; and when wc listcn to the
2{ll o NrcK ,0AQUIN
musir: ol'thc South Sr:as, wt. s('(:nl l() lx. lrr.arirrg srlrnr:thing wt:hcard long, long ago, in some othcr lilb. Nothing, in fact, inthe world of the South Seas can be strange to us - whetherit be the religion, with its animist worship of trees and volcanoeslor the cuisine, which is rice, fish, pork and yams cooked incoconut milk and banana leaves; or the cultural ensemble, wherewe find again our patadyong, our head-cloth, our squattingposition, our tattooing, our folktales, and even our style oftalking. If we are to identiS the pre-hispanic Filipino with acultural geography, this is the world to which he belonged: thepagan world of the South Seas, when it was completely distinctfrom the Hindu or Buddhist or Sinified or Islamized world ofAsia. Our true relatives are the Polynesians.
However, I don't propose going back to some primevalPolynesian identity of ours. I am against all this talk aboutgoing back or stripping off, as if identity were just a matter oftaking a bus or taking off your clothes. Identity is not acommuter; identity is not a burlesque dancer. Identity is thehistory that has gone.into bone and blood and reshaped theflesh. Identity is not what we were but what we have become,what we are at this moment. And what we are at this momentis the result of how we responded to certain challenges fromoutside.
You may have heard of the near-human monkey found inthe heart of Africa and which some anthropologists regard asthe "missing link" between ape and man. The question is: Whydid this African species remain monkey when other formermembers of it became human beings? And the answer given isthat the African species was perfectly adapted to its environment.It was faced with no new challenges and therefore came upwith no new responses. But ages and ages ago, some membersof this species wandered away from that original environmentand into a more hostile world. They were confronted with theproblem of a cold climate and had to invent fire. They wereconfronted with the problem of no food and had to inventagriculture. They were confronted with the problem of shelterand safety and they had to come up with tools. But all theseproblerns and how they were tackled were what created thehuman being. One can imagine these early human beings regret-ting that they ever left their original environment, where therewere no problems and ho challenges. But, according toanthropologists, if man had not been faced with these problemsand challenges, he would never have become man; he wouldstill bc his original identity in that jungle deep in the heart ofAflrica.
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(llrirrk's t.irr<llx'rg was t:otrlpk:tcly t:hartrrt'tl by thc 'l'asaday
cavr:-rlwclk'rs, but at tht: samr: tirne he wondcrcd why theylackcd thc advcnturousness that he had always supposed to be
part of human nature: that adventurous and ever restless curiosityto learn what lies beyond the next hill, what lies beyond thenext horizon. Because the Tasaday never felt drawn beyond thenext hill, the next horizon, they have been able to Preserveintact the identity that man had as cave-dweller. They are a
huppy people because they have no history: and they have nohistory because their never-changing environment never offers
any new challenges.The Christian Filipino, on the other hand, is, you might
say, so unhappy because, since the l6th century, his environmenthas been in upheaval, has been perpetually changing. And itis in upheaval, it is ever changing, because of the continuousintroduction of new tools and new ideas. And each new tool,each new idea, has been a challenge demanding a resPonse.
Most agonizing, of course. But it's this challenge-and-resPonsethat has shaped the Filipino. In fact, when you say Filipinoyou are referring to an epoch - and I'm using the word epoch
in its basic sense of a new beginning, a new creation.The Filipino is the product of a particular history that
began in the 16th century and our identity as Filipino was
chiefly formed by what I consider the twelve greatest events inPhilippine history, greatest because they were the epochal ones,
the ones which, by the way we responded to them, determinedour response to all subsequent events.
Here are what I consider the twelve greatest events inPhilippine history:
l. The Introduction of the Wheel.2. The Introduction of the Plow.3. The Introduction of Road and Bridge.4. The Introduction of New Crops like Corn, Tobacco,
Camote, Coffee, Tea, Cocoa, Beans, Achuete, Onion, Potato,Guava, Papaya, Pineapple, Avocado, Squash, Lettuce, Cucumber,Cabbage, Sincamas, Sigadillas and Mani, etc., etc.
5. The Introduction of New Livestock like the Horse, the
Cow, the Sheep, the Turkey, the Goose, etc., and of the Carabao
as Draft Animal.6. The Introduction of the Fabrica, or Factory-7. The Introduction of Paper and Printing.B. The Introduction of the Roman Alphabet.9. The Introduction of Calendar and Clock.
10. The Introduction of the Map and the Charting of thePhilippinc Shapc.
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12. The Introduction of the (iuisado.These twelve events are the greatest in our history because
they have been affecting us since the l6th century and willcontinue to affect this nation as long as there are Filipinos.They affect not only the christian majority but also the high-landers in the north and the Muslim in the south. They affectthe artist in his studio as well as the housewife in her kitchen.In short, their effect is universal and at the same time deeplyintimate, for these are the events that first informed the ideniitycalled a Filipino.
Take the twelfth event: the Introduction of the Guisado.Very simple is the process of the saut6, or guisd, but the Frenchsay it's the foundation of civilized cooking; and when we thuslearned to dress food, our whole culture was transformed andbecame the Philippine culture of the adobo, the menudo, theguinisang repollo, the tinola. And every time we sit down attable, the guisado is still an event for us, a continuing event,and one so vital that the inner man in every Filipino, andespecially in every Filipina, would undoubtedly declarl that theintroduction of the guisado is, for us, a far more importantevent than, sol, the founding of the Katipunan.
Or take the introduction of eorn, which rescued the Visayanfrom age-old hunger and has been his prime stapre for the lastfour centuries. Wouldn't the Visayan readily agree that theintroduction of corn is a greater event than the Kawit procla-mation of lB9B? Or take the introduction of camote, which nowseems to us so typically Philippine and which has been deliveringfrom famine those parts of our country so regularly ravaged bytyphoons. Wouldn't the camote-eaters of Samar and Benguetand the Batanes hail the introduction of camote as an eventof more lasting value than the Malolos Congress?
Of lasting value, of lasting importance: that,s the qualitywhich distinguishes these twelve events I consider basic to ourhistory; and they are the reason I consider the l6th and lTthcenturies the most crucial in our history. Yet there are historianswho declare that what was happening in the philippines thenwasn't even Philippine history! Corn and camote and the guisado'are not Philippine history? Apparently not. What philippinehistory book even devotes a line to the advent among us ofcorn and camote and the guisado? They are vital, to put itmildly, to the life of the Filipino - but, no, they are notPhilippine history, though Gunter Gra.ss would undoubtedlyrank them as higher in importance than the events to which
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wt: <lt'volc clutpltr lli<'r t'haptt:t' ilt tlttr history lrrtoks.
Ily snulllling lht' trrtly intp<trtatrl to lirvor lhc less irrrportant,we have bccn dt:veloping in ttur pc<lplc a warpt:d vicw of ourculture and history. Before the war we were being told that we
made more progress in fifty years under the Americans thanin over three hundred years under Spain; and this contentionwas echoed in an article I read recently in a Manila daily,where the author declares that more important events occurredin the Philippines during the first decades of the 20th centurythan in all the four previous centuries. And I asked myself:What events happened in the 1900s that could possibly beregarded as more important than the introduction of the wheelor the introduction of the plow? Or the introduction of roadand bridge and masonry that revolutionized our ideas of humanhabitation? Or the introduction of calendar and clock thatdeveloped in us a sense of history? Or the introduction of paperand printing and the Roman alphabet that resulted in the birthof the Philippine book? Or the introduction of the factory andthe machine that signified our passage into an industrial culture?Or the introduction of all those artifacts that enabled us tomove forward into civilization?
For, look, we can read our history as the corn, camote,calabasa, cabbage and all those other f,ast-growing grains, greensand beans which, by freeing sectors of the population fromfood production, enabled them to engage in specialized tasks.These special non-aggie tasks meant a shift from subsistenceculture to "civilizallsl" - which means city culture - sincethe city is all those arts and crafts and sciences that becomepossible only when a large enough number of people can be
spared from food-growing. And this became possible for us onlywith the introduction of new crops like corn and cabbage, andnew livestock like horse and cow, and new tools like wheel andplow, map and money, adobe and the painter's brush. It wasthe l6th and lTth centuries that made possible the lateremergence in our history of a Burgos, a Rizal, a Juan Luna, a
Manuel Guerrero, an Amorsolo. In fact, it was the 16th andlTth centuries that made possible the eventual emergence ofthis nation called the Philippines. And to my list of the twelvegreatest events of Philippine history, I should add a thirteenthevent: the Introduction of the Bell. For, by gathering us underthe sound of the bell, Spain created the beginnings of a nationalcommunity where, before, there was no one community, onlya welter of hostile communities; and it was thus that Spaincreated a national identity, where, before, there was only a riotof identities. But under the sound ol' thc bcll, wt' dt:vt:loped
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su(:h t str()ng s('ns(' (,1' ulrily llr:rl wr. (.lln n()w tlr.t'lart. that,even bcfl<rrc l52l what is now thc I'hili;rPi,es alrt:ady cxistedas a nation known as Maharlika. ()nc wonders wh<i was itspresident in 1521. Madame Urduia?
Moreover, this effort to locate before l52l something thatstarted developing only from 1565 on, is an irrelevant efforttoday and could even be harmful. Prove that the Filipino existedbefore l52l and you prove that we don't need to have onenation, or one government, or one head of state, since theFilipino was able to develop and maintain a national identitywithout any of these things. In which case, why not just dissolvethe Republic and return to a system of small independentkingdoms? Which, in fact, is what the Muslim secessionists aresaying.
Happily, however, the name of a process is not the processitself. You can change its name but the process will still bethe same. Remove the name Filipino and you do not in anyway remove the process, or make it untrue, or disprove its timeschedule. The Filipino by any other name will still be Filipinb;that is, the product of a specific epoch, a particular history,which veered in this particular specific direction only in thel6th century.
I bring this up because we are currently asking why weshould bear the name of a king of Spain, Don I'elipe Segundo;and in my role as devil's advocate, I have to give the devil hisdue. Culturally, Don Felipe is our godfather - and isn't itusual among us to carry a godfatfuer's name? He is our culturalgodfather because the thirteen epochal events I have mentionedoccurred under his auspices; so that, symbolically, we can saythat it was Felipe Segundo who brought us the wheel, whotaught us the plow, who built our {irst roads and bridges, andwho gave us the horse, the clock, the factory, the cabbage, thecow, the printing press and the book; as it was Felipe Segundowho started the development o{'a national community by gather-ing us together under the. sound of the bell. We are merelycontinuing his work when, for instance, we gather. our nomadictribes together under the sound of the school bell, as panaminis doing.
This is the Spanish heritage that almost never gets men-tioned among us. And so the average Filipino thinks that Spainbrought us nothing except "religion." And it is therefore withastonishment that the Filipino learns that Spain brought uscorn and camote, coffee and tobacco, beef and bread, potatoesand tomatoes, lechugas and repollo, the ruler of the engineerand the brush of the artist, and even many of the trees that
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givt: our lltrrlst'itpc so rlistittctly l'lrililtpine n lrxrk. 'l'lrt' lrilipin<rlroy waslring lltc litslr worrrr<l ol'lris cirt'ttttt<'isirtrt itt gtr:tva-ltt:rfoinlrnt'nl s('('rns so irrrrrtt'rrtori:rlly rt lxtrt ol'ortr :rllorigin:rl culturt:that wc are startk'cl to clist'<tvcr lhrtl lltt'guava tr(:('came t() us
only with Spain. Just as inrrn<'rnorially "native" seelns theipil-ipil of our countryside and we do a double take on hearingthat the ipil-ipil was brought here by the galleons. But howmuch of what is to us so "truly Filipino".as to be part of ourcommon identity
- like sincamas and achuete and sineguelas
- is really part of our hispanic, not our primeval, heritage?When we fully realize that, we may begin to understand
why the Filipino bears the name of a king.Our culture and history may be said to be a process
convertins a mix of cabbages and kings into something different.And the novelty is this nation-in-the-making called the Philip-pines, this identity-in-progress called the Filipino.
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