Fighting on all Fronts (57 page)

Not all co-option was spiritually based. Cooperative local chiefs received tribute and labour amnesties and the lion’s share of the official land grants in return for facilitating the exploitation of their barangay.
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Exploitation often required force, but the paucity of exploitable natural resources throughout the archipelago meant that the occupation was relatively less brutal than had been the case in parts of Latin America.
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Still, numerous revolts took place against colonial excesses.
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In the early years, wrote historian John Phelan, rebellions “usually began as protests against economic exploitation or political injustice, but they invariably terminated on an anti-Catholic denominator”.
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Friars established themselves as landlords and their abuses became systematic.

The Spaniards played one ethnic group against another in the early years. But with integration into the world division of labour, commercial relationships penetrated deeper into the archipelago. A national market was established, the basis of a national consciousness. Revolts also began to take on a class character. Labourers were working on large, often church-controlled estates, breaking their backs to fill sugar, hemp and tobacco quotas. A broader indigenous hierarchy developed. This included the chiefs and other layers of civil authority such as inspectors, deputies and elected officials. They were often more exploitative and corrupt than the friars.
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A class of wealthy mestizo traders formed (the most important of which were the Philippine born Chinese/indigenous). The mestizos had an interest in the maintenance of the existing economic order. They too began accumulating land and benefitted from the exploitation of the mass of the population. They also received protection from the colonial authorities and culturally became more European than indigenous.

“In the 19th century particularly”, wrote US colonialist James Le Roy, “the mestizos (mostly the propertied class) have flocked to [the two Jesuit and Dominican colleges]”.
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Universities in Europe were taking greater mestizo enrolments. Educational and economic advance increased social and political aspirations. These were not welcomed by the Spanish. Peninsulares (Spaniards born in Spain) considered even creoles (those of Spanish descent born outside Europe) socially inferior. Rebellion began to ferment within the ranks of the mestizo and indigenous secular clergy from the 1820s because the Spanish friars often blocked indigenous priests rising to positions of authority and restricted the teaching of Spanish.
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Colonial policy also limited social advance within the administration and the military. One doctor related the prevailing attitude of the oppressors: “The friar would say [to the indigenous or mestizo who had gained an education], ‘You are a very ugly person to try to imitate the Spaniards; you are more like a monkey, and you have no right to try and separate yourself from the carabaos’ [water buffaloes]”.
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The social order, however, was butting up against a new reality. As a visiting German observed in the mid-19th century:

The old situation is no longer practicable, with the social change the times have brought. The colony can no longer be excluded from the general concert of peoples. Every facility in communication opens up a breach in the ancient system and gives cause for reforms in a liberal sense. The more that foreign capital and foreign brains penetrate, the more they increase
the general welfare, the spread of education, and the stock of self-esteem, the existing ills becoming in consequence the more intolerable.
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In late 17th century Spain physician Diego Matheo Zapata had warned that Enlightenment philosophy was a threat not only to the church, but to society.
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Two hundred years later the radicalism associated with that country’s 1868 Glorious Revolution was transmitted to the colony, where an alliance of lawyers, liberal businessmen and clergy began pushing for reform. They were joined by students demanding academic freedom and an end to discrimination against the indigenous population. Enlightenment ideas were permeating through an increasingly literate class of Filipinos. Originally the latter term referred exclusively to the creoles. But with the rise of the mestizo the term broadened in scope. The growing intelligentsia—the ilustrada, the educated sons of the landowning and trading elite—“infused it with national meaning”.
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The secular concepts of equality, democracy and citizenship contradicted the political and social barriers erected against the Filipinos. Newly appointed governor Carlos María de la Torre wrote to Spain in 1870: “The whole country points its finger at certain individuals of the clergy and certain lawyers, all mestizos and [creoles]… Everything, I repeat, leads one to believe that these lawyers and priests…dream of the independence of the country”.
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His impression wasn’t accurate. For many of the Filipino elites, genuine equality meant the political integration of the Philippines with Spain and the granting of citizenship. This was the outlook of the mainstream of the anti-clerical Propaganda Movement, which was organised by Filipino exiles in Europe and in Manila was embodied in the Liga Filipina, founded in 1892 by the European-educated mestizo novelist Rizal and others, including a young self-taught radical named Andres Bonifacio. Its goals were broadly liberal. And while it was anticlerical, it also attracted priests interested in reforming the church.

The ilustrados were, in Constantino’s appraisal “vacillating [and] opportunistic”.
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Rizal and his collaborators were loyal to empire and to the class from which they emerged. He never advocated (at least publicly) Philippine independence and denounced the idea of revolution. Yet de la Torre’s intuition captured something of the dynamic in the growing movement: “Liberalism…became a revolutionary force”, wrote historian John Schumacher, “when it became evident that the
traditionalist, friar-dominated Church, which was the sworn enemy of liberalism, was perceived by Spain as the only prop on which the decadent colonial regime could maintain itself”.
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The Spanish colonial authorities made paltry accommodations to the reformists. But each clear demand for Filipino advancement carried broader implications: to concede one in reality would be to concede another logically.

The logic of belligerence led in the same direction. The Katipunan,
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a radical separatist wing of the nationalist movement, grew under the leadership of Bonifacio. This wing involved provincial elites but also the labouring classes, who were concerned as much with the appalling social conditions they endured as with social status. By the late 1800s the working class was expanding in Manila. It, and the masses suffering in central and southern Luzon, rallied to the radicals. “The convergence of thousands of workers in a single place necessarily developed in them recognition of their solidarity of interest as Filipinos, though not yet as proletarians”, wrote Constantino.
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Affiliations with the organisation grew to the tens of thousands or more.
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National identity as Spaniard or Filipino expressed competing claims. The urban Filipino elite mostly spurned the radical movement—at least at first. Many sought equality with the colonialists, not with the lower classes. Yet the Spanish administration, suspicious of any liberal sentiment, struck out at all—even wealthy Filipinos with a stake in the colonial regime. There could be little distinction when Spanish class privilege rested on notions of racial superiority. As the colonialists lashed out and the ranks of the Katipunan swelled, the latter launched an uprising in August 1896. The Philippine revolution had begun.

Adding to the class and national antagonisms was religion. On one hand, the aspirations of the Filipino clergy were bound up with the anti-colonial question. On the other, the agrarian question dominating the minds of the central Luzon labourers also had a religious dimension due to friar control of the large landed estates. The anti-clerical revolutionary movement faced a conundrum—only through alliance with the Filipino clergy could the masses be mobilised. The local clergy played a significant role in bringing their parishes to the revolutionary cause,
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but often the priests had divided loyalties between the rebellion and the church.
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Ultimately the revolutionary forces were not strong enough to rout the Spaniards. Emilio Aguinaldo, one of Bonifacio’s lieutenants, took control of Cavite province, just south of Manila. Skilled military leadership and the backing of more conservative rural elites propelled him to prominence. In an ensuing factional struggle Bonifacio was executed.
The revolutionaries eventually retreated to inaccessible areas and engaged in guerrilla warfare before Aguinaldo negotiated an armistice in return for a financial settlement and an agreed exile in late 1897. Popular revolt resumed in several provinces in March the following year.
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By the time the US declared war against Spain in April 1898, the rebellion was regrouping. Aguinaldo, in alliance with and funded by the US, returned from exile. As commodore George Dewey’s squadron smashed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay on 1 May, a 30,000-strong insurgency took control of Luzon. A revolutionary government was proclaimed and independence was declared on 12 June. The leaders were keen to demonstrate loyalty to the economic status quo. “We sufficiently guarantee order to protect foreign interests in our country” and “the most holy right of property”, wrote Aguinaldo in December.
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The US allegedly gave assurances that it was the Filipinos’ friend despite refusing to recognise the new republic.
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It was not bringing freedom, but negotiating the transfer of power. “The insurgents and all others”, declared President McKinley, “must recognise the…authority of the United States”.
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Aguinaldo capitulated and recognised US authority—at least in Manila and its surrounds. He hoped that international negotiations would nevertheless result in recognition for his independent republic. It wasn’t to be. War broke out between the rebels and the US in early 1899.

National and religious questions remained intertwined. Gregorio Aglipay, military vicar general (later excommunicated by Rome for his role in the revolutionary government), attempted to overcome the divided loyalties of the Filipino clergy and pull them decisively into the revolutionary camp. Ultimately he was unsuccessful, but many clergy participated in the war. “Sixty percent of the native priests”, advised apostolic delegate Guidi, “are Katipuneros”.
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Some saw the struggle as a religious war—both against what was seen as widespread US desecration and looting of local parishes, and in defence of Catholicism against Protestantism.
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Arcadio Maxilom of Cebu, for example, was confident:

that should the starry flag of the Union dominate these islands, our children will not receive the Christian education which is found in the Philippines, through the grace of God, now strongly rooted, and should they be converted to Protestantism and will continue corrupting Christian customs… Let us fight then without hesitation or dismay, because God is in us and his power is great.
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The conflict left 200,000 Filipinos dead. The revolutionaries endured defeat after defeat. General Jacob Smith, commander of US
forces in Samar, ordered death to every person over the age of ten: “The more you kill and burn”, he instructed his commanding officer, Major Littleton Waller, in late 1901, “the better you will please me”.
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Yet in some areas the struggle continued and periodic uprisings occurred for more than a decade. “The diehard resistance”, observes historian Jim Richardson, “was sustained almost entirely by less privileged elements who had less to lose from protracted war and less to gain from surrender”.
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Under the US colonial regime resistance was brutally put down and the archipelago was unified under the rule of Manila. The Filipino elite flourished. In the provinces surrounding the capital the Spanish friars had accumulated more than half a million acres of land. The new administration confiscated most of this and sold it to the mestizos. So long as the Philippines remained a colony, many of these landowners were protected behind the US tariff. That meant favourable treatment exporting primary products to the largest market in the world. They became the greatest of collaborators. The US substituted education for religion in its pacification attempts. The civil service and government also were opened up to expand the Filipino middle class. This “Filipinisation” helped create a crony political system, by and large controlled by the landowners. The early Spanish rural reorganisation provided the foundation of the modern political unit and the power base of the Nationalist Party, which was originally established by more radical nationalists but in time became the main party of the establishment. Under its domination the Filipino state was built and prepared for eventual US handover. Historian Benedict Anderson explained:

It was above all the political innovations of the Americans that created a solid, visible “national oligarchy”. The key institutional change was the stage-by-stage creation of a Congress-style bicameral legislature… The new representational system proved perfectly adapted to the ambitions and social geography of the mestizo nouveaux riches. Their economic base lay in hacienda agriculture, not in the capital city. And their provincial fiefdoms were also protected by the country’s immense linguistic diversity. They might all speak the elite, “national” language (Spanish, later American), but they also spoke variously Tagalog, Ilocano, Pampango, Cebuano, Ilongo, and a dozen other tongues.

In this way competition in any given electoral district was effectively limited, in a pre-television age, to a handful of rival local[s]. But Congress, which thus offered them guaranteed access to national-level political power, also brought them together in the capital on a regular basis. There, more than at any previous time, they got to know one another well in a civilized “ring” sternly refereed by the Americans… They were for the first time forming a self-conscious
ruling
class.
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