Rizal's Annotation Of The Morga.pdf

Rizal’s Annotation of Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas

Historical antecedents • Secularization controversy was no longer the principal issue in the 1880s • At the beginning of the 1890s the assimilationist issue was already being edged out by the more fundamental issue of independence

Shift in the Filipinos’ consciousness Filipinos began to realize that they could have equal access to jobs monopolized by the Peninsulars in the Church, the military, and the bureaucracy only through a drastic change in the Philippines’ colonial status itself.

Shift in the colonial ideology

The myth of the lazy native

Ingratitude of the Filipinos to Mother Spain

The central thesis of the Filipino camp • 300 years of colonization was 300 years of backwardness! • The colony had not progressed because the ignorant and immoral friars, through the complicity of a corrupt and incompetent bureaucracy, had blocked the winds of change and any form of modernization coming into the islands. • (Remember one of the themes in Rizal’s brindis speech?)

The possible course of action • To debunk the colonial apologists’ myths, there had to be a massive scholarly search into the country’s precolonial past and the 300-year record of Spanish colonialism. • But the primary obstacle was: HOW?

Efforts to examine the country’s past

José Burgos “His references are relatively brief and not all accurate” (Schumacher, 1991).

Isabelo Delos Reyes His contemporaries “did not hold his historical work in high regard” (Schumacher, 1991).

Pedro Paterno “indigenous culture and institutions…were so similar to those of Spain..” (Quibuyen, 2008)

Rizal’s major writings and their relationships: A project of national emancipation

Noli Me Tángere (Rizal presented the condition under Spain)

Annotation of Sucesos de Las Islas Filipinas (Rizal showed the Filipino the roots of their nation)

El Filibusterismo (Rizal charted the Filipino course for the future)

Rizal’s intellectual tradition • Excerpts from Rizal’s letter to Fr. Vicente Garcia (January 1891): “In the titanic task of common regeneration, without stopping in our forward march, from time to time we turn our eyes toward our elders to read on their faces their judgment of our actions. For this thirst of understanding the past, of knowledge, to enter into the future, we go to persons like you. Leave us in writing your thoughts and the fruits of your long experience so that condensed in a book, we may not have to study again what you have already studied and that we may increase the heritage that we receive from you either expanding it or adding to it our own harvest…”

Rizal’s intellectual tradition • Excerpts from Rizal’s letter to Fr. Vicente Garcia (January 1891): ”…The smallness of the advancement that the Filipinos have made in three centuries of Hispanism is all due, in my opinion, to the fact that our talented men have died without bequeathing to us nothing more than the fame of their name. We have had very great intellects… Nevertheless, all that these men have studied, learned, and discovered will die with them and end in them, and [we] shall go back to recommence the study of life. There is then individual progress or improvement in the Philippines, but there is no national, general progress. Here you have the individual as the only one who improves and not the species.”

Rizal’s project to reclaim history Rizal originally requested Ferdinand Blumentritt to write a Philippine history book that would counter Spanish colonial history of the Philippines. Blumentritt declined.

Antonio de Morga • 1559 – 1636 (Seville, Spain) • Lawyer and high-ranking Spanish official • Appointed as lieutenant general in the Philippines in 1593, and also became a judge in the Real Audiencia • He was in charge of the Spanish fleet in the Philippines against the Dutch invasion in 1600.

Reasons for Rizal’s choice of Morga • A rare, civil, instead of ecclesiastical or religious, history of the Philippines written during the colonial period. • Relatively objective and trustworthy content.

• Rizal: “All the histories written by the religious before and after Morga, up to our days, abound with stories of devils, miracles, apparitions.”

• Friar accounts were biased or downright racist in tone and interpretation. • Morga was an eyewitness on the Philippines and its people at the time of the Spanish arrival.

Rizal’s dedication in his annotation of the Sucesos (Propaganda and Revisionism) Threefold Agenda: 1. To awaken in the Filipinos “a consciousness of our past, now erased from our memory” 2. To correct “what has been distorted and falsified” concerning the Filipinos 3. “to better judge the present and assess our movement in three centuries.”

Burgos’ influence Rizal nurtured the seeds in Burgos’ Filipinization project (appeal to the past to further the cause of the secularization) into full fruition.

Some of Rizal’s Instructive Footnotes in the Sucesos

The Indio as Filipino • One striking feature of Rizal’s footnotes on the Morga was his reference to the precolonial natives as Filipinos, indio Filipinos, or antiguas Filipinos. • Morga: “Indios” or “naturales” • During the colonial times, Filipino was the colonial label for the Spanish creoles.

The Indio as Filipino • Ambeth Ocampo (1998) claimed that “Rizal did not refer to non-Christian Filipinos collectively as ‘Filipinos.’” • Rizal’s footnote: • “In the Philippines, the Negritos, Igorots and other independent tribes were still tattooed… tattooing has much resemblance to what the Japanese practice today. However, the Filipinos apparently did not use any color but black…”

Immediate impact of Spanish conquest: Death and destruction • Rizal’s footnote: • Death has always been the first sign of the introduction of European civilization in the Pacific… the Pacific islands which became “civilized” suffered dreadful depopulation. • Impacts of Spanish conquest for Rizal: • Death and destruction (e.g. native industries) • Violence and oppression • Decline (e.g. trade) and depopulation

Long-term consequences of colonial rule • Rizal notes that the long-term effects of colonial rule, such as the encomienda system, the oppressive policies of the colonial regime, and the rapacity of the friar corporations brought the following impacts: a) Economic underdevelopment b) Destruction of the indigenous culture and the worsening demoralization of the native population

Deconstructing colonial discourse • Rizal debunked the “white mythologies” in the Spanish colonial discourses. • Colonial discourses deploy words that perform an insidious double function: 1. They mask the violence and irrationality of colonial practice 2. They attribute such violence on the natives who are being colonized.

• Examples of such words in Morga: “pacify” “entrust” “treachery” “piracy”

Deconstructing colonial discourse • Examples: • Rizal’s footnote: • “The raid by Datus Sali and Silonga of Mindanao, in 1599 with 50 sailing vessels and 3,000 warriors, against the capital of Panay, is the first act of piracy by the inhabitants of the South which is recorded in Philippine history. I say "by the inhabitants of the South" because earlier there had been other acts of piracy, the earliest being that of Magellan's expedition…”

• Spanish forces’ “pacification” campaign in Mindanao in which Captain-General Esteban Rodriguez de Figueroa was “treacherously killed” by a native warrior named Ubal.

What was Rizal’s response to the Spaniards’ “ingratitude” claim? “The Spaniards, however, say that the Philippines bring nothing to Mother Spain, that is the Islands that owe her. Probably; the enormous quantity of gold that she took from the Islands in the first years, the tributes of the tenants of the encomiendas, the nine million duros paid to military men, employees, diplomatic agents, corporation, etc. the salary not only of the people who go to the Philippines but also of those who return and even those who had never been or will ever be in the Islands nor have any thing to do with them – undoubtedly all this is nothing in comparison with so many captives, soldiers who died in the expeditions, depopulated islands, inhabitants sold as slaves by the Spaniards themselves, the death of industry, demoralization of the inhabitants, etc. etc. – wealth brought to these Islands by that holy civilization.”

Question to Ponder on: In recent times, the Philippines is experiencing another case of historical revisionism. Like the Spanish colonial discourse claiming that the natives had been "civilized" upon conquest, a growing number of Filipinos nowadays believe that the authoritarian interval in our post-colonial history was the country's "golden age" that was interrupted when the people began to call for democratization. How do we protect the truth and challenge such a revisionism?

References • Craig, A. (1927). Rizal’s Life and Minor Writings. Philippine Education Co. • Ocampo. A. (1998). Rizal’s Morga and Views of Philippine History. Philippine Studies vol. 46, no. 2: 184–214 • Quibuyen, F. (2008). A Nation Aborted: Rizal, American Hegemony, and Philippine Nationalism. ADMU Press.