Philperiodicals

The Revolution began on August 23–24, 1896, with the Cry of Balintawak. Shortly afterward, the Katipunan of Andrés Bonifacio managed to easily seize Cavite from the Spaniards, and the revolt extended to other provinces. Emilio Aguinaldo grew popular after his victories, overshadowing Bonifacio and being elected president of the Revolutionary Government—which was to replace the Katipunan—at the Tejeros Convention held on March 22, 1897. Aguinaldo executed Bonifacio on May 10 1897 for treason and lead the revolutionaries to victory over the Spanish empire, despite the brief truce signed by the Pact of Biak-na-Bato on December 14, 1897. The conflict overlapped with the Spanish-American war, which ended de facto with the Battle of Manila Bay on May 1, 1898, after which Spain sold the Philippines to the US. for $20 million through the Treaty of Paris. Aguinaldo declared Philippine independence on June 12, 1898, and then organized the First Philippine Republic (the Malolos Government).

One of the most interesting items in the UPD collection is probably the 12 numbers of the bi-weekly and bi-lingual publication El Heraldo de la Revolución (1898-1899), one of the official organs of the Revolutionary Government of Malolos, going from November 1898 to January 1899. Presidential decrees, edicts, provisions, regulations, official tariffs, bulletins, judicial and military sentences, and public calls were published in El Heraldo, which makes it an important resource to understand, not only how the Republic of Malolos looked, but also how the fully democratic revolutionary state model, then “free and independent of the ominous foreign dominion of the Spaniards”, was supposed to look like if it wasn't for American intervention.

During the whole month of January, El Heraldo would comment on the possibility of colonial occupation by the US, although it seems they were convinced that neither the Americans nor the American history favored an imperialistic expansion, which would be accepted neither by Aguinaldo nor by the revolutionary army.

Mariano Ponce insisted that the Republic was constituted in a “civilized manner” and still believed that the US had gone to war out of humanism and in order to protect Filipino independence.

The Malolos constitution published in El Heraldo de la Revolución

On the 22nd of January 1899, El Heraldo published the Malolo’s constitution in Castilian, and announced the proclamation of the republic on the 23rd of January. As the communications of the local authorities show, the revolutionary army made preparations to confront the US army in case they wanted to annexate the archipelago. It would, as is suggested by the fact that this is the last number of El Heraldo held at the UPD collection.

On the night of February 4, 1899, the Philippine-American War started. The conflict ignored Filipino sovereignty and the revolutionary control over the majority of the country before Spain even surrendered it to the Americans and was marked by extreme violence (Kramer 2006, 169). Although reluctantly, Aguinaldo retired into guerrilla tactics and was forced to scatter his forces (and the Republic) in order to face the US army, but couldn’t win a true war of attrition. On March 31 1899, the rebel capital of Malolos was captured by U.S. forces and Aguinaldo was captured on March 23, 1901. As a consequence, most of the numbers of El Heraldo held at UPD wear a stamp of the American Administration from 1900 that marks them as “Insurgent Records”. President Theodore Roosevelt declared the Philippine-American War officially over on July 4, 1902, but the US colonial administration would control the archipelago until 1905, shifting from military to civil control.

The Revolution would be one of the axes around which different national projects would orbit, a common point of reference for both the Filipino people and their political leaders whose meaning would range from a way to highlighting the virtues of American tutelage under Quezon and Quirino, to a historical debt to an unfinished revolution, an idea shared by Jose Laurel or even the Huk leader Luis Taruk (Hau 2005, 46-48). The Ilustrado’s and revolutionaries’ discourse were co-opted, same as the revolutionaries themselves, by the American administration, who banned the more militant manifestations of nationalist sentiments but encouraged its more conservative forms (Rafael 1999, 339). Some of the periodicals illustrate how figures such as José Rizal or even Andrés Bonifacio were soon integrated into the American discourse of “benevolent assimilation”.

Nevertheless, as Glòria Cano (2011, 421) argues, the Katipunan were to become potent signs to attract the masses but also a tacit refusal against U. S. institutions being imposed by the administration, and nationalists complained about this neglection, revindicating the revolution with massive events and even inaugurating a monument to the cry of Balintawak already in 1911, a unique event richly illustrated. in the UPD collection.

The US censored this discourse and made everything it could to shut down anti-American magazines such as El Renacimiento (Cano 2011). Accordingly, few mentions of the Revolution can be found in the UPD collection, at least until the Tydings–McDuffie Act of 1934 and the establishment of the Philippine commonwealth in 1935, which, as one cartoon put it, would make “rise again” the Republic established in Malolos.

Directly afterwards, we start finding representations of the Revolution in the press centered on the fight against Spain. The Philippine-American War didn’t fit into a new national discourse marked by a “special relationship” with the US, which silenced the event, especially (but not only) during the US colonial administration years (Ileto 1899, 5-7). An illustrated story about the defense of Malolos in 1897 (and not in 1899) held in the collection suggests precisely this.

This can be seen the clearest in The Young Citizen (1935-1941), which almost monthly would offer a small biography of “Our heroes” from the Philippine Revolution, ranging from José Burgos, Teodora Alonzo, and especially José Rizal to Leon María Guerrero. After 1936, these biographical notes started including revolutionaries from the Katipunan such as Emilio Jacinto or Gregorio del Pilar, although focusing only on their fight against Spain.

Nevertheless, as Vicente Rafael has argued (1999, 369) it was not until the post-independence period that the legacy of the revolution was repoliticized, stressing its popular and anticolonial nature. The UPD collection holds several examples of this dialectic and the different directions it tended towards. Since Elpidio Quirino made the Cry of Balintawak a national holiday in 1950, Semana followed the events of the Philippine revolution, highlighting not the “act of rebellion itself” but the events that it unfollowed.

In 1954, Jaime C. de Veyra in his column for Semana, “Efemérides filipinas” (Philippine Anniversaries) would revisit several key moments of the revolution and their protagonists. Interestingly De Veyra, although commending Bonifacio's abnegation and the Katipunan role in achieving independence, was reluctant to criticize openly a “paradisiac” Spanish colonialism.

This contrasts with other evocations of Bonifacio held in the UPD collection, which illustrates a much fiercer revindication of Bonifacio's fiery battle which made the Philippines “a free and famous nation”.

But it was not until the intellectual generation of the 1960s that the legacy of the Philippine Revolution was assumed and scholarly debate started (Rafael 1999, 369), especially during the series of centenaries of that decade. A good example of this is a series of articles in the magazine Panorama in which important historians vindicated figures such as Bonifacio, Mabini, or Aguinaldo.

Although still under debate, as proven by the quantity of bibliography published about it in late years (Mojares 2006, Thomas 2012, Anderson 2005), the long Philippine Revolution of 1896–1906 is still a key event for Filipino national discourse. As Nicole CuUnjieng (2020) argues, the revolution began against Spain and continued against the United States but took place against a backdrop of imperial consolidation and local resistance that was truly region-wide and which, in fact, would go on at least until WWII and the First Indochina War  (also part of this itinerary). The UPD collection shows not only the long-standing impact of the revolution in the archipelago but also its transhistorical and transnational entanglements.

Bibliographic references

Anderson, Benedict Richard O’Gorman. 2005. Under Three Flags: Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination. Verso.

CuUnjieng, Nicole. 2020. Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887–1912. Columbia Studies in International and Global History. Columbia University Press. 

Hau, Caroline. 2005. “Rethinking History and ‘Nation-building’ in the Philippines”. In Nation-building: Five Southeast Asian histories., 39-67. Institute of Southeast Asian Studies Singapore.

Ileto, Reynaldo C. 1999. “The Philippine-American War: Friendship and Forgetting”. In Vestiges of war: The Philippine-American war and the aftermath of an imperial dream, Ed. by Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia: 3-21.New York: New York University Press, 1999.

Kramer, Paul A. 2006. “Race-Making and Colonial Violence in the U.S. Empire: The Philippine-American War as Race War”. Diplomatic History 30 (2): 169-210. 

Mojares, Resil B. 2006. Brains of the nation: Pedro Paterno, TH Pardo de Tavera, Isabelo de Los Reyes, and the production of modern knowledge. Quezon City: Ateneo University Press.

Rafael, Vicente. 1999. “Parricides, Bastards and Counterrevolution: Reflections on the Philippine Centennial”. In Vestiges of war: the Philippine American war and the aftermath of an imperial dream 1999. Ed. by Angel Velasco Shaw and Luis H. Francia: 361-375. New York: New York University Press, 1999.

Thomas, Megan C. 2012. Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados: Filipino scholarship and the end of Spanish colonialism. St. Paul: U of Minnesota Press.