Anti-Colonial Archipelagos: Expressions of Agency and Modernity in the Caribbean and the Philippines, 1880-1910

Home , 1872 Cavite mutiny, Antonio Luna, Apolinario Mabini, Canarian nationalism, El filibusterismo, Emilio Jacinto

DISSERTATION

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Kristina A. Escondo, M.A., B.A.

Graduate Program in Spanish and Portuguese

The Ohio State University

2014

Dissertation Committee:

Dr. Ignacio Corona

Dr. Ileana Rodríguez, Adviser

Dr. Fernando Unzueta, Co-Adviser

Kristina A. Escondo

2014

Abstract

In the past decade, an impetus towards a more globalized field of Hispanic studies has emerged, critiquing the Peninsular/Latin America binary in academic departments and highlighting the need for significant studies of Hispanic Asian and African literatures. Various scholars have been contributing to this call, both in the study of

Africa and in Asia, in order to move away from the centrality of the Spanish presence.

My research is located in this emerging trend. This project highlights Filipino texts in order to continue building a transoceanic bridge to the Pacific by comparatively placing it alongside Cuban and Puerto Rican texts.

1898 and the first few years of U.S. neo-colonization. This study uses South Asian and

Latin American Subaltern Studies as a point of departure and addresses the gap in Iberian and Latin American studies that ignores the former Spanish colonies in the Pacific Ocean with a decolonial objective in mind. The works studied show the development of a new, regional and national consciousness and reveal the authors’ responses to modernization, highlighting the political, cultural, and social tensions of that time period aesthetically and socio-culturally.

By employing a transoceanic approach of the Filipino propagandista movement and the Latin American modernista movement, I aim to disrupt coloniality’s focus on the

Atlantic and allow for the emergence of decolonial thought that considers the inclusion of the formerly marginalized Pacific. Through an analysis of these parallel movements, my overall claim is that, by reading these texts through a transoceanic lens, we see not a mimicry of a European style, but rather an educated, elaborate response to the collapsing empire and to the international community. In this response, the subaltern asserts his agency, fostering dialogue on nation, citizenship, modernity, and identity.

My chapters (1) trace the seeds of a rising indigenous / criollo consciousness in both the Caribbean and in the Philippines against Spanish identity; (2) study the development of this new consciousness into nationalist identity and explore the creation of the meaning of the autonomous national subject; (3) explore the transformations of some of these nationalist sentiments into a revolutionary form of anti-colonialism; and,

(4) examine the cultivation of anti-colonialism into anti-imperialist responses via crises of negotiation between old and new empires. Through this study, I show that, in the struggle for the active participation in the production of knowledge and power, justice, and the creation of a national identity, both Latin American and Filipino cultural and ideological production were carried out by autonomous agents that confronted, negotiated, and initiated their own responses to the colonizing and modernizing projects.

iii

Dedication

To my family and friends, both here and across the oceans,

To remembering my roots,

And to Patrick

Acknowledgments

This dissertation would never have happened without the generous support and encouragement of numerous individuals. First, mil gracias to my adviser, Dr. Ileana

Rodríguez, for pushing me beyond what I believed were my limits. She saw the value in my research and fostered my motivation to pursue it, both on an academic level, as well as on a personal one. Likewise, to Dr. Fernando Unzueta for graciously co-advising my dissertation; his unparalleled insight into nineteenth-century nationalist literature provided inspiration for many future projects. Additionally, to Dr. Ignacio Corona, who especially fueled my passion for modernismo, Orientalism, and border thinking. These professors’ expertise, comments, suggestions, and guidance have been indispensable to this project, and for that, I am very grateful. To Judy and Melodie, for guiding me through the paperwork which is always harder to keep track of than it seems. And to my friends and colleagues at the Ohio State University in the Department of Spanish and

Portuguese, who continuously inspire me and provide mental support – I am grateful to draw from their brilliance.

Maraming, maraming salamat sa aking mga magulang – my parents have been my strongest supporters. Without really understanding my passion or the significance of this dissertation, they have nonetheless encouraged me and been a unique fount of knowledge on Filipino heroes, anti-heroes, and the Philippines in general (and even

v purchased hard-to-find books for my research on their trip to the Philippines!). Special thanks to my extended family; they have also been absolutely essential in their help with

Tagalog translations into English, especially with the old Tagalog (improving my

Tagalog is my next project). Maraming salamat sa inyong lahat.

Special thanks to my non-academic friends, who kept me grounded, especially the

Frankart-Hoffman family, who have provided an endless supply of chips and salsa, comfy couches, and laughter. And last, but certainly not least, to Patrick, who rejoiced and suffered with me during the entire process. I owe a debt of gratitude for his patience and emotional support, for being a soundboard for my ideas, for rigorously interrogating my work, and, ultimately, for everything.

All of these individuals share in the joys and successes of this work, but all errors, inaccuracies, and shortcomings are my own.

Vita

2003...... Garfield Heights High School

2007...... B.A. English and Spanish, Marietta College

2009...... M.A. Spanish, The Ohio State University

2007 to present ...... Graduate Teaching Associate/Lecturer,

Department of Spanish and Portuguese,

The Ohio State University

Publications

Escondo, Kristina. “Cuba, the Philippines, and Anti-Imperial Alliances.” A Review of

Koichi Hagimoto’s Between Empires: Martí, Rizal, and the Intercolonial Alliance

(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). A Contracorriente 11.2 (Winter 2014):

447-453.

Fields of Study

Major Field: Spanish and Portuguese

vii

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgments...... v

Vita ...... vii

Introduction: Anti-Colonial Archipelagos ...... 1

Transoceanic voices ...... 5

Comparative African and Asian Literature in Spanish ...... 7

Modernity, Modernismo, and Orientalism ...... 11

Modernity/Coloniality, Subaltern Studies, and Decolonial Thought ...... 24

Chapter 1: Islands of Consciousness:

Representation in the Works of Julian del Casal and Isabelo de los Reyes ...... 38

Julián del Casal and the Chronicle ...... 47

Isabelo de los Reyes and Folklore ...... 71

Chapter 2: Islands of Nationalism:

The Poetry of Ramón de Emeterio Betances and José Rizal ...... 98

Sentimentalism, Progress, and Nation in José Rizal’s Poetry ...... 105 viii

Love, Freedom, and Patriotism in Ramón Emeterio Betances’ Poetry ...... 132

Chapter 3: Islands of Revolution:

Manifestos of José Martí and Andrés Bonifacio...... 152

José Martí and his “Manifiesto de Montecristi”...... 158

Andrés Bonifacio and “Ang Dapat Mabatid ng Mga Tagalog” ...... 169

Chapter 4: Islands of Modernity:

The Responses of Apolinario Mabini and José de Diego ...... 189

Apolinario Mabini, “The Sublime Paralytic” ...... 196

José de Diego, “The Father of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement” ...... 221

Afterword: Transitions ...... 249

Bibliography ...... 254

Introduction: Anti-Colonial Archipelagos

Transoceanic Knowledges, Nations, and Narratives

Conocer diversas literaturas es el medio mejor de liberarse

de la tiranía de algunas de ellas.

- José Martí (Ensayos y crónicas 41)

In the past decade, an impetus towards a more globalized field of Hispanic studies has emerged, critiquing the Peninsular/Latin America binary in academic departments and highlighting the need for significant studies of Hispanic Asian and African literatures. This critique, illustrated most clearly in the collection edited by Ileana

Rodríguez and Josebe Martínez, Estudios transatlánticos postcoloniales. Vol. I:

Narrativas commando / Sistemas mundos: Colonialidad / Modernidad (2010), points out specific areas in which this intercontinental dialogue is neglected. For example, Brad

Epps, in his essay “Al Sur y al este: La vertiente africana de los estudios transatlánticos postcoloniales,” proposes beginning to unlock the field by establishing a triangular configuration between Europe-Americas-Africa. He specifically highlights Equatorial

Guinea as a starting point because it is the only former Spanish colony in Africa today in which Spanish is the co-official language. Epps argues that Equatoguineans deserve to situate themselves alongside Latin American and Peninsular critics, “ya que la historia del (post) colonialismo hispano implica… a todas partes (des)iguales” (156). Adopting

1 only a Hispanic viewpoint perpetuates the centrality of the Spanish presence, excluding

Africa and, moreover, the problem of slavery. Upon establishing triangular trans-Atlantic configurations, the study of trans-oceanic flows – across the Atlantic and Pacific – between Spain, Latin America, and former Asian-Pacific colonies (such as Guam and the

Philippines) is the logical next step. As a result, various scholars have been contributing to this call, both in the study of Africa and in Asia. My research is also located in this emerging trend. This project highlights Filipino texts in order to continue building a transoceanic bridge to the Pacific by comparatively placing it alongside Cuban and

Puerto Rican texts.

This project carries out a transoceanic comparative study of Cuban, Puerto Rican and Filipino nationalist and revolution literatures written during the late nineteenth century. These works cover the time period leading up to Spain’s loss of its final colonies in the Spanish-American War in 1898 and the first few years of U.S. imperialism and neo-colonization. This study uses South Asian and Latin American Subaltern Studies as a point of departure to address the gap in Iberian and Latin American studies that ignores the former Spanish colonies in the Pacific Ocean with a decolonial objective in mind. It primarily highlights essays and poetry written at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century during the Latin American modernismo movement and the parallel Filipino Propaganda Movement. Modernismo in Latin America was initially characterized by its focus on beauty, art, and French symbolism, but eventually evolved to focus on the nation and national identity. The Propaganda Movement, formed by Filipino émigrés to Europe, aimed to increase Spanish awareness about the needs of

2 the Philippines and advocated for reform and representation in the Spanish courts through propaganda. The works of both movements show the development of a new, regional and national consciousness and reveal the authors’ responses to modernization, highlighting the political, cultural, and social tensions of that time period aesthetically and socio- culturally. The simultaneity and similarity of these movements demonstrate the autonomous, yet interconnected cultural, social, political, historical, and economic processes involved in the region’s cultural and nationalist formations.

By employing a transoceanic comparative study of these parallel modernista and propagandista movements, I aim to disrupt the established coloniality that prioritizes the

Spain-Latin America Atlantic binary and thus allow for the emergence of decolonial thought that considers the flows between these formerly marginalized spaces. My overall claim is that, by reading these texts through a transoceanic lens, we see not a mimicry of a European style, but rather an educated, elaborate response to the collapsing empire and to the international community. In this response, the subaltern asserts his agency, fostering dialogue on nation, citizenship, modernity, and identity. My chapters (1) trace the seeds of a rising indigenous / criollo consciousness in both the Caribbean and in the

Philippines against Spanish identity, characterized by the elevation of local, non-

European knowledges; (2) study the development of this new consciousness into nationalist identity through the writers’ interactions with the nation-state, their elaboration of a new national memory, and their construction of the meaning of the national subject; (3) explore the transformations of some of these nationalist sentiments into a revolutionary form of anti-colonialism via the writers’ responses to colonialism,

3 which incorporate a language of community and chaos; and, (4) examine the cultivation of anti-colonialism into anti-imperialist responses via their conflicted critique and heritage of coloniality and crises of negotiation between old and new empires.

All of these processes and aesthetics reflected a transoceanic modernity whose responses toward the collapsing old empire and the emerging new one express anxieties regarding coloniality, modernization, and impending neocolonialism. Through this study,

I hope to show that, in the struggle for active participation in the production of knowledge and power, justice, and the creation of a national identity during the end of the nineteenth century, both Latin American and Filipino cultural and ideological production were autonomous agents that confronted, negotiated, and initiated their own responses to the colonizing and modernizing projects.

Although it is impossible to completely sift out any external influence over the island nations’ intellectual formations – by definition, a colonial intellectual has already been compromised by being drawn into the colonizer’s orbit – it is essential to highlight the autonomy of the Caribbean and the Philippines in their responses to changing global events. By misrepresenting these regions and their movements as simply derivative or mimetic from Spain and/or the rest of Latin America, one risks the exercise of epistemological violence over their particular colonial situation. Likewise, to completely negate the influence of imperial and other world affairs equally ignores 300 years of modernity/coloniality, tyranny, and dominance. If we consider the opening epigraph by

Martí, the recognition of external influences over is the first step toward liberation from their control and, I’d like to add, the first step toward determining one’s own course.

Transoceanic voices

The impetus for this project arose during the course of my graduate education.

While working on my Master’s degree, which focused on Iberian literatures and cultures, my initial interest was in Spanish modernismo, the writers of la generación de ’98, and their artistic and political expressions of anxiety over Spain’s loss of its final colonies –

Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. However, taking courses in the field of modern Latin American literature fostered my interest in a trans-Atlantic approach – it had not occurred to me to put these discourses in dialogue! As this interest developed, I began to wonder why, despite the status of the Philippines and Guam as long-time colonies of the Spanish empire, they were simply added as a footnote to both Peninsular and Latin American studies. While further research found that Guam’s roots in oral traditions explained the overall lack of Guamanian written texts, thus making it more difficult to find written research on those islands (but not negating their importance), the study of the Philippines’ rich literary tradition was primarily confined to programs on

Southeast Asian studies, if at all.

On a personal note, as a first-generation Filipino-American, I was also drawn to the absence of Filipino literature in Hispanic studies, not only because of the extensive

Spanish colonial and linguistic presence, but also because of the abundance of literature written in Spanish. This abundance of Spanish-language literature, poetry, and articles is particularly striking during the end of the nineteenth century because the writers of the

Propaganda Movement, which sought political reform from Spain so that Filipinos could have equal rights and representation in the courts, were mostly educated in Europe and

5 wrote their propaganda primarily in Spanish. Furthermore, much of this literature in

Spanish (though now often in translation to major Philippine languages, so as to be accessible to the general public) forms the historic, civic, and national canon in

Philippine pedagogy (for example, by law, José Rizal’s novels Noli Me Tangere and El filibusterismo are required readings in every high school in the Philippines). I wondered whether the opposite were true: whether Filipino literature was read at all in Spain and/or

Latin America. 1

During my work at the doctoral level, the contribution of the Philippines’ literature and culture to the Spanish and Latin American fields has fueled my professional interests. To begin with, courses on nationalism, globalization, trans-Atlantic studies, transnationalism, and border theory introduced me to questions of identity, culture, and nation through comparative and transoceanic approaches. Moreover, courses on modernismo – both in the sense of “art for art’s sake” and also in its engagements with modernity, Westernization, and geopolitics (explicit or not) – often overlapped aesthetically and conceptually with the concepts mentioned above. They also introduced me to questions on the definition and role of modernity, Orientalism, and the literary production of identity, culture, and nation. Contemporaneous to la generación de ’98 in

Spain, the modernista movement in Latin America saw itself as its own, distinct movement which clearly forged a connection between the anxieties of nation and

1 Regarding adjectival forms of the Philippines: The word “Philippine” is generally used to describe inanimate nouns, but may also be used for people when it describes a person representing the Philippine nation, e.g. the Philippine president. The term “Filipino” is generally used to refer to citizens or to people of Filipino ancestry, although it can occasionally be used for inanimate nouns. In general, but not without exceptions, the term “Philippine” is most often used to describe an inanimate noun associated with the nation (e.g. the Philippine National Anthem), whereas the term “Filipino” is primarily associated with a noun “produced” by the person or culture (e.g. Filipino cuisine). 6 nationalism and a rejection (or at least a critique) of colonialism, especially in the

Caribbean, similar to the propagandista movement in the Philippines. I began to notice the commonalities and interconnectedness of modernismo and its arguments about culture, identity, nation, and modernity/coloniality – and realized that the same preoccupations emerged in the literature of the same time period in the Philippines. With this formation, the trajectory of my research organically came together, encompassing the aesthetic, cultural, and political questions of modernismo, and the relationship between knowledge and power, modernity/coloniality, and nation.

Comparative African and Asian Literature in Spanish

As I noted above, the past two decades have seen a rise in scholars who have been recognizing the need for a more transoceanic study, particularly in academic departments of Spanish. The study of Africa has been particularly rich; scholars such as Jorge Salvo,

Marvin A. Lewis, Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo, and Mbaré Ngom Faye, among others, have highlighted nationalist, post-colonial, and exile literature from Equatorial Guinea, mostly due to the wide availability of more contemporary Equatoguinean literature written in

Spanish. For example, Marvin A. Lewis’ book An Introduction to the Literature of

Equatorial Guinea: Between Colonialism and Dictatorship (2007) is one of the first to compile a type of reader that highlights the major works of Spanish Africa, specifically

Equatorial Guinea. In dealing with the Pacific, scholars such as María Dolores Elizalde

Pérez-Grueso, Josep M. Fradera Barceló, and Epifanio San Juan, among others, have highlighted the significance of colonial, nationalist, and post-colonial works in the

Philippines. While it is more difficult to gain access to some of the more obscure Filipino

7 texts (if at all – many historical texts have been destroyed due to war, floods, and fires, for example), the fact that Peninsular and Latin American scholars have begun paying more attention to the texts and cultural artifacts that are readily available (such as José

Rizal’s novels) – and seeking out those that are hidden – is optimistic. These attempts to cultivate a multi-continental dialogue between Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and

Spain demonstrate that these scholars recognize the potential dangers of, in Epps’ words,

“suscribir, ahistóricamente, a una hispanidad que sigue proclamando su particular universalidad sin reconocer la extensión y los límites, de su poder en una época postcolonial” (“subscribing, ahistorically, to a Hispanity that continues proclaiming its particular universality without recognizing its extension and the limits of its power in a postcolonial era”; 156, my translation). Put differently, there is a conscious effort to be aware of the pervasiveness of the coloniality of power and knowledge. However, I wish to emphasize that this does not simply “rescue” texts from oblivion, but rather establishes a dialogue between all of the former colonies and situating their voices and knowledges as equally authoritative as those from the metropole.

To begin with, I would like to first highlight some of the more prominent works and scholars on the colonial Philippines, particularly on the Propaganda Movement, because while they are not necessarily explicitly comparative, the fact that the works and figures studied do dialogue with the Spanish empire makes their work implicitly so. The works of John Schumacher (The Propaganda Movement, 1880-1895: The Creation of a

Filipino Consciousness, The Making of a Revolution [1997]), Reynaldo Clemeña Ileto

(Pasyon and Revolution: Popular Movements in the Philippines [1979]), Teodoro A.

Agoncillo (The Revolt of the Masses: The Story of Bonifacio and the Katipunan [1956]), and Gregorio F. Zaide (History of the Katipunan [1931]), for example, are considered classics on both the Propaganda Movement and its revolutionary foil, the Katipunan, in the same way that Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1983) is one of the classics on nationalism.

With respect to more contemporary scholarship, Vicente L. Rafael’s works, especially his recent The Promise of the Foreign: Nationalism and the Technics of

Translation in the Spanish Philippines (2005), focuses primarily on language and argues that translation was key to the emergence of Filipino nationalism. He examines the ambivalence of the Filipinos with respect to the Castilian language, on the one hand viewing it as a tool to overcome difference – be it linguistic, regional, or class – and on the other hand, seeing the limits of such a fantasy. Correspondingly, John D. Blanco’s book, Frontier Constitutions: Christianity and Colonial Empire in the Nineteenth-

Century Philippines (2009), explores cultural transformations of the racially mixed

Philippine atmosphere in the nineteenth century, as well as the social instability that resulted from this crisis. His investigation of this paradoxical colonial consciousness is especially valuable for his treatment of the artists and writers’ agency in their attempts to synthesize the contradictions apparent in colonial society as they attempted to achieve reform – or conversely, independence – during this turbulent era. Additionally, Megan C.

Thomas’ book, Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the

End of Spanish Colonialism (2012) brilliantly shows how the Filipino ilustrados’ anticolonial project of constructing the “Filipino” involved Orientalist discourses usually

9 ascribed to colonial projects. Drawing from the work of Benedict Anderson and Partha

Chatterjee, she explores how the work of the ilustrados drew from and transformed the tools of European scholarship – particularly Orientalist thought – in order to analyze the boundary between nationalist and colonialist thought.

At this point, let’s turn our attention to more recent comparative works on the

Philippines. María Dolores Elizalde Pérez-Grueso’s collection Repensar Filipinas:

Política, Identidad y Religión en la construcción de la nación Filipina (2009) provides one of the first well-rounded reflections on the relationship between Spain and the

Philippines, including essays from European, American and Filipino scholars that deal with politics, identity, and religion. This text, which serves as an introductory sampling of Filipino-Spanish literature and culture, demonstrates the current trend toward globalized Hispanic studies. Additionally, the recently published book by Adam Lifshey,

The Magellan Fallacy: Globalization and the Emergence of Asian and African Literature in Spanish (2012), unites Equatoguinean and Filipino contributions and carries out a comparative study between Filipino literature in Spanish and Equatoguinean literature in

Spanish. In this text, Lifshey argues that literature in Spanish from Asia and Africa re- imagines the presumed centers and peripheries of the modern world by shifting his focus completely away from the Spain-Latin America binary. While his claim that his is the

“only” book written on Asian and African literatures in Spanish is exaggerated, I agree that it is the only text to date that comparatively studies these two areas outside of the

Peninsular-Latin American binary, and it is one of few that give major texts in each region a more in-depth treatment.

In a similar fashion, few comparative connections have been made between the

Philippines and Latin America; on the bright side, this is beginning to change. John D.

Blanco’s “Bastards of the Unfinished Revolution: Bolívar's Ismael and Rizal's Martí at the Turn of the Nineteenth Century” (2004), for example, compares themes of a lost patrimony and the anomalous identity of the bastard in novels and poems from Cuba and the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth century, embodied in the figure of a bastard son or daughter. In his study, Blanco compares Cuban author Cirilio Villaverde’s work

Cecilia Valdés (1882), Cuban José Martí’s collection of poetry Ismaelillo (1882), and

Filipino José Rizal’s novels Noli Me Tangere (1887) and its sequel El Filibusterismo

(1891). The more recent text, Between Empires: Martí, Rizal, and the Intercolonial

Alliance (2013) by Koichi Hagimoto thoroughly and systematically compares the writings of José Martí and José Rizal, providing an excellent entry point into comparative

Filipino-Latin American studies by highlighting the works of two of the most well-known figures of their respective regions and placing them in dialogue. Beyond these texts, the work of scholars such as Ignacio López-Calvo and Araceli Tinajero on Orientalism in the

Hispanic World – especially on the connections between Asia and the Americas – have been vital to opening up this rich field of study. It is here that I intend to contribute through the comparative study of Latin American modernista and Philippine propagandista literature.

Modernity, Modernismo, and Orientalism

There are a plethora of works dedicated to modernity and modernism, and a considerable number dedicated to their regional variants; here I want to mention those

11 most relevant to my study. With respect to modernity, Enrique Dussel and Julio Ramos serve as starting points. Dussel’s work articulates the relationship between knowledge and power by examining at modernity from its underside – that is, from coloniality. The term coloniality refers to structures and discourses brought and/or left over from colonial rule that continue to exert authority over the knowledges, laws, and cultures of a people.

In his book The Underside of Modernity (1996), Dussel approaches the question of liberation from a philosophical framework. For Dussel, liberation philosophy is a counter-discourse which challenges Eurocentrism, reveals the underside of modernity – that is, that modernity and coloniality are necessarily constitutive of one another – and establishes an ethic that reproduces life, spurns exploitation, and generates collectivity.

This relationship between a decentered view of modernity, the questioning of coloniality of power, the creation of an ethics-based counter-discourse, and a rising collectivity can be used as a lens through which to examine the discourse of modernismo in Latin

America and propagandismo in the Philippines.

In this book, Dussel critiques the Eurocentric notion of modernity proposed by

Hegel and Jürgen Habermas (51). According to this idea, modernity was an exclusively

European phenomenon that originated in the Middle Ages and, through inter-European movements – the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the French Revolution – modernity spread throughout the world. Additionally, this viewpoint posits that Europe attributes its modern development to its own “self-enclosed, self-referential, autopoietic system” that not only elevated European particularities as “universal,” but also “pretended that the work of humanity in [Europe] was the product of its autonomy and exclusive creativity”

(Dussel 216). That is, Europe confused European particularities with universality and globality. Dussel rejects this interpretation and proposes that modernity is not a European phenomenon but rather a global one that began in 1492. It was in 1492 when the world’s cultures were placed into a global relation – prior to this point, the great cultures were the

“center” of their own sub-systems with their own peripheries. However, Europe’s novelty was that it made itself the center of the system that confronted all of the world’s cultures, dominating these cultures and making them Europe’s periphery (Dussel 132). Spain, specifically, was the first “center” of this world-system, and its colonies, peripheries. For

Dussel, modernity and colonialism are mutually dependent.

In this light, Julio Ramos’ book, Desencuentros de la modernidad en América

Latina: literatura y política en el siglo XIX (1989) explores the relationship between power, literature, writing, citizenship, and culture. In contrast to the a priori presumed existence of a “Latin American identity” (lo latinoamericano), Ramos questions whether the very creation of lo latinoamericano was actually inseparable from the very constitution of “literature” as a specific object, discourse, and discipline. That is, what if literature reinforced the forging of lo latinoamericano? Ramos explains that literature had provided the model for a homogenous national language, as well as designated the place where models of citizenship, the nation-state, and symbolic boundaries were outlined. For the elite, “literature” was a way through which chaos would be transformed into organization; it was the space where national language, models of subjectification, and the norms for the invention of citizenship and symbolic boundaries were created and projected (49). Yet, he notes, by the 1880s, nostalgia for this literary legitimacy begins to

13 appear in the work of modernista writers, reflecting an anxiety toward the dissolution of codes that had previously assured the legitimacy and authority of writing in Latin

American society. Yet, the modernistas’ writings also attest to the rise of a new discourse on literature, in which these writers attempt to delineate the limits of this new authority, apart from the project of state-building. That is, the previous relationship between literature and the state would be problematized as the very condition that would allow for literary autonomy and modernization. Ramos then investigates the literary, political, and pedagogical practices and processes in which he explores both genealogies of literature and the creation of a Latin American identity and elaborates a dialectical analysis between literature and identity. Ultimately, Ramos proposes the articulation of a double movement: the first is the exploration of literature as a discourse that tries to be autonomous, or defines its field of social authority; the second is the analysis of the impossible conditions of its institutionalization (55). In Martí’s work, then, Ramos looks at the heterogeneity in his discourse, characterized by various authorities, be it aesthetic, political, ethical, or otherwise.

The link between political engagement, different knowledges, and power outlined by Dussel and Ramos ties in perfectly with Jessica Berman’s book Modernist

Commitments: Ethics, Politics, and Transnational Modernism (2011). While not focused specifically on Latin America or Asia, her text focuses on a transnational view of modernism to show how modernist narratives connect ethics and responsibility to the active creation of political relationships and the way justice is imagined through her juxtaposition of modernity in colonial India, Civil War Spain, rural United States,

London, and Dublin. Berman argues that narrative can play a crucial role in bridging the gap between ethics and politics by connecting ethical attitudes and responsibilities to the active creation of political relationships and just conduct (5-6). In narrative, ethics are put into play and justice is imagined; the ethical demands of alterity infuse the narrative situation and the reader’s attempt to respond to this demand takes place as “an ethical event between writers and readers that responds to, intervenes in, and changes its rhetorical and social situation” (Berman 6). Recognizing that the event of narration requires a public arena and an audience predisposed to attend to it in order to engage with politics, have political power, and imagine justice, Berman then turns to modernism to exemplify narrative’s role in the imagining of justice.

Modernism, Berman claims, refers to a “dynamic set of relationships, practices, problematics, and cultural engagements with modernity” rather than a specific canon of works, set of formal devices, or range of beliefs (32). The modernist narrative, then, is related to the social, political, and historical circumstances and demands of modernity and their challenges to representation. Like many Latin American scholars on modernism

(Gerard Aching and Cathy L. Jrade, for example), Berman challenges the division between “modernist” and “committed” or “politically engaged” writing and instead argues that a continuum of political engagement, united with formal experimentation, actually strengthens modernisms worldwide. Also, by employing a transnational model of modernism, Berman, like Dussel, decenters the Eurocentric “modernist canon” and instead challenges the boundaries between global and local constructions of modernist texts.

While Berman does not dialogue explicitly with Dussel, they similarly advocate a counter-discourse which challenges Eurocentric notions of modernity and calls for an engagement with politics, ethics, and justice through a new, active characterization of modernism. Much like the Latin American modernistas, who were engaged, politically- minded journalists who contributed significantly to the cultural-political atmosphere of the time and helped define pan-Hispanic national identities, the Filipino propagandistas similarly contributed to the construction of a pan-Filipino national identity and anticolonial thought in their writings. A transnational model serves to demonstrate that the coincidence of the Latin American modernista movement and the Filipino propagandista movement does not necessarily imply that they were dependent on external cultural, ideological, and artistic production; rather, it challenges the Eurocentric notions of mimicry by showing the autonomy of each region’s cultural, ideological, and artistic production without discounting these external influences.

We can see these ideas illustrated in Resil B. Mojares’ book Brains of the Nation:

Pedro Paterno, T.H. Pardo de Tavera, Isabelo de los Reyes, and the Production of

Modern Knowledge (2006). While his work does not explicitly discuss either modernism or modernismo, it serves as an excellent companion to the works by Dussel, Ramos, and

Berman through its examination of the production of knowledge in the Philippines, its relationship with power, and its engagement with culture and politics. In his explorations of the historical conditions that shaped the emergence of a modern Filipino elite, Mojares analyzes the ways through which these intellectuals – specifically those mentioned in the title – engaged with Western knowledge and how they dealt with the local realities of the

Philippines, as well as whether they chose or tried to speak from, of, or for it. In his chapter “The Filipino Enlightenment,” Mojares points out the entangled genealogies of local and Western knowledge in the Philippines that begins with the arrival of Magellan, continues with European missionaries, and interacts with Western intellectuals and scientists in the interest of “imperial knowledge-building” (387). He stresses that, while natives felt the practical results of the Western production of textual knowledge, they themselves did not have access to the texts, aside from printed religious works in the vernacular languages (prayer books, catechisms, saints’ biographies) – even the Bible itself was not circulated. Natives, Mojares points out, referring in this case to the

Filipinos, “were the object rather than the subject of this kind of knowledge. European scholarship was knowledge produced for Europe” (388). Although he notes that the sufficient conditions did not exist for the expanded use of writing in pre-colonial times in the Philippines – there were no epics or chronicles, and local communities did not have the scale for the need of legitimating uses of writing, such as treatises or royal chronicles

– he points out that a wealth of indigenous knowledge exited mostly in oral, ritual, and localized forms, maintained by “persons of knowledge” who were persecuted by the

Spaniards and pushed to the margins of society (390).

Mojares, like Benedict Anderson, attributes the later rise of the Filipino intelligentsia to the rise of the press, which in the nineteenth century made printing cease to be a friar monopoly and allowed for the printing of liberal ideas in newspapers and other publications. Although literacy in Spanish was limited, the influence of newspapers was extraordinary – extending beyond readers, they were relay points in the oral

17 transmission of news, rumor, and gossip. Censorship only made the problem worse – by prohibiting certain works, it only stimulated the traffic in contraband literature, especially since, as previously mentioned, the only books in circulation prior were religious texts.

Additionally, the formation of Masonic lodges in the Philippines contributed to the rise of modernist/propagandist literature because these were “schools” of Enlightenment thought, oriented toward ideas of republicanism and constitutionalism, and the major proponents of the Propaganda Movement belonged to these lodges. In the Philippine case, the political bent of Freemasonry was essential in its nationalist, anti-friar stance; lodge meetings were devoted not only to the instilling of Enlightenment principles, but also the discussion of Philippine issues (such as representation in the government), diffusion of libertarian ideas, and vehicles for enlisting the support of foreign lodges.

This is quite similar to the influence of Freemasonry in the Caribbean – while I do not analyze at length the impact of Freemasonry on the authors studied in this project, the fact that most of them were members of this institution – and, therefore, implicitly connected – warrants mentioning.2 Here, we see the hybrid knowledges that united the local with the global and brought forth narratives demanding justice. Mojares emphasizes that by mediating knowledge, the local intellectual does not have to leave it unchanged. It is no surprise that several of the major figures of the Propaganda movement in the

Philippines were Freemasons who negotiated oral texts with written ones in order to actively engage with the local/global politics, demand justice, and critique/create their own modernity.

2 For further reading on Freemasonry in the Caribbean, see Jossianna Arroyo’s book Writing Secrecy in Caribbean Freemasonry (2013). 18

This mediation of various knowledges surely brings to mind Edward Said’s foundational text Orientalism (1977). In this work, he studies primarily nineteenth- century literary discourses on representations of the “Orient,” focusing specifically on the

Middle East, Asia, and Africa. For Said, “Orientalism” is a form of intellectual discourse through which the “Orient” is constructed in the minds of the “West” – meaning

Europeans and the United States. That is, it is fundamentally “a political doctrine willed over the Orient” (204). He argues that Western knowledge about the East comes from preconceived archetypes and representations that lump all “Eastern” societies as fundamentally similar to one another and fundamentally different from “Western” societies. In other words, the Orientalist discourse is a way of creating an “other” to the

West; therefore the “East” is antithetical to the “West.” Said argues that, as a form of knowledge, the discourse of Orientalism is driven by power and political interest rather than an “objective” pursuit of knowledge and reality. Notwithstanding Orientalism’s critiques, several authors have used this concept as a point of departure, extending the

“Oriental” categorization to encompass peripheral or marginalized societies. In Filipino writing and scholarship, Resil B. Mojares comments on how propagandista writers were some of the first to “engage Orientalist scholarship on its homegrounds” (504) in the late nineteenth century; and, as previously mentioned, Megan C. Thomas emphasizes the critical engagement of Filipino intellectuals with Western structures of knowledge. This brings up the tension between a “self-Orientalizing” discourse on the part of the Filipino intellectuals and their response to the Orientalism imposed on them by Europe, Latin

America, and the United States.

Yet, Said postulates that if no discourse were to exist about the “Other” (in this case, the “Oriental”), and if this discourse had not been incorporated into the imaginaries of both the colonizer and the colonized, European domination of the colonies would have been impossible. Said observes that the Orient is not only adjacent to Europe, but is also

“the place of Europe’s greatest and richest and oldest colonies, the source of its civilizations and languages, its cultural contestant, and one of its deepest and most recurring images of the Other” (1). Thus, the study of the Orient’s past is linked to a search for the origins of European civilization. That is, the idea of Europe comes from the construction of the Orient. The European constructed the Other as an object of knowledge and, in the process of dominating the Other, creates his/her own image of his/her locus of enunciation. These ideas of the world and its subjectivities are fundamental in the creation of colonial hegemony. The fact that Said’s concept is used as a point of departure to examine the representations of the Near and Far East in Latin American modernist texts – specifically if we consider tactical uses of self-orientalization or strategic orientalization – makes his text essential to a study which questions whether the opposite can be true.

Could this opposite, then, be Occidentalism? Walter Mignolo, in his chapter

“Occidentalism and the ‘Americanity’ of America,” critiques Said’s argument and applies it to the idea of America. He argues that the idea of America (and subsequently,

Latin- and Anglo-America) is the product and consequence of Occidentalism. He reaffirms Edmundo O’Gorman’s claim that Occidentalism locates the geo-historical space of western culture, which fixed its locus of enunciation and critiques Said’s claim

20 that there is no Occidentalism. Paraphrasing Sun Ge, Mignolo writes that Asia and Latin

America are “mediums through which we are effectively led to our history, and it is precisely because of this historical significance that it is important we keep asking how

Asia (or “Latin America”) signifies” (40). The “we” and “our” refer to the geopolitical inscription of the subject. Therefore, the historia of Asia or Latin America may be written by someone who does not necessarily pertain to that story. Mignolo states that this happened in the sixteenth century by the Spanish missionaries, who decided that the indigenous populations did not have their own history due to the supposed scarcity of written texts – therefore, the missionaries would write it for them. The history of Africa,

Mignolo notes, follows the same vein. Thus, the Occident, implying Europe and the New

World, emerged from these paradigms. Occidentalism, according to Mignolo, is not a field of study but rather is the locus of enunciation from which Orientalism becomes a field of study (42).

At this point, I want to draw attention to the contributions of Araceli Tinajero and

Ignacio López-Calvo in the study of the production of orientalism in Latin American modernista texts, authors whom I briefly alluded to earlier. Tinajero’s book Orientalismo en el modernismo hispanoamericano (2003) centers on allusions to Eastern images, artifacts, and thought (specifically China, Korea, India, Japan, Singapore, Sri Lanka, and

Vietnam) found in writings within the Latin American modernismo movement. Tinajero weaves her knowledge on Japanese language and culture with cultural and literary theory, ethnography, art history, and travel theory in her analysis of the writings of the modernists who made their way to the East (such as Arturo Ambrogi and José Juan

Tablada, among others), as well as how their representations differed from those who did not make the journey (such as Rubén Darío and José Martí). From there, they constructed a form of exoticism (Orientalism, à la Said, but divergent, since it does not originate from the “West”) while those who traveled noticed non-European tendencies in their own cultures, as well as in the Eastern ones. According to Tinajero, this resulted in a unique, non-European Orientalism that considered the contact and dynamics between one periphery and another, in contrast to the more common “center-periphery” focus.

In a similar vein to Tinajero, López-Calvo’s edited essay collections Alternative

Orientalisms in Latin America and Beyond (2007), One World Periphery Reads the

Other (2010), and the more recent Peripheral Transmodernities: South-to-South

Intercultural Dialogues Between the Luso-Hispanic World and "the Orient" (2012), which borrows from Dussel, establish intercultural south-south dialogues between Latin

America and Asia, breaking away from the metropolis-colony binary and demonstrating that there is no need to resort to the mediation of the center. Several articles deal with the knowledge production from people of Asian or Arab descent in the Luso-Hispanic world and interrogate the relationship between these texts and Orientalism. Although the texts heavily focus on Latin American cultural production and the representation of the

“Orient” in these texts and lack the opposite – that is, “Oriental” cultural production and the representation of the Luso-Hispanic world – they still serve well as a means through which to enter into the dialogue, particularly from the Latin American field and focusing on south-south interactions.

Considering the Eastern images found in Latin American modernismo as pointed out by scholars like Tinajero and López-Calvo, and due to the parallels in aesthetics and treatment of cultural politics, I argue that the Filipino propagandista movement (1880-

1900) was also one of modernista tendencies, in the sense that they also engaged with the political, social, and historical currents of the time. As a result of this shared world- system, these coeval movements embody similar characteristics, but are unique to each region’s particularities. Some scholars, such as Antonio Fernández Molina, Soledad S.

Reyes, and Isaac Donoso Jiménez, situate Filipino modernismo after Spain’s loss of the final colonies and during American and Japanese occupation (between 1898-1930s).

According to this point of view, this was due to the proliferation of Filipino works written by Spanish-educated Filipino elites whose ideals clashed with the United States’ colonization. As a result, their works were influenced by the Spanish language and culture, characterized by highly introspective, nationalist subjectivities and an idealization of the past Spanish colonial rule. Without contradicting the perspective that the referenced works were, in fact, “modernist,” but also implying a completely different intellectual standpoint, I contend that the association implied by situating the movement after the Spain’s loss of the final colonies and during American colonization risks falling into the trap of Eurocentrism – by associating Filipino “modernism” with the West,

Filipino cultural, ideological, and artistic production is seen as simply mimetic and/or derivative of those of their Hispanic counterparts, giving rise to the aesthetic in the periphery after it had already passed in the center and suggesting an imitation brand of modernity. That is, in the line of Dussel, focusing on the trans-Atlantic modernismos

23 ignores cultural moments “exterior” to European-American modernity. To ignore the particularities of the Philippines would be universalizing European particularities and, as a result, exercising epistemological violence via the production of orientalism.

Modernity/Coloniality, Subaltern Studies, and Decolonial Thought

In order to combat this Eurocentric point of view and rethink it from the perspective of the subaltern, it is important first to consider the structures of power that created and positioned this point of view in the first place. This intersection of racial hierarchy, coloniality, and power is the subject of Aníbal Quijano’s “Coloniality of

Power, Eurocentrism, and Social Classification.” As the title indicates, Quijano examines the relationship between colonialism and the coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and social classification in the construction of hierarchical structures of power in the

Americas. Quijano underlines two historical processes in the establishment of this model: the codification of differences between the colonizer and the colonized – that is, race – and the constitution of new structures of control over labor, resources, and its products

(182). The notion of “race” began with the colonization of the Americas and was established as an instrument of social classification, which legitimized control over the people imposed by the conquest and created a hierarchy of the world’s population within these structures of power. Furthermore, the configurations of control and exploitation of the work force and the production and distribution of their products revolved around the world market. In other words, it was constructed for the service of capital, allowing for the emergence of world capitalism. As a result, Quijano notes, the identities produced under this idea of race within these new structures of labor division were linked and

24 mutually reinforced one another. As a result, new identities were produced that were associated with a racial distribution of labor.

Taking this relationship between race and the labor market, Quijano develops the concept of the coloniality of power to illustrate the imposition of domination and its configurations by the colonizers over the rest of the world. In the same way as Enrique

Dussel, Quijano critiques the idea that Europe was the protagonist of modernity, although he points out that Europe’s strength was in its ability to spread and establish its power through its colonization of the culture of the colonized. They did this by first expropriating the cultural characteristics that benefitted capitalism – that is, for the profit of the European center; second, by repressing the colonized’s forms of knowledge, its production, and their models of expression; and third, by trying to change the traditional knowledge of the colonized so that they adopt the colonizer’s knowledge as their own, particularly if it benefitted the reproduction of domination (Quijano 189). For Quijano, then, coloniality of power is the project of creating the colonized in the image of the

(Western) colonizer. Through the epistemological violence against the knowledges of the indigenous populations, these knowledges were destroyed, or at least made peripheral. As a result, the European colonial imaginary was a way in which the colonized was able to gain access to power. Put differently, cultural Europeization was a way to participate in colonial power. Quijano’s text provides a framework that allows for the tensions that exist in both the Latin American and Filipino consciousness to negotiate the local with the global, but also calls attention to the importance of recognizing the coloniality that continues to pervade structures of knowledge and power.

To begin dismantling these structures of coloniality, Walter Mignolo’s work provides an entry point. His article, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial

Difference,” traces the relationship between the geopolitics of knowledge, colonial difference, and the history of capitalism, using the ideas of Aníbal Quijano, Immanuel

Wallerstein, and Enrique Dussel as points of departure. To briefly reiterate: the modern/colonial world-system, as posited by Wallerstein, can be described alongside the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit, which is linked to the conceptualization of colonial difference and the coloniality of power. With the expansion of Western capitalism, so comes the expansion of Western epistemologies and their characterization as “universal.” Mignolo’s critique frames the discussion in terms of the geopolitics of knowledge and calls for establishing the limits of these Western cosmologies. Drawing from Dussel’s notion of transmodernity – a concept that draws from non-Western responses to European “modernity” (which I will explain in more detail momentarily) –

Mignolo relocates the locus of enunciation from that of coloniality to that of the subaltern. For Mignolo (and Dussel), this requires the decolonization of philosophy, knowledge, and power in which there is the simultaneous appropriation of modernity – or

Western thought – and a move toward transmodernity, understood as a liberating strategy. In any case, Mignolo echoes, this requires the participation of both the colonizer and the colonized (240). These ideas establish much of the foundation of Madina V.

Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo’s book Learning to Unlearn: Decolonial Reflections from Eurasia and the Americas (2012), which opens a dialogue on the decolonization of knowledge, thinking, and being. This text positions itself via the framework of border

26 epistemology and rethinks Western notions of modernity and coloniality from a multifaceted decolonial framework, advocating for transoceanic, decolonial ways of thinking.

By decolonial thinking, I mean the confrontation and detachment from the colonial matrix of power. In other words, it questions or problematizes histories of power coming from the West and promotes recognizing and/or eliminating the tendency to view

Western modes of thinking as universal. For example, the Transoceanic Studies Series, edited by Ileana Rodríguez and published by the Ohio State University Press, introduce non-Western border epistemologies that allow for decolonial thinking and, concurrently, stress a transoceanic approximation and dialogue, which is central to my project. One of the texts in the series, Oriental Shadows: The Presence of the East in Early American

Literature by Jim Egan (2011), offers a compelling analysis of several American authors that suggest that the United States actually fought its perceived inferior status by adopting styles and standards associated with the East rather than those associated with Europe.

That is, Egan shows how the United States used Orientalist discourses to demonstrate their superiority to European modes and methods, and that the East played just as much of a role as the colonial frontier in the construction of a powerful American identity. His demonstration of an American colonial fascination with the East contributes to the transoceanic nature of his study, much like his aforementioned Latin American counterparts Tinajero and López-Calvo.

Additionally, in carrying out a south-south transoceanic dialogue, it is imperative to mention the work of the Latin American Subaltern Studies group, which appropriated the concept from the South Asian subaltern group based in India, in order to initiate a

27 conversation on representation, agency/positionality, and language. The The Latin

American Subaltern Studies Reader (2001), edited by Ileana Rodríguez, provides a solid foundation for the framework. As Rodríguez discusses in her article “Reading Subalterns

Across Texts, Disciplines, and Theories: From Representation to Recognition,” the work of the group was based on two essential postulates: the first was to create solidarity between intellectuals and the poor, the exploited, and the voiceless – the subaltern – and the second was to produce scholarship “to demonstrate that in the failure to recognize the poor as active social, political, and heuristic agents reside the limits and thresholds of our present hermeneutical and political condition” (3). Like the South Asian Collective, the

Latin American group was dissatisfied that the subaltern “had not been recorded in a history of their own, but rather subsumed in a narrative which was not exactly their own”

(Rodríguez 3). In response, Rodríguez points out that subaltern studies aims to be “a radical critique of elite cultures, of liberal, bourgeois, and modern epistemologies and projects, and of their different propositions regarding representation of the subaltern” (9).

A key point in their intervention has been to stress the “politics of location”; in this case, the convergence of the South Asian and Latin American subaltern studies is a South-

South dialogue – one that encompasses a transoceanic model.

In this model, Rodríguez highlights the contributions of Ranajit Guha, a key member of the South Asian collective, toward the study of the relationship between the metropolitan imperialist powers and nationalist insurgent movements. In his chapter in the same collection “Discipline and Mobilize,” Guha defines imperialism as the subjugation of one nation by another based on “reason;” nationalism as the ideology of

28 indigenous ruling groups in their struggle for hegemony and the establishment of a state that protects their economic, cultural, and political interests; and hegemony as rule by consent. Guha critiques the elite liberal nationalism in which hegemony and domination are presented as an adjustment to modernity. Due to the formation of a nation as one that benefits the elites, liberation demands a double articulation from the colonial power and from the masses. Like Latin American critics of modernism, Guha questions the

“universality” of bourgeois theories. Furthermore, he observes that what is new in the study of nationalist peasant insurrections is how theorists connect them to colonialism rather than the nation-state, placing the subaltern at the center of his/her own struggle.

For my project, a model of nationalism and national identity situated within the framework of subaltern studies underscores the tensions between the indigenous elites and their confrontations, appropriations, and negotiations with Western forms of knowledge and power in the establishment of a new nation-state. Additionally, subaltern studies stresses that the colonial experiences of subordination and orientalization are markers of difference that can be mined as a source of an autonomous, empowered identity. In the mediation of Western knowledge, the subaltern can alter it – according to

Mojares, the subaltern’s principal advantage is “location and difference: or being so situated he knows things the other [European] cannot know, deploying the power of the

‘hidden’ to interrogate the claims of what the other has ‘revealed,’ or, conversely, posing the ‘evident’ against what the other has ‘concealed’” (Mojares 499). Examining the works of both Caribbean and Filipino writers reveals the varied, dynamic ways in which they use location and difference as a positioning tool in relation to Western knowledge,

29 the audience of their discourse, the languages and forms they used, and the shifts in their loci of enunciation. It is this south-south dialogue that I establish between the Caribbean and the Philippines.

Finally, Enrique Dussel’s article “World-System and ‘Trans’-Modernity” summarizes his ideas about the “centrality” of Europe, analyzes the ascension of the

West, and notes the reasons for which Spain – and not other nations – was able to

“discover” the Americas. From here, he proposes the practice of trans-modernity and contributes to this south-south dialogue. According to Dussel, due to the “discovery” of the Americas, Europe created the world-system, and modernity is “the management of the world-system’s ‘centrality’” (222). For him, the displacement of this system would have to emerge “from within” the process of globalization. He argues that the recent impact of modernity over the multiplicity of cultures of the world produced a varied

“response” on their behalf that comes from trans-modernity (Dussel 221). Trans- modernity demands “a whole new interpretation of modernity in order to include moments that were never incorporated into the European version” (Dussel 223). This exteriority allows for the recognition of cultural moments situated “outside” of modernity; Dussel exemplifies the case of China as the economic, political, and cultural power of the eighteenth century before tracing Europe’s ascension to power beginning in

1492. Dussel’s arguments explain the rationale behind Eurocentric discourse and the peripheral characterization of Latin America and the rest of the world in relation to

Europe, while recognizing the contributions of other nations – such as China – that were central prior to Europe. Additionally, his concept of trans-modernity affirms the

30 multiculturality that Europe excludes. Within this exteriority, according to Dussel, cultures exist that preceded European modernity and that have developed in parallel with

Europe and have survived to this day. Trans-modernity allows for the analysis of cultures outside of Western modernity that are represented in the modernist and propagandist works that I study, following Ignacio López-Calvo’s aforementioned line of inquiry.

Through the intertwined transoceanic frameworks of orientalism, modernity/coloniality, subaltern studies, and decolonial thinking, I show how through political and textual interrelationships between the Caribbean and the Philippines, the subaltern engages with politics, power, and justice, actively situating him/herself on the global stage using his/her own knowledges and languages. The relationship between subaltern agency, varying configurations of power and knowledge, and their engagements with modernity and modernism is the foundation and impetus for my project. That is, political engagement, narrative and aesthetic experimentation, and the subaltern experience are interconnected, tying continents together without losing the local particularities of each region. In moving toward a more decolonial approach, I make the conscious attempt at incorporating lesser-known narratives from the indigenous working class (primarily in the Philippines) in order to break away from the modernist conventions that focus on the role of the indigenous elites in the political realm and the construction of a new nation-state. It is a reminder that the locus of enunciation of the working class also serves as a site for modernist narrative and political engagement.

Chapter outline

This project is comprised of four chapters in which I carry out a transoceanic comparative study of the Filipino propagandista movement and the Latin American modernista movement in order to show that the subaltern subjects, in response to modernity and in their demands for justice via the active participation in politics, were essential in the creation of their own discourses on identity, nation, and modernity. This decolonial framework aims to disrupt the colonial matrix of power that focuses on the

Atlantic and to allow for the emergence of a south-south discourse.

Chapter 1: Islands of Consciousness:

Representation in the Works of Julian del Casal and Isabelo de los Reyes

In my first chapter, I show how Cuban Julián del Casal and Filipino Isabelo de los

De los Reyes use and develop language and literature in journalistic works, such as the chronicle, and scholarly works, such as folklore, to respond to modernity and modernization. In their representations to a European audience, not only do they reveal the emergence of a local consciousness, but they also assert their authority and agency in their own production of knowledge. To begin with, I examine the role of language, literature, art, and politics in Casal’s article “Bonifacio Byrne” from his collection

Bustos. In this article, he criticizes the obligatory work of the journalist and its relationship with capitalism and practical discourses, privileging art as an alternative discourse. From here, I analyze Casal’s “Dedicatoria a Madame Juliette Lambert,” which shows that Casal’s portrayals of Cuban society are a production of knowledge for a

European audience. Next, the chronicle about General Marín showcases his critique of

32 the Spanish governing body allegorically through the figure of General Marín and elevates General Marín’s Cuban-born wife as the exemplary Cuban model. Using Casal’s work as a frame, I then show how, de los Reyes produces knowledge for a European audience through a representation of Filipino society while simultaneously critiquing the colonial authority in the “Introducción” contained in Tomo I of his book El folk-lore

Filipino (1887). Additionally, de los Reyes calls attention to the Philippines’ pre-

Hispanic history and demonstrates their formerly progressive trajectory, to suggest that, in the same line as Casal, it was actually because of Spain’s rule that the Philippines had not reached their modernizing potential. From here, de los Reyes’ piece on “Filipino

Poetics” explores the relationship between language, literature, art, and politics. In this article, he specifically highlights the orality of his mother’s Ilocano poetry, simultaneously legitimizing speech and text by incorporating both into his work as equally authoritative sources. At the same time, he also shows the untranslatability of the

Filipino experience into the European one.

Chapter 2: Islands of Nationalism:

The Poetry of Ramón de Emeterio Betances and José Rizal

My second chapter focuses on the works of José Rizal, considered the “Father of

Filipino Nationalism,” and Ramón de Emeterio Betances, considered the “Padre de la

Patria” in Puerto Rico. Both were medical doctors, writers, and Freemasons; their extensive knowledge of Western forms of thought, united with their strong advocacy for the good of their country and their people, demonstrate the negotiations between oriental/occidental loci of enunciation. However, rather than focusing on their more well-

33 known scholarship and novels, I look at their lesser-analyzed poetry to study the development of this new consciousness into nationalist identity and explore how they manage emotion and reason in their discourse to legitimate their participation in the nation-state. Specifically, I examine their use and transformation of Western structures of knowledge and power in their re-conceptualizations of history, language and aesthetic, and citizenship. The sentimentalism in both Rizal’s and Betances’ works unites tradition and modernity to call for progress, navigates colonialism and revolution in an expression of patriotism, and ultimately compels his fellow Filipinos to join in the struggle for the future of the nation.As a result, their work reveals a fragmented nationalism, characterized by the conflicting structures of knowledge in their narratives in the search for the justification for the creation of a nation-state that allows for their participation – as indigenous elites – in government while simultaneously protecting their interests. Yet, this also conflicts with the realization of justice for the masses and the marginalized, at times creating tension in the work.

Chapter 3: Islands of Revolution:

Manifestos of José Martí and Andrés Bonifacio

The third chapter focuses on revolution and anarchy – more confrontational demands for justice and citizenship. This chapter comparatively highlights the essay

“Manifiesto de Montecristi” (“Montecristi Manifesto”) by Cuban intellectual and patriot

José Martí and the manifesto “Ang Dapat Mabatid ng Mga Tagalog” (“What the

Tagalogs Should Know”) by Filipino revolutionary leader Andrés Bonifacio and explores the transformations of nationalist sentiments into a revolutionary form of anti-

34 colonialism. In their manifestos, both Martí and Bonifacio issue calls for solidarity by outlining the injustices of the Spanish colonizers, pointing out that the divisions imposed on each of their countries – be it racial, religious, or otherwise – are tactics used by the empire to exploit the people for their own benefit and maintain power. Solidarity and violemce, in both of the authors’ works, are the tools to fight this power. During this time, Martí and Bonifacio represented the voices of the working class through ideals of collectivism and were dedicated to the promotion of liberty, independence, and democracy. I focus particularly on Martí and Bonifacio to highlight the connection between nationalist peasant insurrections and revolutions and colonialism, in the line of

Ranajit Guha, demonstrating how these rebellions were, in fact, representative of the peasants’ agency and resolve to effect political change. Rather than responding directly to the nation-state, I show how Martí and Bonifacio carried out more confrontational demands for justice and citizenship through expressions of chaos and community. This resulted in the creation of an alternative insurgent language and order that was used to shape their visions of a new Cuba and Philippines by uniting the people and responding directly to domination via violence and resistance.

Chapter 4: Islands of Modernity:

The Responses of Apolinario Mabini and José De Diego

Finally, my fourth chapter centers on both the loss of Spain’s final colonies and the emerging American imperial threat. I focus on the writings of Filipino revolutionary and lawyer Apolinario Mabini, known as the “Brains of the Revolution” for his role as a close adviser of the General turned President Emilio Aguinaldo, and the writings of José

35 de Diego, known as the “Father of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement,” who was also a lawyer, journalist, and poet, known for his eloquent oratory and patriotic speech.

At the crossroads of the Spanish empire’s collapse and the United States’ rise as an imperial power, Mabini and De Diego re-take up the question of a neocolonial consciousness. While Cuba managed to gain its independence from Spain, Puerto Rico and the Philippines became territories of the United States, and questions of nationalism, anti-imperialism, and modernity reemerge once again in this neocolonial context. As a result, Mabini and De Diego respond to the emerging relationship with the United States empire, both through their involvement with the United States government and also through their advocacy for continued resistance for independence.

In both Mabini’s and De Diego’s responses, I argue, the tension and ambivalence that they face in either cooperating with the new power and resisting it brings about a new crisis of negotiation between the remnants of the past empire with the new one. In their work, we see an initial compromise between their nations and the United States’ empire, mainly based on the belief that the United States will eventually grant their countries autonomy. However, this compromise begins to break down as they realize that the United States, like the former colonial masters, continues the legacy of coloniality by defining the Philippines and Puerto Rico through the colonial difference, and that the

United States has no intention of granting the islands autonomy. In Mabini’s and De

36 coloniality. In this critique, they express the struggle for political engagement and justice, active participation in the production of knowledge and power, and negotiations of the meaning of citizenship.

While this study certainly addresses notions of solidarity, nationalism, and citizenship, at this point it is not my intention to elaborate a specific conclusion of how these terms were used across the oceans during the end of the nineteenth century/beginning of the twentieth century. Rather, I wish to explore how the various authors conceived of these ideas, negotiated their meanings, and cultivated these meanings into useful tools and ideologies in their art, essays, and propaganda. The fact that each author expresses his own specific understanding of each concept further suggests a distinct knowledge, awareness, and agency that should not be discounted in favor of “universalist” definitions when examining these discourses of nation.

Through this study, I aim to show that, in the struggle for political engagement and justice, the active participation in the production of knowledge and power, and the creation of a national identity, both Latin American and Filipino cultural and ideological production were autonomous agents that confronted, negotiated, and initiated their own responses to the colonizing and modernizing projects. A transoceanic comparative study of the Filipino propagandista movement and the Latin American modernista movement shows that the subaltern subject, in their responses to modernity, was autonomous in the creation of their own discourse. As a result, this project contributes towards the development of a transoceanic space in which a global dialogue can begin and in which decolonial thought can flourish.

Chapter 1: Islands of Consciousness:

Representation in the Works of Julian del Casal and Isabelo de los Reyes

On October 10, 1868, a sugar mill owner named Carlos Manuel de Céspedes delivered his 10th of October Manifesto in which he and his followers declared Cuba’s independence from Spain and beginning the Ten Years’ War, the first of three wars of independence against Spain in Cuba. One of the most tragic events of the Ten Years’ War was the execution of eight medical students in La Habana for supposedly desecrating the tomb of a Spanish newspaperman. On November 27, 1871, they were sentenced to death by a firing squad.

The lasting effects of these events on Cuban poet Julián del Casal, who was five years old when the Ten Years’ War began and eight years old when the medical students were executed, is significant – although most of his political expression is contained in his prose, it is noteworthy that his first collection of poetry, Hojas al viento (1890) includes poems that demonstrate his indignation and critique of the colonial powers. For example, his sonnet “A los estudiantes” (“To the students”), dedicated to the martyred medical students – “Víctimas de cruenta alevosía” (“Victims of bloody treachery”) – condemns those who did nothing to prevent the execution: “los que ayer no supieron defenderos / solo pueden, con alma resignada, / soportar la vergüenza de lloraros”

(“Those who yesterday did not know how to defend you / only can, with resigned soul, /

38 bear the shame of crying for you”; Casal 75).3 Another poem, “A un héroe” (“To a hero”), published in his collection Rimas and dedicated to General Antonio Maceo, similarly criticizes the passivity of Cubans who privilege personal interests over patriotic ones.

Among scholars of Cuban modernismo, a common tendency has been to contrast

José Martí, the archetypal civic poet, with Julián del Casal, the aesthetic, nihilistic poet.

However, as has been shown by scholars such as Julio Ramos, Ángel Augier, Cathy

Jrade, and Gerard Aching, to name a few, their responses through writing to their immediate circumstances unite them as modernistas, struggling to negotiate with the changing sociopolitical atmosphere. It would be a mistake to assume that Martí’s work lacked any concern about art, only focusing on the political; in the same vein, it would be erroneous to claim that Casal’s work was purely aesthetic, lacking any political stance whatsoever. Ángel Augier notes in his prologue to the collection of Casal’s work Páginas de vida, poesía y prosa that, during Casal’s time at the Colegio de Belén, the poet “estuvo vinculado a los grupos estudiantiles más liberales y patriotas y codirigió un periódico manuscrito subversivo que fue suspendido por los jesuitas” (“was linked to the most liberal and patriotic student groups and co-directed a subversive newspaper manuscript that was suspended by the Jesuits”; XI). Years later, Casal would lose his clerkship at a governmental office for an article that he wrote about General Sabas Marín, one of the major political figures of Havana at the time.

3 My translations, unless otherwise noted 39

The poetic characterization of Casal is compounded by the fact that most of his poetry has been published in three collections – Hojas al viento (1890), Nieve (1892) and

Bustos y Rimas (1893). Meanwhile, his prose work, mostly found in magazines and newspapers of Havana, while acknowledged, is largely put aside. Yet, despite his preference for the ideals of “arte por el arte” (“art for art’s sake”), it is significant that he wrote pieces for a considerable number of newspapers – La Habana Elegante, El

País, La Discusión, El Fígaro and La Caricatura. Some of these articles were published under the pseudonyms El conde de Camors, Hernani and Alceste. It is in these articles, crónicas (“chronicles”), and short stories where we find a more complete picture of Casal that, without negating or toning down his aesthetic contributions, also showcase his political concerns. In both his poetry and his prose, we see not only themes of solitude, death, and his efforts to achieve the modernist ideals of beauty, art, and poetry, but also

Casal’s attempts to find a language that shapes his vision of Cuba and Latin America as it undergoes dramatic change. Scholars have noted that Casal’s preoccupation with modernization and colonization has characterized him as an “escapist,” due to his highly stylized, ornate, and pessimistic language. Yet, scholars have argued, his writing provided him with a form of catharsis in his search for the ideal of beauty, suggesting perhaps a belief that, for him, life should copy art.

On the other side of the world, we see a similar search for a new vision of the

Philippine Islands, responding to related issues of colonialism, empire, and politics as in the Caribbean. On January 20, 1872, around two hundred soldiers and laborers rose up in

Cavite, Philippines, in response to an order by Spanish Governor-General Rafael de

Izquierdo which subjected the soldiers to personal taxes from which they were previously exempt. The uprising failed, and the mutiny was used by the Spanish colonial government to implicate three Filipino priests, Mariano Gómez, José Burgos, and Jacinto

Zamora (collectively known as Gomburza), as instigators of the uprising. The priests, along with other Filipino leaders, were sentenced to execution. Due to the shadowy nature of the trials, the Cavite Mutiny and these executions emblematized the abuse of colonial powers, similar to the Ten Years’ War and the unjustifiable execution of the medical students in Cuba. Dr. José Rizal’s second novel, El Filibusterismo, is dedicated to Fathers Gómez, Burgos, and Zamora, and the Filipino historian Isabelo de los Reyes would eventually immortalize the friars as the “Precursors of the 1896 Revolution.”

Coincidentally, Isabelo de los Reyes’ strong sense of local identity, combined with his eccentricity and unpredictability, seem to simply replace Martí as Casal’s foil.

De los Reyes strongly opposed Spanish and American rule, founded an independent church that separated from the Roman Catholic one, and, as the founder of the Philippine labor movement, is considered the “Father of Filipino Socialism.” He published prodigious articles and pamphlets on diverse topics, such as history, folklore, language, politics, and religion, yet as Resil B. Mojares points out, his writings are characterized as scattered, unsystematic, and inconsistent (339-341). Mojares first exemplifies the remarks of Wenceslao Retana, a peninsular Spanish journalist, in which Retana mocks de los

Reyes as an amateur. On de los Reyes’ work El folk-lore Filipino, Retana writes:

Podría leérsele con paciencia, pues para una cosilla curiosa que en su

Folk-lore se halla, hay en su famoso <> no pocos plagios, y

vulgaridades y tonterías a porrillo, escritas con los pies, salvo aquello que

la mano generosa de un español puliera con más o menos cuidado. (20)

One could read him with patience, but for a curious little thing that is

found in his Folk-lore, there is in his famous “Folk-lore” not a few

plagiarisms, and vulgarities and trivialities galore, written with his feet,

save that which the generous hand of a Spaniard polished more or less

with care.

Retana’s remarks exemplify the common colonialist view of the ambitious colonial subject. But more importantly, Mojares stresses that even fellow Filipinos were dismissive of de los Reyes’ work. De los Reyes was born in Vigan, a thriving town in the

Ilocos region in the northwestern Luzon coast, and declared pride in his regional origins.

Meanwhile, the traditional characterization of the Propaganda Movement has located its site in Europe where the young Filipino ilustrados, freed from colonial constraints and censorship, embraced the Enlightenment ideas of science and reason. However, this characterization lacks a fuller consideration of the intellectual formation within the colony itself; this is where the case of Isabelo de los Reyes enriches our study.

Filipino intellectuals living in Europe, such as José Rizal and T.H. Pardo de

Tavera, saw themselves – and their location – as the center of the movement. Conversely, all of de los Reyes’ work – also aimed toward the intellectual, moral, political, and material improvement (or modernization) of the Philippines – came from the archipelago.

De los Reyes’ rural origins, local education, and local projects marginalized him from the

42 elite ilustrados. As Retana points out, as do other contemporaries of de los Reyes, it is certainly probable that some of his work relied on secondary, inaccurate, or incomplete sources. Still, for someone who worked within the confines of the colony, facing censorship and imprisonment, and lacking the international educational opportunities of the ilustrados, his display of global scholarly knowledge was impressive. De los Reyes combined commerce, the letters, and politics and filtered it through his own experiences and knowledge in order to find a new means that expressed and shaped his vision of the

Philippines as it underwent modernization and change. It is in the work of Isabelo de los

Reyes where we find a more complete picture of the seeds of anti-colonial consciousness that not only considers the work of the European-educated ilustrados, but also the work of the colonial subject from the colony.

At first glance, Julián del Casal and Isabelo de los Reyes may appear to have little to nothing in common. However, their attempts to assert their own agency and foster a dialogue on identity and modernity to shape their visions of the changing Cuban and

Filipino societies are more similar than it may at first seem and therefore merit interrogation. In the texts that I analyze, both authors write about themselves and/or their societies to a European audience. This led me to question the role of representation: How do Casal and de los Reyes represent themselves? Furthermore, I am curious as to the relationship between their self-representations and the depictions of their homeland and the people in it. Do these representations serve a particular purpose? Is it purely spiritual, political, artistic, scholarly, historical? Considering that their audience was at least in

43 part, if not primarily European, what role did the audience play in the creation of these representations? What is it in their writing that is not what it seems?

In this chapter, I show how Julián del Casal and Isabelo de los Reyes use and develop language and literature in journalistic works, such as the chronicle, and scholarly works, such as folklore, to respond to modernity and modernization, especially through representation. To begin with, I examine the role of language, literature, art, and politics in Casal’s article “Bonifacio Byrne” (1893) from his collection Bustos. In this article, he discusses the relationship between the role of the poet/journalist, the newspaper, knowledge, society, politics, and modernization. Casal criticizes the obligatory work of the journalist and its relationship with capitalism and practical discourses, privileging art as an alternative discourse. From here, I analyze Casal’s “Dedicatoria a Madame Juliette

Lambert” (“Dedication to Madame Juliette Lambert”) which prefaces La sociedad de la

Habana, a collection of five chronicles that portray colonial society in Cuba, and the first chronicle “El general Sabas Marín y su familia” of this collection. The “Dedicatoria” shows that Casal’s portrayals of Cuban society are a production of knowledge for a

European audience. The chronicle about General Marín showcases Casal’s critique of the

Spanish governing body allegorically through the figure of General Marín and criticizes high society’s passivity in the face of the colonial power. He focuses specifically on the relationship between self-interest, materialist discourses, and spiritual unoriginality in the name of modernity. In stark contrast, Casal allegorizes and elevates General Marín’s

Cuban-born wife as the exemplary Cuban model.

Using Casal’s work as a frame, I then explore how, in a similar vein as Casal, De los Reyes produces knowledge for a European audience through a representation of

Filipino society while simultaneously critiquing the colonial authority in the

“Introducción” contained in Tomo I of his book El folk-lore Filipino. Additionally, in several articles on superstitions found both in Europe and in Ilocos Sur, de los Reyes calls attention to the Philippines’ pre-Hispanic history and demonstrates their formerly progressive trajectory, to suggest that, in the same line as Casal, it was actually because of Spain’s rule that the Philippines had not reached their modernizing potential. From here, de los Reyes’ piece on “Filipino Poetics” explores the relationship between language, literature, art, and politics. In this article, he specifically highlights the orality of his mother’s Ilocano poetry, simultaneously legitimizing speech and text by incorporating both into his work as equally authoritative sources. At the same time, by incorporating translations of his mother’s poetry, he also shows the untranslatability of the Filipino experience into the European one, demonstrating the tensions that occur in trying to read one culture through the lens of another.

In both Casal and De los Reyes, we will see how both found certain European ideas and models appealing as they negotiated their place in the turbulent sociopolitical

Spanish-colonial atmosphere and as they rewrote their narratives in which they saw their homeland. Their texts deal with themes of crisis with respect to the arts and the spirit, manifested in science, art, religion, history, and politics; in this sense, they also dialogue with and respond to modernity and modernization. Here, I use the term “modernity” to refer to what Marshall Berman refers to as the “Classical phase” (or second phase) of

45 modernity (16-17). That is, it comprises the social relations, the rise of modern technologies such as the newspaper and other forms of mass media, and mechanical industrialization marked by the rise of capitalism. I recognize and agree with the debates put forth by scholars such as Enrique Dussel, who argues that modernity is not a

European phenomenon but rather a global one that began in 1492 when the world’s cultures were placed into a global relation. Prior to this point, the great cultures were the

“center” of their own sub-systems with their own peripheries. However, because I explore the writings of authors preoccupied by Berman’s definition, “modernity” will be employed in the way that the modernistas used it, unless otherwise noted.

In their writings about the peoples and history of Cuba and the Philippines leading up to their respective revolutions (that would eventually become part of the Spanish-

American War in 1898), Casal and De los Reyes drew on scholarly practices, methods, and discourses that were part of European Orientalism, such as ethnography and folklore.

Yet, I would like to add, the use of these methods does not imply that the writers simply

“mimic” it or leave it unchanged. Rather, they are used as tools to further develop and comment on their regions’ relationship with identity and modernity. Through the languages and literatures developed by Casal and De los Reyes, discourses and knowledges emerge which lay the intellectual foundations for anticolonial ends by critiquing modern society and demonstrating a subtle patriotism while subverting, or at least seemingly conforming to, colonial conditions. From here, they plant the seeds that lead to the development of an anticolonial consciousness, which will be explored in the following chapters.

Julián del Casal and the Chronicle

In March of 1891, Julián del Casal wrote the following to his friend, Dr. Esteban

Borrero:

Tampoco se extrañe de que, en lo sucesivo, no aparezca mi firma al pie de

los folletines de El País. He renunciado el puesto, porque los suscriptores

se quejaban de que nunca me ocupaba de fiestas, salones, teatros y cosas

propias del folletín. Aunque el Director no me dijo nunca una palabra

acerca de esto y me suplicó no abandonara el destino, resolví dejarlo de

una vez, porque no estaba dispuesto a complacer a los suscriptores ni a

tolerarles sus quejas. (Prosas, 323)

Nor be surprised, from now on, that my signature does not appear at the

foot of the serials of El País. I have renounced the position, because the

subscribers complained that I never discussed parties, lounges, theaters,

and typical subjects of a chapbook. Although the Director never said a

word of this to me and pleaded with me not to abandon my destiny, I

resolved to leave it at once, because I was not disposed to cater to the

subscribers nor tolerate their complaints.

The first paragraph in Casal’s letter reflects on the problems of the production and interpretation of literary texts by a reading public whose whims and caprices were in constant flux, due in part to the capitalist consequences of modernization. Moreover, it also implicitly meditates on the crisis of the previous cultural system in which literature –

47 or, more appropriately, letters – occupied a central place in the organization of Latin

American society and which now had been mass produced and commodified. Julio

Ramos explains that literature had provided the model for a homogenous national language, as well as designated the place where models of citizenship, the nation-state, and symbolic boundaries were outlined. Yet, he notes, by the 1880s, nostalgia for this literary legitimacy begins to appear in the work of modernista writers, such as Julián del

Casal, José Martí, and Rubén Darío, among others, which reflect an anxiety toward the dissolution of codes that had previously assured the legitimacy and authority of writing in

Latin American society (Ramos xxxvi-xxxvii). On the other hand, the modernistas’ writings also attest to the rise of a new discourse on literature, in which these writers attempt to delineate the limits of this new authority, apart from the project of state- building. That is, the previous relationship between literature and the state would be problematized as the very condition that would allow for literary autonomy and modernization (Ramos xxxvii).

At the risk of repeating myself, I want to emphasize that, in the system preceding the modernistas, the formalization of law had been one of the essential tasks of the intellectual, dominated by the model of the letrado. However, in the writing of the modernistas – particularly in their prose – we see the elaboration of new strategies of legitimation by spelling out the crisis of literature. Later, in Casal’s letter to Borrero, he describes his plans after leaving El País:

Ahora pienso buscar una habitación alta, aislada, en una azotea, abierta a

los cuatro vientos, porque pienso aprender a pintar y porque creo que mi

neurosis, o como se llame mi enfermedad, depende en gran parte de vivir

en la ciudad, es decir, rodeado de paredes altas, de calles adoquinadas,

oyendo incesantemente estrépito de coches, ómnibus y carretones.

Procuraré irme a vivir en un barrio lejano, cerca del mar, para aguardar allí

la muerte, que no tardará muchos años en venir. Mientras llegue, viviré

entre libros y cuadros, trabajando todo lo que pueda literariamente, sin

pretender alcanzar nada con mi trabajo, como no sea matar el tiempo.

(323; italics mine)

I plan to find a tall, isolated place, on a roof terrace, open to the four

winds, because I plan to learn how to paint and because I believe that my

neurosis, or as it is said, my illness, depends in large part on living in the

city, hearing incessantly the racket of cars, buses, and carts. I will make

sure to go live in a far neighborhood, close to the sea, to wait there for the

death that will not take many years to come. As it arrives, I will live

among books and paintings, working all that I can literarily, without

trying to achieve anything with my work, as not to be killing time.

Among Casal’s trademark modernista themes of solitude, isolation, neurosis, and a preoccupation with death, not only do we see his stress and anxiety with the rapid pace of modernization – “coches, omnibus, carretones” – but we also see his desire to work

“literarily,” not trying to achieve anything with his work. Here, Casal demonstrates his decision to separate himself from the influences of modernity by living closer to nature –

49 in a space “abierta a los cuatro vientos,” “cerca del mar,” and far from the city – and, in his isolation, surrounding himself with art and beauty. That is, not unlike today’s metropolitan culture, in which we are constantly surrounded by screens and confronted with images that encourage excess and consumption, Casal similarly just wants to “get away from it all.” Additionally, by working “literarily,” he confronts the crisis of commodified literature and establishes the limits of his new, legitimate language and literature – art for art’s sake.

The voice that details this crisis of legitimation, according to Ramos, “marks the specificity of a gaze, of a literary authority that had not until that moment existed in Latin

America. Modern literature is brought into being and proliferates, paradoxically, by announcing its death and denouncing the crisis of modernity” (Ramos xxxviii). For example, Casal’s essay “Bonifacio Byrne” introduces his titular colleague by stating that for such a talented poet, he has devoted himself to “las bajas tareas del periodismo, tan opuestas a la realización de sus legítimas aspiraciones como contrarias al desarrollo de sus soberbias facultades poéticas” (“the low work of journalism, as opposite to the realization of his legitimate aspirations as contrarian to the development of his superb poetic abilities”; Casal 473, italics mine). Again, Casal asserts the authority of literature and poetry over that of journalism, yet demonstrates the modernistas’ desire to differentiate themselves from the preceding role of the letrados by focusing on the development of poetic faculties rather than the law. In the chronicle – especially in Casal

– we see how he and other modernistas attempt to specify their locus of enunciation as authoritative, devoid of any master narrative code.

For the modernistas, literature was a way to aesthetically overcome the uncertainty generated by modern fragmentation and whims produced by capitalism. That is, confronting the forms of knowledge privileged by modern rationalization, the modernistas – especially Casal – asserted the superiority of an alternative knowledge found in art, poetry, and beauty. Like several other modernista writers, Casal makes it no secret that he believes that journalism is one of the essential reasons for the crisis of literature, in part due to its relationship with capitalism, catering to the demands of the public rather than toward a cause (for the nation, perhaps?), or at least toward original thought. He contends that:

Sí! el periodismo, tal como se entiende todavía entre nosotros, es la

institución más nefasta para los que, no sabiendo poner su pluma al

servicio de causas pequeñas o no estimando en nada, los aplausos efímeros

de la muchedumbre, se sienten poseídos del amor del arte, pero del arte

por el arte, no del arte que priva en nuestra sociedad, amasijo repugnante

de excremencias locales que, como manjares infectos en platos de oro,

ofrece diariamente la prensa al paladar de sus lectores. (Casal, Páginas

473)

Yes! Journalism, as still understood among us, is the most disastrous

institution for those that, not knowing how to put their pen to the service

of small causes or not thinking highly of anything, the ephemeral applause

of the crowd, feel possessed by the love of art, but of art for art’s sake, not

of the art that is in style in our society, repugnant dough of local

excrements that, like infected delicacies on plates of gold, the press offers

daily to the palate of its readers.

For Casal and other modernistas, it is precisely in art’s resistance to the instability and flux of modernization and literature’s critique of the dominant tasks of formalizing the law – that is, the questioning of the political – that gives literature its authority.

It is here that I would like to highlight Casal’s chronicles. At this point, I would like to make clear that I am not arguing that art and literature are diametrically opposed from capitalism and modernization in modernista writing; rather, their writing explores the tensions and contradictions in negotiating these discourses. These confrontations are especially evident in the chronicle. In the chronicle, according to Ramos, “literature would represent (at times anxiously) its encounter and conflict with the technologized and massified discourses of modernity” (xli). Furthermore, Ramos affirms, the formal heterogeneity of the chronicle “serves to portray the contradictions confronted by a literary authority and its ever-frustrated attempt to ‘purify’ and homogenize its own territory against the pressures and interventions of other discourses limiting literature’s virtual autonomy” (xli). In other words, the discourses of “art for art’s sake,” social modernization, urbanization, and the incorporation of Latin American markets into the world economy (separate from Spain) all converge into the form of the chronicle.

Yet, in contrast to the work of the letrados, whose work in which writing had provided a model for a new nation, literature and writing for the fin-de-siècle writers provide a locus of enunciation outside the state, criticizing state-sponsored discourses and

52 providing a new model and language of speaking about society and politics. With respect to Casal’s chronicle, I would like to focus on how the tension between the demands of the market and the move toward a formal literary autonomy emerge into an artistic form that represents and critiques the contradictions and effects brought about by the modernizing project in Cuban society and its relationship with the colonial power. To go a step further,

I show how the modernistas’ art critiques the relationship between modernity and the state – that is, how the state uses modernization, especially in carrying out the law, and especially for what ends.

To start, I would like to focus on the relationship between themes of the interior and the exterior. Let’s think back to Casal’s plans after leaving El País. Here, he contrasts living near nature in a high, isolated, open dwelling, surrounded by literature, hearing the sounds of the ocean, with living in the city, where pavement and walls surround him, the racket of cars and buses in the background. We can extrapolate these images to poetry and the chronicle: “If poetry, for the modernists […] is the literary interior par excellence,” Ramos states, “the chronicle represents and thematizes the exteriors, tied to the city as well as the newspaper itself, which the interior obliterates” (87). Iris Zavala adds that:

as knowers, it was necessary for [the modernista writers] to insert

themselves and their perspectives into the domain of the discourse and

become self-reflective. They aspired to live in an age of open

responsiveness, of renovated social relations, and to theorize about it with

no traditional attachment to genres or traditions. (40)

This internal/external tension is evident in Casal’s complaints regarding the work of the journalist. The journalist – in contrast to the (solitary) poet – must suffer, in the name of the newspaper, and court the (exterior, public) populace:

Lo primero que se hace al periodista, al ocupar su puesto en la redacción,

es despojarlo de la cualidad indispensable al escritor: de su propia

personalidad. Es una exigencia análoga a la que los directores de teatro

tienen con los que abrigan la pretensión de salir a las tablas. Hay que

blanquearse los cabellos, si sois negros, ó ennegrecérselos, si son blancos;

enrojecerse las mejillas, si son pálidas, o empalidecérselas, si son rosadas;

alargarse las cejas, si son cortas, o recortárselas, si son largas […]. Así el

periodista, desde el momento que comience a desempeñar sus funciones,

tendrá que sufrir inmensos avatares, según las exigencias del diario,

convirtiéndose en republicano, si es monárquico, en libre pensador, si es

católico, en anarquista, si es conservador. (Casal 473)

The first thing that is done to the journalist, upon occupying his place at

writing, is to divest it of the quality indispensabile to the writer: his own

personality. It is a demand analogous to the one that theater directors have

with those that entertain the pretense of going onstage. One must whiten

the hairs, if they are black, or blacken them, if they are white; redden the

cheeks if they are pale, or whiten them if they are rosy; lengthen the

eyelashes if they are short, or trim them if they are long […] So the

journalist, from the moment he begins to carry out his functions, will have

to suffer immense avatars, according to the demands of the paper,

converting to a Republican, if he is monarchist, a free-thinker, if he is

Catholic, to an anarchist, if he is conservative.

Casal elaborates on two central critiques: first, the confrontation between original art and uninspired, mass-produced literature; second, a commentary on the reading public. Is

Casal critiquing the medium or the people? It is clear that Casal demonstrates a strong contempt toward both. To begin with, not only does journalism disallow (interior) self- reflection and creativity, via the deprivation and commodification of the journalist’s own personality, it also protests the lack of creativity and criticizes the lack of dialogue and open responsiveness with the reader. Yet, if the role of the newspaper is one which influences public opinion and forms the civic sphere, it is significant that he uses the form of the chronicle precisely to criticize the unaesthetic, mass production for mass culture.

Thus, his contempt for the public stems from their own lack of reflection and desire to dialogue with the writer; similar to his hatred for uninspired, mass-produced literature,

Casal despises the reading public’s thoughtless mass consumption. In this way, Casal asserts authority and vehemently privileges contemplation, art, and the aesthetic as a way to speak about society, particularly in his critique of society’s passive absorption of mass production and the stresses that come with modernization. Moreover, as we will see,

Casal not only critiques modernization, but the legal system that makes its uses possible – that is, he fears what the law does with modernity. I will return to this point.

The chronicle, then, reflects a site that allows for the dual function of competing aesthetics and social authorities. In a similar fashion, we can argue that the chronicler assumes an equally heterogeneous role that negotiates between his/her interior, private domain and the exterior, public city. Here, Ramos and other scholars draw on Walter

Benjamin’s image of the flâneur, a strolling subject who roams the city in a touristic digression, both showcasing the city and simultaneously searching for forms of privacy:

[The stroller] sets out to expand the boundaries of his or her private

domain in the chronicle. By strolling, not only does s/he reify the flux of

the city, turning it into material for consumption and incorporating it into

that curious receptacle, or showcase, that is the chronicle; the chronicler-

stroller also seeks out, in the touristic digression that individualizes and

distinguishes him or her from the urban mass, the signs for a virtual shared

identity in the features of certain others. In response to the solitude of the

interior, the chronicler investigates the forms of privacy outside him or

her, thus becoming a voyeur, an urban onlooker. (130-131, author’s italics)

Let us remember that the chronicle originally was a minor form in Europe, especially in France. An avid reader of French literary journalism, it comes as no surprise that Casal would adopt the technique of the croniquer, as several other Latin American modernistas do, such as Enrique Gómez Carrillo and other newspaper correspondents in

Paris (Casal xxxviii). Let me point out two features to keep in mind as we tease out the relationship between modernization, the public, the chronicler, the chronicle, and the critique of the state: first, that many of these chronicles tended to incorporate elements of

56 tourism and travel – scholars such as Ignacio López-Calvo and Araceli Tinajero, for example, have specifically highlighted the use of orientalism in the modernistas’ works as a way to reinterpret Latin American culture and recreate it according as a response to the rapid pace of modernization and its associated feeling of alienation – and second, as

Ramos notes, that the emphasis on that which “individualizes” and “distinguishes” simultaneously seeks out the “shared identity in the features of certain others.”

Let us look at the dedication and the first chapter of Casal’s collection “La sociedad de La Habana. Ecos mundanos recogidos y publicados por el Conde de

Camors,” which he envisioned as a book, inspired by the ideas of French writer Juliette

Lambert, founder of the Nouvelle Revue Française and sponsor of a series of volumes about European capitals’ societies. In his flattering dedication to Lambert, Casal writes:

Desde el lejano París, esa Atenas moderna, hasta nuestra Cuba, esta

Irlanda americana, han venido, impulsados por las ondas azules del océano

y los vientos favorables del aplauso, los volúmenes encantadores que, bajo

el seudónimo de El conde Paul de Valisi, habéis publicado en los últimos

tiempos, acerca de las sociedades más notables del mundo civilizado. Aquí

se han leído esas obras, escritas por vuestra pluma fina – tan fina que a

veces parece rozar el papel – con el mismo deleite que se leen las

producciones de vuestros inmortales compatriotas. Hemos sentido, al

devorar cada página, la misma impresión que siente el navegante, perdido

entre los hielos del polo, condenado a fría noche perpetua, al respirar, en

fúlgido rayo de sol, efluvios perfumados de rosas primaverales. (245)

From that faraway Paris, that modern Athens, to our Cuba, this American

Ireland, have come, inspired by the blue waves of the ocean and the

favorable winds of applause, those enchanting volumes that, under the

pseudonym of the Count Paul of Valisi, you have published in recent

times, about the most notable societies of the civilized world. Here those

works have been read, written by your fine pen – so fine that at times it

seems to skim the paper – with the same delight that the productions of

your immortal compatriots are read. We have felt, at devouring each page,

the same impression that the sailor feels, lost in the ice of the pole,

condemned to a perpetual, cold night, upon breathing, in the glowing ray

of sun, perfumed outpours of springtime roses.

There are several elements of which to take note: the rhetoric of travel, Casal’s admiration of Lambert’s artistic portrayals of European societies (in the civilized world, he clarifies), and his evaluation of her art as literature. Significantly, Casal cites Paris – not Madrid – as the “modern Athens,” which has endured as a center of culture, refinement, and art; it also alludes to his awareness of Spain’s traditionalism and imperial decadence. Likewise, it is important to note Casal’s characterization of Cuba as the

“American Ireland.” Without doubt, he was referencing the Land War, a prolonged period of agrarian agitation and civil unrest in Ireland that had begun in the 1870s (and would continue until the end of the nineteenth century), brought about by the Great

Potato Famine. The protests were led by the National Land League and focused on tenant

58 farmers’ rights and ultimately a redistribution of land to tenants from landlords. By juxtaposing Cuba with Ireland, Casal draws attention to the political atmosphere of the island, in which he suggests that Cuba similarly lacks the rights of the controlling powers.

Additionally, Casal observes not only that that Lambert’s chronicles have traveled, but that they deal with the most notable societies “del mundo civilizado” (italics mine). He stresses the modernity and cosmopolitanism of her work; at the same time, like the letrados before him, he distinguishes between a “civilized” world and one that is not.

Lambert’s work, Casal asserts, gives the same impression that a lost sailor in the ice feels upon breathing in a warm ray of sunshine – that is, her art is a breath of fresh air from the cold articles of journalism. Furthermore, Iris Zavala’s remarks regarding the reappropriation of foreign cultures (in this case, Lambert’s French style), the legitimation of modernista literature, and the element of travel are particularly salient. She observes,

What these first modernists had in mind – as the legitimation of their own

narrative project – was to reposit and reappropriate foreign cultures in

order to defeat not only the materialism and mechanism of Anglo-

American culture but also a classicist (and classical) Spanish realism

turned sour after the wars of independence. The valorization had its own

positive ideological project, if we place language at the heart of anti-

colonialism. What mattered was not the myths themselves but their

usefulness to reinterpret their own modern culture. (83)

In connecting Zavala’s observation to Ramos’ description of the chronicler, it is clear how Casal incorporates and uses this rhetoric of travel to distinguish himself from the

59 urban masses, find solidarity in “certain” others and, therefore, interpret his culture and identity. In this case, he aligns himself with Juliette Lambert – a Parisian who understands and produces art – showcasing new locales as a way to interpret culture and identity. This brings to mind the creation of a community, as well as demarcating those that are excluded from this community. As a result, he declares that

Impulsado por la lectura de vuestros trabajos, me he atrevido, desde el

rincón sombrío de mi vivienda de bohemio, a levantar mi voz – mi

humilde voz nunca escuchada de vuestros oídos – […] para presentaros,

con desusado atrevimiento, aunque no sin cierta timidez, a la sociedad

cubana de nuestros días. Algunos de los personajes que veréis desfilar en

estas páginas, si vuestros hermosos ojos se dignan fijarse en ellas, os serán

conocidos por haberlos encontrado muchas veces en el Bosque de

Bolonia, en los Campos Elíseos, en los espectáculos de la Ópera Cómica y

en las recepciones públicas. (245-246; italics mine)

Inspired by the reading of your works, I have dared, from the dark corner

of my bohemian home, to raise my voice – my humble voice never heard

in your ears – […] to present you with unusual audacity, although not

without certain timidity, Cuban society of our days. Some of the

characters that you will see pass by in these pages, if your beautiful eyes

deign to look upon them, will be known to you by having met them many

times in the Forest of Bolonia, the Elisean Fields, in the shows of the

Comic Opera, and in public receptions.

I would like to emphasize three elements: first, Casal’s voice, which he dares to raise up and use to (re)present Cuban society; second, his emphasis on those “characters” in society, particularly those whom Lambert has likely encountered for having been to Paris and attending functions of a “cultivated” society; and third, the relationship between the interior – he speaks from “el rincón sombrío de mi vivienda de bohemio” – and the exterior – in his chronicles, he presents glimpses into (public) Cuban society. Yet, this specific sector of Cuban society is an exclusive one – united with his “daring” to lift up his voice, his chronicles emulate a form of gossip, underlining an oral element in his work. Ramos suggests that

Orality – pleasant conversation – may indeed be opposed to the

technologized language of information; and even protected as a

simulacrum of familiarity, of (a certain) community, within the

fragmented project of the newspaper. But, above all, it is an orality that

interpellates […] the readers of a social class capable of identifying

themselves with this kind of community, epitomized in the pleasant

conversation of the club. […] The orality of the chronicle is an inclusive

proceeding, a vehicle for the formation of the social subject. (133)

If the newspaper is a space in which the civic subject is formed and in which societal and cultural behavior is determined, is this not reminiscent of the work of the letrados? Yet, the application of orality and his humble, bold insistence that he “dare” present a

61 showcase of a specific sector of Cuban society reflect the work of the modernistas: as the locus of enunciation outside the state, orality – a traditional mode of communication – provides a new model and language of speaking about society and politics. By re- legitimizing orality via its incorporation into written text (or, perhaps, the text is legitimized by orality?), the emerging, heterogeneous language can gain authority in its critique of state-sponsored discourses, precisely by being outside of it. Additionally, his self-proclaimed authority with respect to Cuban society and, inspired by Lambert’s chronicles, his positioning of Cuban society alongside European societies imply an intimate knowledge that is capable of critiquing these societies.

Taking what has been discussed thus far regarding the rhetoric of travel, his

(authoritative) representation of Cuban society, and the relationship between the interior and the exterior, we begin to see how Casal begins to sketch the idea of an “us” and

“them” in Cuban society – in other words, Cuba’s “Other.” For me, this immediately brings to mind Orientalism. Edward Said, in defining Orientalism, asserts that it is

a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly,

economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts […]; it is, rather

than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases to

control, manipulate, even to incorporate what is a manifestly different (or

alternative and novel) world; it is, above all, a discourse that […] is

produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power,

shaped to a degree by the exchange with power political […], power

intellectual […], power cultural […], power moral […]. (12, author’s

italics)

To make this connection clearer, let’s examine the first chapter that Casal wrote for La Sociedad de La Habana, titled “General Sabas Marín y su familia.” As I mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, Casal lost his clerkship at a governmental office for the article that he wrote about General Sabas Marín, the (Spanish) Captain

General of Cuba, his wife Matilde de León y Gregorio, a Cuban criolla,4 and their daughters. In this article, he features Cuba as the premier backdrop of his societal showcase and affirms that his knowledge regarding Cuban society (including political society) is authoritative. Through these assertions, he crafts and legitimizes a new literature and language via methods of gossip and voyeurism in order to underscore what is manifestly different or alternative in this society. By doing so, Casal draws from

European Orientalist methods in order to promote Cuban society, distinguish it from

Spain while simultaneously incorporating it into the cosmopolitan world, and call attention to the failings and limitations of the Spanish colonial powers. This is not to say that he simply adapts European methods or leaves them unchanged, rather that he engages and transforms these discourses in seeking to identify the commonalities and boundaries of his Cuban community that is capable of speaking to both Cuba and Europe.

Casal begins first by sketching a not-very-flattering portrait of General Marín’s physical appearance:

4 That is, she was born in Cuba to Spanish parents. 63

De frente ancha, surcada de leves arrugas, por donde la calvicie se

empieza a abrir paso; de ojos negros, luctuosamente negros,

acostumbrados a presenciar los horrores de sangrientos campos de batalla;

de nariz irregular, algo abierta, semejante a la de los emperadores

romanos; de boca risueña, poco sensual, sombreada por luengos

mostachos teñidos; de rostro agradable, bastante cárdeno, como el de toda

persona que ha tomado grandes dosis de hierro; de andar lento, mitad por

sus achaques, mitad por su naciente obesidad; tal es, en rápido bosquejo,

la personalidad física del general Marín. (247)

Of a wide brow, scored with light wrinkles, through where baldness

begins to open up a path; of black eyes, tragically black, accustomed to

witnessing the horrors of bloody battlefields; of an irregular nose,

something open, similar to the nose of Roman emperors; of a smiling

mouth, not very sensual, shadowed by long dyed mustaches; of an

agreeable face, rather livid, like that of every person that has taken great

doses of iron; of a slow walk, half for his aches and pains, half for his

rising obesity; such is, in a rapid sketch, the physical personality of

General Marín.

With respect to General Marín’s personality, Casal writes:

Respecto a su carácter, es altivo, […]; impetuoso, […]; arbitrario, de una

arbitrariedad de monarca absoluto, según lo prueban sus disposiciones.

Los que le rodean temen sus primeros arranques. Parece que firma sus

decretos, no con pluma de acero, sino con la punta de la espada. (247)

With respect to his character, he is haughty, […], impetuous, […];

arbitrary, of an arbitrariness of an absolute monarch, according to what his

dispositions prove. Those that surround him fear his first outbursts. It

seems that he signs his decrees, not with a pen of steel, but rather with the

point of a sword.

In both the physical and character descriptions of General Marín, Casal emphasizes those features which show power and violence (especially that associated with colonialism and war) as associated with ugliness and age. For example, Casal compares Marín’s asymmetrical nose to that of a Roman emperor’s, contends that Marín is arrogant, impetuous, and capricious, like an absolute monarch, and declares that Marín signs his decrees with the sword, not a pen. That is, the government rules by fear and terror, not by any sort of democratic system that incorporates Cuban society’s participation. Yet, despite Marín’s power, he has also struggled to maintain it; Casal describes Marín’s eyes as being accustomed to bloody battle fields and his face as purple as one that has suffered

“great doses of iron.” These characteristics, added to the fact that Marín is balding and his walk is slow, in part for his pains, and in part for his obesity, suggest an old, decaying empire. In fact, Cuban society is beginning to notice, and they disapprove of their

Spanish ruler:

Teniendo la desdicha de estar rodeado de malos consejeros, el general se

ha hecho antipático a sus subordinados. Tanto la prensa, a quien persigue

tenazmente, como el comercio, a quien no ha querido escuchar, lo han

dejado en el más terrible aislamiento. Todos comentan desfavorablemente

sus actos gubernamentales. (Casal 248)

Having the unhappiness of being surrounded by terrible advisers, the

general has made himself disagreeable to his subordinates. The press,

whom he tenaciously pursues, as well as business, to whom he has not

wanted to listen, have left him in the most terrible isolation. Everyone

comments unfavorably on his governmental acts.

We can extrapolate Casal’s critique of General Marín as an allegorical critique of the

Spanish empire. The Napoleonic Wars in the late eighteenth century, which left Spain economically devastated and politically unstable, and King Ferdinand VII’s attempt to reassert control through an absolute monarchy in the early nineteenth century precipitated the wars of independence in the colonies due to their opposition to restoration. As a voyeur, Casal shows glimpses of Spain’s political failures and its effects to both his

European audience and his Cuban one. Moreover, Casal employs a tone of gossip when he notes that even the press – associated with public opinion – and the commercial sector

– associated with Latin America’s integration into the world economy (modernity) – have been unfavorable toward the general, leaving Marín terribly isolated and left behind. For

Casal, the cosmopolitan sectors of Cuba and France are included in his renegotiated

66 community, whereas Spain is left on the outside looking in. Commenting on the gossipy tone and exclusivity of the chronicle, Ramos observes that

[T]he class character of the constitution of any public space whatsoever

must be stressed, as it governs the field of identity. Gossip, in the end,

does not include everyone. In the very oral quality of the chronicle, which

in general continues to be organized as causeries or conversations at the

turn of the century, the exclusivity that the voice of the gossip-tale asserts

and the anxiety with which the chronicler protects the borders of a

reconstituted community are obvious. (133)

Again, this allegorically reflects Spain’s decline, leaving the country “excluded” from the gossip, while Cuba, much like the rest of Europe, became more cosmopolitan and more

“modern.” For Casal, Cuba’s status in the renegotiated global community is more on par with France and suggests an anxiety with being drawn back into Spain’s sphere.

In contrast to the images of Paris as the center of art, beauty, and cosmopolitanism, Casal’s article about General Marín examines the lack of the modernista images of solitude, opulence, and sophistication to explore and critique

Spain’s traditionalism and decadence, juxtaposed with his desire to both distinguish Cuba from Spain and incorporate Cuba into the global community and his anxieties with modernization. In contrast to the glorious, ornamentation of the past, Casal writes that

“Los salones del Palacio, notables por sus esplendores pasados, están convertidos en amplios museos de antigüedades. Ya no se celebran, como en tiempos de Serrano, magníficas fiestas, en las cuales se encontraba lo más selecto de nuestra sociedad” (“The

67 salons of the Palace, notable for their past splendors, are converted into ample museums of antiquities. Unlike in the times of Serrano, magnificent parties are not celebrated, in which the most select of our society were found”; 248). The palace, once vibrant and filled with parties and high society, has become sterile; the beauty and art that once enlivened the palace have simply become soulless objects in the museum of Spain’s imperial past. Additionally, “lo más selecto de nuestra sociedad” are no longer high- cultured socialites, rather “los burócratas son los más asiduos concurrentes de las recepciones vulgares del general Marín. Sólo algunas familias cubanas, ya por razones de alta política, ya por hacerse merecedoras de algún favor, frecuentan todavía dichos salones” (“the bureaucrats are the most frequent attendees of the vulgar receptions of

General Marín. Only some Cuban families, now for reasons of high politics, now for making themselves deserving of some favor, still frequent said salons”; 248). Gone are the days of originality or active contemplation in high society. Rather, Casal disparages that passivity via political flattery and a “cultivated” society driven by self-interest has become the norm, rather than those who frequent the Parisian “Bosque de Bolonia,” “los

Campos Elíseos,” and “los espectáculos de la Ópera Cómica” that Lambert would know.

Moreover, the public nature of the fiestas and the former exteriority of those who belonged to this society – that is, they used to be “seen” – have now been relegated to the interior, like art displayed lifelessly in a museum. As I mentioned before, Casal critiques not only modernity, but what the law does with modernity. This interiority comes into play when we consider how the state makes use of modernization – in this case, the supposedly efficient, rational, rule-based control of colonial bureaucracy – to placate the

68 people, moving away from the individual freedom and creativity. The society of La

Havana – specifically, politicians and their politics – has become passively enclosed and secretive, and Casal purports to showcase it (and the law) and bring it back out into the open. In this world, isolation has become a way of hiding and preserving power; Casal investigates this external privacy in order to distinguish himself from this specific community – the Other – and situate himself alongside his European audience, renegotiating questions of cosmopolitanism and modernity in Cuban society via difference from Spain.

In contrast to General Marín, Casal portrays Marín’s wife, “La excelentísima señora doña Matilde León” (249), in a much more favorable light. After describing the beauty of Matilde’s three sisters (the first, “un modelo de belleza” [“a model of beauty”] the second, “verdadera dama del gran mundo, [que] se ha distinguido, no sólo por su hermosura, sino por su elegancia” [“true dame of the great world, who has been distinguished, not only for her beauty, but also for her elegance”], and noting that the third, “Por lo que se ve, la hermosura es tradicional en esta familia” [“By what is seen, beauty is traditional in this family”; 249]), he remarks that

Todo lo que le falta a su esposo, se encuentra amontonado en [Matilde].

La benevolencia, la amabilidad y la ternura son sus rasgos distintivos.

Desde la altura de su posición, se digna fijar sus ojos en los que están a sus

pies. Conocidas son del público sus ofrendas piadosas. Se le llama la

madre de los desheredados. (249; author’s italics)

Everything that her husband lacks is found in abundance in [Matilde].

Benevolence, friendliness, and tenderness are her distinctive traits. From

the height of her position, she deigns to cast her eyes on those at her feet.

Known are her pious offerings to the public. She is called the mother of

the disinherited.

Many scholars have noted the allegorical relationship between women – especially mothers – and the nation.5 Casal’s description of General Marín’s Cuban-born wife exemplifies all of the traits that distinguish her (Cubans) from her husband (Spaniards).

Despite Matilde’s Spanish lineage – Casal comments that she is “hija de Andalucía, la tierra española más semejante a la nuestra” (249), – Casal emphasizes her Cuban-born status, aligns her positive traits with the Cuban identity, and compares the particular region of Spain as the one which is most similar to Cuba. For example, by focusing on her beauty, Casal defines her against the Spanish ugliness and traditionalism.

Additionally, her caring and benevolence to the “disinherited” – the Cubans – brings to mind the image of a mother caring for her children – the nurturing motherland – in contrast to the image of the violent, controlling father – the colonial fatherland.

Through Casal’s critique of the journalist, his production of knowledge for a

European audience and critique of colonial power, and his allegorical representation of

General Marín’s Cuban-born wife as the exemplary Cuban model, we can see how Casal draws from both local and European ideas and models as he negotiated the role of Cuba in the colonial atmosphere. Let us now turn to the other side of the world where Isabelo

5 Doris Sommer’s Foundational Fictions and Ileana Rodríguez’s House/Garden/Nation come to mind. 70 de los Reyes – in many ways, the complete antithesis to Casal – similarly manipulates colonial scholarly and aesthetic methods and styles for his own goals.

Isabelo de los Reyes and Folklore

In stark contrast to Julián del Casal, history characterizes Isabelo de los Reyes as a brash, overzealous instigator. Resil B. Mojares describes de los Reyes as “energetic and erratic” and the Philippines’ “most unorthodox intellectual” (255). During his lifetime, de los Reyes campaigned against both Spanish and American rule, was arrested and incarcerated numerous times both in the Philippines and in Spain for his acerbic articles against the Spanish friars, established an independent, rebel church, and founded the

Philippine labor movement. A prolific writer, he wrote on diverse topics in history, folklore, language, politics, and religion, and contributed copiously to the Propaganda

Movement, although he was never a member of any specific revolutionary groups. De los

Reyes is reported to have said, “There is enough chaos in me for God to create another world” (Mojares 255).

As mentioned earlier, Isabelo de los Reyes did not belong to the European- educated group of ilustrados, rather worked primarily in the confines of colonial Manila.

This is not to say that Manila was a backwards, provincial colonial town; in fact, in the mid-nineteenth century, Manila was a cosmopolitan center bustling with activity. In

1869, the Suez Canal opened up in Egypt, allowing water transportation between Europe and Asia without having to go around Africa. By 1870, a direct steamship linked

Barcelona and Manila, with regular mail service between Manila and Hong Kong. Manila itself buzzed with literary and artistic activity, and by the second half of the nineteenth

71 century, the printing press ceased to be monopolized by the monastic orders, allowing privately owned print shops and literary, artistic, and scientific periodicals to surface.

This change is particularly important if we consider that during the three centuries of

Spanish colonization, the most pervasive form of colonial authority was the Catholic

Church. The missionaries, according to Mojares, wrote texts as a “necessary aid for pastoral work and social control and because they saw themselves as ‘men of learning’ and privileged agents in advancing knowledge of the world” (384). Mojares points out that the missionaries’ “textualization” of the Philippines in a body of written texts not only underwrote how colonialism was conducted, but also formed much of the basis for how the Philippines would be represented and counter-represented (384). However, he stresses that well into the nineteenth century, the only type of printed literature circulated among the natives – the objects, not the subjects of this type of knowledge – were religious and pastoral works in the vernacular languages, such as prayer books and catechisms, and a few secular manuals on literacy, numeracy, and health. Even the Bible itself was not circulated, rather the pasyon, which was a versified account of the life of

Christ more often chanted than read in the vernacular.

Compared to Latin America, or even other parts of Southeast Asia, written traditions of scripture, architecture, or iconographic representations were not richly articulated, and, while a pre-colonial writing system existed, it was not widely used. In contrast to the early nationalist contentions that blame Spanish missionaries for destroying pre-colonial writings, the reality is that, while there were recorded instances of such destruction, it was not widespread. According to Mojares, this is in part due to the

72 relative material constraints – bamboo, stones, palm leaves – that limited writing to verse fragments and short messages rather than epics or chronicles. Furthermore, in contrast to

Latin America, local societies did not have the scale to necessitate the legitimating uses of writing, such as royal chronicles or treatises (Mojares 390). In short, the conditions for the expanded use of writing did not exist. As a result, in contrast to the re-legitimation of writing set forth by the modernistas, by the nineteenth century, José Rizal and his contemporaries set out to prove that there was, indeed, a wealth of indigenous knowledge prior to the Spaniards’ arrival. However, the difficulty was finding the kinds of proof that

Western discourse privileged since the indigenous traditions of knowledge in the

Philippines were found in oral, ritual, and localized forms.

It is here where Isabelo de los Reyes’ first book, El folk-lore Filipino, contributes to the genealogy and knowledges of the pre-colonial Philippines. Amid de los Reyes’ flurry of scholarly and political projects and writings throughout his long and active life, I want to focus on this seminal work, for which he won a silver medal at the Exposición

General de las Islas Filipinas in Madrid in 1887, that allowed him and other fin-de-siècle

Filipinos to enter into the dialogue on identity and modernity. As a youth, de los Reyes had been intrigued by the growing field of el saber popular, or folklore. In an article in

Manila’s Spanish newspaper La Oceania Española, editor José Felipe del Pan asked readers to contribute articles on folklore, offering directions on how to collect material.

One of the colony’s leading peninsular journalists of the time, del Pan was inspired by a secular ideology of “improvement” resulting from the Glorious Revolution of 1868 in

Spain. Del Pan had lived and worked in the Philippines for forty years and served as a

73 secretary to the governor-general. In the Philippines, del Pan promoted liberal causes, such as economic self-sufficiency, women’s education, and the eradication of racism; additionally, his writings – in contrast to the modernista ideology of “art for art’s sake” – were secular and utilitarian. So, del Pan urged Filipino writers like de los Reyes to write on topics such as folklore that would stress social utility and was greatly influential in promoting a scholarly interest in the Philippines. From the “useful” knowledge promoted by del Pan, de los Reyes charted his own course and moved to issues more overtly political. De los Reyes credits del Pan for inspiring him to study folklore by giving him books to spark his interest. De los Reyes also received encouragement from other folklorists in the peninsula, among them Antonio Machado, “founder of Spanish folklore,” and Alejandro Guichot, editor of the journal Folk-Lore Andaluz.

The career of de los Reyes that began with El folk-lore filipino serves as a reminder that the Propaganda Movement was as much as a local phenomenon as it was diasporic. While de los Reyes’ exile in Spain (1897-1901) was certainly significant, his substantial work in the country, his unmistakable provincial and ethnic pride, and his treatment of “local knowledge” as authoritative demonstrate the local production of modernity and “enlightened” thinking, rather than their mere importation. Especially with the publication of El folk-lore filipino, de los Reyes had not yet even left the Philippines at that point in his life. Therefore, his knowledge of the present state of the field of folklore is impressive. In his introduction to El folk-lore filipino, de los Reyes writes,

A la escasez de conocimientos con que [contaban] los antiguos la

suplía su atrevimiento, el cual estaba en proporción con su grande

74 ignorancia. Así es que si los antiguos no dejaron de dar soluciones a nungún problema científico esa pretendidas soluciones por lo peregrinas suelen arrancarnos grandes carcajadas. Si supieseis de quién creían que hemos descendido los indígenas de Filipinas!

Pero a medida que las ciencias progresaban y se descubría que los errores obedecían a hipótesis y a datos no bien comparados, se procuró buscar éstos, examinándolos con mayor escrúpulo y al fin en la

Antropología, la Prehistoria y en todas las demás ciencias relativas al hombre primitivo húbose de reconocer gran escasez de materiales que al contrario debieran abundar, para poder sostenerse s[e]riamente alguna teoría científica. (4)

Due to the lack of knowledge during the olden times, people resorted to opinions which matched their astounding ignorance. The old people unceasingly offered answers to all scientific problems. However, these so-called answers, because they are superficial, usually made us laugh. If you only knew who they think we, the natives of the Philippines, descended from!

But as science progressed and errors were discovered to have followed a hypothesis and data not very well tested, efforts were made to look for them and examine them scrupulously. Finally, it was established that in Anthropology, Pre-history and other sciences related to primitive

man, there indeed exists a great lack of material which should otherwise

abound to be able to support seriously a scientific theory. (Dizon 5)

The first two paragraphs in de los Reyes’ “Introducción” reflect on the progression of knowledge, specifically from “common” knowledge to the sciences promoted by the

Enlightenment. In particular, de los Reyes is highlighting the progression of European knowledge about the Philippines. In his exclamation – “Si supiéseis de quién creían que hemos descendido los indígenas de Filipinas!” – de los Reyes, much like Casal, employs a tone of gossip: he speaks to a reader with whom he aligns himself (“supiéseis”) about who “they” think (“creían”) the Filipinos descended from. But, considering that this text won a silver medal in Madrid’s Exposición General de las Filipinas, with whom is de los

Reyes aligning himself? Who does he consider to be the outsider, the Other?

It is significant that de los Reyes dedicated his book “A los folk-loristas españoles de la Peninsula” (2); his “Introducción” further underscored his correspondence with his colleagues in Spain who kept him updated on current research going on in the Peninsula.

It is also significant that, with the exception of folklore, Spain lagged far behind its neighbors France, Germany, and England in the anthropological sciences and other nineteenth-century scholarly fields, particularly regarding work in the Philippines –

Spain’s own colony. Megan C. Thomas stresses that both Peninsular Spaniards and

Filipino ilustrados themselves have pointed out the deficiency of Spanish scholarship about the Philippines, specifically underlining German scholars’ contributions to

Philippine ethnography (Thomas 41-43).6 Isabelo de los Reyes subtly also calls attention to the deficiency of Spanish scholarship on the Philippines – it is he, not the Spanish scholars, who is gathering data and carrying out his research in the field. Later in the

“Introducción,” de los Reyes details the controversy sparked by his Folk-lore filipino, specifically his tête-à-tête with a peninsular doctor under the pen name Astoll. In this correspondence, de los Reyes quotes Astoll for his admiration of de los Reyes’ courage and enthusiasm for undertaking folkloric studies, but also Astoll’s pessimism about de los

Reyes’ chances for success. In response, de los Reyes indirectly raises the question as to why “ciertas corporaciones que hubieran podido acometerla” (“certain corporations that would have been able to undertake [the task of folkloric studies]”) – referring to the religious orders – did not do so (16).

This allows him to position himself as the authority and pioneer of this new science in the Philippines. Benedict Anderson, in an essay on de los Reyes’ text, addresses this question of positionality. According to Anderson, de los Reyes positions himself as one who mediates the “Inside,” the “Outside,” and the “Outside Inside”

(“Rooster” 58-59). As an Ilocano, he possesses first-hand, privileged knowledge that outsiders do not have. Yet, as a folklorist-scientist, he speaks from the ranks of global scholarship, claiming access to knowledge that the Ilocanos and other natives do not have. Thomas, following the line of Anderson, cites two other Filipino folklorists,

6 See more in Thomas, Megan C. Orientalists, Propagandists, and Ilustrados: Filipino Scholarship and the End of Spanish Colonialism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012: 41-43. With respect to the German scholars, the most notable authority on the Philippines was Ferdinand Blumentritt, who encouraged and promoted serious study by Filipinos of their homeland, citing their works, and translating them into German. He also became a close friend of a few of these Filipinos, most notably José Rizal, and supported their campaigns for political reform. 77

Serrano Laktaw and Mariano Ponce, as employing similar strategies. Yet, as Mojares points out, these positional shifts are contradictory – although de los Reyes ultimately tends to privilege the local, he confesses that there are things that even he does not know, despite being an Ilocano, which is what Anderson refers to as the “Outside Inside.”

According to Mojares, de los Reyes

takes the ta[s]k of assuming Western (“outside”) knowledge as knowledge

already “revealed” while problematizing the local as that which harbors

the as yet “unknown.” This “unknownness” exposes the incompleteness of

Western knowledge and undercuts its totalizing claims. It threatens the

hegemony of the other’s knowledge by virtue of its being as yet

unexplained and unincorporated. (352)

The idea of “knowledge” is particularly salient if we consider that, in the next few paragraphs, de los Reyes outlines the beginnings of the study of folklore, pointing out its

Anglo-Saxon linguistic origin – a term that the Spanish simply adopted – which means,

“literalmente, saber popular” (“literally, popular knowledge”; 6). In other words, it is not simply “mythology” or folk tales; rather, it carries the connotation of a legitimate knowledge. He further elaborates on folklore’s authority – and his own – due to the

“entusiastas plácemes de varios sabios en Europa” (“enthusiastic congratulations of various intellectuals in Europe”) that he and his work had received (18). The initial objective of the school of folklore, according to de los Reyes, is “recoger esas leyendas tradiciones, consejas y supersticiones que conserva el pueblo, para de su estudio y comparación con las de otros países, deducir teorías relativas al hombre prehistórico” (“to

78 gather legends, traditions, fables and superstitions preserved by the people, for study and comparison with other countries, to deduce theories pertinent to prehistoric man”; 6,

Dizon 7). However, its general scope would expand to include not only anthropological and ethnographic research, but also to enrich other sciences, such as medicine, astronomy, and chemistry: “En una palabra, archivo general al servicio de las ciencias todas” (“in a word, a general archive at the service of all sciences”; de los Reyes 6).

In many ways, the comparative nature of folklore – particularly in relation to the study of history – brings to mind the rise of Orientalist studies in Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Driven largely by European scholars’ linguistic

“discovery” of the relationship between Sanskrit and European languages, the texts on which Orientalist studies were based also became central for the intellectual excitement about the laws, literature, history, and philosophy of the Orient (Said 42). Through the comparative study of these texts, Europe discovered that its own past was linked to an ancient world in India, decentering the “foundational” characterizations of Greece and

Rome as the progenitors of Europe and arguing that they had actually borrowed ideas from earlier societies – particularly from ancient India. As Thomas has argued,

Orientalism and the anthropological sciences employed methods whose particular features made them more or less available for use by Filipino intellectuals (24). Two specific features of Orientalism that Thomas highlights with respect to Filipino political- intellectual projects are Orientalism’s focus on authoritative texts and its narrative of historical decline from ancient greatness. Using Thomas’ study in dialogue with Said as a point of departure, I follow the lead of others who have studied Orientalism as a tool that

79 has challenged colonial rule, arguing that the intellectual borrowings of de los Reyes – and other ilustrados – should not be considered as a validation of colonial domination, rather reflect the conventions of the field in which they write. Thomas, in examining the problem of derivation and originality with respect to agency in colonial formations, has rightly pointed out that a work’s innovation and originality are only distinguishable to the degree that it can be understood in relation to others (29). Moreover, she notes, “no knowledge springs sui generis from a brain untainted with language or modes of thinking” (30). De los Reyes himself outlines the established criteria by Spanish folklorists as a starting point for the conventions of the genre:

Según la primera de las bases establecidas por los folk-loristas

españoles, el Folk-Lore tiene por objeto reco[g]er, acopiar y publicar todos

los conocimientos del pueblo en los diversos ramos de la Ciencia […];

formas poéticas y literarias del pueblo, los usos, costumbres, ceremonias,

espectáculos y fiestas familiares, locales o provinciales, […] los nombres

de sitios y lugares, que no se mencionan en mapas; los de piedras,

animales y plantas; y en suma, todos los elementos constitutivos del genio,

del saber y de los idiomas, contenidos en la tradición oral, en los

monumentos y en los escritos, como materiales indispensables para el

conocimiento y reconstrucción científica de la historia y cultura.

[…] los folk-loristas deben tener como principal objetivo la

fidelidad en la transcripción y la mayor escrupulosidad en declarar la

procedencia de la tradiciones o datos, etc., que recojan, utilizando, cuando

el estado de sus recursos lo consienta, la escritura musical, dibujo,

taquigrafía, fotografía y demás medios adecuados para obtener la fidelidad

en la reproducción. (De los Reyes 6-8)

According to the first criterion established by Spanish folklore

experts, folklore aims to gather, copy and publish every popular

knowledge in the different branches of science […], poetic and literary

forms. Also included are the ways, customs, ceremonies, common

entertainment and fiestas, local or provincial, […] names of sites and

places not appearing in maps, names of stones, animals and plants. In

short, all the elements that constitute the temperament, knowledge and

languages contained in the oral tradition, in monuments and in writings are

considered indispensable materials in understanding and reconstructing

scientifically the history and culture of a people.

[…] folklore experts must consider as their principal objective,

faithfulness of transcription, extreme care in stating the source of the

traditions or data that they gather, and utilizing the condition of their

sources, musical scores, drawings, stenographic records, pictures and other

adequate means that will result in a faithful reproduction. (Dizon 7)

For de los Reyes, the emphasis is on that which is local, unwritten (be it oral, ritual, or practice), and unnamed (by Europeans) as “indispensable” to the reconstruction of history and culture, and according to the conventions of folklore studies, his principal aim is to

81 maintain fidelity to the representation of these cultural artifacts. In dialogue with

Orientalist studies, de los Reyes points out that, more than any European country,

Philippine folklore should be stressed “para que luego puedan con [las tradiciones, costumbres, consejas, supersticiones, etc.] hacer comparaciones, que tengan por objeto escudriñar los misterios mil que encierra el pasado de estos pueblos” (“so that later, the scholars could compare [traditions, customs, advice, superstitions, etc.] and unravel the thousand mysteries in the past of these peoples”; 8, Dizon 9). By recognizing and dialoguing with the formal conventions of this “new science,” de los Reyes establishes his voice as authoritative, navigating the relationship between his personal, native subjectivity with the distant, objective voice of the scientist.

In this light, Thomas’ study, in which she argues for the theorization of the pre-

Hispanic unity of the different peoples of the Philippines, analyzes how the nature of folklore’s data – much like the heterogeneous nature of the modernista chronicle – lent it to social and political criticism. In part, de los Reyes concedes that, for his “objectivity” toward the subject of folklore, “he sacrificado a la ciencia el cariño de los ilocanos, pues que se quejan de que he sacado a relucir sus prácticas no muy buenas” (“I have rished losing the affection of the Ilocanos who complain that I have stressed their unpleasant practices”; 18, Dizon 19). Yet, he argues, by offering up data about his country, de los

Reyes claims that he accomplishes two tasks. The first, de los Reyes states that folklore

“se trata de algo más serio que el ridiculizar a mis paisanos que ya sabrán corregirse, después de verse retratados” (“is a serious task, far more serious than ridiculing my countrymen who after seeing themselves described will know how to correct their

82 mistakes and improve themselves”; 18, Dizon 19); the other, nationalism: “Todo esto he sacado a relucir, porque para mí, el peor de los hombres es el infeliz que no esté dotado de ese sentimiento noble y sagrado que llaman patriotismo” (“All this I have brought forth to light, for I believe that the worst of all men is the one who is not imbued with this noble and sacred sentiment called patriotism”; 18, Dizon 19). That is, for de los Reyes, the study of the past is intrinsically linked both to progress and love of country.

Again, in writing and researching El Folk-lore filipino, de los Reyes’s objectives were to gather the traditions, customs, legends, and superstitions of the Philippines, and, in their reconstruction, to make comparisons with others regions to recreate the pre-

Hispanic, Philippine past. But how are these objectives linked with progress and love of country? In the next section of his “Introducción,” in which de los Reyes elaborates on folklore terminology, he first elaborates on the debates regarding the scientific status of folklore. On the one hand, there is the rush to define it as a theoretical science; on the other, as a collection of cultural artifacts that are analogous to a museum. For de los

Reyes, folklore is defined as “La ocupación del pensamiento humano, que tiene por objeto recoger los datos que la gente no ilustrada conozca y tenga, que aun no hayan sido estudiados” (“It is that particular task of the folklorist to gather popular data about the illiterate and simple people, which are still unknown”; 24, Dizon 25). De los Reyes posits an example of a “salvaje de los bosques de Abra” (“savage of the forests of Abra”) who, by accident, discovers an antidote for cholera that’s more effective than the one

83 developed by the Spanish physician, Dr. Ferrán.7 “Decidme, folk-loristas,” he challenges,

“¿no os apresuraríais a apuntarlo en vuestros mamotretos folk-lorísticos?” (“As folklorist, you would not hesítate to write it down in your folklorist’s memo book, would you?”; 24,

Dizon 25). De los Reyes continues, “En este caso, el Folk-Lore perdería una joya que puede muy bien reclamar, dado que su significación etimológica no excluye los conocimientos del pueblo, que no sean tradicionales” (“Otherwise, folklore would lose a precious gem, since its etymological significance does not exclude the knowledge of the people that may not be traditional”; 24, Dizon 25). Thinking back to de los Reyes’ insistence that folklore refers to “el saber popular” – as a valid knowledge, and not simply “magic” – and in Mojares’ observation regarding the role of the “unknownness” of local knowledge to the Western world, we see the role of folklore studies in the overall progression of human knowledge and modern sciences.

Interestingly, de los Reyes’ first chapter, which focuses on folklore materials on religion, mythology, and psychology in the Ilocos region, includes a section on

“Supersticiones ilocanas que se encuentran en Europa” (“Ilocano superstitions found in

Europe”). Here, de los Reyes examines folklore materials gathered from folklorists in the

Spanish provinces of Andalucía, Madrid, Asturias, and in Portugal, from which he compiled a list of superstitions, “que supongo hayan introducido los españoles en los pasados siglos, lo que no sería extraño, puesto que en los primeros días de la dominación española, estaban en boga de la Península las creencias más absurdas” (“supposedly

7 Dr. Jaime Ferrán developed the first cholera vaccine in 1885, the first to be used against a bacterial disease in humans. 84 introduced by the Spaniards in the past centuries. This should explain the abundance of superstitions at the beginning of the Spanish regime”; 128, Dizon 129). For example:

Los gallos en llegando a viejo, o estando siete años en alguna casa pone un

huevo del que nace cierto lagarto verde que mata al dueño de la casa; o

una serpiente que si mira primero al dueño, éste morirá; pero si se adelanta

en mirarla, ella es la que fina, según los portugueses y franceses. Del

huevo nace el basilisco, según los italianos e ingleses, y también en el

centro de Europa. El P. Feijóo dice que ‘es verdad que el gallo, en su

última vejez, pone un huevo.’ Los gallegos e ilocanos están acordes en que

es un escorpión el contenido del huevo. (De los Reyes 130)

When rosters grow old or reach their seventh year at one’s house, they lay

an egg from whence there emerges a green lizard that will kill the master

of the house. According to the Portuguese and the French, it is a snake that

comes out: if the snake is first to look at the master, the master dies; if it is

the master who looks at it first, it does. The Italians, the English, and the

central Europeans say that it is a basilisk that comes out of the egg. Father

Feijóo asserts: ‘it is true that the rooster, in its old age, lays an egg.’ The

Galicians and the Ilocanos are agreed that the egg contains a scorpion.

(Dizon 131)

Or another:

Para que las visitas no se prolonguen mucho, los ilocanos ponen sal en sus

sillas (las de las visitas). Los españoles colocan una escoba puesta

verticalmente, detrás de la puerta, los portugueses un zapato o banco en el

mismo sitio, o echan sal a la lumbre. (De los Reyes 134)

In order that visitors will not overstay, the Ilocanos put salt on the chairs.

The Spaniards place a broom vertically behind the doorl the Portuguese

put a shoe on a bence or they throw salt at the fire. (Dizon 135)

By situating Ilocano superstitions alongside European ones, he accomplishes several goals, of which I will highlight three: first, he de-exoticizes and de-orientalizes the local people and customs; second, he subverts the intellectual superiority of the Europeans – namely, the Spaniards and the friars – by pointing out their equally strange superstitions; third, he incorporates Filipinos into a collective endeavor in which they assert their agency in the study and production of history and culture. Thinking back to Orientalism and its methods, we can see how de los Reyes de-exoticizes and de-orientalizes the local people and customs for the European audience in their juxtaposition with similar contemporary peoples and customs elsewhere in the world. By comparing the folklores from Spain, France, Portugal, Italy, and England with those of the Philippines, particularly the Ilocos region, he de-centers the notion that Europe is morally and intellectually superior and that the Philippines is backwards and primitive. In a sense, he uses Orientalist methods of “Othering” in order to point out elements of “Otherness” that continue to exist in contemporary (modern) European societies while simultaneously

86 elevating Philippine society by placing both Europe and the archipelago on the same playing field.

Moreover, precisely by citing the analogous relationship between local and international superstitions, de los Reyes further uses Orientalism to demonstrate that it is actually because of Europe – specifically Spain – that certain “primitive” beliefs were present in the Philippines. For example, in his explanation of the Filipino belief in los duendes, or dwarfs, de los Reyes states that “El duende es uno de los seres mitológicos introducidos en Filipinas por los españoles a juzgar porque hasta su nombre exótico se conserva y no tiene equivalente en ilocano” (142). Let us remember that European

Orientalists analyzed the relationship between European languages and Sanskrit to trace their common genealogy and thus create a narrative of India’s historical decline from ancient greatness, highlighting Europe’s superiority in their ascension. De los Reyes, subverting this narrative, likewise incorporates the relationship between the linguistic origins of the mythological duende, likewise insinuating that its origin – Spain – was also declining from ancient greatness. Yet, because the Spaniards and the friars continued to rule the islands and propagate these types of superstitions, the Philippines had not reached their full potential. That is, Spain was actually holding the Philippines back from becoming “modern.”

At this point, however, I do wish to clarify that de los Reyes’ positioning is not unproblematic. Although he certainly privileges the authority of the local, it is noteworthy that El folk-lore filipino is in Spanish, not in Ilocano, Tagalog, or any of the other indigenous languages, problematizing the question of access. Anderson, however,

87 argues that de los Reyes saw the Spanish language as an international, linguistic vehicle which gave access to the rest of the modern, scholarly, European world, rather than a language of domination (Imagined, 61). Furthermore, while de los Reyes certainly praises popular knowledge, he also distances himself from that which is “ignorant” or “naïve” in local culture. For example, in a chapter on “Los curanderos filipinos y sus abominables prácticas” (“Healers and their abominable practices”), de los Reyes targets those who pretend to have healing powers or abilities to contact supernatural beings in order to trick their victims into giving them material goods, such as food, drink, or money. De los

Reyes exemplifies the mangkukulam, which is a person who has made a pact with the devil and uses a small doll to harm his enemies (428). To make the enemy feel pain in certain parts of the body, the mangkukulam simply pricks the part of the doll with a needle. De los Reyes explains that in the Tagalog provinces, when someone becomes crazy for any reason, the mangkukulam are blamed, and so relatives seek out a healer who specializes in the exorcism of the mangkukulam: “Suponen que éste invisiblemente va al lecho del paciente, y le aprieta el cuello o produce su enfermedad y que si se azota o golpea al paciente, no siente él los golpes sino el mangkukulam” (“They believe that the latter becomes invisible, goes to the patient’s bed, and strangles him or causes him to fall ill; if the healters hit or whip the patient, it is not the patient, but the mangkukulam that they are hitting or whipping”; 428, Imson 429). These con men/women then take advantage of the common people’s credulity, making them vulnerable to manipulation and exploitation: “De modo que, matando al mangkukulam que daña, cesan los efectos de su poder. Así lo creen los tagalos y pampangos no ilustrados” (“Obviously, the effects of

88 the mangkukulam’s power cease when he dies. The uneducated Tagalogs and Pampangos believe this”; 432, Imson 433). Yet, de los Reyes uses these snapshots of the common person’s naïveté as part of the discourse on progress, in which education would be the cure; as mentioned prior, throughout El folk-lore filipino, de los Reyes scrutinizes the church and governmental practices as partly, if not mostly to blame.

Finally, by using the method of comparison, de los Reyes does not simply address a European or Filipino audience, but also provides an authoritative text in the study of

Filipino folklore while involving Filipinos into a collective endeavor in the study of their own history, cultural production, and progress. By interviewing fellow native Filipinos, de los Reyes incorporates Filipino oral tradition into this production of history; for him, the shared belief of these oral traditions gave this specific unwritten history its authority and authenticity. Additionally, in this process of data collection, he focuses on its contemporary, living presence in the Philippines, emphasizing that these narratives are not mere relics of the past, but rather continue to influence and illustrate the range of a people’s lived experience – and this experience includes the workings of the illogical, colonial power, just as much as it includes superstitions and rituals. Finally, in the same way that this comparison de-exoticizes the Philippines for the European audience, it further calls attention to the fact that there are, indeed, Filipino scholars – such as himself

– that are ready and capable to rising to the task.

As noted by Anderson, Mojares, and Thomas, among others, for de los Reyes, claiming folklore was a way to establish the history and unity of the multiple groups in the Philippines, well beyond that history framed by Catholic missionary texts and

Spanish coloniality. In this sense, he connects the far-reaching past with the future progress of his country – both Ilocos and the Philippine “nation” as a whole – imagining these new discoveries as the inspiration for a cultural reawakening. Anderson, Mojares, and Thomas point out the living presence of these traditions, whose “unknownness” to

Europe characterized a distinct modernity, contributing a resource for building a common future. Moreover, not only does de los Reyes’ project contribute to social and political criticism and reform, but like Casal’s chronicles, folklore is also a means for a new art, language, and knowledges to emerge, materializing from the minds of local people.

These new arts, languages, and knowledges, then, serve to unite the regions of the

Philippines, emphasizing the ties between the multiple regions rather than linking them to others beyond the archipelago’s borders – the seeds of a nation.

Taking into consideration the role of art, language, and knowledge and their relationship to folklore, it is noteworthy, then, that de los Reyes devotes an entire chapter in El folk-lore filipino on the Filipino woman, literature and poetry – specifically the poetry of Leona Florentino, his mother. In the introduction to the chapter, de los Reyes writes to Madame Andzia Wolska, the editor of a Parisian journal, stating that he had gathered a few pieces of his mother’s poetry when he received a letter from her announcing the establishment of a Bibliotheque international des Œuvres de Femmes for the upcoming Exposición Universal de Paris (1889). However, he gives the following disclaimer:

Comprendo que poco o nada valen estas poesías, especialmente porque

están escritas según el gusto y estilo puramente filipinos o ilocanos, que

nada tienen de común o conforme con el gusto y arte europeos. (274-276)

I understand that these poems are worth little if anything, especially since

they are written according to purely Filipino or Ilocano taste and style that

have nothing in common and do not conform [to] European art and taste.

(Imson 275-277)

Still, he points out that

Acaso parecerán irrisorios a muchos; pero no a los sabios folk-loristas,

filólogos y, sobre todo, a Vd. cuyo objeto, por su carácter internacional,

tiende a formar un archivo de gustos y estilos, y mientras más variedad

haya, será más rico aquél. (De los Reyes 276)

They will perhaps seem ridiculous to many; but not so to trained

folklorists, philologists and, above all, you yourself who seek to establish

an international archive of tastes and styles which will be richer for having

more variety. (Imson 277)

Here we see how de los Reyes considers the local art, language, and knowledge as a resource that, although distinct from European art and tastes, would serve to enrich an international archive of such work. In this sense, de los Reyes demonstrates his (and his country’s) capacity to participate on the international stage, putting Ilocano poetry on par

91 with European works. To supplement his mother’s poetry, de los Reyes also notes that he includes several chapters on the history of women’s education in the Philippines, per

Madame Andzia Wolska’s second objective, as well as translations and comments of her poetry.

In the next few chapters, de los Reyes elaborates on a moral and physical portrait of the Filipina before tracing her development from ancient times, her education under the Spaniards, and her relationship with literature. Interestingly, the Filipina is portrayed in a rather positive light – in fact, de los Reyes insinuates that she is the key to the development of society, the nation, and, overall, progress. He describes the Filipino woman as “superior al varón de Filipinas, moralmente hablando” (“superior to the man of the Philippines, morally speaking”) and “más inteligente” (“more intelligent”), which is why the husband tends to be dominated by her, although she does not abuse her power

(280). In fact, the women “trabajan más que el varón para ganar el sustento de la familia”

(“work more than the man in order to earn a living for the family”) and in Manila and the central provinces, “suele verse que la mujer es la que sale afanosa por la morisqueta o pan diario, y queda en casa el marido desempeñado las tareas domésticas, propias de la mujer” (“it is customary to see the woman diligently going out to earn the daily bread while her husband stays home doing the household chores proper to women,” de los

Reyes 280-282; Imson 281-283). Furthermore, it is the women who manage the shops in the Philippines, whereas in Europe and America, “se busca con tanto afán nuevas tareas, no muy pesadas, para las mujeres” (“they are still seeking new occupations that are light enough for women”; de los Reyes 282, Imson 283). Yet, most interesting is de los Reyes’

92 perspective regarding the education of the Filipina under the Spaniards. It is worth quoting at length. He writes:

La misión de la mujer en Filipinas, por su superioridad y las circunstancias

actuales del país, es altamente civilizadora. Ella traerá la luz y el progreso;

ella es la llamada a desterrar de las casas a los mediquillos y sobadoras;

ella la llamada a regenerar al filipino indiferente; ella es la que debiera

difundir los conocimientos agrícolas, elementos de derecho, y de la

farmacopea. Quitemos por ahora los conocimientos de adorno, o al menos

no hagamos obligatorio su estudio, y en cambio exijamos a las aspirantes a

maestras elementos de Medicina y Farmacia domésticas, conocimientos

agrícolas […] y otros conocimientos útiles; y qué no todo haya de enseñar

la mujer, sino algo ha de corresponder a los hombres. […] Si se dirige bien

su educación[…], ellas contribuirán en mucho a la civilización del país

(De los Reyes 304).

The Filipina woman, because of her superiority and the circumstances

prevailing in the country, must play a civilizing role. She will bring light

and progress, she is the one called upon to drive out the quacks and the

idle from all homes; she is destined to regenerate the apathetic Filipino, to

disseminate knowledge of agriculture, of the law and pharmacology. Let

us now put aside the study of the decorative arts, or at least, let us now

make their study compulsory; instead let us require all teacher aspirants to

study the elements of Family Medicine and Pharmacology, agricultural

techniques […] and other such useful knowledge. Moreover, let us not

forget that not only women but men, as well, must teach what is

appropriate. […] If her education is well-planned […], she will have much

to contribute to the country’s progress. (Imson 305)

Thinking back to Casal’s portrayal of the General Marín’s wife as emblematic of

Cuba, it is obvious that de los Reyes similarly sees the Filipina woman – and, not insignificantly, his mother – as the symbol of the Filipino nation. Again, if we consider the female body as representative of the nation, we can consider the male body – the men who stay at home while the women work – as the fatherland, allegorizing Spain’s backwardness and elevating the progress not only of womanhood in the literal sense, but also in the nationalist sentiment. It is not surprising, then, that de los Reyes exemplifies his mother’s poetry.

Still, it is precisely in publishing Leona Florentino’s poetry that we see the tension in de los Reyes’ positioning as “Outside Inside,” to use Anderson’s terminology. On the one hand, as a youth, he was sent to and educated in a seminary in Vigan, where he organized a demonstration against the abusive behavior by the friars; then studied at the

College of San Juan de Letran, and finally for a degree as a Notary Public (which he could not practice because he was too young at the time to meet the minimum age requirement of 25) at the University of Santo Tomás in Manila, the only colonial university in Southeast Asia at the time. In sum, his education was chiefly European. On the other hand, he was driven by indigenizing impulses, influenced by his own

94 experiences as an Ilocano. The friction between his personal, intimate love for his mother and his (European-educated) distance from tradition is illustrated in his dedication to his mother, by then deceased: “Coleccionando y publicando tus poesías, te habré tributado homenaje de gratitud? Eso no basta; tal vez no te agrade, porque en vida no querías publicar tus escritos” (“Shall I have rendered grateful homage by compiling and publishing your poems? It is not enough; perhaps it will not please you, for in your lifetime you did not want to publish your writings”; de los Reyes 278, Imson 279). Here, he illustrates that Florentino did not write for a public, nor did she think of preserving her work; rather, “ella misma no daba valor ninguno a sus escritos y enviaba los versos a quienes se dirigiesen o se los encargasen sin tomar ninguna copia” (“she herself did not thiknk much of her own poems and she sent them to those they were addressed to, or to those who had requested them without keeping a copy for herself”; de los Reyes 314,

Imson 315). In fact, he writes that all Ilocanos and Filipinos in general are like that: “No damos ninguna trascendencia a nuestras composiciones y las redactamos para leer una vez sola e inutilizamos después” (“we give no transcendence to our compositions and we write them only to be read once and not to be used again”; 314). He blames this “bad habit” as dating back to the pre-historic times, which is why such few written texts existed when the Spaniards arrived on the islands.

Still, despite the lack of written texts, he points out that the late Doña Leona

Florentino was a well-known poetess in the Ilocos region, “a pesar de no haber publicado en periódicos ninguna de sus composiciones” (“despite the fact that she has not published any of her compositions in any newspaper”; 312, Imson 313), demonstrating that the

95 ephemeral was perhaps as authoritative as the written text. The difficulties of

“translating” his mother’s poetry to a foreign audience, then, come from its resistance to being incorporated into a public archive. After translating one of her poems, de los Reyes exclaims, “¡Qué diferente [la estructura del idioma ilocano] de la de los idiomas de origen latino!” (“How different [is the structure of Ilocano] from the structure of languages of Latin origen!”; 328), noting that at first glance, the poem may appear as a chain of grammatical disparities and suggesting perhaps the local’s (Ilocano, native,

Filipino) own resistance to being read through a European lens. However, he still situates himself as a local expert. The European, without knowledge of the Ilocano language, cannot be expected to understand the intricacies and particularities of Ilocano poetics, and having considered this, de los Reyes believes that his translation was rather good.

As we saw in Casal, de los Reyes in his attempt to produce a local knowledge for a European audience likewise critiqued colonial authority by suggesting that Spain was actually hindering the Philippines’ potential for progress and modernization. Both Casal and de los Reyes draw from regional sources – such as local society and orality – and manipulate European methods – such as the chronicle and folklore – in order to criticize the ruling power and develop a language and literature that adequately depicts their turbulent sociopolitical reality during the last decades of the nineteenth century.

Moreover, what is fascinating is the subtle suggestion made by both men that, by allegorizing Cuba through Matilde de León (a Cuban woman married to a Spanish

General) and the Philippines through Leona Florentino (de los Reyes’ mother), women are key to their countries’ progress and identity. Through the languages and literatures

96 developed by Casal and De los Reyes, discourses and knowledges laid the intellectual foundations for anticolonial ends, planting the seeds that will lead to the development of an anticolonial consciousness, which will be explored in the following chapters.

Chapter 2: Islands of Nationalism:

The Poetry of Ramón de Emeterio Betances and José Rizal

¡Adiós, Patria adorada, región del sol querida,

Perla del mar de oriente, nuestro perdido Edén!

A darte voy alegre la triste mustia vida,

Y fuera más brillante, más fresca, más florida,

También por ti la diera, la diera por tu bien.

- Jose Rizal, first stanza of “Mi último adios”

On the eve of his execution on December 30, 1896, Filipino nationalist José Rizal penned his swan song, “Mi último adios.” He was en route to Cuba, having requested that he be allowed to serve as a physician for Spanish forces on the island after hearing of the outbreak of the second insurrection there. Prior to this request, he had been forced in exile on the Philippine island of Dapitan for his reformist and nationalist writings.

However, the outbreak of the Katipunan rebellion in the Philippines prompted officials to bring Rizal back to the archipelago to be tried for treason; he was found guilty and sentenced to execution.

Two years later, in 1898, Filipino propagandist leader Mariano Ponce sent a letter to his Cuban friend, José Alberto Izquierdo, mourning the loss of Puerto Rican revolutionary Dr. Ramón de Emeterio Betances. In this letter, Ponce writes:

Con profundo pesar me entero de la muerte del eminente patriota,

Doctor Betances, ocurrida en ese París a mediados de Septiembre último.

Con fecha 20 de dicho mes le había escrito una carta, contestando la que él me había dirigido el 26 de Julio, ajeno completamente al triste suceso que había privado a la independencia cubana y filipina de un ardiente defensor y a cubanos y filipinos, de un excelente amigo y un consejero lleno de saber y experiencia en momentos en que unos y otros empezábamos a saborear el triunfo de nuestros ideales.

Es muy triste, querido amigo, el destino de muchos de nuestros prohombres de la Revolución. Nosotros también hemos llorado muchas pérdidas de esta naturaleza, y por eso nos damos cuenta perfectamente del dolor que sufren ustedes en este momento, al cual no puede ser menor el nuestro por la misma causa. […] Ruego a V. transmita a los amigos y correligionarios la expresión de nuestro hondo pesar por tan irreparable pérdida, esperando que nuestros fervientes votos por la felicidad de la naciente República, a cuyo establecimiento había consagrado el doctor todas sus energías, sirvan de lenitivo a su justo dolor. (Ponce, 238-239)

With deep remorse I learn of the death of the imminent patriot,

Doctor Betances, which occurred in Paris last mid-September. On the 20th of said month, I had written him a letter, answering the one which he had sent the 26th of July, completely unaware of the sad event that had

deprived the Cuban and Filipino revolutions from an ardent defender and,

from Cubans and Filipinos, an excellent friend and adviser filled with

knowledge and experience in moments in which both parties were

beginning to savor the triumph of our ideals.

It’s quite sad, dear friend, the fate of many of our great men of the

Revolution. We also have mourned for many lost in this way, and because

of this, we understand perfectly the pain that you suffer in this moment

which cannot be less than ours for the same cause. […] I ask that you pass

to his friends and brethren our deep remorse for such an irreparable loss,

hoping that our fervent vows for the happiness of the rising Republic, for

whose establishment the doctor had consecrated all of his energy, serve as

a balm for their palpable pain. (Translations mine, unless otherwise noted)

Notorious for his role in instigating the Puerto Rican Grito de Lares Revolution in 1868 – the first major revolt against Spanish rule in Puerto Rico – Betances was equally known for advocating for the creation of an Antillean Confederation, which would unite the islands of the Greater Antilles (Puerto Rico, Cuba, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic).

Moreover, Benedict Anderson points out that Betances also maintained a “lively interest in the Philippine revolution” and expressed strong support for their uprisings (Under

Three Flags 189). In contrast to Javier Morillo-Alicea’s question as to why there was no

“meaningful alliance” formed between the colonial reformers and separatists in the

Caribbean and the Philippines, the letter from Ponce to Izquierdo not only shows Ponce’s awareness of the political atmosphere in the Caribbean, but also Betances’ support and

100 encouragement for both the Caribbean and Southeast Asian sister colonies. It also draws a direct trans-oceanic connection between the revolutionary networks.

I begin with the deaths of these two nationalists to highlight the impact of their lives on what many may call the “birth of a nation.” It is particularly telling that Rizal is considered the “Father of Filipino Nationalism,” whereas Betances is known as “El Padre de la Patria” (“Father of the Homeland”). Moreover, Betances is considered “El

Antillano” (“The Antillean”), highlighting his identity as one from the Greater Antilles, and Leon Ma. Guerrero has declared Rizal to be the “First Filipino.” Both were medical doctors, writers, and Freemasons who fought for reform and revolution in their respective countries. Both spent a considerable amount of time studying, living, and traveling in

Europe and the United States, and both have a considerable number of political and literary writings. For this reason, as well as for their roles in their countries’ independence, Rizal and Betances have been widely studied in their respective countries.

Yet, while several scholars have pointed out the parallels between Rizal and Cuban revolutionary José Martí,8 very few have noted the stark similarities between Betances and Rizal,9 let alone compared them systematically. Additionally, although as far as we know, Rizal and Betances had never directly corresponded nor met, the concurrence of their ideas and writings furthermore demonstrate the scope of the revolutionary networks.

In fact, Félix Ojeda Reyes notes that Betances had Rizal’s last poem published under the title “Mi último pensamiento” in the Revista de Cayo Hueso in 1897 (373).

8 See Adam Lifshey, The Magellan Fallacy (2012), John Blanco, Frontier Constitutions (2009), and Koichi Hagimoto, Between Empires (2013). 9 See Ivonne García’s dissertation, “Anticipating 1898” (2008) and Koichi Hagimoto, Between Empires (2013). 101

Considering that both are recognized as the “Father of Nationalism” in their respective countries, what, specifically, elevates these two men to such a heroic status?

When we consider the idea of nationalism, it would be curious to find the similarities and differences in their writings, especially considering that Betances was significantly older than Rizal with several more decades of experience in political agitation, and considering the ebbs and flows of goods – as well as information – across the oceans. Also, considering the differences in their respective countries – the Philippines and Puerto

Rico, while at the time were both colonies of Spain, still had their unique cultural, political, and economic differences – I wonder how, as well-travelled, well-educated, global citizens, they reconciled or combined anti-colonialism and nationalism, especially taking into consideration the problem of negotiating these global experiences with the needs of their native countries’ populations. That is, to what extent do their cross-cultural, global experiences contribute to the exchange of revolutionary ideas? Additionally, both were avid writers, not only of articles and propaganda, but also of novels and poetry.

Here, I am interested in how both authors use literary and political writings to articulate a nationalistic discourse, as well as examining the limits of such a discourse, particularly keeping in mind their elite locus of enunciation, as well as the role that modernity/coloniality plays in the construction of this national discourse.

For both Rizal and Betances, the awakening of a national conscience, be it

Filipino or be it Antillean, serves as one of their primary goals – indeed their passion.

Their novels, essays, letters, and poetry – for their impact on the anticolonial movements of their regions – are key to understanding their countries’ historical realities at the turn

102 of the century.10 Their works’ patriotic character and modernizing spirit not only reveal a desire to unify their countries against the Spanish empire, but also their aspirations for their countries’ progress. For example, in a letter to Román Isaza, Betances writes, “Mi pasión, mi pasión es hoy la revolución borinqueña. Mándeme un himno que haga salir fusiles, fusiles nada más (no pido hombres) de la tierra, que arrastre las piedras y sople llamas y fuego sobre los déspotas” (“My passion, my passion is today the Puerto Rican revolution. Send me a hymn that causes rifles to come out, rifles, nothing more (I do not ask for men) from the earth, that sweeps over the stones and blows flames and fire over the despots”; Córdova Iturregui 20). According to Félix Córdova Iturregui, the passion evident in this letter and in his literary work should not be seen as insignificant when considering his political work; this can also be applied to Rizal. Both Rizal’s and

Betances’ writings express a strong emotional attachment – at times wonderful, at times sorrowful – to their people, their languages, and their histories. Their writings engage with the desire to insert their countries within modernity and to unveil and attack colonialism. The contradictions found in their political and aesthetic expressions on modernity and colonialism, because of the intensity of the emotion, are most fascinatingly expressed in their poetry.

In contrast to the last chapter’s focus on a local consciousness, this chapter highlights the question of nationalism through the poetry of Dr. Ramón de Emeterio

Betances and Dr. José Rizal. Their extensive knowledge of Western forms of thought,

10 As mentioned, Betances advocated for the creation of an Antillean Confederation and was greatly influential in their independence movements. With respect to Rizal, nearly half a century after his death, his final poem was recited to Indonesian soldiers before going into battle in their struggle for independence. 103 united with their strong advocacy for the good of their country and their people demonstrate the contradictions and negotiations between oriental/occidental loci of enunciation. In the line of Partha Chatterjee, their work attempts to respond to modernization by negotiating and confronting Western logic and Enlightenment ideals in the search for the justification of the creation of a nation-state. However, while this language allows for the participation of the indigenous elites in government, it also serves to protect the interests of this indigenous elite (whether it be economic, political, social, etc.) under the banner of justice for the masses and the marginalized, producing ambivalence in their texts.

Rather than focusing on their more well-known scholarship and novels, however,

I look at their lesser-analyzed poetry to study the development of this new consciousness into nationalist identity and explore how they manage emotion and reason in their discourse. I examine their use and transformation of Western structures of knowledge and power by their re-conceptualization of history, treatment of reason and sentimentality, and redemption in their elaboration of new discourses on nation and citizenship. I focus on how both authors negotiate the positioning of emotion and reason in their discourse as a way to dialogue with and transform “universalist” notions of reason associated with modernity/coloniality and adapt it for their own ends. Here, I intentionally betray chronological order by beginning with Rizal’s poems, written in 1879, 1891, and 1896, respectively: “A la juventud filipina” (“To the Filipino Youth”), “Kundiman,” and “Mi

último adios” (“My Last Farewell”). Using Rizal’s work as a frame, I look at two of

Betances’ poems – “A Borinquen” (“To Borinquen”) and “Destierro y libertad” (“Exile

104 and Liberty”), published in 1859 and 1891, respectively – to examine the tensions between this complex, contradictory space between the intimacy of nationalism and the disconnected, yet networked transoceanic exchanges of exile. The sentimentalism in both

Rizal’s and Betances’ works evokes the national memory of the people to call for progress, navigates structures of colonialism to create an expression of patriotism and unity, and ultimately compels their fellow citizens to join in the struggle for justice and for the future of the nation.

By analyzing the structures of sentimentality and reason in the language of Rizal’s and Betances’ poetry, we see the negotiation of conflicting structures of knowledge and consciousness that aim to articulate a new historical, nationalist discourse. Ultimately, I argue that their work reveals a fragmented nationalism, characterized by these very contradictory structures of knowledge in the search for legitimacy and the justification for their participation in the workings of the nation-state. Yet, this also conflicts with the realization of justice for the masses and the marginalized, at times creating tension in the work and illustrating the entangled complexities of nationalism and citizenship.

Sentimentalism, Progress, and Nation in José Rizal’s Poetry

At half Betances’ age,11 Dr. José Rizal was known as the “Father of Filipino

Nationalism.” In fact, León Ma. Guerrero refers to Rizal as “The First Filipino” in his book of the same name (1963). In part, he points out the racial reasons for it: prior to the late nineteenth century, the derogatory term indio was used to refer to natives of the

Philippines, mestizos referred to those of mixed race (usually Chinese and natives), and

11 Betances died in Paris in 1898 at the age of 71; Rizal was executed by the Spanish Army in the Philippines in 1896 at the age of 35. 105 filipinos, like the criollos in Central and South America, referred to Spaniards born in the

Philippines, distinguished from the peninsulares who were Spaniards born in Spain. The people of the Philippines, however, preferred to call themselves by their regional names, as we saw with Isabelo de los Reyes who proudly referred to himself as “Ilocano.”12

Here, I will use the term “Filipino” in the sense that Rizal used it – to describe the peoples of the Philippine Islands. If we think of Benedict Anderson’s Imagined

Communities, in which he argues that the nation is (1) a socially constructed community in which its members perceive themselves as part of a group, (2) limited and sovereign, and (3) always conceived as a deep comradeship, then we can see how the rise of the term “Filipino” to forge solidarity and, ultimately, create this new “imagined community” may be used as a way not only to define the new nation, but also its citizens.

A little bit about Rizal: Rizal was the seventh out of eleven children born in

Calamba, Laguna in 1861 to Francisco Engracio Rizal Mercado and Teodora Morales

Alonzo y Quinto. His parents were wealthy landowners and of mixed Chinese, Spanish,

Japanese, and native descent. He was a polymath who was skilled in both the arts and sciences, having mastered 22 languages in his lifetime. At the age of 16, he enrolled at the Ateneo Municipal de Manila to obtain a land surveyor degree and, at the same time, at the University of Santo Tomas studying law. Rizal later switched to the study of medicine, specializing in ophthalmology upon learning that his mother was going blind.

However, due to discrimination against Filipino students at the university, he secretly went abroad to Madrid in 1882 to finish his medical studies at the Universidad Central de

12 Others include Tagalogs, Cebuanos, Pampangenos, Chavacanos, etc. 106

Madrid. Like Isabelo de los Reyes, Rizal was influenced greatly by the execution of the three Filipino priests (known collectively as Gomburza) for supposedly instigating the

1872 Cavite Mutiny and by his brother’s political activism. While his first novel, Noli Me

Tángere, was dedicated to the Filipino people (“A mi patria”), its sequel, El

Filibusterismo, was dedicated to the memory of Gomburza.13

Already, we see the influence of sentimentalism in Rizal’s works – this particular event emotionally triggered Rizal’s worldview, and his nationalist work would be driven by this passion for justice and for his love of country. In a study on Rizal’s essay

“Filipinas dentro de cien años” (“The Philippines a Century Hence”) (1889), Koichi

Hagimoto notes Rizal’s argument that “unlike the foreign models, ancient traditions of the colonized race are inspired by the climate and by ‘their way of feeling’” (80).

Hagimoto rightfully underscores the relationship between this “way of feeling” and the characterization of the Filipino race in terms of their sensitivity: “By rearticulating the history of the country,” Hagimoto stresses, “[Rizal] suggests that Filipinos should return to their own ‘feeling’ as a way to recuperate ‘what was theirs and what was national.’ For

Rizal, such sensitivity represents one of the essential elements of the Filipino race” (80).

In a study on Rizal’s poetry, Jaime C. de Veyra supports this idea and rightly points out,

Rizal, poeta, es tan conspicuo como Rizal, patriota, y desde luego más que

como médico, como hombre de ciencia, como historiógrafo, como

periodista, y hasta como novelista; para nuestra concepción, después de

13 It reads: “A la memoria de los Presbíteros, don Mariano GÓMEZ (85 años), don José BURGOS (30 años) y don Jacinto ZAMORA (35 años). Ejecutados en el patíbulo de Bagumbayan, el 28 de febrero de 1872.” 107

patricio y lingüista – títulos que ponemos por encima de los otros, – Rizal,

poeta, lo era todo y por sobre los demás atributos. (x)

Rizal, the poet, is as conspicuous as Rizal, the patriot, and certainly more

than as a doctor, as a man of medicine, as a historiographer, as a journalist,

and even as a novelist; for our conception, more than aristocrat and

linguist – titles that we place higher than others – Rizal, the poet, was all

of these and beyond the other attributes.

In this sense, then, it is only logical to incorporate Filipino sentimentality, passion, and art as part of Filipino reasoning. Veyra continues to explain that, upon examining Rizal’s poetry, one finds

que la peculiar complexión de aquella alma grande, compleja, sujeto y

objeto a la vez de acciones encontradas, artista de todas las artes, pioneer

de su raza y su pueblo, el ‘protoplasma’ que todo lo envuelve, que todo lo

empuja y conduce, y lleva a cabo las acciones y la misión para que vino al

mundo. (x)

that the peculiar complexion of that great soul, composed of various parts,

subject and object at once of contradictory actions, artist of all arts,

pioneer of his race and his people, the “protoplasm” that envelopes him,

that drives and leads him, and carries out the actions and mission for the

beginning.

108

In Rizal’s poetry, Veyra’s affirmation is quite accurate: a desire for progress, influenced by Rizal’s worldliness and extensive travels, expressions of idealism and selflessness, and the creation of an ideal Philippine identity and nation come together in a passionate expression of patriotism and modernity. In a sense, to not include a characteristic so essential to the Filipino people would be illogical. In this chapter, I use “sentimentalism” to refer to the capacity to feel strong emotions and thus be guided to “truth,” in contrast to

“rationalism,” which relies solely on observation and “logic” as the basis for “truth.” I argue that the “reason” that Rizal employs draws from both sentimentalism as well as rationalism, which therefore creates a type of reason particular to the Filipino people.

Keeping these ideas in mind, I begin with Rizal’s poem “A la juventud Filipina.”

This poem was published in 1879 in Manila while Rizal was studying at the Universidad de Santo Tomas and won first prize in a contest held by the Liceo Artístico Literario in

Manila. In this early piece, Rizal expresses faith and hope for his country though the

Filipino youth. He tells them to hold their heads high (“Alza tu tersa frente”) and to let their light shine (“Luce resplandeciente/Tu rica gallardía”), exclaiming that they are the

“Bella esperanza de la Patria mía!” (“Beautiful hope of my homeland!”; 31). He contends that through the education of the Filipino youth – a vital step toward bringing the country into modernity – there is hope for freedom and progress for the Philippines. In the third stanza, Rizal unites images of knowledge with liberty and freedom, shaking off the heavy chains that hold back their spirit and progress:

Baja con la luz grata

De las artes y ciencias a la arena,

109

Juventud, y desata

La pesada cadena

Que tu genio poético encadena. (Rizal 31)

Come down with pleasing light

Of art and science to the flight,

O youth, and there untie

The chains that heavy lie,

Your spirit free to blight. (Zaide [Derbyshire] 50)

Education and the ideals of freedom, in line with Enlightenment thought, are united with the image of light, suggesting that the arts and sciences are tools to fight the entrapment and darkness of ignorance. By fighting darkness with light – suggesting a battle between ignorance and knowledge – the individual is free to pursue progress and modernity.

Interestingly, Rizal refers to a modernity that is analogous to Western ideals. Partha

Chatterjee highlights this contradiction in nationalist texts, asserting that

Nationalist texts were addressed both to ‘the people’ who were said to

constitute the nation and to the colonial masters whose claim to rule

nationalism questions. To both, nationalism sought to demonstrate the

falsity of the colonial claim that the backward peoples were culturally

incapable of ruling themselves in the conditions of the modern world.

Nationalism denied the alleged inferiority of the colonized people; it also

asserted that a backward nation could ‘modernize’ itself while retaining its

110

cultural identity. It thus produced a discourse in which, even as it

challenged the colonial claim to political domination, it also accepted the

very intellectual premises of ‘modernity’ on which colonial domination

was based. (30)

The passage above from the poem, then, captures this contradiction. On the one hand,

Rizal addresses the Filipino youth – the future “people,” insinuating their future status as citizens of the Philippine nation – as the country’s hope, the future constituents of the nation. Yet, it is clear how he draws from European Enlightenment discourse in his poetry and, through this discourse, justifies Filipino participation in the nation and capability of self-rule by negating their supposed inferiority by responding to the colonial power. But, as Chatterjee points out, Rizal appears to accept the modernity on which this knowledge is based. Rizal’s fascination with education, particularly the arts and sciences in the European sense, is evident in his extensive writings and in his work as an ophthalmologist and unites with ideals of rationality, progress, and liberty to cultivate love and national pride.

It is essential at this point to mention briefly the concept of modernity/coloniality and its relationship to universalism, as put forth by scholars like Aníbal Quijano,

Immanuel Wallerstein, Enrique Dussel, and Walter Mignolo, among others. The notion of modernity – whether it be that grounded in the European industrial revolution and the

Enlightenment, or whether it be grounded in the initial encounters between Europe and the Americas, as argued by Dussel and Wallerstein – is constituted by coloniality, which refers to the axes of power that categorize and place people and knowledges on a

111 hierarchy, as outlined by Quijano. Among others, Quijano and Mignolo highlight how, as a result of modernity/coloniality, European knowledges and epistemologies were packaged as being “universal,” rather than recognizing local particularities. As a result, according to all of these scholars, there is a need to establish the limits of Western epistemologies and decolonize knowledge in order to create a space from the colonial difference.

While this chapter will not deal explicitly with the decolonization of knowledges, the notion of modernity/coloniality and universality with respect to European structures of thought are essential to the discussion. The contradictory nature of Rizal’s relationship with Spain shows this apparent acknowledgement of European universalism with respect to modernity (and its underside, coloniality). In previous poems, he had depicted Spanish figures, such as explorers, generals, and kings, in a favorable and patriotic light. This poem follows a similar pattern. In the fourth stanza, he praises the knowledge and education that Spain had brought to the Philippines. Rizal writes,

Ve que en la ardiente zona

Do moraron las sombras, el hispano

Esplendente corona,

Con pía y sabia mano,

Ofrece al hijo de este suelo indiano. (Rizal 32)

See how in the flaming zone

Amid the shadows thrown,

112

The Spaniard’s holy hand

A crown’s resplendent band

Proffers to this Indian land. (Zaide [Derbyshire] 50) 14

At this point, it is essential to point out that traditionally, Rizal has been characterized as a reformist rather than a revolutionary, advocating for peaceful reform rather than a violent revolution. However, most contemporary scholars of Rizal now acknowledge that while he advocated for reform during his lifetime, his ultimate hope for the country was independence.15 Rizal’s belief, as demonstrated in his novel El filibusterismo and in several of his essays,16 was that the country was not yet ready for revolution and independence; he saw reform as a more peaceful, logical, and attainable goal in working for the independence of the Philippines. In these stanzas, again harkening back to

Chatterjee, he seems to accept the modernity offered by Spain to the Philippines; in fact, he draws from European history and illustrates the Filipino reality using Western terms.

The next several lines, anyway, suggest as much. Rizal continues to incorporate celestial images of his nation’s youth throughout the poem, drawing from Greek mythology rather than local tradition, but insinuates that through this knowledge, the nation will be free. Yet, if we consider the double message that is being produced, not only is he demonstrating to the colonial powers the Filipinos’ capability for self-rule and progress by “speaking their language,” but he empowers the Filipinos to use the knowledge of the Spanish as another tool to advocate for their own freedom and identity.

14 For this poem’s excerpts, I use Charles Derbyshire’s translation, as found in Gregorio F. Zaide’s Jose Rizal: Life, Works and Writings (1961). 15 Among others, see Koichi Hagimoto, Between Empires (2013), Vicente Rafael, Promise of the Foreign (2005), and Benedict Anderson, Under Three Flags (2005) 16 See Rizal’s essays “The Indolence of the Filipino” and “The Philippines a Century Hence.” 113

In the next lines, Rizal declares that their search for “the most tender poetry” (education) from the highest power – Mount Olympus – is more delicious than nectar and ambrosia:

Tú, que buscando subes,

En alas de tu rica fantasía

Del Olimpo en las nubes

Tiernísima poesía,

Más sabrosa que néctar y ambrosía. (Rizal 32)

Thou who now wouldst rise

On wings of rich emprise,

Seek from Olympian skies

Songs of sweetest strain,

Softer than ambrosial rain. (Zaide [Derbyshire] 50)

Considering that nectar and ambrosia are associated with immortality, this compelling image again suggests the possibility of immortality and strength of the Filipinos, given their ability to access education and enter into modernity, whatever their version of modernity may be. Yet, by evoking the history of the Spaniards – European history – and despite his aforementioned praises of the education brought to the Philippines by the

Spaniards, Rizal begins to transform this history into a source of strength for the

Filipinos. In the sixth stanza of his poem, he makes reference to the minor Greek figure of Philomela:17

17 Also written “Philomena.” 114

Tú, de celeste acento,

Melodioso rival de filomena,

Que en variado concento

En la noche serena

Disipas del mortal la amarga pena. (Rizal 32)

Thou, whose voice divine

Rivals Philomel’s refrain,

And with varied line

Through the night benign

Frees mortality from pain. (Zaide [Derbyshire] 50)

This image is particularly striking if one considers the marriage of violence, art, and rebirth associated with Philomela. According to Greek mythology, Philomela was the younger of two sisters born to the King of Athens. Her sister was married to the King

Tereus of Thrace. While there are multiple variations on the myth, the general representation is that, after being raped and mutilated by Tereus – he cuts off her tongue after threatening her to keep silent – she gets her revenge by weaving a tapestry that tells her story. To escape Tereus’ vengeance, Philomela is transformed into a nightingale by the gods. Thinking back to the sentimentality of the Filipinos, then, it is revenge rather than reason that fuels progress and justice. Moreover, by uniting the Filipino future with the history of the Europeans – tying together their intertwined geopolitical connections –

115

Rizal suggests that the potential outcome of Philippine history will be one in which the

Filipinos succeed in freeing themselves from Spanish oppression.

“A la juventud filipina,” then, is Rizal’s tapestry in which he weaves the story of the silence imposed by the Spanish authorities and exalts the song of the Filipino youth – a sorrowful, but beautiful song, rivaling that of Philomela’s. By lifting up their “celeste acento” – their language, their song, and their feeling – this poem can be read as a way to elevate and give the Philippines back their voice, transforming and dispelling the violence and creating a beautiful harmony that will rejuvenate the country toward a bright, hopeful future. Rizal ends the poem triumphantly, declaring

¡Día, día felice,

Filipinas gentil, para tu suelo!

Al Potente bendice,

Que con amante anhelo

La ventura te envía y el consuelo. (Rizal 32)

Day, O happy day,

Fair Filipinas, for thy land!

So bless the Power today

That places in thy way

This favor and this fortune grand. (Zaide [Derbyshire] 50)

It is noteworthy that it is not the Spaniards who are the “bella esperanza de la Patria,” but rather Filipino youth, but it is more significant that, when referring to “la Patria” and “tu

116 suelo,” he refers to the Philippines, not Spain. By nurturing love for one’s country, Rizal believes, the Filipinos will be united and will take pride in their country, working for its progress and betterment – that is, they will insert their country within modernity.

Still, it is noteworthy that “A la juventud filipina” was written in Spanish, especially if we consider that it is written precisely for the Filipino youth. Is the “celeste acento,” then, in Spanish or in one of the Filipino languages? Returning to the contradictions inherent in nationalism outlined by Chatterjee, this again can be seen as an acceptance of the colonizer’s modernity. In his treatment of Edward Said’s arguments in

Orientalism, Chatterjee writes that

The “object” in nationalist thought is still the Oriental, who retains the

essentialist character depicted in Orientalist discourse. Only he is not

passive, non-participating. He is seen to possess a “subjectivity” which he

can himself “make.” In other words, while his relationship to himself and

to others have been “posed, understood and defined” by others, i.e. by an

objective scientific consciousness, by Knowledge, by Reason, those

relationships are not acted by others. His subjectivity, he thinks, is active,

autonomous and sovereign.

At the level of the thematic, on the other hand, nationalist thought accepts

and adopts the same essentialist conception based on the distinction

between “the East” and “the West,” the same typology created by a

transcendent studying subject, and hence the same “objectifying”

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procedures of knowledge constructed in the post-Enlightenment age of

Western science. (38)

Again, we see this contradiction in Rizal’s conception of nationalist thinking. Although it may be true that he implicitly addresses Spain in the poem in order to refute their control, it must also be the case that this poem is explicitly directed to a very specific subgroup of

“la juventud filipina” – that is, the Filipino youth that can speak Spanish and understand the allusions to Greek and European mythology. This suggests that these youth, like him, are likely to be wealthy and Europe-educated (or, at least, educated in European thought), accepting of the kind of modernity “bestowed” upon them by the Spanish. It also hints that Rizal’s vision of the Filipino national citizen – specifically, the citizen who would participate in government – is an elite, educated, upper-class Filipino. Still, Rizal’s placing his hope in the Filipino youth is motivated by his love of country, as well as his desire for progress and modernity.

Yet, can love and pride of country be separated from progress and modernity, or, like modernity/coloniality, must nationalism be necessarily constituted as a response to modernity/coloniality, as Chatterjee questions? Rizal’s poem “Kundiman” embodies both a critique of coloniality as well as a call for unity through an expression of patriotic sentiment. A kundiman, traditionally written in Tagalog, refers to a specific genre of

Filipino love songs that were often used to serenade one’s love. According to Antonio

Molina, one theory for the origin of the term “kundiman” is that it is a contraction of the phrase “kung hindi man,” which means “though I am not worthy” (2026). Molina explains that the kundiman is “erotic and gloomy” and “gives consolation to anguished

118 hearts” (2026). During the end of the nineteenth century, the kundiman came to serve as a veiled expression of patriotism and nationalism, in which the undying devotion expressed for one’s love symbolized the love of country. However, in contrast to the hope and optimism expressed in “A la juventud filipina,” Rizal’s “Kundiman” is characterized by its rebuke of Spain’s negligence and oppression, highlighting the Philippines’ vulnerability. But, for our author, by vindicating their eventual freedom and exaltation, the country will become joyful.

Similar to “A la juventud filipina,” Rizal continues his sentimental language by juxtaposing themes of oppression, sleep, and silence with images of love, modernity, and independence in a strong expression of local patriotism. Curiously, in contrast to “A la juventud filipina,” Rizal’s “Kundiman” is written in Tagalog, directing this poem to a wider range of Filipino people. Could he be proposing different roles in the nation for different citizens? Is he carrying on the legacy of coloniality by calling certain Filipinos – the “educated” ones – to participate in one way (as the “hope” of the Philippines) while calling on others – perhaps the masses who only speak the vernacular language – to create solidarity and unite the different peoples of the country? In other words, I am curious as to how agency itself could be used as a nationalist tool, referencing the problematic in Chatterjee’s work. The first stanza reads,

Tunay ngayong umid yaring dila't puso

Sinta'y umiilag, tuwa'y lumalayo,

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Bayan palibhasa'y lupig at sumuko

Sa kapabayaan ng nagturong puno.18

Now mute indeed are tongue and heart:

love shies away, joy stands apart.

Neglected by its leaders and defeated,

the country was subdued and it submitted.19

In the footnote, I mention that I use Filipino writer Nick Joaquin’s translation which, although he takes poetic liberties, effectively balances the meaning, tone, and overall art of Rizal’s poem. It is crucial to note that, to maintain the poetic voice and tone, the last two lines of Nick Joaquin’s translation are flipped – the third verse in Tagalog actually refers to the last verse in English, and vice versa. While this does not change the literal meaning of the stanza, I point this out to highlight that in Tagalog, Rizal moves chronologically back in time from the first stanza to the fourth. He begins with the contemporary results of silence and distancing in the first two lines, states that the country (or, more literally, bayan refers to “people”) had suffered suppression (lupig) and surrendered or submitted (sumuko), and places the blame on the leaders of the country

(Spain). One can also see this as a reflection of the historical situation – under the rule of

Spain, the Philippines does not move forward toward progress; rather, the country is

18 In the collection Poesías de Rizal, only the Spanish translation has been provided. The Tagalog version used is found here on the website The Life and Writings of Dr. José Rizal, which is now managed by the National Historical Commission of the Philippines (NHCP). Accessed 3 March 2014 . 19 For this poem, I use Nick Joaquin’s translation, as found on the aforementioned website, The Life and Writings of Dr. José Rizal. Nick Joaquin was a Filipino writer, historian, and journalist, and a renowned translator of José Rizal’s works. 120 hindered and kept mute, oppressed, and miserable, reflecting Spain’s decadence and deterioration. Moreover, by using one of the local languages of the Philippines, Rizal demonstrates Filipino agency in bringing to light the negligence of Spain through Filipino channels rather than Spanish ones, also highlighting the fact that Spain did not even bother to teach its Pacific colony the Spanish language. As a result, the act of critique in a local language places Tagalog in an equal – if not higher – position of power, also reminding the colonizer that the Spanish themselves had to learn the local language in order to communicate, not the other way around.

The second stanza, however, juxtaposes the Philippines with a bright future characterized by awakening, liberty, and modernity. He writes,

Datapuwa't muling sisikat ang araw,

Pilit maliligtas ang inaping bayan,

Magbabalik mandin at muling iiral

Ang ngalang Tagalog sa sandaigdigan. (Rizal, NHCP)

But, O, the sun will shine again!

Itself the land shall disenchain;

and once more round the world with growing praise

shall sound the name of the Tagalog race. (Joaquin)

This stanza brings to mind the idea of resurrection. Going back to Rizal’s use of Tagalog, the image of resurrection speaks volumes in light of the process of Christianization in the

Philippines and in light of the coloniality underlying this process. In the first century or

121 so of Spanish colonization, the Spanish missionaries to the archipelago had to learn the vernaculars of the Philippines in order to communicate with and convert the local people.

This strategy, along with others, was very successful; to this day, the Philippines is the fifth largest Christian country with about 85-90% of the population being adherents to the faith. Additionally, Filipino Christianity was and is very syncretic, blending animistic beliefs with a style of Christianity adapted to the local contexts. One of these adaptations was the Pasyon (Passion), which is an epic narrative of the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ, based on Filipino oral tradition. Traditionally chanted during

Holy Week, the allusion to the Pasyon and the use of Tagalog merge to symbolize the moral implications of the Philippines’ liberty.

In contrast to the joyless, dark tone of the first stanza that juxtaposes the

Philippines’ situation with the suppression and submission of Christ to the authorities,

Rizal starts the second stanza with the image of the sun, dawning on a new day, hinting at the idea of rebirth and rejuvenation. Moreover, the second and third lines are reflexive, suggesting that the oppressed country (inaping bayan) will fight and that she will return and prevail in the same way that Christ fought for the love of the world and promised to return. The last line, parallel to the fame of Christ’s name around the world, similarly hints at the Philippines’ international fame and recognition. Much like how the Old

Testament in the Christian Bible depicts the paradise lost, the New Testament can be seen as a paradise regained through the passion, death, and resurrection of Christ. Taken in this way, in contrast to the first stanza’s movement into the past, the second stanza suggests the Philippines’ movement into the future, establishing its own nation and its

122 subsequent entrance onto the global stage and into modernity. In this sense, Rizal manipulates the colonial structure in order to elevate the Philippines’ status and unite them under the experience of shared oppression. In the final stanza, Rizal highlights the shared sacrifice of the Filipinos for their land:

Ibubuhos namin ang dugo't babaha

Matubos nga lamang ang sa amang lupa

Habang di ninilang panahong tadhana,

Sinta'y tatahimik, iidlip ang nasa. (Rizal, NHCP)

We shall pour out our blood in a great flood

to liberate the parent sod;

but till that day arrives for which we weep,

love shall be mute, desire shall sleep. (Joaquin)

This stanza demonstrates unmistakably Rizal’s belief that one day, violence will be necessary to achieve independence, even if the country’s current situation did not allow for it. In the third line, Joaquin takes some poetic liberty, using the phrase “for which we weep” for tadhana. However, tadhana actually refers to fate or destiny – again, considering the allegory of the Pasyon, the death and resurrection of Christ had been foretold in the same way that Rizal foresees the Philippines’ destined rebirth. The juxtaposition of a blood spilled in war to free the country and the spilling of Christ’s blood to save the world bring to mind the notion of love and sacrifice. By uniting ideas of selflessness and patriotism, Rizal associates sacrifice for the country with martyrdom,

123 placing a moral connotation and duty on saving and liberating the country. Yet, mirroring how Christ’s disciples fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane before he was captured and crucified, the love of country has also been silenced and the desire to save her has not yet been awakened. Harkening back to the martyrdom of Gomburza, the image of dying to save the world becomes even stronger. Additionally, going back to the idea of the hierarchy of different Filipinos’ specific roles, this could also be read as a form of mass mobilization – in order to achieve the emancipation of the Philippines, he conjures up the image that blood will be shed “in a great flood,” indicating his certainty that there will be war and revolution, and appealing to their love of country for their participation in this mobilization. Still, he does not necessarily imply any promise for a democratic participation in government.

To be sure, Rizal did not expect others to die for the Philippines without putting his own life on the line – in fact, Rizal himself was quite clear that he would be willing to die for the good of the Philippines. The union of life and sacrifice culminates in Rizal’s last poem, now known as “Mi último adios.” It is said that, facing the firing squad at

7:00am on December 30, 1896, Rizal requested that he be allowed to face his executors and that they shoot him in the front, not the back, for he was not a traitor. This petition was denied, but his request that his head be spared was granted. It is said that, upon being shot by the squad, Rizal used the last of his strength to twist his body as he fell on his back, both to face his executioners and to face his beloved Philippine sun.20 Overflowing with emotion and arguably the most translated swan song in the world – originally

20 Among the various retellings of this narrative, Leon Ma. Guerrero’s account in The First Filipino (1974) is the most often cited (pg. 490-491). 124 written in Spanish, this poem has been translated into over 30 languages (and over 45

Filipino languages) – Rizal’s last poem intertwines images of light and life with sleep and death, professing that sacrifice for the love of country will lead to progress.

Again, it is curious that Rizal writes his final poem in Spanish; yet, for his international work on reform in the Philippines, it is likely that this choice was also strategic – by writing in Spanish, not only does he appeal to the Filipino ilustrados, who tended to be closest to him and would have similar educational backgrounds, but also to

Spanish-speaking sympathizers. Moreover, by using Spanish, he would have a wider global audience than had he written in his native tongue, Tagalog. His first stanza, which opens this chapter, bids goodbye to his nation – not Spain, but rather, the Philippines:

¡Adiós, Patria adorada, región del sol querida,

Perla del mar de oriente, nuestro perdido Edén!

A darte voy alegre la triste mustia vida,

Y fuera más brillante, más fresca, más florida,

También por ti la diera, la diera por tu bien. (Rizal 69)

Farewell, beloved Country, treasured region of the sun,

Pearl of the sea of the Orient, our lost Eden!

To you eagerly I surrender this sad and gloomy life;

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And were it brighter, fresher, more florid,

Even then I’d give it to you, for your sake alone.21

At this point, I would like to draw attention to the striking similarities between this poem and Cuban poet Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda’s sonnet “Al partir,” which details her emotions as she left Cuba for Spain in 1836. If one were to read her poem alongside

Rizal’s, the comparisons between the two are remarkable. Her first stanza reads:

¡Perla del mar! ¡Estrella de Occidente!

¡Hermosa Cuba! Tu brillante cielo

la noche cubre con su opaco velo

como cubre el dolor mi triste frente. (Gómez de Avellaneda 7)

Pearl of the sea! Star of the Occident!

Beautiful Cuba! The sky covers

Your brilliant sky with its opaque veil

As my sorrowful face covers my pain.

Moreover, in his poem, Rizal paints the Philippines as the lost paradise of Eden, the

“pearl of the Eastern seas,” characterizing the country as a bright and pure nation.

Likewise, in Avellaneda’s third stanza, she compares her happy homeland Cuba to a beloved Eden:

¡Adiós, patria feliz, edén querido!

21 For this poem, I use Edwin Agustín Lozada’s modern translation. I used the translation found on his publisher’s website here: http://www.carayanpress.com/ultimo.html; however, it is also found in his book, Sueños anónimos / Anonymous Dreams. San Francisco: Carayan Press, 2001. 126

¡Doquier que el hado en su furor me impela,

tu dulce nombre halagará mi oído! (7)

Farewell, dear homeland, beloved Eden!

Wherever in its furor fate now sends me,

Your sweet name will grace my ear!

While I do not intend to carry out a full-scale comparison here,22 I do wish to call attention to these brief lines by Avellaneda to highlight the startling similarities between phrases and styles of the two authors’ poems and perhaps hint at the intercolonial connections between the Philippines and Cuba, albeit implicit. Although the two had never met – Avellaneda died in 1873, when Rizal was still only a 12-year-old boy in the

Philippines – it is certainly likely that, when Rizal came to study in Madrid in 1882, he had come across her writings, considering her substantial literary output and participation in Madrid’s literary circles. Furthermore, it is notable that – if he were to have read this poem – upon his death, he was inspired by a Cuban poem that, for him, was a clear expression of a love of country and sorrow upon leaving it.

So, in a burst of feeling, Rizal selflessly offers his life for his country’s sake, whether it be as gloomy as it was at the time of writing the poem, or whether it be

“brighter, fresher, and more florid,” as others have selflessly done on battlefields, in combat, or in cruel martyrdom (v. 6-10). Again, he draws from Judeo-Christian imagery in his elaboration of the Philippines as a lost paradise, yet he himself becomes involved in

22 Although it will be a project for the near-future! 127 his expression of patriotism. In a sense, the sentimental feeling of a love for country is part of Filipino reason, and this reason will lead the country to progress. By surrendering to death, Rizal declares, he brings his beloved country one step closer to life. He cries,

Si grana necesitas para teñir tu aurora

Vierte la sangre mía, derrámala en buen hora

Y dórela un reflejo de su naciente luz. (Rizal 69)

If you need scarlet to tint your dawn,

Shed my blood, pour it as the moment comes,

And may it be gilded by a reflection of the heaven’s newly-born light.

(Lozada)

The image of dawn brings to mind a new beginning, and the spilling of blood continues the image of sacrifice offered in his “Kundiman.” By gilding his blood in the reflection of a new dawning in the Philippines, he contributes to the beauty and rebirth of his beloved country and serves as a model for the rest of the Filipino people to do the same. In the fourth and fifth stanzas, he elaborates on his dreams of a proud Philippines, renewed and moving forward. To bring those dreams to life, he writes, he will gladly sleep for eternity:

Mis sueños cuando apenas muchacho adolescente,

Mis sueños cuando joven ya lleno de vigor,

Fueron el verte un día, joya del mar de oriente,

Secos los negros ojos, alta la tersa frente,

Sin ceño, sin arrugas, sin manchas de rubor.

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Ensueño de mi vida, mi ardiente vivo anhelo

¡Salud te grita el alma que pronto va a partir!

¡Salud! Ah, que es hermoso caer por darte vuelo,

Morir por darte vida, morir bajo tu cielo,

Y en tu encantada tierra la eternidad dormir. (Rizal 69)

My dreams, when scarcely an adolescent,

My dreams, when a young man already full of life,

Were to see you one day, jewel of the sea of the Orient,

Dry those eyes of black, that forehead high,

Without frown, without wrinkles, without stains of shame.

My lifelong dream, my deep burning desire,

This soul that will soon depart cries out: Salud!

To your health! Oh how beautiful to fall to give you flight,

To die to give you life, to die under your sky,

And in your enchanted land eternally sleep. (Lozada)

Chatterjee, in his discussion on nationalist texts as a body of writings on political theory, argues that it necessarily means to explore their meaning at the level of discourse. That is, it requires the study of the ideology of nationalism, positing that “it is the content of nationalist ideology, its claims about what is possible and what is legitimate, which gives specific shape to its politics” (40). He further argues that

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It is part of the ideological content of nationalism which takes as its

adversary a contrary discourse – the discourse of colonialism. Pitting itself

against the reality of colonial rule – which appears before it as an existent,

almost palpable, historical truth – nationalism seeks to assert the

feasibility of entirely new political possibilities. […] As a matter of fact, it

is precisely in the innovative thinking out of political possibilities and the

[defense] of their historical feasibility that the unity is established between

nationalist thought and nationalist politics. The polemical content of

nationalist ideology is its politics. (40)

In the aforementioned stanzas, then, Rizal likewise pits himself against colonial rule, as well as asserts the feasibility of new possibilities – but only through the solidarity of the people. First, considering the fourth stanza alongside his reference to the “marterio” in the second stanza alludes to the impact of the martyrdom of the Gomburza priests when

Rizal was still a youth, spotlighting the reality of Spanish colonial oppression and, ultimately, the discourse of Spanish colonialism. Since then, Rizal writes, his dreams were to see his beloved country and its peoples free, opening the dawn of possibilities; the fifth stanza reiterates his sacrifice to give his country life and welcome the dawn of the liberty of the Philippines. “To die to give [the Philippines] life,” according to Rizal, is a legitimate action, motivated by his love of country, for its freedom and progression.

The next three stanzas focus on nature, in which Rizal bids nature to remember him and to hear his love song. Again, he focuses on light, desiring the moon to see him

“con luz tranquila y suave” [with smooth and tranquil light], the dawn to send him “su

130 resplandor fugaz” [its shooting light] and for the sun “ardiendo, las lluvias evapore/Y al cielo tornen puras” [sun burning, evaporate the rains/toward the sky may they turn pure]

(v. 31, 32, 36-37). These images depict peacefulness and purity; he hopes for a calm, peaceful night without violence, and the sun washing away the rain represents the restored purity, beauty, and honor of the Philippine nation, liberated from the oppressive

Spanish empire. The next stanza asks,

Ora por todos cuantos murieron sin ventura,

Por cuantos padecieron tormentos sin igual,

Por nuestras pobres madres que gimen su amargura;

Por huérfanos y viudas, por presos en tortura

Y ora por ti que veas tu redención final. (Rizal 70)

Pray for all the unfortunate ones who died,

For all who suffered torments unequaled,

For our poor mothers who in their grief and bitterness cry,

For orphans and widows, for prisoners in torture,

And for yourself pray that your final redemption you’ll see. (Lozada)

Again, Rizal situates himself against colonialism and requests peace for those who have died so that they may rest after suffering. Ignoring written elegies, he lifts up oral prayers.

Rizal remarks that, even after he and his gravestone are forgotten, “Deja que la are el hombre, la esparza con la azada,/Y mis cenizas, antes que vuelvan a la nada,/El polvo de tu alfombra que vayan a formar” (“Let men plow and with a spade scatter it,/And before

131 my ashes return to nothing,/May they be the dust that carpets your fields”; Lozada). This image illustrates his becoming part of the land of the Philippines, be it his thoughts, his actions, and his ashes themselves. He situates the Philippines’ freedom in the political possibilities garnered by his death and defends its feasibility, establishing the link between nationalist thought and nationalist politics. That is, he hopes that his ashes – physical and symbolic – be used to continue to fertilize the country and contribute to its growth and progress, even long after he is gone.

In his “Último adios,” Rizal builds nationalism by appealing to the sentiments of his fellow Filipinos – which, for Rizal, is part of reason – so that the Filipinos empathize with a man about to be executed and, moved, take action for their country. The final stanzas reiterate his farewell, crying for his country, but at peace with sacrificing his life.

He bids farewell to his loved ones, his family, and his friends, ending his poem saying

“Adios, queridos seres, morir es descansar” (“Farewell, loved ones, to die is to rest”). As a martyr does, only by dying can he finally achieve rest and can the country achieve peace.

Love, Freedom, and Patriotism in Ramón Emeterio Betances’ Poetry

Several decades before Rizal, Dr. Ramón Emeterio Betances was born in Cabo

Rojo, Puerto Rico, the only son of Felipe Betanzos Ponce, a wealthy merchant from

Santo Domingo, and María del Alacán de Montalvo, a criolla from Cabo Rojo. In 1837, after Betances’ mother passed away, his father sent him to study in Toulouse, France.

After witnessing the aftermath of the 1848 Revolution in Paris, he briefly returned to

Puerto Rico before going back to France to study medicine. In April of 1956, Betances

132 returned to Puerto Rico where he distinguished himself as a physician during a cholera epidemic. During this time, he openly despised the Spanish authorities for demanding immediate and preferential treatment over the native Puerto Ricans affected by the disease. He also became a staunch abolitionist, forcing him into exile and setting the stage for his long-standing role as a newspaper correspondent and lifetime of separatist activities against Spain. In fact, he was exiled three times from his native Puerto Rico, twice from Saint Thomas, and once from Santo Domingo, eventually making his way back to France where he continued his revolutionary activities. Félix Ojeda Reyes and

Paul Estrade, two of Betances’ primary biographers, write that “Betances es, sin lugar a dudas, uno de los hombres que más dolores de cabeza le propina al gobierno español durante la segunda mitad del siglo diecinueve” (“Betances is, without a doubt, one of the men who gave the Spanish government the most headaches during the second half of the nineteenth century”; Betances 14, translations mine unless otherwise noted). Already, we can see the similarities between Betances and Rizal, despite their age differences.

Betances’ literary work does not pertain specifically to modernismo like some other Caribbean authors of this study; however, his characterization as a romantic poet still provides a point of departure for the study of his conceptualization of nationalism in his poetry are worth exploring. Characterized by its reaction to the Industrial Revolution in Europe, Romanticism rejected the industrialization and rationalization of nature and was associated with liberal ideas of freedom and equality, likely influencing the growth of nationalism not only in Europe, but also Latin America. Often, romantics drew from local histories or reinterpreted traditions, myths, or epics to distinguish their indigenous

133 cultures from the dominant ones and regularly saw geography as having a large role in shaping people and their customs, again highlighting the importance of nature in romantic literature and, in Quijano’s and Wallerstein’s terms, calling attention to the geopolitics of knowledge. In line with the sentimental ideas that have been discussed,

Romanticism emphasized emotion as an aesthetic experience, praised creation and originality, and generally was rather allegorical.

As mentioned in the beginning of this chapter, Betances declared that his passion was the Puerto Rican revolution. Félix Córdova Iturregui notes that “Razón y pasión van unidas en diálogo inacabable en la vida de [Betances]” (“Reason and passion are united in an everlasting dialogue in Betances’ life”; 20) and underlines the themes of exile and liberty as the point of departure for understanding Betances’ works: “La tension entre ambos abre un espacio complejo y contradictorio que permite aquilatar tanto la grandeza como la miseria de la vida, su dimensión íntima y su dimensión pública” (“The tensión between both opens a complex and contradictory space that permits the assessment of the greatness as well as the misery of life, its intimate dimension and its public dimension”;

20). Iturregui emphasizes Betances’ affirmation that the Puerto Rican revolution is one founded in love of country (23); in contrast to Rizal, Betances’ view was less reformist – he believed that only through revolution could Puerto Rico and the rest of the Antilles overcome Spanish imperial domination and be reborn. However, in a similar manner to

Rizal, Betances unites reason and direct emotion in his poetry in an attempt to negotiate the Parisian modernity in which he lived and the underdevelopment of colonial Puerto

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Rico. In a sense, Betances’ poetry – like Rizal’s, uniting reason and sentiment – can be characterized as one of creation and transformation.

This union of transformation and nationalism can be seen in Betances’ poem “A

Borinquen.”23 Originally published in his novel Les Deux Indiens: Épisode de la conquéte de Borinquen (The Two Indians: Episode of the Conquest of Borinquen) (1857),

“A Borinquen” is an epic poem included at the end of the book. Although this poem is a bit older than the other works of this study, I would like to use it as a point of departure to see the romantic roots of nationalism and study how Betances re-conceptualizes Puerto

Rican history in order to create a national memory and comment on the distinct Puerto

Rican condition of the time period. Additionally, we will be able to see the historical currents during the transitional period in the mid-nineteenth century after the independence movements of the early nineteenth century, but leading up to the late nineteenth century, the time period in which Rizal, Betances, and other anti-colonialists of the time were strongly active. “A Borinquen” is divided into three parts: first, the creation of Borinquen; second, Spanish colonization; and third, a prophecy predicting the eventual liberation of Borinquen.

In “A Borinquen,” the roots of Rizal’s “Mi último adios” are clear, particularly if the general Biblical structure is taken into account. Thinking of the Romantics’ reinterpretation of ancient traditions and the idea of creation, Betances begins with a description that harkens back to Genesis, which details the creation of the world. He juxtaposes light and darkness to emphasize the idea of a new creation arising from

23 “Borinquen” comes from the indigenous Taíno name of the island of Puerto Rico, Borikén. The term “Borinquen” continues to be used today by Puerto Ricans (borinqueños). Here, I use them interchangeably. 135 darkness and rubble. In the first stanza, Betances sets the scene of a beautiful night and sparkling skies, in which God was looking over the immensity of the seas. Betances writes that God, upon reflecting on this scene, wanted to create a new work of art or perhaps a new kind of human from the depths of the rubble. Betances designs a new story of creation:

Esa noche, Dios tomó una estrella

y contemplando las desabridas ondas,

como una barca sin vela

depositóla en los mares.

Dijo luego al dirigirla en las olas:

“Allá existe un lejano país,

que el viejo mundo desconoce.

¡Ve! tú serás su paraíso.

Te detendrás en su orilla

donde nacen los grandes bosques:

Yo derramaré sobre ti el agua viva,

el arca pura de mis secretos. (Betances 54) 24

That night, God took a star

and contemplating the harsh waves,

24 This poem, along with the book in which it was included, was originally written in French. However, at the time of writing, I was unable to obtain access to the original French text. In this chapter, I use the Spanish versions of his poetry as published in Obras completas: Escritos literarios. Vol. 3. Eds. Félix Ojeda Reyes and Paul Estrade. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Puerto, 2008. 136

like a boat without a sail

placed it in the seas.

He later said, directing it in the waves:

“There exists a faraway country,

of which the old world does not know.

Go! You will be its paradise.

You will keep yourself on its shores

where the great forests are born:

I will spill over you living water,

the pure ark of my secrets.

In this passage, it is clear that, as we see in Rizal’s later “Mi último adios,” Betances paints Borinquen as a hidden paradise, referring to the country as a star placed in a turbulent sea, bringing light to a chaotic world. By employing the imagery of a baptism, he suggests Borinquen’s sacredness, purity, and rebirth; moreover, it brings to mind the allegory of Jesus Christ coming to save the world from their sins. Intriguingly, bringing to mind Enrique Dussel’s notion of transmodernity in which he argues for the inclusion of moments situated outside of European modernity, Betances situates Borinquen outside of the knowledge of the “old world,” inverting the notion of Europe as the source of knowledge and progress (Dussell 223-224). He calls attention to those moments before the Eurocentric vision of modernity, pointing out a time when Europe was still left in darkness and chaos – in contrast to the bright, progressive paradise of Borinquen.

However, the pure ark or box of secrets hints at a foreboding – much like opening

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Pandora’s box, or perhaps more aptly, eating the fruit from the Tree of (European?)

Knowledge, evil can be released.

In the next stanza, God’s discourse continues, in which he tells Borinquen that it will see man and his infancy, the island’s children burning with love for God, and that under God’s power, they will be inclined to adore “el diurno astro” [the daytime star].

However, God warns: take care that slavery, the Demon that gnaws away at the universe,

no venga un día a mancillar tu playa

con sus pies negros cargados de cadenas. (Betances 54)

does not one day come to dishonor your shores

with their black feet heavy with chains.

Betances hints at the idea that, rather than being bearers of modernity, the foreboding arrival of the Spanish actually brings decadence and oppression. The next several lines detail the creation of Borinquen, using metaphors of an artist painting colors on a canvas, a farmer sowing celestial seeds, and wind breathing life into the first people. Betances showcases Borinquen’s nature and beauty through the use of colors, light, and abundance, emphasizing the distinct natural wonders of the island:

Esa dulce isla afortunada

de la que Dios hizo un nuevo Edén,

con el perfume de las flores coronada,

esa isla, - esa fue Borinquen. (Betances 55)

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That sweet, fortunate island

on which God made a new Eden

crowned with the perfume of flowers,

that island, – that was Borinquen.

Betances explicitly brings home the idea of a paradise and, in the Romantic sense, elevates Borinquen’s geography, as well as its perfect geopolitically independent state before the arrival of the colonizers. In the next few lines, he shows how the people of

Borinquen lived in tranquility, peace, and beauty, free from hatred, lavishness, and hunger. Silence and simplicity are virtues of this island, while noise, opulence, and aristocracy (“ruido,” “opulencia,” “altiva casta”) are denounced. These virtues suggest the importance of contemplating nature and connecting the individual to the land rather than being distracted by hierarchy; this depiction of creation, then, embodies a critique of coloniality by associating greed and hierarchy with the colonial power.

In stark contrast to the peaceful, luminous, colorful paradise of pre-Columbian

Borinquen, the poem introduces colonization and slavery to the island with a roaring storm, clamor, and destruction:

La mar, espumando al viento, dando mil vueltas,

se retorcía en medio de largos estruendos sordos,

y en la inmensidad de sus oscuros remolinos,

sobre los residuos esparcidos triturando los negros escombros,

se puso a gritar sus sollozos contra el cielo. (Betances 55)

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The sea, foaming at the wind, tossing a thousand times,

twisted itself in the middle of long, deafening turmoil,

and, in the immensity of its dark whirlpools,

over the scattered remains crushing the black debris,

began to cry out its sobs against heaven.

The next stanzas recount how a boat with a person gets washed on shore, with the natives trying to save the “pescador cuya canoa ha naufragado” (“fisherman whose canoe had shipwrecked”) until they realize that the “canoe” was carrying chains. Betances, appealing to both reason and the emotions of the reader, places the reader not in the context of the Spaniard, but rather gives the perspective of the borinqueños. Here, emotion is highlighted as to give more credence to the reasoning behind it – by associating the slave boat with the storm, Betances emphasizes the chaos and logic behind the fear and impending oppression. Terrified, the natives flee, shouting to one another:

Hermanos, estos son enemigos

que cazan, armadas de truenos,

los vomitó la mar

y con ellos se está tragando la tierra!

Estos son los mensajeros de muerte

que a veces creemos ver en sueños,

es la tropa de espíritus que salen

de la noche cuando todo se consume. (Betances 55)

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Brothers, these are enemies

that hunt, armed with thunder,

the sea vomited them up

and with them is swallowing up the earth!

These are messengers of death

that we sometimes believe to see in dreams,

it is the troop of spirits that come out

at night when everything is consumed.

This picture of evil, destruction, and death stresses the newcomers’ insatiable consumption and exploitation of people and resources, much like monsters – and colonizers – do. Death and noise disrupt the peace and beauty in the island, leading the people to their demise and the island to its destruction – he separates the indigenous from their land. Furthermore, by using the perspective of the borinqueños, not only does

Betances depict the natives’ fear as understandable and reasonable, but he also stresses the foreignness of the colonizers and their vices and wickedness that they bring to the island, further characterizing the original borinqueños as pure and moral and again emphasizing the decadence and destruction – rather than the progress and creation – brought by the colonizers. While in the Philippines, Rizal emphasizes that the country’s undeveloped state is due to the Spaniards’ failure to educate the natives, Betances underscores Puerto Rico’s underdeveloped state via the savagery and corruption of the colonizer. Keeping in mind the Romantic ideals of freedom and equality, the problem of

141 slavery rampant in the Caribbean keeps the region from moving forward. In fact, according to Betances, it is precisely this inequality of class and race keeping the island stagnant. Rather than creating – a distinctive feature of both romanticism and modernity – the colonizers instead destroy. The next several lines repeat Betances’ farewell to

Borinquen’s beauty, paralleling Adam and Eve’s farewell as they are banished from the

Garden of Eden:

Adiós, Borinquen con tus bosques,

oh, nido jubiloso de un pueblo libre!

Adiós llanos con tus frutos,

adiós valles, adiós montañas,

adiós caricias de nuestros hijos,

adiós dulces cantos de nuestros campos. (Betances 56)

Farewell, Borinquen with your forests,

oh, jubilant nest of a free people!

Farewell plains with your fruits,

farewell valleys, farewell mountains,

farewell caresses from our children,

farewell sweet songs of our fields.

In contrast to the Spaniards, who see the destruction of nature as modernizing and civilizing, Betances bemoans the loss of Borinquen’s distinctiveness. He finishes this section with Borinquen’s swan song, lamenting “Sin libertad, ¿para qué vivir?”

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(“Without liberty, what is there to live for?”) and illustrating the people’s death “bajo el acero extranjero” (“under the foreigner’s steel”). To Betances, the process of colonization is inherently characterized by violence and exploitation. For that reason, the banishment of Adam and Eve – the natives – parallels Betances’ own expulsion, indicating the contradictory relationship between exile, liberty, and nationalism. That is, nationalism inherently carries with it a love and pride for that which is unique to one’s homeland, whether exiled or whether on its lands. This love and pride of country – this patriotism – inherently liberates.

Therefore, in the last section of the poem, we see not the hispanization of

Borinquen, but the devastating effects of colonization and a prayer for the island’s future salvation. He depicts the invaders as without scruples, drunk with gold, and that they bring over more slaves simply to watch them die, quenching their thirst with the blood of the slaves’ cadavers. Betances again emphasizes the violence and consumption of the colonizers, criticizing their lack of self-control and compassion. By doing so, he appeals to the reader’s sentiments and achieves a sort of call to arms – if one is moral and if one loves his/her country, one will join the fight for Borinquen. Here, emotions and sentiment are reasoned logic. Despite this terrifying image of devastation and exploitation, Betances does not depict the Spaniards as having prevailed; rather, he includes an image of resistance and hope:

Pero mira, bajo la espesa maleza

de aquel empinado peñasco,

¿quién es este cuerpo estremecido?

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¿Quién será el vigía? – Es el Indio. –

En la lejanía, bosque adentro,

muy apartado del camino,

¿quién será ese hombre de frente umbría? –

Es el Negro que le tiende la mano. (Betances 58)

But look, under the thick brush

of that steep crag

Who is this shaking body?

Who is the lookout? – It’s the Indio. –

In the distance, inside the forest,

Away from the path,

Who is this man with the shaded forehead? –

It’s the Black that offers his hand.

Fascinatingly, this image does not include the Spanish colonizers at all – these faces of resistance and hope are faces of the indigenous and the Afro-Caribbean people, and the place is not the Spanish city, but rather the forests of Borinquen itself. Much like

Borinquen represented a hidden star in the middle of a harsh ocean, so Betances depicts the borinqueños as hidden gems in the middle of his country’s harsh forests and crags.

The liberation of Borinquen will not be through reform, the union of the Spanish and the borinqueños, or the acceptance of the borinqueños of the Spanish hierarchy; rather, it will

144 come from Borinquen’s children, elevating their distinctive, indigenous status as superior.

Iturregui explains that “la liberación de Puerto Rico exige un proceso radical de desespañolización. La función metonímica de lo negro y lo indígena es precisamente acentuar, en esa imagen de manos enlazadas, lo distintivo del país, su corte, y la separación radical con respecto al pasado colonial” (“The liberation of Puerto Rico demands a radical process of dehispanization. The metonymic function of the black and the indigenous is precisely to accentuate, in this image of joined hands, what is distinctive of the country, her court, and the radical separation with respect to the colonial past”; 31).

Their primacy to the geography and their distinctiveness would be key to their political and national legitimacy, rather than the “civilizing” mission of the Spaniards. So,

Betances unites them, saying that they are slaves and brothers, joined by the same yoke and making the same vows to the nation. The poem ends with a patriotic cry:

“¡Borinquen, Borinquen amada!

-Gritan al unísono-, ¡humanidad!

¿Cuándo por fin renacerá la patria?”

¡En la primavera de la libertad! (Betances 58)

“Borinquen, beloved Borinquen!”

They cry in unison, “Humanity!

When will the country finally be reborn?”

In the spring of liberty!

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The image of liberty and rebirth ends the poem, bringing the piece full circle. After the harsh winter of oppression, much like the crashing waves of the seas, the spring of liberty will bring colors, light, and tranquility back through the rebirth of its people.

At this point, however, it is necessary to point out that this poem – as well as the others by Betances in this study – was originally written in French. It is unlikely that

Betances knew the indigenous languages of Puerto Rico, but it is also interesting that it was not originally written in the Spanish colonizers’ language – which, by the time

Betances was writing the poem, was clearly well-established as the lingua franca of

Puerto Rico. Again, taking into account Chatterjee’s contradictory characterizations of nationalism, the use of French over Spanish, in a similar light as Rizal, suggests the audience to whom this work was directed, as well as to whom he related to. While France was high on the European hierarchy of the time for their revolution and their ideals of liberty, it also was the center of international happenings. The use of French then insinuates a wider audience for Betances’ works.

Fast forward about three decades, and the connections between romanticism and nation become more apparent. In 1891, Betances’ poem “Destierro y libertad” was published in Spanish near the end of the nineteenth century in the periodical América en

París.25 Here, we see traces of the romantic style that remains, but a significantly stronger focus on the tensions between emotion and nationalism. Specifically, as he struggles with the emotions of love and anger, he draws a connection to the strain of negotiating exile

25 According to América en París (Edition 17 from 15 September 1891); however, this poem was translated into Spanish by an S.V. from Santo Domingo. The version in Spanish I use here is the one published in the aforementioned periodical and reproduced in Ramón Emeterio Betances, Obras completas: Escritos literarios. Vol. 3. Eds. Félix Ojeda Reyes and Paul Estrade. San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Puerto, 2008. Again, translations into English of this poem are mine. 146 and liberty. In the first part of the poem, Betances experiences anguish and pain upon confronting Exile and Liberty:

En horas de tristeza,

¡Cuánto dolor he hallado en mi camino!

Destierro y Libertad, ¡cuánta grandeza

Y miseria encerráis a un tiempo mismo!

Ora la altiva frente

He visto prosternar a los proscriptos

Y a lágrimas sumirse débilmente… (Betances 101)

In hours of sadness,

How much pain have I found in my path!

Exile and Liberty, how much grandeur

And misery do you contain at the same time!

Now the lofty brow

I have seen bow down to the outlaws

And in tears, sink down weakly. . .

This strong expression of pain and anguish brings with it a longing for change. By littering the first several lines with numerous instances of words associated with sorrow –

“tristeza,” “dolor,” “miseria,” “prosternar,” “lágrimas,” “sumirse débilmente” – Betances clearly establishes the current state of Puerto Rico’s situation. However, he includes hints of grandeur – “grandeza” and “altiva frente” – to show that, in the same way that exile

147 and liberty intersect, so do freedom and sacrifice. With this agony comes the desire to destroy its cause; that is, he elevates the pain and grief as motivators and reason for which to fight for one’s country and freedom. Betances continues and illustrates the pains that Liberty has suffered, saying that she has been humiliated at the feet of tyrants

(“Humillada a las plantas de tiranos”) and that Betances himself has seen many disown their brothers “with pitiful lip and paltry heart” (“Y a muchos renegar de sus hermanos/Con torpe labio y corazón mezquino…”; Betances 101). However, there is a glimmer of hope:

Mas cada vez, con entusiasmo férvido,

Exclamé: – ¡Libertad, tú siempre irradias!

Faro de luz espléndido

Es para mí tu frente soberana. (Betances 102)

But each time, with fervent enthusiasm

I exclaimed, “Liberty, you always glow!”

A splendid beacon of light

Is for me, your sovereign brow.

In this description, Betances uses light to underscore Liberty’s beauty and sovereignty.

Juxtaposed with the previous lines, in which Liberty was humiliated and disowned, there is also the suggestion that, upon her liberation, Liberty’s authority will take retribution upon those who disgraced her.

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Considering that this poem was written during Betances’ exile in France, the inspiration for this particular image of Liberty is unsurprising – the figure of the Roman goddess of Liberty, Libertas, was a popular allegory for ideals of freedom and independence during the nineteenth century. For example, the painting Liberty Leading the People (La Liberté guidant le peuple) by Eugène Delacroix (1830), a prominent image in France of the time, commemorated the French Revolution and depicted a very revolutionary, fighting version of liberty. Liberty, depicted as a woman, leads the people of all social classes over the bodies of the fallen, holding the French flag in one hand and a bayoneted musket in the other. Additionally, the poem was written only five years after

France gifted and dedicated the Statue of Liberty to the United States of America.

Holding up a “splendid ray of light,” Liberty serves as a guide, like a lighthouse – that is, a reason for action and a point of reference on how to arrive at a specific destination, be it freedom or progress – and her “sovereign brow” suggests authority and pride, holding her head up high in the face of battle.

In the next few lines, Betances describes her “intrepid song,” which sings “in harmony with her bronze spear” (“Tu canto, siempre intrépido, En acorde potente al bronce lanza”) (v. 16-17). Again, considering the use of song in Rizal’s poetry – and the role of Betances’ previously discussed epic poem, “A Borinquen” – the orality, the emotion, and the possibility of transformation serve as a localized expression for the creation of a new, free nation. That is, her “intrepid song” is her revolutionary cry as she goes into battle, signified by her spear. The final part of the poem unites passion, sacrifice, and love of country in the fight for the nation:

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Y – ¡luchad! – nos repite; ¡-que el destierro

Es el bautismo de la Santa Causa;

Es reto con que el pueblo,

Azotando la faz de los tiranos,

La redención política prepara…

Destierro y Libertad, ¡por eso os amo! (102)

And “Fight!” she repeats to us; for exile

Is the baptism of the Holy Cause;

It is the challenge through which the people,

Lashing the face of the tyrants,

Prepares political redemption. . .

Exile and Liberty, that is why I love you!

The juxtaposition of battle imagery with religious descriptions similarly illustrates the inextricability of exile and liberty, revolution and freedom, and sacrifice and nation.

Reminiscent of Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People, the image of Liberty telling

Betances and the Puerto Rican people to fight, and that exile – as the “baptism” of the

“Holy Cause” of independence – is sacred. In other words, it is the spark that ignites the fire for revolution. If through baptism, the nation becomes “reborn,” “purified,” and

“saved,” the nation’s sanctity is thus dependent on exile’s christening waters. In a sense, through Betances’ and others’ international work for independence, the nation achieves further gains than if he and other exiles stayed in the local context. It is clear, in the same

150 way that Rizal finds out years later, that love of country – and being away from the country that one loves – still poses emotional difficulty; as Betances writes, exile “is the challenge through which the people… prepares political redemption,” again suggesting the sacrifice involved in the fight for independence. In trying to negotiate his international with his local preoccupations, Betances incorporates pieces of international discourse – specifically, French ideals of liberty, freedom, and equality – with what he desires for his homeland Puerto Rico, for his local context.

Dr. Ramón Emeterio Betances died on Friday, September 16, 1898 in Neuilly-sur-

Seine, France at 10:00am. His remains were cremated and entombed in Paris, France, but were moved back to his native Puerto Rico in 1920 at the request of Puerto Rican poet and lawyer, Luis Lloréns Torres, to fulfill Betances’ wishes that his ashes be returned.

Betances did not desire any pomp and circumstance, requesting that no formal ceremony be made for his funeral. Rizal, likewise, had requested to his family that he simply be buried and that there not be any anniversaries commemorating him. Both men, however complicated their local and international work for their homelands, died working for their beloved countries, using both global forms and local knowledge to produce a new language that, inevitably, would be a love song for the freedom of their patria.

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Chapter 3: Islands of Revolution:

Manifestos of José Martí and Andrés Bonifacio

“A revolution is not a dinner party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or doing embroidery; it cannot be so refined, so leisurely and gentle, so temperate, kind, courteous, restrained and magnanimous. A revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which

one class overthrows another.”

- Mao Tse-tung

On January 29, 1895, the “Orden de Alzamiento” was written by José Martí and signed by representatives of the Cuban Revolutionary Party. This order went to Juan

Gualberto Gómez, addressed by Martí as a Cuban “citizen” (ciudadano) who then set the official start date for the War of Independence against Spain for the following month.

Martí outlines three resolutions: first, the simultaneous revolt of the “committed regions”

(regiones comprometidas); second, that any revolt that takes place in the West [of Cuba] that is not effective for the East be considered dangerous; and third, that immediate assistance and resources already acquired are assured (Martí, “Orden” 276). He writes:

Actuando desde este instante en acuerdo con estas resoluciones, tomadas

en virtud de las demandas expresas y urgentes de la Isla, del conocimiento

de las condiciones revolucionarias de adentro y fuera del país, y de la

determinación de no consenter engaño o ilusión en medidas a que ha de

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presidir la más desinteresada vigilancia por las vidas de nuestros

compatriotas y la oportunidad de su sacrificio, firmamos reunidos estas

resoluciones en New York, a 29 de enero de 1895. (Martí, “Orden” 276)

Acting from this instant in accord with these resolutions, taken by virtue

of the express and urgent demands of the island, from the knowledge of

revolutionary conditions both within and outside of the country, and from

the determination not to tolerate any deception or illusion in measures

which must be governed by the most unselfish vigilance for the sake of the

lives of our fellow countrymen and the occasion of their sacrifices,

assembled we sign these resolutions in New York, on January 29, 1895.26

About a year and a half later in the Philippines, Spanish authorities confirmed the existence of the Katipunan, a revolutionary secret society that sought independence from

Spain through revolt. After hundreds of arrests of suspected Filipino suspects, on August

28, 1896, Katipunan’s leader Andrés Bonifacio issued his Proclamation to the Filipino people.

Mga Pangulo, mga Kasanguni, mga Kapatid, kayong lahat ay aming

tinatawagan; kailangan sa madaling panahon ang pagsasangalang sa mga

Anak ng Bayan napipiit at pinahihirapan sa mga bilanguan, kaya pulungin

ang mga Kapatid at ipaunawa, na sa Sabado […], sa kanikaniyang bayan,

26 Translations of Martí’s work in this chapter are mine unless otherwise noted; however, they are heavily based on J.A. Sierra’s translations. 153

at ang pagpasok sa Maynila’y mangagaling sa Balara,27 sasagui sa bundok

ng Ugong ay tatawid sa Guadalupe (San Pedro Makati) at sasagian ang

mga Guwardya Sibil sa Santa Ana. Ang Kapatid na di sumangayon sa mga

banal adhika ng kalahatan ay aariing Lilo at ibibilang sa kaaway; sa

talangang may sakit ay igagawad ang pagtingin inauutos ng palatuntunan.

(Bonifacio, “Panawagan” 70)

This manifesto is for all of you: It is absolutely necessary for us to stop at

the earliest possible time the nameless oppressions being perpetrated on

the sons of the country who are now suffering the brutal punishment and

tortures in jails, and because of this, please let all the brethren know that

on Saturday, the 29th of the current month [August], the revolution shall

commence according to our agreement. For this purpose it is necessary for

all towns to rise simultaneously and attack Manila at the same time.28

Anybody who obstructs this sacred ideal of the people will be considered a

traitor and an enemy, except if he is ill or is not physically fit, in which

case he shall be tried according to the regulations we have put in force.

(Agoncillo 4)

Both Martí’s and Bonifacio’s declarations were effective – in Cuba, the insurrection officially began on February 24, 1895, marking the date of the Cuban War of

27 Balara, Ugong, and Guadalupe (San Pedro Makati) are all cities that made up Metro Manila. 28 In this translation, Agoncillo condenses the various names of the cities in metro Manila into one line. For our purposes, his translation gets the point across. 154

Independence. In the Philippines, Bonifacio led an attack on Manila in August of 1896, setting off the Philippine Revolution.

In stark contrast to José Rizal and Ramón Emeterio Betances who primarily fought for liberty through their writings, José Martí and Andrés Bonifacio fought for independence through armed revolt. This is not to say that they did not also disseminate their ideals through writing; rather, that they saw force as a more effective and viable way to achieve their goals of independence and justice. It is clear that Martí’s nickname as the

“Apostle of Cuban Independence” and Bonifacio’s designation as the “Father of the

Philippine Revolution” speak to their more confrontational demands for justice and citizenship in their respective countries. As noted in their proclamations, Martí states that the resolutions for revolt were “taken by virtue of the urgent and express demands of the island,” and Bonifacio declares that it is necessary to stop “the nameless oppressions being perpetrated on the [children] of the country.”29 This suggests that, rather than responding to the nation-state through legal reform, Martí and Bonifacio were responding to the day to day challenges of colonialism. The tensions therefore sparked revolution, in which the national citizen fought for their sovereignty so that the islands could participate on the world stage on their own terms.

This chapter focuses on revolution and anarchy, which are more confrontational anti-colonial demands for justice, freedom, and citizenship. I draw primarily from the ideas of the South Asian and Latin American Subaltern Studies Groups, particularly those

29 Unlike in Spanish, nouns are not gendered in Tagalog. Agoncillo translates “Anak ng Bayan” as “Sons of the Country”; however, “anak” refers to “child” in general and is not differentiated by sex/gender. Considering the active role of women in the Philippine revolution (which, unfortunately, is not discussed in this dissertation), I would like to use the more neutral term “Children of the country.” 155 of Ranajit Guha, Partha Chatterjee, and Ileana Rodríguez. By no means do I insist that the

Indian context can simply be transplanted to the Latin American context or even the

Filipino one; nor do I insist that the Latin American context would serve as a catch-all for the Filipino context. Rather, the ideas of these groups serve as a springboard to examine the specificities of each region. According to Rodríguez, Subaltern Studies postulates first “to continue placing our faith in the projects of the poor,” and second, “to find ways of producing scholarship the demonstrate that in the failure to recognize the poor as active social, political, and heuristic agents reside the limits and thresholds of our present hermeneutical and political condition” (“Reading Subalterns” 3). The subaltern, according to Rodríguez, marks the insufficiencies of the concept of class, expressing more fully the marginalization of a peripheral community – more specifically, the subaltern is a “decentered subject on which the archive of state citizenship and governability was constructed” (Rodríguez 5-6). Following suit, I focus particularly on the voices of the subaltern – specifically, Cuban intellectual and patriot José Martí and

Filipino revolutionary leader Andrés Bonifacio – in order to highlight the connection between nationalist peasant insurrections and revolutions and colonialism. Although

Martí is not generally considered part of the “peasant class,” his dedication to liberty, independence, and racial democracy for Cuba, as well as all of Spanish America, speak well for his ideas of collectivism.

For this reason, going against the customary comparison between Rizal and Martí,

I situate our Cuban intellectual alongside Andrés Bonifacio. Bonifacio, on the other hand, also known as “The Great Plebeian” for his humble roots, is recognized alongside José

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Rizal in the Philippines for his role in the revolution; however, his story is relegated to the back-burner. By incorporating Bonifacio’s story, I aim to surpass the “limits of our present hermeneutical and political condition” by suggesting an alternative interpretation of anti-colonial history that comes from below and questioning the protagonism that seems to come from solely the elite. While research on La Liga Filipina and José Rizal continue to blossom, studies on the Katipunan and Andrés Bonifacio have largely stagnated,30 making it even more of a priority to critique the elite epistemologies and projects and consider the language of its “other.” In the line of Guha, the subaltern is placed at the center of his struggle and “alters the logic of order and the syntax of domination and governance” to create chaos and respond to modernizing projects in his/her own way (Rodríguez 13).

At the end of the nineteenth century, Martí and Bonifacio represented the voices of the working class through ideals of collectivism and were dedicated to the promotion of liberty, independence, and democracy. In this section, I highlight the essay “Manifiesto de Montecristi” by José Martí (Cuba) and “Ang Dapat Mabatid ng Mga Tagalog” (What the Tagalogs Should Know) by Andrés Bonifacio (Philippines). Both essays outlined the purposes and principles of each country’s respective revolution. Rather than responding directly to the nation-state, I show how Martí and Bonifacio carried out more confrontational demands for justice and citizenship through chaos, resulting in the

30 In part, this was due to the lack of primary sources. However, the very recent publication of Jim Richardson’s The Light of Liberty: Documents and Studies on the Katipunan, 1892-1897 (2013) brings to light a few dozen previously unpublished texts of the Katipunan, which will undoubtedly spur future in- depth studies of both the Katipunan and its members. 157 creation of an alternative language and order. This alternative language and order shaped their visions of a new Cuba and Philippines as the countries underwent dramatic change.

José Martí and his “Manifiesto de Montecristi”

In Ileana Rodríguez’s article “Reading Subalterns Across Texts, Disciplines, and

Theories: From Representation to Recognition,” she writes that one way to understand subaltern history is

to think of ungovernability as insurrection, disobedience, or indiscipline.

Insurrection implies that the subaltern is negating his/her own negation

within the established order, inviting punishment through his/her

counternegation. The insurgent can lose everything, from his/her sense of

self to his/her own body; therefore, rebellions must first pass through the

filter of consciousness. (14)

Considering this quotation, the fact that José Martí died on the battlefield on May 19,

1895 in the Battle of Dos Ríos, having spent his entire life advocating for the independence of Cuba seems to illustrate exactly this relationship between insurrection, punishment, and counternegation.

I begin this chapter with José Martí’s essay rather than Andrés Bonifacio as a way to bridge the gap between the work of the nationalist elites from the last chapter and the work of the subaltern class. Martí strikes me as a unique case that straddles both the elite and subaltern realms, blurring the line between the two. Since Martí is one of the most studied heroes of Cuban and Latin American historiography – in part, for his prolific writings, and more so, for his leadership, unification, and mobilization of the Cuban

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émigré communities in Mexico, the United States, and Europe – it is logical to situate him among the privileged, elite class. Yet, despite his being a criollo31 – his father was from Valencia and his mother was from the Canary Islands – his approach was strikingly

Latin American. Like José Rizal, he insisted on the importance of his country’s education. Unlike Rizal, who wanted Filipino representation in the Spanish cortes and desired elements of European modernity for his country, Martí emphasized institutions, knowledge, and laws that came from the natural facets of the country, strongly advocating against the importation of foreign models and for knowing the realities of one’s own history.32 Also unlike Rizal, Martí believed that working for peaceful reform was futile and that war was necessary for Cuban independence. Like Betances, not only did Martí advocate for the abolition of slavery, he also believed in a multi-racial and multi-class society in which everyone lived in harmony – for Martí, anything that divides the people is a sin against humanity.33

As I mentioned in the introduction for this chapter, rather than responding to the nation-state through reforms, Martí responded directly to colonialism by mobilizing the people – both in Cuba and abroad, uniting the people rather than thinking of them as separate. According to Ranajit Guha, “Mobilization in the domain of elite politics was achieved vertically whereas in that of subaltern politics this was achieved horizontally…

Elite mobilization tended to be relatively more legalistic and constitutionalist in orientation, subaltern mobilization relatively more violent” (Guha 4). This is especially

31 A criollo referred to a person born in the Americas, but whose parents were from Spain. 32 The belief that institutions, knowledge, and laws should come from the native country is most clearly seen in his essay, “Nuestra América,” originally published in La Revista Ilustrada in New York and in El Partido Liberal in Mexico in January 1891. 33 Martí expounds this belief in several of his essays, most notably “Nuestra América” and “Mi raza.” 159 true in the case of Martí – as seen in the beginning of this chapter, his order for revolt was for the sake of the lives of “our” fellow countrymen, uniting those both in Cuba and abroad. About a month after the war of independence started in Cuba, Martí, with general

Máximo Gómez in Montecristi, Santo Domingo, penned the “Manifiesto de Montecristi,” which outlined the reasons, the policy, and the goals for the liberation movement. In the

“Manifiesto,” Martí depicts Cuba as a completely independent, sovereign republic, free from foreign economic or military control, and united in its people, regardless of race or class. The document also outlines the war policy for independence: that it be waged by both blacks and whites, because all the participation of all Cubans was necessary for victory; that Spaniards who support the Cuban cause be spared; that the revolution bring new economic life to Cuba; and ultimately, that the war endeavor to maintain the dignity of the people.

I would like to examine out two central characteristics of Martí’s “Manifiesto.”

The first is that the liberation policies that he outlines are tied together by an underlying thread of community. Along the same lines of his Venezuelan predecessor, Simón

Bolívar, this sense of community – apart from advocating for a united Latin America – collectively condemns colonialism and coloniality vis-à-vis a critique of difference, such as race, class, and citizenship.34 In his article “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism, and

Social Classification,” Aníbal Quijano examines a model of power based on

Eurocentrism, social classification via race and labor, and global capitalism that began with European colonizers in the Americas in the late fifteenth century. This system of

34 Here, I am thinking of Bolívar’s Discurso ante el Congreso de Angostura (1819). 160 power, which presupposes an element of coloniality, relies on the construction of difference – in this case, racial – and a new structure of control of labor to maintain inequality and exploitation (Quijano 181-183). Thinking back to the subaltern as a decentered subject on which “the archive of state citizenship and governability was constructed”, it is clear how subalternity and colonial difference mutually presuppose one another. Martí recognizes and critiques this association; he points out that, in Cuba, the fear of the black race is not only unjustified, but demonstrates cowardice. The revolution, he writes,

con su carga de mártires y de guerreros subordinados y generosos,

desmiente indignada, como desmiente la larga prueba de la emigración y

de la tregua en la isla, la tacha de amenaza de la raza negra con que se

quisiese inicuamente levantar por los beneficiarios del régimen de España,

el miedo a la revolución. (Martí 186)

with all its martyrs and generous subordinate warriors, denies indignantly,

as denies the long experience of emigration and of the truce on the island,

the slanderous notion of a threat by the black race, which has been

wickedly raised, to the benefit of those who profit from the Spanish

regime, to stir up fear of the revolution.

Martí highlights specifically how the colonizer established a racial hierarchical structure in order to wield colonial difference as a tool of exploitation. In order to maintain dominance over the people of Cuba, subalternity is embedded in the society as a result of

161 the coloniality of power: “Sólo los que odian al negro ven en el negro odio, y los que con semejante miedo injusto traficasen para sujetar, con inapetecible oficio, las manos que pudieran erguirse a expulsar de la tierra cubana al ocupante corruptor” (“Only those who hate the black see hatred in the black, and those that trade in such unjust fears do so in order to subjugate, with undesirable reasons, the hands that could be raised to expel the corrupting occupier from Cuban soil”; Martí 187). As a result, the dominant group aims to keep Cuba divided; for this reason, the people must unite.

What is curious, however, is that Martí also includes the Spaniards as part of this community, specifying that the Spaniard who stands with Cuba be spared. In fact, Martí asks for their support in keeping the war short, minimizing loss, and achieving peace quickly:

En los habitantes españoles de Cuba, en vez de la deshonrosa ira de la

primera guerra, espera hallar la revolución […] tan afectuosa neutralidad o

tan veraz ayuda que por ellas vendrá a ser la guerra más breve, sus

desastres menores y más fácil y amiga la paz en que han de vivir juntos

padres e hijos. Los cubanos empezamos la guerra, y los cubanos y los

españoles la terminaremos. No nos maltraten, y no se les maltratará.

Respeten, y se les respetará. Al acero responda el acero, y la amistad a la

amistad. (Martí 187)

From the Spanish inhabitants of Cuba, instead of the dishonorable wrath

of the first war, the revolution hopes to receive […] such affectionate

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neutrality or truthful assistance that through them the war be shorter, its

disasters lesser, and the peace in which fathers and sons must live together

easier and friendlier. We Cubans start the war, and Cubans and Spaniards

will finish it together. If they do not mistreat us, they will not be

mistreated. If they respect, they will be respected. Steel is answered with

steel, and friendship, with friendship.

Remembering that Martí was a criollo, this passage demonstrates his negotiation of his personal, internal conflict – on the one hand, he clearly expresses a desire for a united country; on the other, he recognizes that he has family and friends who share that same desire that may not necessary be “Cuban” in the jus soli sense, but rather through their commitment to the Cuban cause. Walter Mignolo, in his essay “Coloniality of

Power and Subalternity,” discusses W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of “double consciousness”, which allows for a simultaneous understanding of both the colonial experience and the bourgeois experience (429). However, Mignolo states, this double consciousness could be articulated in various forms – the first proposes assimilation, the second, resistance, and the third, which Mignolo proposes, is “border thinking” or “border epistemology”

(429). Border thinking, according to Mignolo, implies “a radical transformation of the

[colonizer’s epistemology] from the perspective of the [subaltern], and the transformation of the [subaltern epistemology] because of the unavoidable presence of the [colonizer]”

(430). In Martí’s “Manifiesto,” rather than carrying on the legacy of the coloniality of power and simply inverting the hierarchical structure of racial difference – that is, situating the Spaniard as the “other” and establishing power through racial difference –

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Martí defines the “other” through nationalist difference – or, the “other” is the one who is against Cuban independence.

This leads me to the second characteristic of Martí’s “Manifiesto.” Despite its call for violence, the “Manifiesto” has an astoundingly reasoned stance, reflecting classical liberal ideals of freedom and democracy. According to Martí, the war of independence has precise aims, is born of good judgment, and is a means to reach a “rational victory”:

los representantes electos de la revolución que hoy se confirma reconocen

y acatan su deber […] de repetir ante la patria, que no se ha de

ensangrentar sin razón ni sin justa esperanza de triunfo, los propósitos

precisos, hijos del juicio y ajenos de la venganza, con que se ha

compuesto, y llegará a su victoria racional la guerra inextinguible que hoy

lleva a los combates, en conmovedora y prudente democracia, los

elementos todos de la sociedad de Cuba. (182-183)

the elected representatives of the revolution that is reaffirmed today

recognize and respect their duty […] to repeat before the patria, which

must not be bloodied without reason or without just hope of triumph, the

precise aims, born of good judgment and far from vengeance, for which

the inextinguishable war that today, in moving and prudent democracy,

leads all elements of Cuban society into combat and will reach its rational

victory.

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Let’s consider this idea of a “reasoned revolt” – the ideas of rationality, associated with order, control, and Enlightenment thought, juxtaposed with revolt, associated with chaos, violence, and barbarism, appear to be contradictory and even paradoxical. How can one use disorder while simultaneously maintaining a legalistic orientation, if we consider

Guha’s characterization of elite and subaltern mobilization? Yet, Partha Chatterjee points out that

the cultural apparatus of signs and meanings – the language, in the

broadest sense – available to a peasant consciousness, far from being

narrow and inflexible, is capable of a vast range of transformations to

enable it to understand, and to act within, varying contexts, both of

subordination and resistance. It is precisely this ability that makes

insurgency the purposeful political work of a deliberate and active

insurgent consciousness. (Chatterjee 14)

This insurgent language, I argue, is precisely what Martí uses in his “Manifiesto” when he speaks of a reasoned revolt – as an insurgent, he transforms and situates the subaltern language of violence and chaos as one that acts within the context of reason that, rather than dividing the elite and peasant groups in the war of independence, unites them against one cause. Furthermore, Martí emphasizes that war is not simply a desire to conquer Cuba through slaughter, because “la independencia política, que sin derecho pediría a los cubanos su brazo si con ella no fuese la esperanza de crear una patria más a la libertad del pensamiento, la equidad de las costumbres y la paz del trabajo” (“political independence would have no right to ask Cubans for their help if there were not the hope

165 of creating one more patria for freedom of thought, equality of treatment, and peaceful work”; Martí 190, my translation). He makes it clear that the intention of the war is not to become “más temible que útil” (“more fearsome than useful”) by simply replacing one tyrant with another – in other words, by continuing a legacy of coloniality. Rather, the intention is that “en la conquista de la libertad se adquieren mejor que en el abyecto abatimiento las virtudes necesarias para mantenerla” (“in the conquest of liberty, the virtues necessary to maintain it are acquired better than in abject dejection”; Martí 183, my translation). Through this multi-faceted language that incorporates the colonizer, the

Cuban, and the in-between, Martí validates an active agency that can act within both the peasant and bourgeois contexts. Not only can this agent, as Rodríguez notes, negate their own negation within the established order, but a new Cuban citizen is defined that draws from “la congregación cordial de los cubanos de más diverso origen” (“cordial congregation of Cubans of the most diverse origins”; Martí 183).

This brings me to my final point. By uniting these two characteristics of the

“Manifiesto de Montecristi” – the notion of community and this new Cuban language born of a reasoned insurgency – I would like to explore Martí’s characterization of the ideal Cuban citizen. After emphasizing that there would be no reason for Spaniards to hate Cubans because Cubans do not, after all, hate the Spaniards – again, war is necessary only to achieve independence, not for any sort of vengeance – Martí writes:

La revolución emplea sin miedo este lenguaje, porque el decreto de

emancipar de una vez a Cuba de la ineptitud irremediable del gobierno de

España y abrirla franca para todos los hombres al mundo nuevo es tan

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terminante como la voluntad de mirar como a cubanos, sin tibio corazón ni

amargas memorias, a los españoles que por su pasión de libertad ayuden a

conquistarla en Cuba, y a los que con su respeto a la guerra de hoy

rescaten la sangre que en la de ayer manó a sus golpes del pecho de sus

hijos. (188)

The revolution makes use of this language without fear because the decree

to emancipate Cuba at once from the irremediable ineptitude of the

Spanish government and to open it forthrightly to all men of the new

world is as certain as our will to see as Cubans, without faint hearts or

bitter memories, the Spaniards who in their passion for liberty help to

conquer it in Cuba, and to those who with their respect for today's war

redeem the blood that coursed in yesterday's war, under their blows, from

the chests of their sons.

Not only do Cubans come from “diverse origins,” as stated in the previous paragraph, but

Martí also includes Spaniards who fight for Cuba’s liberty as “Cubans.” Again, rather than establishing race, class, or labor as that which differentiates the Cuban from the non-

Cuban, which would carry on the colonial legacy, Martí instead upends coloniality and situates “el vicio, el crimen y la inhumanidad” (vice, crime, and inhumanity”) as the

Cuban “others” (184). The reason other independences have failed, Martí writes, is because they arose “del error de ajustar a moldes extranjeros, de dogma incierto o mera relación a su lugar de origen, la realidad ingenua de los países que conocían sólo de las

167 libertades el ansia que las conquista y la soberanía que se gana por pelear por ellas”

(“from the error of adopting foreign models of uncertain dogma, barely related only to their place of origin, to the ingenious reality of countries that knew nothing of liberty except their own desire to attain it and the sovereignty that was won for fighting for it”;

Martí 184). In other words, the true patriot fights for the love of country – and therefore, its government should similarly come from the country itself rather than from the colonizer.

By fostering community, respect, and dignity, the nation can then live in peace and move forward. Martí insisted that, in this war for independence, the country must find a government that can satisfy “la inteligencia madura y suspicaz de sus hijos cultos y las condiciones requeridas para la ayuda y respeto de los demás pueblos […] Desde sus raíces de ha de constituir la patria con formas viables, y de sí propia nacidas, de modo que un gobierno sin realidad ni sanción no la conduzca a las parcialidades o a la tiranía”

(“the mature and cautious intelligence of its educated sons and the conditions required for the help and respect of its other peoples […] From its roots, the patria must be constituted in viable forms, forms born of itself, so that a government without reality or sanction does not lead it into biases or tyranny”; Martí 189). For Martí, tyranny and domination do not constitute good citizenship; therefore, it is vital to combat coloniality in government.

To do so, he suggests beginning with the coloniality of knowledge. While Martí does not see inherent superiority or inferiority in race, he believes that institutions that match the natural intelligence and cultural specificities of the country are best suited for the

168 development of the patria. By using “foreign models”, the legacy of coloniality would continue, and Cuba would remain stagnant.

I end this section with Martí’s invocation near the end of the “Manifiesto.” After proclaiming again the humanitarian reason for which the people of Cuba unite to fight the war, Martí declares, “séanos lícito invocar, como guía y ayuda de nuestro pueblo, a los magnánimos fundadores, cuya labor renueva el país agradecido, y al honor, que ha de impedir a los cubanos herir, de palabra o de obra, a los que mueren por ellos” (“it is just that we evoke, as a guide and help to our people, the magnanimous founders whose labor renews the grateful country, and the honor, that must prevent Cubans from wounding by word or deed, for those who gave their lives for them”; Martí 191). Ultimately, Martí traces the genealogy of citizenship back to the founders of the revolution and to those who gave their lives for the sake of the country. To emphasize, the Cuban citizen, according to Martí, would sacrifice himself for “el bien mayor del hombre, la confirmación de la república moral en América y la creación de un archipiélago libre”

(“for the greater good of mankind, the confirmation of a moral republic in America, and the creation of a free archipelago”; Martí 190).

Andrés Bonifacio and “Ang Dapat Mabatid ng Mga Tagalog”

In 1892, José Rizal formed La Liga Filipina in the Philippines, which sought to involve the Filipino people in the reform movement. This organization derived from La

Solidaridad, a similar organization formed in Spain only four years prior that aimed to raise awareness in Spain for the needs of its Pacific colony through the publication of a newspaper by the same name, which led to the Propaganda Movement. La Solidaridad

169 was comprised mainly of upper-class Filipinos who were studying in European universities and exiled Filipino liberals. La Liga, therefore, aimed to reproduce this group in the Philippines and to involve the people directly in the movement for reform. One of

La Liga’s members, Andrés Bonifacio, actively worked to assemble chapters throughout

Manila. However, days after La Liga’s founding, Rizal was deported to Dapitan in

Mindanao,35 and the organization split into two factions: the first group was made up by conservatives who wanted to continue working for reform, and the second group was the radical Katipunan – they believed that peaceful reform was futile.

In his essay “On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India,” Ranajit

Guha points out that the historiography of Indian nationalism “has long been dominated by elitism – colonialist elitism and bourgeois-nationalist elitism,” both of which originated as the ideological product of British rule in India (1). He argues that these varieties of elitism highlight the process and development of a national consciousness as elite achievements. While elitist historiography has its uses, Guha points out, what it cannot do is explain Indian nationalism because

it fails to acknowledge, far less interpret, the contribution made by the

people on their own, that is, independently of the elite to the making and

development of this nationalism. In this particular respect the poverty of

this historiography is demonstrated beyond doubt by its failure to

understand and assess the mass articulation of this nationalism except,

negatively, as a law and order problem, and positively, if at all, either as a

35 Mindanao is the second-largest and southernmost major island in the Philippine archipelago. 170

response to the charisma of certain elite leaders or in the currently more

fashionable terms of vertical mobilization by the manipulation of factions.

(Guha 3, italics in original)

Without minimizing the fact that India and the Philippines have their own specificities that should be recognized, Guha’s observation is the reason that I highlight

Andrés Bonifacio. Bonifacio was one of the founders of the Katipunan and its eventual – and most well-known – Supremo, or leader. Yet, when studying the historiography of the

Propaganda Movement and the Philippine Revolution, Rizal and the ilustrados are spotlighted (who were mainly comprised of men from elite, criollo classes and had studied in Europe), whereas Bonifacio is characterized as an overzealous, peasant follower, charmed by Rizal’s personality and ideas. However, while it is true that Rizal planted the idea through La Liga – in fact, in homage, “Rizal” was one of the passwords for the Katipunan – I argue that Bonifacio’s role in carrying out the revolution is equally as important as Rizal’s writings. To imply that one’s role is more important than the other commits epistemological violence by negating one’s active agency; for the revolution to have happened, both were necessary. For this reason, Bonifacio deserves further study and recognition for his role in the Philippine Revolution and in the development of

Filipino nationalism.

As mentioned before, Bonifacio is known as “The Great Plebeian” for his humble roots.36 Orphaned at 14, he dropped out of school to take care of his five younger

36 Ambeth Ocampo problematizes this characterization in his book Bones of Contention: The Andrés Bonifacio Lectures (2001), suggesting that he was lower-middle class at best because he certainly had some education, was literate, and upwardly mobile in his employment. In sum, Ocampo concludes that Bonifacio was “far from being a plebeian” (98). 171 siblings. In his adolescence, he sold canes and paper fans, and then later worked at a

British trading firm. He was self-taught and read books about the French Revolution, the

United States, and works by José Rizal. Aside from Tagalog, he learned Spanish and a little bit of English from working at the trading firm. Still, much of what is known about

Bonifacio had come from interviews of his surviving friends and relatives after the revolution, and only one known faded photo of the Supremo has survived to this day. In artistic depictions, he is represented wielding a bolo, yet, according to Ambeth Ocampo, his preferred weapon was a revolver (Ocampo, “Bonifacio’s Bolo”). This stereotyped representation further emphasizes Bonifacio’s modest background; however, this iconic image creates a sort of backward, primitive caricature of the historical revolutionary and minimizes his role as a sidekick, one that is secondary to the “modern” and “educated”

Rizal and the Ilustrados. It is this image of his secondary role that I aim to contest.

When discussing Bonifacio, it is necessary to also discuss the Katipunan (KKK).

Short for Kataas-taasan Kagalang-galangang Katipunan ng mga Anak ng Bayan

(“Highest and Most Honorable Society of the Children of the Nation”), the Katipunan was a secret revolutionary society whose primary goal was to gain independence from

Spain through revolution. Most of the Katipuneros came from the lower and middle classes, although many of its leaders were prominent figures in their local towns. At first, membership was exclusively male, particularly because its foundations drew from

Freemasonry. However, membership was later extended to women, with Bonifacio’s wife, Gregoria de Jesús, as the leader of the women’s chapter. Upon intitiation to the

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Katipunan, the new member must sign a handwritten oath of allegiance in his or her own blood.

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, there is a scarcity of studies on the

Katipunan. In part, this is due to the lack of primary documents available, but also in part due to the considerable secrecy maintained by the Katipunan. Because discovery could mean imprisonment, exile, or execution for its members, Katipunan documents were dangerous to keep. Additionally, some documents and letters were written using ciphers to varying degrees, depending on the message. In a letter to his comrade, Emilio Jacinto,

Bonifacio tells Jacinto to use the “code of the second degree” if he must write of anything of confidence because the letters, he says, have been arriving already opened (Richardson

311-312). With respect to propaganda, in contrast to La Solidaridad, the Katipunan was only able to produce one issue of its newspaper, Kalayaan (“Liberty”); however, not a single copy of that issue has yet been found (Richardson xii). The second issue, upon learning that the Spanish forces were closing in, was burned, along with many other

Katipunan documents (Richardson 171). By the outbreak of the revolution, it is estimated that the Katipunan had grown to reach between 20,000 to 30,000 members (some even estimate as high as 400,000); while exact figures are unknown, it is clear that word of mouth effectively brought together the masses.

In his article “The Nation and Its Peasants,” Partha Chatterjee summarizes Ranajit

Guha’s six “elementary aspects” of the insurgent peasant consciousness: negation, ambiguity, modality, solidarity, transmission, and territoriality (Chatterjee 12-13). Every one of these six aspects, he points out, expresses itself through the principle of

173 community. According to Chatterjee, in contrast to bourgeois solidarities that form on the basis of common interests, peasantry solidarities grow because “individuals are enjoined to act within a collectivity because, it is believed, bonds of solidarity that tie them together already exist” (Chatterjee 14). This inherent solidarity is seen in Bonifacio’s famous rallying cry, “Ang Dapat Mabatid ng Mga Tagalog,”37 or “What the Tagalogs

Should Know.” 38 Published in the inaugural issue of the Kayaan, this manifesto gives a brief history of the Spanish presence in the Philippines, outlines their abuses over the past three centuries, then calls to the people to rise up and dedicate themselves to revolution.

Like Martí, Bonifacio highlights the knowledge that comes from the natural elements of the country as superior to that of the foreigner, the Spaniard. He begins this essay by portraying the pre-colonial Philippines as a peaceful, prosperous Eden:

Ytong Katagalugan na pinamamahalaan ng unang panahon ng ating tunay

na mga kababayan niyaong hindi pa tumutungtong sa mga lupaing ito ang

mga kastila ay nabubuhay sa lubos na kasaganaan, at kaguinhawahan.

Kasundo niya ang mga kapit bayan at lalung lalo na ang mga taga Japon

sila'y kabilihan at kapalitan ng mga kalakal malabis ang pag yabong ng

lahat ng pinagkakakitaan, kaya't dahil dito'y mayaman mahal ang kaasalan

ng lahat, bata't matanda at sampung mga babae ay marunong bumasa at

sumulat ng talagang pagsulat nating mga tagalog. (Bonifacio 189)

37 Attributed, but accepted by most Filipino scholars as Bonifacio’s work. 38 As mentioned in previous chapters, “Filipino” originally referred to a Spaniard born in the Philippines, or what was considered a “criollo” in Latin America. Natives were referred to as “Indios” by the Spaniards, whereas the natives themselves referred to one another using regional nomenclature (i.e. Bisayan, Ilocano, etc.). By the end of the nineteenth century, the term “Filipino” was used to refer to natives of the Philippines. Here, Bonifacio uses the term “Tagalog” to refer to the natives, regardless of their place of birth or language spoken. 174

In the early days, when the Spaniards had not yet set foot on our soil, this

Katagalugan [the Philippines] was governed by our compatriots, and

enjoyed a life of great abundance, prosperity and peace. She maintained

good relations with her neighbors, especially with the Japanese, and traded

with them in goods of all kinds. As a result, everyone had wealth and

behaved with honor. Young and old, including women, could read and

write using our own Tagalog alphabet. (Richardson 191)

In these first few phrases, Bonifacio highlights several positive characteristics of pre- colonial Philippines: self-government, economic independence, prosperity, and diversity, and widespread literacy and education. Part of Bonifacio’s characterization of the Pacific

Eden is precisely its focus on its already liberal, progressive, and civilized state.

However, according to Bonifacio, the purpose of the Spaniards’ arrival was to offer friendship:

Dumating ang mga kastila at dumulog na nakipagkaibigan. Sa mabuti

nilang hikayat na di umano, tayo'y aakain sa lalung kagalingan at lalung

imumulat ang ating kaisipan, ang nasabing nagsisipamahala ay ng yaring

nalamuyot sa tamis ng kanilang dila sa paghibo. Gayon man sila'y

ipinailalim sa talagang kaugalian ng mga tagalog na sinaksihan at

pinapagtibay ang kanilang pinagkayarian sa pamamaguitan ng isang

panunumpa na kumuha ng kaunting dugo sa kanikanilang mga ugat, at

yao'y inihalu't ininom nila kapua tanda ng tunay at lubos na pagtatapat na

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di mag tataksil sa pinagkayarian. Ytoy siang tinatawag na “Pacto de

Sangre” ng haring Sikatuna at ni Legaspi na pinaka katawan ng hari sa

España. (Bonifacio 189-190)

Then the Spaniards came and offered us friendship. It seemed they would

help us better ourselves and awaken our intellects, and our leaders were

seduced by the sweetness of their enticing words. The Spaniards, however,

were required to follow the custom of the Tagalogs, and to bind their

agreement by means of an oath, which consisted of taking blood from

each other's veins, and then mixing and drinking it as a token of their

sincere and wholehearted pledge not to betray the agreement. This was

called the “Blood Compact” of King Sikatuna and Legazpi, the

representative of the King of Spain. (Richardson 191)

In his book Reading the West / Writing the East, Epifanio San Juan argues for the importance of situating Filipino literary expression in the specific historical conjuncture of political, economic, and ideological forces: “Unless the production of such discourse is historically situated, one cannot grasp its power of producing meaning, of communicating what Foucault calls knowledge/power and its dual effects of inhibiting and in the same breath mobilizing people into action” (15). By harkening back to this historical blood compact between the native king Sikatuna and Spanish explorer Miguél López de

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Legazpi,39 Bonifacio revisits this initial contract for three central purposes: first, to establish unity between the various peoples of the Philippines through this founding myth in which the king represented all of the peoples in the archipelago; second, to show how the Spaniards, rather than partaking in this unity, tricked the leaders of the past by the

“sweetness of their enticing words”; and third, to mobilize people into action to take revenge on Spain’s betrayal of this historical agreement. Because of this betrayal, according to Bonifacio, the Spaniards do not pertain to the Filipino community.

Like Isabelo de los Reyes’ aims with El Folk-lore Filipino, Bonifacio calls to the pre-Hispanic past to bring legitimacy to the country’s culture. Because of the multiple ebbs and flows of colonial encounters and resistance in the Philippines, San Juan endorses the use of what Mary Louise Pratt calls a “linguistics of contact” which would

“focus on modes and zones of contact between dominant and dominated groups,” how these speakers with multiple identities are relationally and differentially constituted, and how they enact differences in language (San Juan 16). In a similar discussion, Walter

Mignolo in his chapter “‘An Other Tongue’: Linguistics Maps, Literary Geographies,

Cultural Landscapes” discusses the relationship between literature, language, and coloniality/modernity. He argues for the use of “languaging” – thinking and writing between languages – that “[moves] away from the idea that language is a fact (e.g., a ststem of syntactic, semantic, and phonetic rules), and moving toward the idea that speech and writing are strategies for orienting and manipulating social domains of

39 For a more in-depth study on the ancient Philippine ritual, see Filomeno V. Aguilar Jr.’s article “The Pacto de Sangre in the Late Nineteenth-Century Nationalist Emplotment of Philippine History” in Philippine Studies 59.1-2 (2010): 79-109. 177 interaction” (226). Additionally, Mignolo writes that it is “the very concept of literature

[...] that should be displaced from the idea of objects [...] to the idea of languaging as cultural practice and power struggle” (227).

The fact that Spanish-language texts continue to be privileged in the study of

Filipino literature, despite the fact that only a small percentage of Filipino elites spoke

Spanish, makes it all more significant to consider the role of “Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga

Tagalog.”40 The power struggle via Mignolo’s “languaging” is especially evident in

Bonifacio’s text, particularly if we consider the fact that his title itself insists that the essay discuss “What the Tagalogs Should Know.” Not only does this text enact difference between the dominant and dominating groups, but it also implies a necessary knowledge

(“mabatid”) for the Tagalogs. Also, the word “should” (dapat) can be read two ways: it can suggest what the Tagalogs must already know – “you should already be aware of this” – or it can suggest that this information, which the Tagalogs do not yet know, will be useful and should therefore be learned. This double nuance suggests that the Tagalogs are clearly aware of the differences between the culture, customs, and character between the Tagalogs and the Spaniards (“kastila”), in part creating a community that defines the

“us” versus “them.” However, this information will be useful, according to Bonifacio, because this knowledge will unite the Tagalogs and fuel the fight for independence.

Taking into account these ideas regarding language, culture, and power, I would like to point out the idea of naming: in Bonifacio’s essay, rather than using the term

40 I recognize, however, that within the Philippines, and even in the field of Philippine studies, Tagalog is considered the “dominant” language; I wish to clarify here that the contributions in other regional languages, such as Cebuano, Ilocano, and Bikol, among others, should not be neglected. 178

“Philippines,” he uses the term “Katagalugan.” This term comes from the root “Tagalog”; as I point out in a previous footnote, “Tagalog” in this case refers to the native people of the archipelago rather than the language, its speakers, or even the particular territory where Tagalog speakers tended to live. The term “Katagalugan,” then, signifies “Tagalog region.” Not only does Bonifacio emphasize his point that the Philippines had their own name before the arrival of the Spaniards, but he outright rejects the colonizers’ naming of his nation and his people. In this way, he “takes back” the Philippines – it is not a

“Spanish region,” nor does it belong to the Spanish monarch after whom the colonizers named it. Rather, he envisions, it belongs to the Tagalogs, no longer named – or colonized – by the Spaniards.

Interestingly, despite Bonifacio’s characterization of the Philippines as an already progressive, civilized nation in the manifesto, he implies that it was the promise of further progress – that the Spaniards would help them “better [themselves]” and “awaken [their] intellects” – that seduced the king. For that reason, Bonifacio writes,

Buhat ng ito'y mangyari ay bumibilang na ngayon sa tatlong daang taon

mahiguit na ang lahi ni Legaspi ay ating binubuhay sa lubos na

kasaganaan, ating pinagtatamasa at binubusog, kahit abutin natin ang

kasalatan at kadayukdukan; iguinugugol natin ang yaman dugo at sampu

ng buhay sa pagtatangol sa kanila; kinakahamok natin sampu ng tunay na

mga kababayan na aayaw pumayag na sa kanilay pasakop, at gayon din

naman nakipagbaka tayo sa mga Ynsik at taga Holanda na nagbalang

umagaw sa kanila nitong Katagalugan. (Bonifacio 190)

179

Since then, for more than three hundred years, we have supported the race

of Legaspi most bountifully; we have allowed them to live lavishly and

grow fat, even if we ourselves suffered deprivation and hunger. We have

expended our wealth, blood and even our lives in defending them, even

against our fellow countrymen who refused to submit to their rule; and we

have fought the Chinese and the Dutch who tried to take Katagalugan

from them. (Richardson 191)

Bonifacio remarks that it was actually the Philippines who helped Spain “better themselves” and it is through the Philippines’ sacrifice that Spain was able to move toward modernity and live the prosperous, peaceful life that had characterized the pre-

Hispanic Philippines. Along the same lines of Martí, Bonifacio also makes a less explicit commentary on the dangers of importing foreign ideas and government to the country – the pre-Hispanic success of the Philippines, he implies, were built around the knowledge of the local realities and of one’s own history.

As a result, he laments, the Tagalogs have sacrificed themselves in service to this foreign power, “even against our fellow countrymen who refused to submit to their rule”

(Richardson 191). It is likely that Bonifacio was not only referring to individuals or small rebellious groups that protested the Spanish rule over the past several centuries, but also to the Muslim population (Moros) living in the southern islands of the Philippines

(namely, in Mindanao). Despite a series of wars from the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries, the Spanish were never able to fully incorporate those islands, and the Moros maintained their independence. Bonifacio’s reference to them as “our fellow

180 countrymen,” however, suggests his vision of the new citizen. Much like Martí’s, citizenship is not aligned along religious or (mostly) racial lines. Rather, it comes from the sincere love of country (although for Bonifacio, he seems to imply a stronger sense of jus soli than Martí does). Echoing Chatterjee, the bonds of solidarity that already exist in

Martí’s Cuba assert racial harmony; Bonifacio likewise asserts that religion should not be a divider, rather that refusing to submit to foreign imperial rule is the bond that unites them. In contrast to Martí, however, Bonifacio does not seem to show flexibility with

Spaniards; he does not mention any Spaniards who might unite themselves to the Filipino cause and therefore does not address this possibility; rather, Bonifacio lumps them together as the Filipinos’ “other.”

In the next section of the essay, Bonifacio chastises Spain, demanding to know what benefits Spain had bestowed upon the Philippines. Rather than fulfilling their side of the contract, he writes,

Wala kung di pawang kataksilan ang ganti sa ating mga pagpapala at mga

pagtupad sa kanilang ipinangakung tayo'y lalung guiguisingin sa

kagalingan ay bagkus tayong binulag, inihawa tayo sa kanilang hamak na

asal, pinilit na sinira ang mahal at magandang ugali ng ating Bayan;

Yminulat tayo sa isang maling pagsampalataya at isinadlak sa lubak ng

kasamaan ang kapurihan ng ating Bayan; at kung tayo 'y mangahas

humingi ng kahit gabahid na lingap, ang naguiguing kasagutan ay ang

tayo'y itapon at ilayo sa piling ng ating minamahal na anak, asawa at

matandang magulang. (Bonifacio 190)

181

We see nothing but treachery as a reward for our favors. Instead of

keeping their promise to awaken us to a better life, they have only blinded

us, contaminated us with their debased customs and forcibly destroyed the

good customs of our land. They have instilled in us a false faith, and have

cast the honor of our Country into a mire of corruption. And if we dare

beg for scraps of compassion, they respond by banishing us, by sending us

far away from our beloved children, spouses, and aged parents.

(Richardson 191-192)

In this passage, Bonifacio clearly responds to colonialism’s oppression and cultural destruction. In contrast to the progressive characterization of the Philippines, portrays

Spain as a barbaric, destructive, degenerative force. He inverts the “civilizing mission” of the Spaniards into an evangelical corruption in which “debased customs” were introduced and, much like in the Garden of Eden, the Spaniards act as the serpent whose promise for knowledge turns out to be paradise’s destruction. This destruction, for Bonifacio, comes in the form of dis-unity – by casting the country into “a mire of corruption,” it is impossible to trust those in power. Rather than seeing and receiving new, progressive knowledge, the people are blinded and kept in ignorance. Upon begging to “scraps of compassion,” the Tagalogs are further divided and sent away from their community – in this passage, it is likely that Rizal’s exile is still fresh on the minds of the Katipuneros.

After elaborating on more oppressions carried out by the Spaniards, Bonifacio then demands, “Ano ang nararapat nating gawin?” (“What, then, is to be done?”;

182

Bonifacio 190, trans. Richardson, 192). Along the same lines as Martí, reason leads him to chaos and revolution:

Ang araw ng katuiran na sumisikat sa Silanganan, ay malinaw na itinuturo

sa ating mga matang malaong nabulagan ang landas na dapat nating

tunguhin, ang liwanag niya'y tanaw sa ating mga mata, ang kukong nag

akma ng kamatayang alay sa ating ng mga ganid na asal. Ytinuturo ng

katuiran, na wala tayong iba pang maaantay kundi lalut lalung kahirapan,

lalut lalung kataksilan, lalut lalung kaalipustaan at lalut lalung kaalipinan.

Ytinuturo ng katuiran, na huag nating sayangin ang panahon sa pagasa sa

ipinangakong kaguinhawahan na hindi darating at hindi mangyayari.

Ytinuturo ng katuiran ang tayo'y umasa sa ating sarili at huag antain sa iba

ang ating kabuhayan. Ytinuturo ng katuiran ang tayo'y mag kaisang loob

magka isang isip at akala at ng tayo'y magkalakas na maihanap ang

naghaharing kasamaan sa ating Bayan. (Bonifacio 190)

The sun of reason that shines in the East clearly shows, to our eyes long

blind, the way that must be taken; its light enables us to see the claws of

those inhuman creatures who bring us death. Reason shows that we cannot

expect anything but more and more suffering, more and more treachery,

more and more insults, more and more enslavement. Reason tells us not to

waste our time waiting for the promised prosperity that will never arrive.

Reason tells us that we must rely upon ourselves alone and never entrust

183

our livelihood to anybody else. Reason tells us to be one in sentiment, one

in thought, and one in purpose so that we may have the strength in

confronting the evil that reigns in our Country. (Richardson 192)

Like Martí, it is reason (“katuiran”) that leads Bonifacio to conclude that revolution is the answer. Here, thinking back to Chatterjee, Bonifacio uses the liberal ideas on liberty, freedom, and equality propagated by the Ilustrados – notably Rizal – but fashions them into a useful tool that allows him to understand and function within both the elite and peasant contexts. Notably, the “sun of reason” shines in the East – in the Philippines – rather than in the West. As such, this guiding light comes from the natural elements of the country, showing them the way that they should be looking to the East, rather than to the

West, or following foreign models. By looking to their own roots, they are able to see and reacquire the knowledge that made them great prior to the arrival and corruption of the colonizer.

In addition, I would like to point out a specific phrase in the passage – in listing the reasons for revolution, the translation uses the terms “Reason shows us…” or

“Reason tells us…” for “Ytinuturo ng katuiran.” However, while the translation does an excellent job capturing the essence of the phrase, it is worth taking a moment to analyze this term linguistically. The root verb “turo” is loaded with the two main meanings: the first means “to point out” or “to show”; the second is “to teach.” When looking at the verb “Ytinuturo” (modern spelling: “Itinuturo”), the “Y” prefix denotes an object focus – to teach someone or to show someone. Here, the focus is on the object rather than the agent. In this case, the people are the focus of this phrase, not Reason as the agent which

184 teaches. The infix “tinuturo” expresses an incomplete or imperfect aspect, suggesting an action – showing or teaching – that has been started, but has not yet been completed. So, the phrase “Ytinuturo ng katuiran” not only suggests the idea of reason “teaching,” complementing Bonifacio’s theme of knowledge in “What the Tagalogs Should Know,” but it also conveys the idea that this experience is still continuing. It also emphasizes the idea that the people are the focus of this knowledge, not the ideals.

Moreover, in contrast to the beginning of the essay, in which Bonifacio outlines the decline of the country with the arrival of the Spaniards, we see here Bonifacio’s vision for the reversal: in his list of Reason’s teachings, he begins with the colonial suffering and oppression, tells the country to stop waiting for the Spanish to fulfill their promises, insists on self-reliance – in other words, knowledge that comes from the country’s natural elements –, and finally proclaims that, now that everyone is aware of the realities of their history, the country should be united into one community once again.

In the penultimate paragraph, Bonifacio declares that it is time to put those teachings to use, positing the Tagalogs’ “reason” as a counter to Spain’s “reason”:

Panahun na ngayong dapat na lumitaw ang liwanag ng katotohanan;

panahon ng dapat nating ipakilala na tayo’y may sariling pagdaramdam,

may puri, may hiya at pagdadamayan. Ngayon panahun ng dapat simulan

ang pagsisiwalat ng mga mahal at dakilang aral na magwawasak sa

masinsing tabing na bumubulag sa ating kaisipan; panahun na ngayong

dapat makilala ng mga tagalog ang pinagbuhatan ng kanilang mga

kahirapan. Araw na itong dapat kilalanin na sa bawat isang hakbang natin

185

ay tumutuntong tayo at nabibingit sa malalim na hukay ng kamatayan na

sa ati’y inuumang ng mga kaaway. (Bonifacio 191)

Now is the time that the light of truth must shine; now is the time for us to

make it known that we have our own feelings, have honor, have self-

respect and solidarity. Now is the time to start spreading the noble and

great teachings that will rend asunder the thick curtain that obfuscates our

minds; now is the time for the Tagalogs to know the sources of their

misfortunes. This day we must realize that every step we take is taking us

closer to the brink of the abyss of death that our enemies have dug to

ensnare us. (Richardson 192)

In stark contrast to Martí, Bonifacio does not include the Spanish as part of the new community; rather, they are the more violently situated as the Tagalogs’ “Other.”

Bonifacio calls upon a nationalist consciousness by claiming agency (“now is the time for us to make it known that we have our own feelings, have honor, have self-respect and solidarity”), propagating knowledge (“Now is the time to start spreading the noble and great teachings that will rend asunder the thick curtain that obfuscates our minds”), and use that knowledge as the first step toward reclaiming that agency (“now is the time for the Tagalogs to know the sources of their misfortunes”) (Richardson 192). Bonifacio emphasizes the oppression that permeates everyday life, and calls on the people to recognize and revolt against this quotidian coloniality.

To reiterate Chatterjee, the principle of community “enables us to read from the actions of a rebellious peasantry at the moment of insurgency the total constitutive 186 character of a peasant consciousness, to relate those actions to the forms of everyday social existence of the peasantry” (Chatterjee 13). In both Martí’s “Manifiesto de

Montecrist” and Bonifacio’s “Ang Dapat Mabatid ng mga Tagalog,” we can see how they begin to formulate their own notions of a national community in their calls to action, how they bring this community together under a more unified consciousness, and how these manifestos articulate a violent response to everyday coloniality. Through community and reason, both Martí and Bonifacio issue calls for solidarity by outlining the injustices of the Spanish colonizers. The divisions imposed on each of their countries – be it racial, religious, or otherwise – are tactics used by the empire to exploit the people for their own benefit and maintain power; community and solidarity, in both authors’ works, are the tools to fight this power. Moreover, Martí and Bonifacio manipulate “reason” in different ways – Martí, for instance, characterizes revolt as a reasoned event rather than a violent one, without malice for the Spaniard; whereas Bonifacio uses reason as the basis for revolution – but both also characterize revolution and revolt as the next logical step to achieve independence.

Finally, through community and reason, the two delineate their visions of nation and the new national citizen. Interestingly, perhaps considering the more “homogenous” racial constitution of the country, Bonifacio’s notion of both nation and citizen stems primarily from a jus soli perspective (aside from the fact that he appears to make no exception for a Spaniard loyal to the Philippines), including even those “fellow countrymen” against whom the Tagalogs have fought as allies and citizens in this new nation. Martí, however, responds to the diverse racial realities of his country and does not

187 consider race nor place of origin; rather, his approach tends toward one of

“naturalization” – specifically, by providing support to the Cuban patria or cause. In fact, he openly criticizes those Cubans who are “halfhearted” or “sedentary” in the fight for liberation from Spain. The nation for Martí, then, is composed of those who share the same culture and history, consonant with his belief for the unity of Latin America as a whole. In this chapter, we have seen how two revolutionaries responded to coloniality – in the next chapter, the new challenge will be neocolonialism.

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Chapter 4: Islands of Modernity:

The Responses of Apolinario Mabini and José de Diego

No imperial designs lurk in the American mind.

They are alien to American sentiment, thought, and purpose.

Our priceless principles undergo no change under a tropical sun. They go with the flag.

- U.S. President William McKinley, Speech at Dinner of the Home Market Club,

Boston, February 16, 1899.

When the Cuban War of Independence began in 1895, New York Journal editor

William Randolph Hearst saw the events as a way to place himself and his paper in the limelight. As the story goes, illustrator Frederick Remington had been sent to Cuba to cover the insurrection, but cabled to Hearst that there was no war to cover. Hearst allegedly replied with, “You furnish the pictures. I'll furnish the war!” On February 15,

1898, an explosion sank the battleship the U.S.S. Maine in the harbor of Havana, Cuba.

Although further investigation concluded that the explosion was an accident, the United

States used the incident – sparked by Hearst’s yellow journalism – as reason to intervene in Cuba’s ongoing War of Independence against Spain. The United States issued an ultimatum to the Spanish government to leave Cuba, but Spain refused. By April 25, a formal declaration of war was recognized between Spain and the United States. The

“splendid little war,” as noted by U.S. Secretary of State John Hay, officially ended on 189

August 12, 1898 and according to the Treaty of Paris, signed on December 10, 1898, the

United States was ceded Puerto Rico and Guam, paid $20 million to Spain for the

Philippines, and Cuba became “independent.”41

Continued resistance efforts in the Pacific led to the Philippine-American War following the defeat of Spain. General Emilio Aguinaldo had proclaimed a dictatorial government that past May, declared Philippine Independence on June 12, 1898, then changed the dictatorship to a revolutionary government later that month. His chief adviser, Apolinario Mabini, drafted his decrees and edited the Malolos Constitution, which outlined the framework of the revolutionary government – the first constitution implemented in Asia. After signing the Treaty of Paris, in response to the events in the

Philippines, U.S. President William McKinley issued the Benevolent Assimilation

Proclamation on December 21, which reads in part:

Finally, it should be the earnest wish and paramount aim of the military

administration to win the confidence, respect, and affection of the

inhabitants of the Philippines by assuring them in every possible way that

full measure of individual rights and liberties which is the heritage of free

peoples, and by proving to them that the mission of the United States is

41 In 1901, the Platt Amendment permitted the United States to lease or buy lands for the purpose of establishing naval bases, prohibits Cuba from making a treaty that gave another nation power over its affairs or going into debt, and allows the United States to intervene in Cuban affairs for “the preservation of Cuban independence, the maintenance of a government adequate for the protection of life, property, and individual liberty” (http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=55&page=transcript). 190

one of benevolent assimilation substituting the mild sway of justice and

right for arbitrary rule.42

In the Caribbean, on April 12, 1900, the United States passed the Foraker Act which established a civilian government in Puerto Rico under U.S. control. While this

Act provided for a governor, an executive council appointed by the President, an elected

House of Representatives with 35 members, and a judicial system with a Supreme Court on the island, among other things it also did not allow for a vote in Washington – only a

Resident Commissioner. Additionally, all federal laws were to be in effect on the island.

Under the newly appointed governor of Puerto Rico Charles H. Allen, McKinley’s

Executive Cabinet included five Puerto Ricans – José Celso Barbosa, Rosendo Matienzo

Cintrón, Manuel Camuñas, Andrés Crosas, and José de Diego – and six U.S. members.

The policies passed by the United States regarding both island nations continued to reflect and produce discourses on colonial difference as ways to justify their treatment of the newly incorporated peoples, as well as carry out their imperial objectives. While in both of these island nations, there were those who advocated for the incorporation of their islands into the United States – such as Filipino Pedro Paterno and Puerto Rican José

Celso Barbosa – not everyone was happy with this arrangement. In Puerto Rico and in the

Philippines, this new foreign power sparked debates on whether or not to compromise with the United States by accepting autonomy and remaining an American territory, or

42 Between 1898-1935, people born in the Philippines were considered U.S. nationals, but were never accorded citizenship. In 1934, the Tydings-McDuffie Act, also known as the Philippine Independence Act, was approved, which provided for Philippine self-government and independence after a ten-year “transitional period” and permitted the maintenance of U.S. Naval bases for two years after. So, although the Philippines did not become officially independent until 1946, their national status was rescinded in 1935 as a result of this Act. 191 whether to continue with resistance efforts to gain the independence for which they had originally fought Spain.

Thus, it is imperative to consider the knowledges produced from the subaltern side of the colonial difference. These knowledges go beyond the imperialist and elite nationalist discourses and take into consideration the subaltern’s agency through intellectual leadership and political strategies in constructing, negotiating, and responding to modernity, neocolonialism, and nation. José de Diego, for example, later resigned from the Executive Cabinet in order to pursue the island’s right to self-government. In order to fight the colonial government established by the Foraker Act, he co-founded the Unionist

Party along with Luis Muñoz Rivera and a few others in 1904. Likewise, in the

Philippines, Apolinario Mabini was appointed prime minister of the newly formed

Philippine Republic, and later led the first cabinet. However, with the continued war in the Philippines, Mabini found himself in the center of negotiations with the United States.

Upon realizing that the Americans were not negotiating bona fide for the Philippines’ autonomy, he renounced the Americans, resigned from the government, and supported war in May of 1899.

In this closing chapter, I focus on the writings of Filipino revolutionary and lawyer Apolinario Mabini, known as the “Brains of the Revolution” for his role as a close adviser of the General turned President Emilio Aguinaldo, and the writings of José de

Diego, known as the “Father of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement,” who was also a lawyer, journalist, and poet, known for his eloquent oratory and patriotic speech.

The theme of Puerto Rican Independence may bring to mind the Puerto Rican intellectual

192 and independence advocate Eugenio María de Hostos – and rightly so – since, like

Betances and Martí, he promoted the idea of the Antillean Confederation

(“Confederación Antillana”). However, while his writings were plentiful during the fight for independence from Spain, Hostos passed away in 1903. Therefore, in an attempt to cover the voices of those fighting against the United States’ empire in the early twentieth century, I choose here to focus on the younger José de Diego, who spent a significant portion of his political career advocating for Puerto Rico’s independence from the United

States.

At the crossroads of the Spanish empire’s collapse and the United States’ rise as an imperial power, Mabini and De Diego – much like Julián del Casal and Isabelo de los

Reyes – retake up the question of a neocolonial consciousness. While Cuba managed to gain its independence from Spain, Puerto Rico and the Philippines became territories of the United States, and questions of nationalism, anti-imperialism, and modernity reemerge once again in this neocolonial context. Following the footsteps of José Rizal and Ramón Emeterio de Betances, who responded primarily to the nation-state in their works, and of José Martí and Andrés Bonifacio, who responded to everyday colonialism through violence, Mabini and De Diego respond to the emerging relationship with the

United States empire, both through their involvement with the United States government and through their advocacy for continued resistance for independence.

For both Mabini and De Diego, then, in line with Partha Chatterjee, the nation has been defined by its break from coloniality – by separating themselves from Spain, the

Philippines and Puerto Rico are now nations that, as delineated by Martí and Bonifacio in

193 the previous chapter, are comprised of people who share the same culture and history.

However, at this juncture, the new imperial power jeopardizes this break from coloniality by threatening to impose its own power structure; the task for Mabini and De Diego, then, is to continue the work of the independentists and continue defining themselves against colonialism and imperialism.43

In this chapter, I begin chronologically with a collection of Apolinario Mabini’s responses. I say “response” rather than “essay” or “article” to emphasize the action- reaction nature of his replies – not only is he responding to the neocolonial conditions of the local Philippine government, but he also counters global discourses regarding the

Philippine situation. Among the writings analyzed, I focus on his responses directed specifically to discourses proffered by the United States, such as “Consideraciones al

Congreso Norte-Americano” and “El Mensaje del Presidente McKinley,” among others.

Finally, having begun with the aesthetics of Julián del Casal’s work at the beginning of this project, I end with the work of José de Diego to demonstrate how he takes up the modernista art as a tool for unity and progress – De Diego writes:

La poesía no es cosa de fútil adorno y vano recreo: ninguna ciencia,

ninguna arte podrán desligarse de la universal cooperación al bien

humano, como nada en el orden físico puede ausentarse del trabajo

universal de la naturaleza. La producción y la contemplación de la belleza

43 While I do not intend to complicate the terms “colonialism” and “imperialism” in this work, I do wish to clarify my usage of these terms. The two are similar in their act of extending their power and authority over other regions and peoples; however, I use “colonialism” to refer to the control and influence of a nation over a dependent people or territory, often focused on development or settlement for economic intentions. Whereas, “imperialism,” which also controls and influences peoples and territories, refers more to the policy of acquiring said territories and countries, operating as a state policy. 194

en sí mismas constituyen un bien y la poesía cumple siempre un propósito

estético; mas la poesía, como toda obra humana, debe acudir

preferentemente al bien necesario, sentido y clamoroso en cada momento

y en cada lugar del mundo. (19-20)

Poetry is not an object of trivial decoration and pointless escape: no

science, no art could separate itself from the universal cooperation of

human good, like nothing in the physical order could absent itself from the

universal work of nature. The production and contemplation of beauty in

themselves constitute a good, and poetry always fulfils an aesthetic

purpose; but poetry, like all human work, should preferentially turn to the

necessary, heartfelt, and resounding good in every moment and in every

place in the world. (Translations mine, unless otherwise stated)

For De Diego, I argue, not only does the modernista aesthetic contribute to the creation of a collective soul of the nation through art, but it also allows him to unite himself with a

Hispano-American legacy – particularly, Darío and Martí – that stands strong against both Spanish colonialism and the rising power of the United States.

195 countries autonomy. However, this compromise begins to break down as they realize that the United States, like the former colonial masters, continues the legacy of coloniality by defining the Philippines and Puerto Rico through the colonial difference, and that the

United States has no intention of granting the islands autonomy. In Mabini’s and De

Diego’s works, their continued anti-colonial viewpoint morphs into an anti-imperial discourse that asserts their agency – as well as that of their respective countries – and responds to the new imperial projects through a critique of the United States’ continued coloniality. In this critique, they express the struggle for political engagement and justice, active participation in the production of knowledge and power, and negotiations of the meaning of citizenship through a refutation of coloniality.

Apolinario Mabini, “The Sublime Paralytic”

Apolinario Mabini, like Andrés Bonifacio, belonged to the peasant class, but had risen through the ranks to join the ilustrados. His mother was a vendor in the local market, and his father was an uneducated peasant who managed to obtain a small plot of land to take care of his family. Mabini, however, demonstrated uncommon intelligence as a child and transferred to a local school, where he took odd jobs to support his education, board, and lodging. He eventually received his law degree in 1894, but not without obstacles – his college studies were regularly interrupted due to a chronic lack of funding, so he regularly tutored children in order to make money for his education. After graduating, during his time as a copyist, he developed a strong friendship with

Numeriano Adriano, a notary public who became part of La Liga Filipina and the eventual president of the Cuerpo de Compromisarios, one of the outshoots of the defunct

196

Liga. Under Adriano’s influence, Mabini began to get a sense of the nationalistic sentiments that were developing among the ilustrados; these events would influence

Mabini’s writings and beliefs for the rest of his life.

It was also during this time, around 1896, when Mabini contracted polio, which deprived him of the use of both of his legs. However, despite his physical limitations,

General Emilio Aguinaldo summoned Mabini to serve as his adviser, recognizing

Mabini’s intellect and devotion to the revolution. However, quite soon after, cracks began to develop in the revolutionary movement, particularly as the revolution transitioned from a revolt against Spain to one toward the new colonial power, the United States. Similar to the divisions between the elite class and the peasantry in colonial India, as outlined by

Partha Chatterjee, among other South Asian subalternists, the revolutionary movement was comprised of two factions: the popular uprising of the masses, led by Andrés

Bonifacio and the educated ilustrado class, who could not bring themselves to trust the peasantry. Eventually, Aguinaldo would side with the ilustrados and abandon the original aims of the revolt. His lieutenants would execute Bonifacio under the banner of treason, and many believe that Aguinaldo was also behind the assassination of the revolution’s most celebrated general, Antonio Luna. Luna, despite his faults, was an ilustrado who sided with the people. He believed that education was the key to freedom, but like

Mabini, he did not agree with many of the ilustrados that the revolution was a means to protect their own interests; rather, it should be for the ultimate benefit of society.

According to Mabini, education was a way for the people to become self-reliant in order to strengthen them against foreign domination. By being knowledgeable and

197 literate, the people can see to it that those in power can be prevented from abusing those powers and oppressing the people. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, because of his opposition to U.S. policy, Mabini resigned from office, but continued to agitate for independence, even after being captured and arrested by the Americans in

1899. In 1901, he was deported to Guam, refusing to swear loyalty to the United States and making clear his work for the independence of the Philippines. Finally, in 1903,

Mabini agreed to take the oath of allegiance to the United States and was allowed to return to his beloved homeland, but much to the dismay of U.S. officials, he resumed his work of agitating for independence upon his return. Mabini died of cholera in Manila in

May of the same year, having spent his life serving as a mediator between the people and the decisions of the first leaders of the Philippines.

Many of Mabini’s articles were so controversial and critical of American policy that even newspapers in Manila decided not to publish them. Mabini demonstrated inconsistencies between the words and actions of American leaders, uncompromisingly raising doubts about the American government’s integrity and openly suggesting that its policy was simply imperialism. Before we delve into his work, allow me to again reiterate the relationship between race, labor, and the coloniality of power in consideration of Mabini’s critiques. Aníbal Quijano in his essay “Coloniality of Power,

Eurocentrism, and Social Classification” states that one of the fundamental axes of the colonial/modern model of power is the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, which expresses the basic experience of colonial domination

(181). The second axis of this model was based around labor. Race, according to Quijano,

198 was “a supposedly different biological structure that placed some in a natural situation of inferiority to the others,” whereas the second process “involved the constitution of a new structure of control of labor and its resources and products” (182). This system of power, combined with global capitalism, eventually grew until ultimately, he notes, “each form of labor control was associated with a particular race” (Quijano 185). Capital, Quijano points out, “was the axis around which all remaining forms of labor control, resources, and products were articulated” (187). As a result, since Europe was at the center of global capitalism, it was able to impose its colonial dominance all over the planet and repressed colonized forms of knowledge, production, meaning, and expression – that is, the colonization of culture, which formulated an ethnocentric viewpoint. This relationship between ethnocentrism and the world’s racial classification gave rise to the idea that

Europeans were the bearers, creators, and protagonists of rationality and modernity.

Later, the United States – as an extension of hegemonic Europe – came to inherit and wield this power characterized by coloniality.

Bearing these ideas in mind, let us turn to Mabini’s articles. In an essay titled “Lo que dice y quiere un imperialista” (“What an imperialist says and wants”), Apolinario

Mabini responds to an article published in the New York paper Independent on March

23, 1899. The article, reproduced in the essay by Mabini, discusses one of the “most interesting questions” that arise regarding the Philippines and its inhabitants:

¿Pueden los naturales ser americanizados? En otras palabras, ¿puede una

raza de malayos, hasta ahora, despóticamente gobernada por españoles,

estar en corto espacio de tiempo tan adiestrada y elevada a la ciudadanía

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para que pueda acomodarse a nuestra forma de gobierno? La contestación

no es dudosa: No pueden. (Mabini 7)

Can the natives be Americanized? In other words, can a race of Malays,

up until now, despotically governed by the Spanish, in such short time be

trained and elevated to citizenship so that they can accommodate our form

of government? The answer is undoubtedly: They cannot.44

The article then continues to outline how the provinces should be governed – by an

American, assisted by the local heads of the districts – “pero el gobierno principal debe formarse de americanos y no de naturales” (“but the chief government should be formed by Americans and not by natives”; 7). Afterward, the author points out that the

Philippines, being a tropical country, does not allow Americans to work their own land.

The author writes outlines the ideal division of labor:

Como capataces para inspeccionar y dirigir a los naturales, los americanos

pueden ser útiles para trabajos lucrativos. Como artesanos y mecánicos no

podrían competir con los filipinos y chinos. Los filipinos son buenos

obreros de barco, fundidores, ebanisteros, plateros y ayudantes de

máquinas: para tales empleos, trabajan por veinticinco o cincuenta

céntimos diarios y bajo la inspección de personas inteligentes pueden estar

a la altura de los ordinarios manufactureros. (Mabini 8)

44 Translations mine, unless otherwise noted 200

As overseers to inspect and manage the natives, Americans can be useful

for lucrative work. As artisans and mechanics, they would not be able to

compete with the Filipinos and Chinese. The Filipinos are good boat

workers, foundry workers, woodworkers, silversmiths and machine

assistants: for such posts, they work for twenty-five or fifty cents per day

and under the inspection of intelligent people, they can be at the level of

standard manufacturers.

In fact, the article states, “A los hijos de europeos o americanos nacidos en Filipinas hay que enviarlos a Europa o América antes de la pubertad; de lo contrario, se desengendrarían” (“Children of Europeans or Americans born in the Philippines should be sent to Europe or America before puberty; if not, they would undo themselves”;

Mabini 8). The author ends the article by stating that “Todo lo que podemos hacer es gobernarles justamente, para ayudarles a levantarse y llegar a un estado político y mental más elevado” (“All that we can do is govern [the Filipinos] fairly in order to help them pick themselves up and arrive at a higher political and mental state”; Mabini 8).

The recognition and critique of these axes of race and labor that constitute modernity/coloniality as outlined by Quijano are seen as early as in Mabini’s essay. In his response, published in June of 1899, Mabini first states his reasons for republishing this article: “Lo trasladamos íntegro para todos aquellos que se prometen de la dominación extranjera los más grandes beneficios, que cifran en ella el engrandecimiento y felicidad de Filipinas” (“We copy it entirely for all of those that are promised the greatest benefits by the foreign rule, that in [the United States’ rule] they encapsulate the Philippines’

201 exaltation and happiness”; 8). First, he questions the idea that Filipinos are “better suited” for the physical labor whereas Americans are suited for “leadership roles”:

¡Oh, qué porvenir tan halagueño ofrece un pueblo de obreros de barcos,

fundidores, ebanisteros, plateros y ayudantes de máquina! Dirían, tal vez,

algunos hombres de letras, propietarios y comerciantes que, por cuanto no

pertenecen a la clase jornalera, serían bien considerados en todas partes y

no sentirían sobre sus espaldas el látigo de los capataces americanos.

(Mabini 9)

Oh, what a promising future a nation of boat workers, foundry workers,

woodworkers, silversmiths and machine assistants offers! Some lettered

men, landowners, and businessmen would say, perhaps, given that they do

not belong to the working class, they would be well-respected everywhere

and would not feel on their backs the whip of the American overseers.

Here, he points out the ideology of modernity/coloniality that establishes the hierarchy that “legitimates” the relations of domination and oppression. Mabini criticizes this relationship by comparing the division of labor to slavery. Although the Americans purport to be “modernized,” benevolently carrying out a “civilizing project” in their new colony, Mabini’s comparison questions this characterization by suggesting that they are simply carrying out a new kind of slavery. By doing so, Mabini equates the United States with domination and oppression rather than with helping the Filipinos to “arrive at a higher political and mental state.” Furthermore, the question in the article – “Can the

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Filipinos be Americanized?” implies that, for the original author, “Americanization” is synonymous with progress and modernization, suggesting the author’s thoughts on what the Filipinos desire. For Mabini, neither the universality of this reasoning nor the association between Americanization/Progress/Modernity are valid claims. By reproducing the article in his essay, and then juxtaposing the promises of “la dominación extranjera los más grandes beneficios,” he dismantles the reasoning of the writer precisely by spotlighting the fallacious nature and duplicity of his logic.

By calling attention to the United States’ racialization of the Filipinos, the characterization of the Filipinos in the labor hierarchy, and their presumption of the

Filipinos’ incapacity for higher level thought, Mabini accomplishes several goals: first, as he states, he lets both the Filipinos and the Americans know the discrepancy between the

Americans words and their actions; second, he refutes the Americans’ justification for imperialism as a noble enterprise; and third, he reminds the Filipino people that the ultimate goal – be it against the Spaniards or against the new imperial power of the

Americans – was independence. He first questions the Americans’ intentions:

Si son tales, si pertenecen a la clase escogida de la sociedad filipina, ¿por

qué no se consideran con fuerzas para luchar por la independencia de su

país? Si tienen tan pobre idea de sí mismos, si se consideran tan nulos, que

no formen atmósfera en el sentido de que los demás filipinos son como

ellos, porque entre tantos millones puede que haya quienes digan al mundo

civilizado: “Reconoced la independencia de Filipinas, porque los filipinos

saben luchar por ella.” (Mabini 9)

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If [the Filipinos] are as such, if they belong to the chosen class of Filipino

society, why are they not considered strong enough to fight for the

independence of their country? If they have such a poor idea of

themselves, if they consider themselves so useless, they should not create

an atmosphere such that the rest of the Filipinos [be] like them, because

among so many millions, it may be that there are those who tell the

civilized world: “Recognize the independence of the Philippines, because

the Filipinos know how to fight for her.”

For Mabini, the Americans’ attempt to foster the Filipinos’ “poor idea of themselves” disguises the United States’ aim to prevent the few who would rise up and renounce this characterization, thus gaining power from the masses. When the article establishes the

Filipinos as racially inferior, he argues, it intends to maintain dominance over the people rather than assure them of their human rights. However, Mabini reminds the Filipinos that they are not so – rather, he insinuates that the Americans fear the islanders’ ability to fight for what they desire – independence. Aside from demonstrating to the new imperial power that, by not working toward independence, they are completely discounting the

Philippines’ actual wishes, Mabini also aims to reignite the Filipinos’ collective consciousness. By reminding the people of the ultimate goals of the revolution, the

Filipinos would continue to demand independence, and the desire for independence would become universal, once again uniting the people.

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On reading Mabini’s works, it is clear that he is uncompromising when it comes to the issue of independence. Ultimately, for Mabini, propagating and keeping in mind the original aims of the revolution become the vehicle that would unite the people and would maintain the dignity of the revolution. For him, it is imperative that the aims of the revolution morph into a fight for personal interest. He addresses the goals of the revolution in his article “¿Cuál es la verdadera misión de la revolución filipina?” which aims to answer that question for Filipino readers as well as foreign ones. Before he answers the titular question, however, he proposes to first outline the answer to a pre- question: “¿la lucha entablada en Filipinas tiene los caracteres de una revolución o de una guerra internacional?” (“Does the fight that started in the Philippines have the character of a revolution or of an international war?”; Mabini 53).

In the development of this pre-answer, Mabini outlines how the revolution acquired the characteristics of a civil war “porque tiende al destronamiento de un poder despótico y arbitrario o injustamente constituído” (“because it tended toward the dethroning of a despotic and arbitrary or unfairly constituted power”; 53). Upon shaking off the yoke of the tyrant (“el yugo del tirano”) and casting them out of the Philippines, the people achieve independence, si no por el derecho internacional, al menos por la fuerza de los hechos consumados” (“if not by international right, at least by the force of the accomplished feats”; Mabini 54). So, according to Mabini, if the war is taken up yet again, it is because the tyrant has been restored, changing the revolution’s character into a true international war. Following this passage, he asserts that the current war between the

Filipinos and the United States continue to be a revolution rather than an international

205 war, since they still had not been able to cast out neither the Spanish nor the Americans that followed. Furthermore, he writes, the Treaty of Paris legitimated the trespassing of the United States into the Philippines; Spain did not fight to take back its old empire.

Mabini writes,

Tomamos aquí por norma de legitimidad, no la justicia absoluta, sino esa

relativa establecida por el tácito consenso de las grandes potencias,

bautizado para gloria y engrandecimiento de éstas y en perjuicio y ruina de

las débiles con el pomposo nombre de derecho internacional, esa justicia

relativa que suele santificar los más inicuos despojos y las usurpaciones

más estupendas, cuya sanción reguladora es la razón de la fuerza y no la

fuerza de la razón. (Mabini 54)

We take here as the norm of legitimacy, not absolute justice, but rather

that relation established by the tacit consensus of the great powers,

baptized for glory and aggrandizement of these and in prejudice and ruin

of the weak with the pompous name of international right, this relative

justice that is accustomed to sanctify the most cruel spoils of war and the

most stupendous usurpations, whose regulating sanction is the reason of

force and not the force of reason.

In the construction of his argument, Mabini first and foremost takes notice of colonialism. Turning back to Subaltern Studies, Ileana Rodríguez states that history from below “must be able to register all the diverse and continually changing strategies and to

206 master epistemologies of colonialism in the forms of positivism, modernism, racism, as well as to explain… the difference between people and the people” (6). In developing a response that addresses a multiplicity of audiences – the Filipinos, the United States, and the international community – Mabini intends to confront and dismantle the coloniality that permeates politics, culture, and knowledge precisely by registering and mastering said epistemologies in order to sketch out who, exactly, are the protagonists of his nation.

Returning to Quijano – upon discussing Europe’s role at the center of global capitalism, he declares that it not only had control of the world market, but was also able to impose its dominance over the entire planet, incorporating its countries into its world- system and model of power (188). This incorporation of such diverse histories meant a cultural and intellectual configuration in which “all of the experiences, histories, resources, and cultural products ended up in one global cultural order revolving around

European or Western hegemony” (Quijano 189). During this process, Quijano writes, the colonizers exercised three operations that brought about this configuration: first,

they expropriated those cultural discoveries of the colonized peoples that

were most apt for developing capitalism to the profit of the European

center. Second, they repressed as much as possible the colonized forms of

knowledge production, models of the production of meaning, symbolic

universe, and models of expression and of objectification and subjectivity.

[…] Third […] the Europeans forced the colonized to learn the dominant

culture in any way that would be useful to the reproduction of domination,

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whether in the field of technology and material activity or of subjectivity,

especially Judeo-Christian religiosity. (Quijano 189)

Are these not the same critiques appearing in Mabini’s work? While Mabini does not explicitly use the term “coloniality” or “world-system,” it is clear that this is precisely what he condemns about the United States and the European world power. What is more interesting is that – recalling Rodríguez’s point about subaltern studies – he uses the epistemologies of colonialism to question the legitimacy that these very epistemologies aim to justify. It is not justice, he testifies, that legitimizes American imperialism, rather pure Western hegemony that continues to impose the “universal” knowledge of its inherent superiority. Mabini’s usage of phrases that call to mind the Judeo-Christian tradition – “baptized,” “glory,” and “sanctify” – juxtaposed with words of power and domination – “aggrandizement,” “prejudice,” “ruin,” “pompous,” “usurpations” – further imply that the supposedly noble and just ideals with which the United States purports to associate itself are actually used as tools for domination. Finally, by stating that the

“justice” that “sanctifies” these atrocities is regulated by the “reason of force and not the force of reason,” Mabini refutes the so-called reason-based legitimacy of the imperial powers.

Upon further deliberation, Mabini finally outlines his answer to the titular question. The true aim of the revolution, he writes, is

mantener viva y fulgurante, en la Oceanía, la antorcha de la libertad y

civilización, para que, iluminando la noche tenebrosa en que hoy yace

envilecida y degradada la raza malaya, muestre a ésta el camino de su

208 emancipación social. ¿Que nos hemos vuelto locos y hemos dicho una necedad? ¿Que sostenemos una utopía, una quimera engendrada por nuestra imaginación enferma? No y mil veces no. Preguntad a Inglaterra,

Rusia, Francia, Alemania, Holanda, Portugal y otras potencias ávidas de colonizar, y veréis cómo tiemblan todas por sus colonias habidas y las que aun esperan haber en el ansiado reparto de China y en este revuelto mar del Extremo Oriente. Todas ellas saben mejor que nosotros que la

Revolución filipina es contagiosa, muy contagiosa; que lleva en su seno volcánico el germen de la fiebre amarilla o de la peste bubónica, mortal para sus intereses coloniales; que puede constituir en día no muy lejano el dique insuperable contra sus ambiciones desbordadas. (Mabini 56-57, author’s italics)

to maintain vivid and bright, in Oceanía, the torch of liberty and civilization, so that, illuminating the gloomy night in which today lies the

Malay race, depraved and degraded, it shows her the way to her social emancipation. That we have gone crazy and speak nonsense? That we sustain a utopia, a chimera engendered by our sick imagination? No, and a thousand times no. Ask England, Russia, France, Germany, Holland,

Portugal, and other powers eager to colonize, and you will see how they all tremble for their colonies and those that they still hope to have in the longed-for neighborhood of China and in this turbulent sea of the Far East.

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All of them know better than we that the Philippine revolution is

contagious, quite contagious; that it carries in its volcanic bosom the germ

of yellow fever or the bubonic plague, lethal for their colonial interests;

that it could constitute one not-so-distant day the insurmountable dike

against their overflowing ambitions.

In his essay “Subaltern Studies: Projects for Our Time and Their Convergence,” Ranajit

Guha discusses the convergence and delimitations of the South Asian and Latin

American Subaltern Studies Groups. In part of this discussion, he develops Kant’s critique of reason and highlights its function as a paradox: “[The paradox] heralds the advent of reason and upholds its sovereignty, and yet ends up by defining the limits of the latter. This is nowhere more obvious than the philosopher’s own attempt to reconcile the freedom of political argument with an unquestioning obedience to the enlightened despot” (39). In the development of his argument, Guha points out that the colonial state in South Asia, for example, stood for a historic failure of said reason due to the colonial state’s desire to model itself on the liberal bourgeois state of Britain and, in its attempt to legitimize itself by the approval of its disenfranchised subjects – a dominance without hegemony, in Guha’s words – was unsuccessful. According to Guha, “There was nothing in its record to justify the [the colonial state’s] promise of a steady progress toward the happiness of all humankind. Neither capital nor liberalism, the twin engines of reason, proved powerful enough to overcome local resistance in the subcontinent’s indigenous economy and culture” (43).

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I highlight these ideas by Guha to demonstrate how this interrogation and challenge of the relationship between reason and experience can even be traced back to the imperial context of the Philippines at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. While Guha writes with the South Asian context in mind, the precursor to these critiques can also be found in Mabini’s essay. In outlining the true aims of the revolution, Mabini uses the colonizer’s idea of universal reason as a tool to first justify the Philippines’ desire for independence, then turns this reason on its head to demonstrate that reason does not inherently imply nor is it linked with statism; that is, the concentration of sovereignty in a state at the cost of liberty, particularly in the name of

“modernity” or “progress.” In challenging this relationship, Mabini alleges that the

Filipinos are fully aware of – and combating – their negation within the current established order. Moreover, he refutes the United States’ assertion – and that of the

“great powers” of the world – that their ideology is universal. For Mabini, the power that the Philippines have over the dominating powers is precisely its contagious nature. That is, the revolution and insurrection have the ability to destroy coloniality, refuting the pretenses of the Filipinos’ inability to govern.

Finally, in the last phase of Mabini’s deconstruction of the supposed universality of colonial reason, he turns to the notion of governability. In his essay “Consideraciones al Congreso norte-americano,” written on Christmas Day of 1899, he posits the following question:

Ahora bien: ¿puede el pueblo americano asegurar que los filipinos son

incapaces para gobernar? Si lo fueran realmente, podría el gobierno de

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Washington establecer la paz e imponer el gobierno que quieran conceder

a Filipinas; pero si son capaces, tenga la completa seguridad de que los

filipinos no dejarán de luchar por sus ideales. (Mabini 128)

Now then: Can the American people be sure that the Filipinos are

incapable of governing? If this really were so, the government of

Washington could establish peace and impose the government that it

wanted to grant to the Philippines; but if they are able, be completely

certain that the Filipinos will not stop fighting for their ideals.

For Mabini, the Philippines are not “ungovernable” – rather, it is simply that the Filipinos do not wish to accept the United States’ form of governance. He then outlines how the

“Philippine problem” could be peacefully resolved by working with the true aspirations and desires of the Filipinos rather than by force or by conforming to the desires of the

United States. For the Philippines, the very act of allowing a foreign power to rule them would be an admission that they were incapable of self-government; for that reason, they continue to rebel. That is, resistance is the language through which the Filipinos reject this dominance without hegemony and attempt to organize their own system of government. Therefore, the continued imposition of the United States’ power suggests a demonstration of superiority rather than attention to the needs of the people. In a statement quite reminiscent of José Martí, Mabini outlines his definition of government:

Gobernar es estudiar las necesidades e interpretar los deseos del

pueblo, para remediar aquéllas y satisfacer éstos. Si los naturales que

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conocen las necesidades, costumbres y aspiraciones del pueblo son

incapaces para gobernar, los americanos, que han tenido muy poco

contacto con los filipinos, ¿serán más capaces para gobernar Filipinas?

Medite bien el Congreso: es necesario un buen gobierno en

Filipinas, no por el bien de los filipinos, sino porque lo demandan el bien,

honor y prestigio del pueblo americano. (Mabini 129)

To govern is the study the needs and interpret the desires of the

people, to mediate [those needs] and satisfy [those desires]. If the natives

that know the needs, customs, and aspirations of the nation are incapable

of governing, will the Americans, who have had very little contact with

the Filipinos, be capable of governing the Philippines?

Ponder this well, Congress: a good government in the Philippines

is necessary, not for the Filipinos’ own good, but rather because goodness,

honor, and prestige demand it from the American people.

Good governance in the Philippines, for Mabini, requires recognizing difference in the sense of varying cultures, customs, and practices, so that the governing body may understand the needs and desires of the people. However, this also requires undoing and rejecting colonial difference – that is, the coloniality of power that places these differences in a hierarchy. Walter Mignolo, in his article “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” traces the relationship between the geopolitics of knowledge, colonial difference, and the history of capitalism, using the ideas of Aníbal

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Quijano, Immanuel Wallerstein, and Enrique Dussel as points of departure. To briefly reiterate: the modern/colonial world-system, as posited by Wallerstein, can be described alongside the emergence of the Atlantic commercial circuit – Western capitalism/the beginning of the modern world-system (Wallerstein, Quijano, Dussel) – which is linked to the conceptualization of colonial difference and the coloniality of power (Quijano,

Dussel). With the expansion of Western capitalism, so comes the expansion of Western epistemologies and their characterization – as Quijano has stated – as “universal.”

Mignolo’s critique frames the discussion in terms of the geopolitics of knowledge and calls for establishing the limits of these Western cosmologies. Drawing from Dussel’s notion of transmodernity – a concept that draws from non-Western replies to European

“modernity” (Dussel 221) – Mignolo relocates the locus of enunciation from that of coloniality to that of the subaltern. For Mignolo and Dussel, this requires the decolonization of philosophy, knowledge, and power in which there is the simultaneous appropriation of modernity – or Western thought – and a move toward transmodernity, understood as a liberating strategy. In any case, Mignolo echoes, this requires the participation of both the colonizer and the colonized (240).

In light of this relationship between governability and decolonization, allow me to draw your attention back to the context of post-1898 Treaty of Paris. In President

William McKinley’s Third Annual Message to Congress on December 5, 1899, the president discusses the implementation of a postal system in Puerto and the Philippines, which “is thus not only a vital agency of industrial, social, and business progress, but an important influence in diffusing a just understanding of the true spirit and character of

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American administration”, as well as markets that are opening up in Hawaii, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, where the people “by the establishment of experiment stations, to a more scientific knowledge of the production of coffee, India rubber, and other tropical products, for which there is demand in the United States” (McKinley). These passages clearly link capitalism, universal reason and knowledge, and the modern/colonial hierarchization and establishment of colonial difference. The United States paints itself as the bearers of modernity through their diffusion of “progress” and their help via “more scientific knowledge,” the diffusion of the American spirit – that is, the colonization of culture so that the colonized culture accepts the “universal reason” of the colonizing one

–, the importance of building a nation-state based on said “universal” Western ideals, and the development of these nation-states to be profitable to the imperial power.

McKinley then turns specifically to issues concerning the Philippines. In his speech, he addresses the Treaty of Paris, the Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation, the

“problems” of the insurrections that continued to persist in the Philippines, and some instructions on how the islands are to be governed and dealt with. In explaining how the

Philippines came under the sovereignty of the United States, McKinley declares that “I had every reason to believe, and I still believe that this transfer of sovereignty was in accordance with the wishes and the aspirations of the great mass of the Filipino people”

(McKinley). However, before an American commission could arrive in the Philippines to establish authority,

the sinister ambition of a few leaders of the Filipinos had created a

situation full of embarrassment for us and most grievous in its

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consequences to themselves. […] The most the insurgent leader hoped for

when he came back to Manila was the liberation of the islands from the

Spanish control, which they had been laboring for years without success to

throw off. (McKinley)

Mabini, upon reading McKinley’s speech, could not resist responding. In his article “El mensaje del presidente McKinley,” he writes about President McKinley’s

Third Annual Message to Congress of December of 1899, specifically the sections concerning the Philippines, because “Estamos convencidos de que todo esfuerzo que tienda a interpretar sinceramente los sentimientos del pueblo filipino, para la más acertada solución del problema, constituye un servicio no sólo a Filipinas, sino también a los Estados Unidos de América” (“We are convinced that all of the effort that is inclined to sincerely interpret the feelings of the Filipino people, for the most correct solution of the problem, constitutes a service not only to the Philippines, but also to the United States of America”; 131). Upon first commenting on the validity of the Treaty of Paris and tersely criticizing the Benevolent Assimilation Proclamation, he addresses McKinley’s comments regarding the “insurgent leader,” referring to General Emilio Aguinaldo: “¿el pueblo filipino, al cansarse del yugo español, no podía tener otro objeto sino el de someterse a otro yugo, o aspiraba al mejoramiento de su condición?” (“Couldn’t the

Filipino nation, on tiring of Spanish oppression, have another objective other than submit itself to another yoke, or was it aspiring to the betterment of its condition?” 133). Mabini then recounts the events leading up to the revolution, beginning with the martyrdom of

216 the three Filipino priests Gómez, Burgos, and Zamora, up to the expatriation of the revolutionary leaders against the Spanish. He then concludes,

Con tales antecedentes creemos haber demostrado bastante que la

Revolución no es obra de unos cuantos ilusos o ambiciosos sino del

pueblo, que el pueblo no obra inconscientemente, arrastrado por esos

pocos, sino que obra con conciencia de lo que hace a impulsos de

aspiraciones bien definidas. (Mabini 185)

With such precedent we believe to have demonstrated quite well that the

revolution is not an act of a few dreamers or ambitious ones but rather of

the people, that the people were not behaving unconsciously, won over by

these few, rather they act with judgment at the impetus of well-defined

aspirations.

Mabini demonstrates how the Filipinos’ insurrections and “ungovernability” is in fact their reasoned, logical, and progressive response to American domination and colonial reason. I use the term “ungovernability” as defined by Ileana Rodríguez, referring to transgression or “a cultural behavior that does not conform or submit to the

[dominant’s] norms” and which “constitutes an area that escapes the control of dominant hermeneutics” (Rodríguez, “Apprenticeship” 362). Here, Mabini responds to the United

States’ expectation that the Philippines would simply submit to the new power and accept their authority as a “thankful gesture” for the Americans’ help in “liberating” them from the Spanish. However, by aspiring to the “betterment of their condition,” Mabini,

217 speaking on behalf of the Filipinos, demonstrates an awareness of the Philippines’ situation as one that desires social emancipation – not just from one power, but from all potential ones. According to Mabini, for McKinley to first state that liberation of the islands from Spain was “the most the insurgent leader hoped for” implies that there was no possibility that the United States had any intention of simply moving on after providing assistance to the Philippines, further indicating their intent to assume control over the islands rather than truly working “for the aspirations” of the people. Second,

Mabini establishes the reasons for why the Filipinos are intent on revolution, paralleling the oppressions of the Spanish – and now the Americans – and the reasons outlined in the

United States’ own cry for revolution in the Declaration of Independence. Mabini thus begins this process of decolonization by appropriating and simultaneously rejecting

Western reason.

In Mabini’s attempt to dismantle the hierarchy of colonial difference and rejecting the universality of colonial reason, he also tries to incorporate the imperial power into this decolonizing project. That is, the colonizing power must not be blind to colonialism and must recognize their own position or locus of enunciation as one constituted by modernity/coloniality. McKinley, in his speech, addresses the suggestion that the United

States could simply renounce their authority over the islands, give them independence, and still retain a protectorate over them. However, he rejects this proposition, which is not, he dismisses, “worthy of your serious attention,” stating that it would involve a

“cruel breach of faith” (McKinley). McKinley again attempts to establish the colonial

218 difference that places Americans at the top and characterize the Filipinos as uncivilized and barbaric:

[The idea of the Philippines as an independent protectorate] would place

the peaceable and loyal majority, who ask nothing better than to accept

our authority, at the mercy of the minority of armed insurgents. It would

make us responsible for the acts of the insurgent leaders and give us no

power to control them. It would charge us with the task of protecting them

against each other and defending them against any foreign power with

which they chose to quarrel. In short, it would take from the Congress of

the United States the power of declaring war and vest that tremendous

prerogative in the Tagal[og] leader of the hour. (McKinley)

In his response, Mabini breaks down these four reasons and responds to each of them.

Here, I would like to elaborate on his responses to the first and the third of them in consideration of his points on reason, governability, and decolonization. Specifically, these points precisely call attention to the coloniality evident in McKinley’s reasoning.

To the first reason, Mabini notes that Filipinos tend to desire nothing more than peace; moreover, that the

Dicha mayoría, en los pueblos ocupados por las fuerzas americanas, no

está a merced de los insurrectos armados, pero sí a merced de los ladrones

armados. […] ¿Que insurrectos y ladrones son una misma cosa? Así lo

creen los americanos, porque no conocen al pueblo filipino y porque les

conviene. (Mabini 137)

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The stated majority, in the towns occupied by American forces, is not at

the mercy of armed insurgents, but they are at the mercy of armed robbers.

[…] Are insurgents and robbers the same thing? That is what the

Americans believe, because they do not know the Filipino people and

because it is convenient for them.

To the third point, Mabini asks “¿no han anunciado que su venida tiene por objeto proteger a los filipinos? Éstos, no ya por temperamento, sino por conveniencia, se guardarán muy bien de reñir con los extranjeros que no atenten contra sus libertades e intereses” (“Haven’t they announced that the object of their arrival is to protect the

Filipinos? These, not for temperament, but rather for convenience, will be very well kept in mind fighting with the strangers that do not threaten their liberties and interests”;

Mabini 137-138). In both of these points, we see that Mabini critiques the manipulation of reason to justify self-interest and the capitalist world-system that places the emphasis on accumulation, consonant with maintaining the hierarchy of colonial difference. In the case of the Philippines, resistance and insurrection then become forms of reason, as well as a form of decolonization – in the line of Mignolo, rather than depending on Western

(or North Atlantic) epistemologies, it responds to the need of the colonial differences. In other words, insurrection responds to the Philippines’ need for independence and autonomy, which would allow the Philippines to progress in its own way and allow it to participate in transmodernity’s dialogue. Mabini, in his response to Western civilization, is essentially calling attention to the United States’ epistemic location and challenging it

220 to think from the point of view from the subaltern. Keeping Mabini’s critiques of reason, race and colonial difference, and governability in mind, let’s move back to the Caribbean to Puerto Rico and see what José de Diego has to say.

José de Diego, “The Father of the Puerto Rican Independence Movement”

As mentioned in the introduction, José de Diego was a statesman, writer, and lawyer in Puerto Rico who advocated for the independence of Puerto Rico from Spain and, later, from the United States, earning him the title “The Father of the Puerto Rican

Independence Movement.” In contrast to Mabini, De Diego belonged to the criollo class, born to a Spanish father, who was an officer in the Spanish army, and a Puerto Rican mother. While he received his primary education in Puerto Rico, he went to study law in both Spain and in Cuba. In Spain, he collaborated on the newspaper El Progreso, which attacked the political atmosphere in Puerto Rico, forcing him to leave and return to the islands in 1896 to advocate for Puerto Rico’s independence from Spain. Like his contemporaries, notably Ramón Emeterio Betances and Eugenio Ma. de Hostos, De

Diego believed in the creation of an Antillean Confederation of the Spanish-speaking

Caribbean islands that included Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the Dominican Republic. In 1897,

Spain acknowledged the autonomy of Puerto Rico, but the celebration was short-lived – the following year’s invasion of the country by the United States subverted the country’s autonomy.

As mentioned in the introduction, after the United States annexed Puerto Rico, De

Diego was appointed by President McKinley to an Executive Council, which acted like a senate, which functioned alongside a 35-member legislature and a U.S. appointed

221 governor. However, he resigned later that year in October and traveled throughout the

Caribbean and Spain advocating and seeking support for Puerto Rico’s independence. He was well-known for being one of the most eloquent orators of his time, and after giving a speech in Barcelona, he earned the designation of “Caballero de la Raza” (“Knight of the

Race”). His manipulation of language is evident in his poetry – united with themes of national and racial identity and Puerto Rico’s independence, it draws from themes of the later modernismo in Latin America. For De Diego, he saw the positive in the role that modernista aesthetics played as an initiator of new tendencies, particularly as it related to national identity and – ultimately – independence.

For De Diego, then, art and poetry had purpose. In the introduction of his collection of poetry Cantos de Rebeldía, De Diego reflects on role of art, poetry, and their aesthetic in the process of nation-building. While he believes that there is no country that has achieved all of their aspirations, those who have realized the principal aims of their destiny – “la independencia, la libertad, el orden, el bienestar común” (“independence, liberty, order, common well-being”) – have the luxury to distract themselves with arts of contemplation and beauty (20). Turning specifically to the literature of Latin America, he writes:

El más grave daño de esta literatura en América fue que apartó de la tierra,

del ambiente, de los sentimientos e ideales patrios la inspiración y el afán

de los poetas nacidos en aquellos dolorosos países, tan necesitados del

concurso de sus filósofos, de sus artistas, de sus hombres de Estado, de

todas sus fuerzas morales y orgánicas, en las tremendas crisis de su

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crecimiento nacional. La Grecia antigua, el Japón moderno, dioses

paganos, emperatrices, hetairas, geishas y obispos endiablados y

marquesitas galantes y todo lo “muy siglo diez y ocho,” fueron cantados

por poetas que tenían en sus nativos lares las bellezas más grandes de la

Creación y los empeños más altos de la lucha por el triunfo de la libertad y

por la subsistencia y el predominio de nuestra raza oprimida y escarnecida

en las tristes patrias del hemisferio americano. (De Diego 22)

The gravest damage of this literature in America was that it detached from

the land, from the atmosphere, from patriotic feelings and ideals the

inspiration and desire of the poets born in those painful countries, so

necessitated from competition from its philosophers, from its artists, from

its statesmen, from all of the moral and organic forces, in the tremendous

crises of its national growth. Ancient Greece, modern Japan, pagan gods,

empresses, hetaerae, geishas, and wicked bishops and gallant

marchionesses and everything “very eighteenth-century”, were sung by

poets that had in their home grounds the greatest beauties of Creation and

the highest determination from the fight for the triumph of liberty and for

the subsistence and the predominance of our oppressed and ridiculed race

in the sad lands of the American hemisphere.

While De Diego rejects the mantra of “art for art’s sake” found in early modernismo and most notably put forth and influenced by Rubén Darío, he acknowledges poetry’s utility,

223 advocating for the nationalization of Puerto Rican art, letters, and poetry. In art, he argues, we find the tools for nation-building and unity. Referring to the writers that pertain to later modernismo, he writes:

Dichosamente pasó como una áurea nube aquella convencional literatura y

hoy la América hispana puede mostrar con orgullo <> poetas, los

insignes poetas de su paisaje, de su historia, de su libertad, de su vida, de

su raza y de la futura hegemonía de los pueblos de su raza en las cumbres

del Planeta. (23)

Happily that conventional literature passed like a golden cloud and today

Hispanic America can show with pride “its” poets, the distinguished poets

of its landscape, of its history, of its liberty, of its life, of its race and of the

future hegemony of its race’s peoples in the summits of the planet.

We see here that for De Diego, then, it is through culture and literature that comes from the country that a nation can create its own image. His poem “Última Cuerda,” the opening piece of Cantos de Rebeldía, illustrates his belief that poetry should be used as a tool for nationalization and independence. The first stanza reads:

Yo traje del fondo del mundo una lira curvada,

una lira curvada en un arco de flecha,

brillante, flexible, como hecha

de una hoja acerada

que puso en la lira su atávico instinto,

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porque es del acero de la misma espada

que mi padre llevaba en el cinto. (De Diego 25)

I carried from the depths of the world a curved lyre,

a lyre curved into an archer’s bow,

brilliant, flexible, as though made

from a steel-tipped blade

that placed in the lyre its atavistic instinct,

because it is from the steel of the same sword

that my father carried in his belt.

The lyre, generally symbolizing art and music, juxtaposed with images of weaponry – the bow, the blade, the sword – is represented alongside images of history, previous metals, and genealogy, suggesting the legacy of art as a valuable weapon being handed down by his ancestors. He describes the songs in the history of the lyre’s life, portraying the strings in terms of precious metals: “cuerda de oro” (golden string), “timbre del duro diamante” (timber of the hard diamond), “una cuerda de plata radiosa” (a string of radiant silver), “una cuerda broncínea” (a bronze string), “una cuerda de oscuro zafiro” (a string of dark sapphire), “una cuerda de claro rubí” (a string of clear ruby), and

la guerda más brava…

¡La cuerda que tiene alaridos de clarín guerrero,

hecha de una tripa del santo Cordero

que gime en la roca de mi Patria esclava! (De Diego 26)

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the most valiant string…

The string that has battle cries,

made from the innards of the holy Lamb

that howls on the rock of my enslaved Patria!

Through the tone or song each string produces, De Diego makes an allusion to the history of the Puerto Rican people: for example, the golden string produces a classically beautiful hymn; the silver string produces a bird’s song; and the bronze string foresees the

Archangel’s arrival on judgment day. However, as the poem progresses, the songs begin to get more and more painful and violent, the lyre emitting dry, broken sounds, ending with a bleating note:

¡¡Un balido del Cordero de mi Patria, en la suprema

rebeldía de su pecho desgarrado y dolorido!!

Esa cuerda está en mi mano

y la pulso y la conservo,

y estará en mi ronca lira hasta la muerte,

como el bien más soberano,

que pudiera la fortuna dar al siervo…

¡Una cuerda larga y fuerte!

¡¡Una cuerda larga y fuerte para el cuello del tirano!! (De Diego 27)

A bleat from the Lamb of my Patria, in the supreme

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rebellion of its torn and painful chest!

That cord is in my hand

and I pluck it and I keep it

and it will be on my roaring lyre until death,

like the most sovereign good,

that fortune may give to the servant…

A long and strong cord!

A long and strong cord for the neck of the tyrant!!

At this point, the musical instrument and its song – like poetry and art – become instruments of rebellion and weapons that use the language of chaos and violence as a form of resistance. The play on words of “cuerda” – as both a musical string and as a cord or rope used as a weapon – unites art and violence in one object. The use of the

Christian image of the Lamb evokes the idea of sacrifice, but it also brings to mind resurrection. Moreover, it is Christ’s body and blood that saves; in a similar vein, the cord that kills the tyrant comes from the body of the sacrificed Patria, thus saving the Puerto

Rican people. However, despite De Diego’s Martían advocacy that Latin America should have its own art, poetry, and history, his work demonstrates a strong tension between an identity purely “from the nation” and one that draws from the former empire in the elaboration of Puerto Rican patriotism and, consequently, national identity. For example, the fact that his father was a Spanish officer in the army complicates the reading of his first stanza – if the steel for his lyre came from the “same sword that his father wore on his belt,” is he then proposing that the legacy passed down to him – of art, of history, of

227 resistance – comes from the Spanish? Or is it simply an image, in which he calls to the

Puerto Rican past for this legacy? This is particularly interesting, considering that the lyre is infused with an “atavistic” – ancient or ancestral – instinct. Is it a Spanish instinct or a

Puerto Rican one? Or can it be a hybrid one, a border epistemology (here, I think of

Mignolo’s use of “border thinking”)? Furthermore, the incorporation of Christian imagery throughout the poem indicates perhaps the inextricability of the two, considering the long colonial presence on the islands.

Like Apolinario Mabini, De Diego draws from Western epistemologies and uses colonial reason as a tool to combat American imperialism. However, Mabini seeks to dismantle the hierarchy of colonial difference by demonstrating that the Filipinos are, indeed, capable of self-government, and that the government must understand the culture, needs, and desires of the people. For him, independence is a means to achieve a moral government that works for the general good rather than for a privileged group. In contrast, De Diego seeks to strengthen Puerto Rico against the United States by drawing from and uniting with the Spanish “race” in the fight for independence. Like Martí, he certainly views those Spanish who support the fight for independence as allies; however,

Martí’s position that the country should know the realities of its own history, have its own literature, and create a government and institutions matching the natural elements of the country indicates his views of a Latin American identity clearly distinct from Spain.

In contrast, as we will see in a moment, De Diego views the remnants of Spanish culture as inherently embedded in Puerto Rico’s identity.

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Therefore, a tension arises in De Diego’s work in which he aligns the Puerto

Rican race with the Spanish one, situating the United States as the “other.” In a sense, one may view his attempts to achieve independence via a sort of “re-colonization” of the national consciousness as a form of resistance in the face of American imperialism.

Again, perhaps De Diego simply sees the two cultures as inextricable – to reiterate, considering Mignolo’s notion of “border thinking,” one may view De Diego’s collaborative interpretation of identity as one situated in the local history, but drawing from the colonizer’s knowledge as tools to promote Puerto Rican agency. In his works, I will examine how De Diego responds to the structures of the coloniality of power via the tensions and confrontations that arise from his conceptualizations of Puerto Rican national identity that often draw from the former empire’s imaginary. These responses reflect his anxieties in the face of the new empire, bringing about a new crisis of negotiation and language to express his anti-imperial discourse and foster Puerto Rican agency in the production of knowledge, power, and citizenship.

Whereas I traced the critique of colonial “universality” first through race, then reason, and ending with governability in Mabini’s works, I would like to flip this order and start with the notion of governability in De Diego’s poetry, moving toward his critique of colonial reason, and ending with his deliberations on race and colonial difference. In doing so, this project comes full circle, returning to the question of nationalism and national consciousness with which I started Chapter One and recognizing that the struggle does not end – rather, the constant negotiations continue to this day. This is especially true in Puerto Rico, which remains an unincorporated territory of the United

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States to this day and in which, according to Ramón Grosfoguel in his book Colonial

Subjects: Puerto Ricans in a Global Perspective (2003), colonial discourses by the

United States and nationalist discourses by the “white” creole elites in Puerto Rico continue to dismiss subaltern struggles for equal rights (10). In the critique of the coloniality of power that privileges Eurocentric forms of knowledge, Grosfoguel – in the line of Mignolo – argues that colonial difference should be placed at the center of the process of knowledge production. Subaltern knowledges, then, should be viewed as forms of resistance that “resignify dominant forms of knowledge from the point of view of the non-Eurocentric rationality of subaltern subjectivities thinking from border epistemologies” (Grosfoguel 20). However, the question that Grosfoguel posits is whether or not a new knowledge that repeats or reproduces the universalistic, Eurocentric point of view will be produced. I believe that, while De Diego struggles with this tension, his ultimate aim is to dismantle the hierarchies of difference and the decolonization of

Puerto Rico.

The first piece that I would like to highlight is not a poem; rather, a very brief essay titled “No” and published in 1913 that highlights the notion of governability while tying it to Puerto Rican identity. The essay begins:

Breve, sólida, rotunda, como un martillazo, he aquí la palabra viril

que debe encender los labios y salvar el honor de nuestro pueblo, en estos

infelices días de anacrónico imperialismo.

Hace dos o tres años el doctor Coll y Toste escribió unos brillantes

párrafos, para demostrar que los puertorriqueños no saben y debieran

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saber la potestad de una enérgica afirmación. El sapiente doctor estaba

equivocado: nuestra dolencia moral más grande es una atávica

predisposición al otorgamiento irreflexivo y a la blandura de la voluntad,

que se doblegan amorosos, como un rosal a un suspiro del viento. (De

Diego, Obras 16)

Brief, solid, emphatic, like a hammer blow, I have here the virile

word that must ignite lips and save the honor of our people, in these

unhappy days of anachronistic imperialism.

Two or three years ago, Doctor Coll y Toste wrote some brilliant

paragraphs to demonstrate that Puerto Ricans do not know and ought to

know the power of an energetic affirmation. The knowledgeable doctor

was wrong: our greatest moral malady is an atavistic predisposition to the

impulsive acquiescence and to the weakness of will, which bends lovingly,

like a rose bush to the sigh of the wind.

Because of the Puerto Ricans’ nature to be agreeable, says De Diego, this has allowed for great progress in science, art, philosophy, and religion. Moreover, he points out as positive results of these affirmations “la muerte de Cristo y la vida de Colón” (16), insinuating that he views the Spanish presence on the island as constructive. In political evolution, in contrast, this affirmation “es casi siempre inúntil y siempre funesto” (“is almost always useless and always disastrous”; De Diego 16-17). As previously mentioned, De Diego here seems to draw on the colonizer’s tools in order to promote

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Puerto Rican agency; however, to reiterate, this strategic “forgetting” of the Spanish past oppressions brings a tension to his work. Evoking once again Ileana Rodríguez’s concept of “ungovernability,” here De Diego argues that while the “SÍ” of Puerto Rican identity has allowed the country to flourish, the arrival of the foreign power – the United States – requires that the “NO” be adopted as a tool for independence:

Desde las sublevaciones casi prehistóricas de las tribus salvajes contra los

caudillos de los imperios asiáticos, la negativa al sometimiento, la protesta

contra el tirano, el NO de los oprimidos ha sido el verbo, la génesis de la

emancipación de los pueblos: y aun, cuando la impotencia de los medios y

la virtualidad de los fines, como en nuestra Patria, alejan el fuego

revolucionario para la visión del ideal, el NO debe ser y es la única

palabra salvadora de la libertad y la dignidad de los pueblos en

servidumbre. (De Diego 17)

From the nearly prehistoric uprisings of the savage tribes against the

leaders of the Asiatic empires, the negative to submission, the protest

against the tyrant, the NO of the oppressed has been the verb, the genesis

of the emancipation of the peoples: and even so, when the impotency of

the means and the potentiality of the aims, like in our Patria, separate the

revolutionary fire from the vision of the ideal, the NO should be and is the

only saving word of the freedom and dignity of the enslaved people.

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In this passage, De Diego finds solidarity with those who have achieved liberation from an oppressive group, worldwide. The word “no” as a verb, as action, brings to mind that it is through transgression that even the earliest societies have progressed and thrived.

Interestingly, in contrast to Mabini’s endorsement for a physical form of ungovernability

– that is, he defends the ongoing insurrection and revolution in the Philippines – ungovernability for De Diego primarily refers to an intellectual transgression – one of the people’s will and through political means. For De Diego, by asserting one’s will and agency – through ungovernability – the country can move toward political independence.

In other words, ungovernability is a means to break apart the coloniality that constitutes the empires “universal” reason.

Perhaps, then, it is this contradiction that De Diego draws from in order to resist a second wave of cultural colonization by the United States – whereas the Eurocentric model of knowledge seeks to name, order, and classify, De Diego incorporates elements of Spanish culture as inherently linked to Puerto Rican culture not as a mode of colonial nostalgia, but rather as a way to combat the logic of empire through a somewhat

“illogical” solidarity. Why, the United States would ask, would Puerto Rico want to unite themselves with their former colonial masters from whom they desired independence?

While this would be a logical question for the empire, I argue that De Diego actually aims to break the divisions that are “supposed” to exist between the two and rather focus on their solidarity as a source of strength and, ultimately, resistance. Here, Fernando

Ortiz’s concept of transculturation comes to mind, which refers to the different phases of the merging and converging of cultures from one to another that eventually results in the

233 creation of entirely new cultural phenomena. As a result, those born in this culture

“siempre tiene algo de ambos progenitores, pero también siempre es distinta de cada uno de los dos” (“always have something from both progenitors, but also always is distinct from each of the two”; Ortiz 90). Through transculturation, De Diego hopes to resolve this conflict as well as open up possibilities for independence and, ultimately, decolonization.

This theme of transculturation via a Puerto Rican identity based on a mixed sentiment of latinismo/españolismo (Latinism/Spanishism) is evident in his poem

“Aleluyas”. By “latinismo,” I mean a recognition, defense, and celebration of a Latin heritage, which is the root of most European languages. In a similar manner, but more specifically, “españolismo” refers to the affirmation, defense, and celebration of a

Spanish heritage. “Aleluyas,” addressed to “los caballeros del Norte” (“the gentlemen of the North”), situates Puerto Rico as part of the world, as well as part of America. In doing so, he traces Puerto Rican history and lineage, starting with the indigenous people and the arrival of the Spanish. He writes:

En el principio, cuando el agua florecía,

Dios las alzó [a las Antillas] del fondo con un fulgor del día.

Y, después de los siglos, viniendo del Oriente,

los indios habitaron Islas y Continente.

Y, pasando otros siglos, triunfantes en las olas,

llegaron a estas Islas las naos españolas.

Naves maravillosas, carabelas divinas,

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aunque con el defecto magno de ser latinas. (De Diego 76)

In the beginning, when water blossomed,

God raised [the Antilles] from the depths with the brightness of day.

And, after centuries, coming from the East,

the indigenous inhabited the islands and continent.

And, centuries after, triumphant in the waves,

arrived on these islands the Spanish ships.

Marvelous vessels, divine ships,

though with the great defect of being Latin.

In this poem, De Diego paints the history of Puerto Rico as one, starting with the natural progression from God’s creation, to the arrival of those from “the East,” to the arrival of the Spanish. Interestingly, however, he points out that they have the “great defect” of being Latin, hinting at a critique of the colonial difference and the coloniality of reason that accompanies it (or, perhaps, Spanish decadence). Even more interestingly, De Diego seems to neglect pointing out the oppressions of the Spanish over the indigenous natives, in part rewriting the narrative of Puerto Rico’s history, and in part reproducing the cycle of epistemological violence. Bringing to mind the meeting of the bourgeois and peasant domains in Indian nationalism in Partha Chatterjee’s “The Nation and its Peasants,”

Chatterjee points out the unresolved contradiction that, in the coming together of these two domains, this union simultaneously required that they be kept apart, creating a fragmented nationalist union fraught with tension (10). He writes,

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While the nationalist leadership sought to mobilize the peasantry as an

anti-colonial force in its project of establishing a nation-state, it was ever

distrustful of the consequences of agitational politics among the peasants,

suspicious of their supposed ignorance and backward consciousness,

careful to keep their participation limited to the forms of bourgeois

representative politics in which peasants would be regarded as part of the

nation but distanced from the institutions of the state. (Chatterjee 10)

Remembering that De Diego had advocated for Puerto Rico’s autonomy from Spain – and this autonomy was granted, albeit for a very short period of time – it is clear that he sees himself as aligned with the nation-state, aiming for independence via political participation and accommodation. Therefore, De Diego’s work, in its attempt to unite the

Puerto Rican people under the umbrella of solidarity and community, still situates himself as one raised by coloniality – as part of the elite class, he still sees himself part of an autonomous domain, not having experienced the oppressions of the indigenous firsthand. The indigenous, therefore, are part of this sphere of Puerto Rican identity, but it is this narrative that keeps him in this position of power. However, with the United

States’ sovereignty, this domain is threatened. De Diego writes:

Sobre todo aquel día, en que la gente ibérica

se hundió con sus cruceros en los mares de América.

El día en que llegásteis, con espléndido porte,

los ultrapoderosos Caballeros del Norte. (De Diego 77)

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Above all that day, in which the Iberian people

sank with their ships in the seas of America.

The day when you arrived, with splendid demeanor,

the ultra-powerful Gentlemen of the North.

In alluding to the Spanish-American War, De Diego highlights the arrival of the United

States as one by force, destroying the newly won autonomy of Puerto Rico. Let us look at this portrayal alongside the title: the word “aleluya” (“hallelujah”) refers to a Judeo-

Christian word of joyful praise to God. However, while for most Christians, this term is simply an expression of praise, its root stems from the Hebrew imperative form of the verb, playing with the dual idea of praising and commanding praise the “gentlemen of the

North” (“a los caballeros del Norte”). In the next few lines, he employs religious language in an ironic critique of imperial reason. Using a hyperbolic irony, he asks forgiveness for those acts that happened beyond the control of the United States:

Perdonad, Caballeros, al cielo y a la tierra,

que hayan hecho a estas Islas, mucho antes de la guerra…

Perdonad que estuviéramos tantos hombres nacidos,

sin que en ello mediaran los Estados Unidos.

Nacidos en América, sin que mediárais vos,

por un atrevimiento de la bondad de Dios.

No somos los más fuertes, ni los dominadores,

pero somos los hijos de los Descubridores. (De Diego 77)

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Forgive, gentlemen, the heavens and the earth,

that they had made these islands, well before the war…

Forgive that so many of us men were born,

without the United States’ intervention in it.

Born in America, without your intervening,

by the audacity of the kindness of God.

We are not the strongest, nor the dominators,

But we are the sons of the Discoverers.

These lines demonstrate a sharp critique of the United States’ imperial designs and their desire to control everything. He suggests that the United States see themselves as more powerful than God; however, the last line of this quoted portion also shows a clear negation of the oppressions of Spanish colonialism. Yet, by calling attention to the

Spanish role in “discovering” the Americas, he speaks from the newly defined side of colonial difference – one that, in his portrayal, includes the Spaniards – and rejects his negation in the face of the American empire. Furthermore, by highlighting the “lack of control” of the United States over the Puerto Ricans’ “transgressions” of simply existing,

De Diego ridicules the United States’ power through exaggeration – in a sense, he creates a parody of the United States that functions as a trivializing mechanism which not only comments on their notions of power and reason, but also positions Puerto Rico in a more favorable light. Notably, however, he calls the Spanish “Discoverers” rather than

“Conquerors” (“conquistadores”), erasing the violent history between the indigenous people and the Spanish in order to highlight the aggression of the United States. It also

238 implies the indigenous’ previous “non-existence,” prior to becoming incorporated into

European knowledge. Here, the boundaries of solidarity and unity shift, depending on the changes brought about by struggle.

In this case, De Diego is willing to forget the previous negation of the Puerto

Ricans by the Spaniards in order to incorporate them into his version of solidarity and, in

De Diego’s opinion, strengthen the country’s stance. In particular, he does this by showing how the Spanish and the Puerto Ricans are united against the Americans by their shared knowledges. Inversely, he also demonstrates their solidarity via their non- knowledges:

Sabemos los misterios de la Filosofía

y del Arte en que reina la santa Poesía.

Pero nada sabemos, en el país del Sol,

del Arte del Gobierno, como en Tamany Hall.

Ni sabemos del salto mortal de las doctrinas,

que puso a California al pie de Filipinas.

Perdonad, Caballeros, si estamos inconscientes

de vuestras concepciones del Derecho de gentes. (De Diego 77-78)

We know the mysteries of Philosophy

And of Art in which holy Poetry reigns.

But we know nothing, in the land of the Sun,

Of the Art of Government, like in Tammany Hall.

239

Nor do we know the mortal leap of the doctrines

That placed California at the foot of the Philippines.

Forgive, gentlemen, if we are unaware

Of your concept of the Right of the people.

De Diego, like Mabini, rejects the imposition of imperial knowledge on his nation, specifically when it comes to supposed knowledge of government. For him, the reasoning that the United States used in order to gain control of the islands was one based on force rather than logic – his references to Tammany Hall and the “mortal leap” of the doctrines that unite the Pacific islands with the American coast do not demonstrate reason45; rather, they are evidence of corruption. In other words, there is no logic guiding the actions of the United States, only control and force. For De Diego, the strength of the Puerto Ricans is their non-imperial knowledge:

Hablamos otra lengua, con otro pensamiento,

en la onda del espíritu y en la onda del viento.

Y os estamos diciendo hace tiempo en las dos,

que os vayáis con el diablo y nos dejéis con Dios. (De Diego 78)

We speak another language, with other thoughts,

in the drift of the spirit and in the wave of the wind.

And we are telling you while in the two,

45 Tammany Hall was a political machine founded in the eighteenth century that played a major role in influencing New York City and New York State politics until the mid-twentieth century. It was also characterized by political corruption whose influence controlled the city’s elections. 240

That you go with the devil and leave us with God.

In these last few lines, De Diego aligns the Puerto Rican people through their language –

Spanish – and their “other” thoughts, perhaps referring to their Hispanic legacy, or perhaps referring to the indigenous one, or both. In any case, he aligns Puerto Rico with

God and the Americans with the devil, associating Puerto Rico with morality and beauty and the United States with savagery.

In doing so, I want to show how De Diego identifies with the fallen empires as a source of strength against the new American one. Edward Said posits that “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient as a sort of surrogate and even underground self” (3). Likewise, I want to argue that in the same way that Europe characterized the Orient as its past – seeing themselves in the Orient, but situating the Orient as the “other” in order to show Europe as a place of “progress” and

“modernity” – for De Diego, these European countries (specifically the “Latin” ones), now no longer the central global power, have now become Puerto Rico’s precursors.

However, rather than situating them as Puerto Rico’s “other,” De Diego instead paints a vision of the Puerto Rican race in which its strength is drawn from the spirit of these fallen empires – that is, its roots are in the Latin race. Manipulating the racial hierarchization of people based on the colonial difference, De Diego uses this difference as a way to elevate the Puerto Rican race over the Anglo-Saxon one.

The final poem of this study, “Magnis Vocibus,” is dedicated to “los pueblos latinos.” In this poem, De Diego calls for the help of the “pueblos latinos” – or rather, those nations with Latin roots – in defense of Puerto Rico’s independence from the

241

United States. The title, “Magnis Vocibus,” is Latin for “great voices,” emphasizing their prominence and power while conveying De Diego’s characterization of Puerto Rico as having roots in these early empires. Because of this shared heritage, he appeals to the

Latin nations to help their sister/daughter, Puerto Rico, through classical myths of renewal and rebirth. The poem begins with a reference to the Greek mythological figure,

Andromeda. He writes:

Trágicamente bella, en pie sobre una roca,

de un rictus doloroso contraída la boca,

tiende hacia el mar los brazos, trémula y delirante,

y al mundo de su raza en su clamor invoca

¡una pobre Isla inerme, una pobre Isla loca,

bajo las férreas garras de un Aguila rampante! (De Diego 82)

Tragically beautiful, standing on a rock,

her mouth pinched with a painful grimace,

her arms stretched out toward the sea, trembling and delirious,

and to the world of her race invokes in her groans

a poor, defenseless Island, a poor, crazy Island,

under the iron claws of a rampant Eagle!

In Greek mythology, Andromeda was the daughter of the Aethiopian king Cepheus and queen Cassiopeia. When Cassiopeia boasts that her daughter is more beautiful than the

Nereids, or sea nymphs, the Greek god Poseidon sends a sea monster to attack Aethiopia.

242

In order to save the kingdom, an oracle tells the king and queen that they must sacrifice

Andromeda to the monster. So, they chain her to a rock near the ocean so that the sea monster could devour her. By referencing Andromeda, De Diego paints the analogy that

Puerto Rico, like Andromeda, has also been sacrificed to the monster – this one being the

Eagle of the United States – simply for being the beautiful daughter of the Latin race. De

Diego calls on the spirit of the fallen empires as well as the newly liberated ones to help:

¿Dónde están en el mundo nuestras madres Latinas?

¿Dónde están en América nuestras fuertes hermanas,

que no escuchan los gritos que a las ondas marinas

confiaron las tristes riberas borincanas?

¡Los gritos de socorro de angustias sobrehumanas

que llevan en sus senos las ondas cristalinas! (De Diego 82)

Where in the world are our Latin mothers?

Where in America are our strong sisters,

who do not hear the cries of the sea waves

that the sad Puerto Rican banks trusted?

The cries of help of superhuman anguish

that the crystalline waves carry in their breasts!

He begins with Rome, who nursed her infant nations, to send “el rayo de tu alma” (“the ray of your soul”) if she is unable to send an army to help (De Diego 83). Then, he chastises France for helping the United States against England, but points out that, as a

243 result, America triumphed in order to open the way for liberty. Afterward, he calls to

Spain, pointing out the colonial heritage that stays with Puerto Rico and obliging Spain, like Rome, to defend the spirit of Puerto Rico. Finally, he calls on the new Latin

American republics, sharing in their pain and resistance and condemning the imperial attacks:

Las jóvenes Repúblicas, aquellas desdichadas

que viven en la zona sujeta a las zarpadas

de la terrible Bestia, en su fiero transporte…

¡las pobres perseguidas! ¡las pobres mutiladas!

¡y aquellas más felices cuanto más alejadas,

cuanto más alejadas de la Bestia del Norte! (De Diego 84-85)

The young Republics, those wretched ones

that live in the zone subject to the blows

of the terrible Beast, in its fierce path…

The poor persecuted ones! The poor mutilated ones!

And those happiest the more distant,

the more distant from the Beast of the North!

Again, De Diego ignores the former Spanish colonial presence in the region, focusing instead on the current imperial power. On the one hand, he seems to ignore the coloniality that continues to pervade these new republics. Yet, on the other hand, it is from the South that De Diego hopes will be the renewal and rebirth of Puerto Rico:

244

¡El Sur! ¡El Sur Olímpico del genio americano!

¡allí brota la fuente que en sus raudales lleva

al porvenir la onda del pensamiento humano!

¡allí la antigua raza se funde y se renueva

y entre la excelsa bóveda y el inmenso Océano

la Cruz del Sur, cual signo de redención se eleva! (De Diego 85)

The South! The Olympic South of the American character!

There the fountain springs up that in its torrents carry

to the future the wave of human thought!

There the ancient race is founded and renewed

and between the sublime cavern and the immense Ocean

the Cross of the South, whose sign of redemption is raised!

In these stanzas, De Diego references Greek – European – mythology in his reference to

Mount Olympus as well as Christian iconography in his reference to the cross in his depiction of the new, modern Latin America. De Diego, in contrast to Martí’s dismissal of that which does not come from the country, uses whatever tools he has at his disposal, whether it be from Europe or whether it be from the Americas, to forge a new, hybrid

Puerto Rican identity, capable of border thinking. By doing so, De Diego creates an entirely new language, thought, and national identity that confront and negotiate with the colonial past and the anti-imperial present, but that are distinctly Puerto Rican – and reflect his version of progress and modernity. In contrast to the opening representation of

245

Puerto Rico as the sacrificed Andromeda, the last two stanzas depict Puerto Rico as the new Prometheus:

¡Venid a nuestros gritos y ruja vuestro cántico,

como las clamorosas tormentas del Atlántico,

ante el último mártir de la progenie ibérica!

¡Venid a nuestros gritos, oh Naciones hispánicas,

y, como a Prometeo las Ninfas Oceánicas,

dad vuestra ayuda al último Prometeo de América!

El Águila de Júpiter nuestra entraña devora,

pero la misma entraña renace a cada hora;

el dolor no nos vence, ni nuestra fe declina…

¡sabemos la potencia de nuestra alma divina

y sabemos que existe la mano redentora

del Hércules invicto de la raza latina! (De Diego 86)

Come to our cries and roar our hymn,

like the clamoring storms of the Atlantic,

before the final martyr of the Iberian progeny!

Come to our shouts, oh Hispanic Nations,

and, like the Ocean Nymphs to Prometheus,

give your help to the last Prometheus of America!

The Eagle of Jupiter devours our essence,

246

but the same essence grows back every hour;

pain does not defeat us, nor does our faith decline…

we know the power of our divine soul

and we know that the redeeming hand

of the undefeated Hercules of the Latin race exists!

As the Titan who gave fire to humanity, Prometheus represents progress, civilization, and human striving for excellence. To punish Prometheus for his theft of fire, Zeus chained

Prometheus to a rock where each day, Zeus’ eagle would feed on his liver, which would grow back to be eaten the next day, due to Prometheus’ immortality. Eventually,

Hercules kills the eagle of Zeus and frees Prometheus from his eternal torment. Similarly, for De Diego, Puerto Rico’s representation as the new Prometheus not only references intellectual rebellion, but progress and regeneration as a result of this rebellion. For De

Diego, Puerto Rico’s strength comes from the spirit of its Latin heritage, and for him, the clearest way to express his version of a national identity in the face of American imperialism is to unite his latinismo pride with the power of the new republics.

While De Diego and Mabini may have disagreed in their responses to American imperialism, I believe they would have understood one another’s struggles with negotiating and confronting the remnants of the old empire and the (broken) promises of the new. Both desired independence for their countries; this was no mistake. However, the ambivalence evident in their writings with respect to how to approach their fight for independence should not be taken lightly – the ultimate goal was autonomy; the only difference was their approach. Regardless of the outcome, I believe that it is important to

247 highlight their agency – these men, as well as the others in this project (and, I must add, the many women that I was unable to include in this current work) demonstrated clear, reasoned, responses that answered not only to their contexts and their needs and desires, but also expressed a consciousness that fought for political justice, participation in the production of knowledge and power, and negotiation for the meaning of an autonomously defined notion of citizenship.

Unfortunately, the legacy of coloniality fought against them – neither Mabini nor

De Diego were able to see their countries’ independence come to fruition. While the

Philippines did eventually gain their independence in 1946, Puerto Rico remains to this day a commonwealth of the United States. Yet, I hope to have shown that the anticolonial sentiments in these writers’ works were varied, fragmented, and complicated; still, for different reasons, their lives still carry weight today. Many of the authors studied here died at a rather young age, fighting for their country and questioning supposedly

“universal” structures of power and knowledge. At a time when Cuban, Puerto Rican, or

Filipino nationalism means wearing a Che Guevarra t-shirt, listening to Calle 13 on the radio, or displaying the Philippine sun and stars on a bumper sticker, remembering the voices that fought for an ideal serves as a reminder for finding what is human in academia.

248

Afterword: Transitions

Para leer en el destino de los pueblos, es menester abrir el libro de su pasado.

- José Rizal, “Filipinas dentro de cien años”

By the year 1900, most of the men in this study had passed away, whether from natural causes (Julián del Casal, Ramón de Emeterio Betances), execution (José Rizal,

Andrés Bonifacio), or on the battlefield (José Martí). Isabelo de los Reyes, Apolinario

Mabini, and José de Diego were the only survivors of 1898, and could only protest vociferously as they watched sovereignty pass from Spain to the United States of

America. All of these men spent their lives fighting to be heard, fighting for equal rights, and fighting to belong. They sought to create a community in which they shared solidarity with those on the same islands, across the archipelago or across the oceans.

They wanted to know what it meant to be a citizen and participate in government, whether through the creation of law or simply by having a voice. They wanted to share in the production of knowledge. And yet, with the multiple cultures that they all grappled with – between Spain, their regional culture, and the United States, as well as those that they encountered when studying or traveling abroad – it is no wonder their approaches were so complex, so knotty, so contradictory, so ambiguous.

In a way, this project serves to recuperate these inconsistent legacies, which I hope will help us further explore the connections between Asia and Latin America, as

249 well as with the rest of the world. By carrying out a transoceanic comparative study of

Caribbean and Filipino essays and poetry written between 1880-1910, contextualized by

Spain’s loss of its final colonies in 1898, this project provides a point of departure to explore the relationship between the Caribbean and the Philippines, as well as demonstrate the intricate complexities and multifaceted processes that make up anticolonial expressions, the construction of a nation, and the concept of a citizen. This time period is a particularly fertile area for research due to the abundance of written material available, allowing scholars on both sides of the ocean to familiarize themselves with major figures of Caribbean and Filipino historiography and providing a springboard for studying these lost articulations of the late-nineteenth century Hispanic world. For this reason, this project has tried to draw from the experiences and knowledges of Cuban,

Puerto Rican, and Filipino authors who hail from a variety of backgrounds, be it racial, class, education, intellectual position, or otherwise, in order to illustrate the diversity of these voices.

To reiterate one of the central concerns of this study, the works studied show the development of a new, regional and national consciousness and reveal the authors’ responses to modernization, highlighting the political, cultural, social, and economic tensions of that time period aesthetically and socio-culturally. By tracing the seeds of a rising consciousness in both the Philippines and the Caribbean, studying the development of this consciousness into nationalist identity, exploring the transformations of some of these nationalist sentiments into a revolutionary form of anti-colonialism, and examining the cultivation of anti-colonialism into anti-imperial responses, the study has shown the

250 multiple, fragmented, and sometimes even contradictory responses that the writers had toward modernity/coloniality. Yet, it has also shown the similarity in these responses despite the distance across the oceans, and even more importantly, their solidarity (often more implicit than explicit) despite contradictory approaches.

Thus, this study suggests that by looking at coloniality, modernization, and neocolonialism from the point of view of the fin-de-siècle Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and

Filipinos, the subaltern struggle for active participation in the production of knowledge, power, justice, and national identity become clear in their narratives through language, solidarity, and transgression. Moreover, drawing attention to the complexity of non-

Western experiences and epistemologies in the elaboration of a national consciousness, community, and anti-imperial thought and looking at these issues from the transoceanic perspective expose the coloniality of histories that trap us in that mode of “universalist” thinking. It also serves as a way to unite rather than maintain divisions between knowledges, peoples, and politics, be it in academic departments of “area studies” or be it in the increasing connectedness of the world’s populations.

As a result, the present study makes several contributions to both the Latin

American and Southeast Asian fields, most notably to the small, but growing body of literature on the Hispanic articulations between these regions. Additionally, it gives a fresh perspective on familiar figures and movements in both the Caribbean and in the

Philippines first by putting them in dialogue. For example, I have situated well-known

Puerto Rican figures Ramón de Emeterio Betances and José de Diego in a new light by connecting them with modernismo – traditionally they are not linked to the movement.

251

Yet, it is through their responses to modernity/coloniality that brings them into dialogue with the other modernistas. Also, while José Martí is commonly juxtaposed with José

Rizal in studies between Cuba and the Philippines, positioning his work alongside the more revolutionary Andrés Bonifacio starkly showcases their insurgent language in the fight for independence; similarly, Julian de Casal’s political sensibility is spotlighted over his artistic one. This study has also underlined some notable connections with lesser- studied propagandistas, members of the Katipunan, and non-Tagalogs. By featuring lesser-studied figures in both the propagandista and modernista movements as well as by drawing attention to lesser-studied works of the more celebrated ones, this project suggests new ways of thinking of modernity and modernismo in Latin America, as well as considers further research into the Propaganda Movement outside of Rizal.

Yet, in its attempt to give a varied sampling of voices to open up diverse connections and voices between the Caribbean and Asia, a number of important gaps and limitations must be considered. Regrettably, the study of women’s contributions are absent, limited by the deficiency of information – mostly on Filipino women during that time period –, as well as the lack of the availability and/or access to primary documents. I had considered the inclusion of the writings of Cuban Juana Borrero and Puerto Rican

Lola Rodríguez de Tío for this study, for example, but at the time of this writing, only brief biographies were to be found on any fin-de-siècle Filipino women. The significant growth of the study of women’s literature in the Caribbean and Latin America provides optimism; however, it is my hope that this project invites further investigation to recover these voices, especially in the Philippines.

252

Additionally, in Philippine studies, Tagalog as a language – and its speakers – tends to be the dominant area of study. While I do touch on one non-Tagalog with Isabelo de los Reyes, who was an Ilocano,46 further research might consider focusing on the voices of those who speak and write in languages outside of Tagalog, such as Ilocano,

Cebuano, and Pangasinan. Similarly, another rich area of investigation would focus on the Muslim community in the Philippines. During Spanish colonization, the Sultanate of

Maguindanao was able to defend most parts of the southern island of Mindanao, home to the majority of the Philippines’ Muslim population, and mostly prevented the Spaniards from colonizing this territory. In a similar light, indigenous and Afro-Caribbean voices are also absent from my narrative but by no means are any less important, especially considering their role in the emancipation of slavery in Jamaica, Cuba, and the

Dominican Republic and in the liberation of Haiti during the nineteenth century.

These, among others, would be fertile areas for future investigation in continuing to promote alternative epistemologies and decolonize knowledges and literature. It is my hope that this project invites further studies to discover alternative ways of thinking, viewing, and studying in order to create the tools for thinking outside of coloniality and turning universality on its head. Considering voices, literatures, and narratives within a transoceanic framework helps to foster understanding and lay the foundation for alternative modes of thinking that move toward focusing on what unites us rather than what divides us.

46 Meaning, he came from the Ilocos region, which is in the northwest part of the island of Luzon 253

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