Apolinario Mabini, Isabelo de los Reyes, and the Emergence of a “Public” 1 Resil B. Mojares Abstract The paper sketches the factors behind the emergence of a “public” in the late nineteenth century, and locates in this context the distinctive careers of Apolinario Mabini and Isabelo de los Reyes. The activities of Mabini and de los Reyes were enabled by the emergence of a “public sphere” in the colony, at the same time that their activities helped define and widen a sphere that had become more distinctly ‘national’ in character. Complicating the Habermasian characterization of a “bourgeois public sphere,” the paper calls for a fuller study of the more popular agencies, sites, media, and networks in the formation of a public in nineteenth-century Philippines. Plaridel • Vol. 13 No. 1 • 2016 1 - 15 THEY are an odd couple. They were born in the same month and year (July 1864), studied for the same profession in the same university, and participated in the biggest event of their time, the anti-colonial struggle for independence. Yet, it seems that they never met. They were contrasting personalities, to begin with: on one hand, an Ilocano of the landed gentry in Vigan, energetic, individualistic, confident and reckless; on the other hand, the son of poor peasants in Batangas, paralytic, very private, and highly principled, almost puritanical. If there is one quick lesson to be drawn from these contrasts, it is this: the struggle for independence was a complex, volatile event that encompassed divergent personalities and diverse forms of action, played out in social space that was heterogeneous and dynamic. What was this “social space” like, in which Isabelo de los Reyes and Apolinario Mabini emerged? The nineteenth century in the Philippines saw the appearance of a “public.” I take public (Latin populus, publicus) in the classic, commonly understood sense of a body of people bound by a common interest in problems of state and civic life, and primed to act on them (Habermas, 1974, 1991). Such a public emerges out of a set of enabling conditions that create space autonomous and apart from the state, space in which contact and communication of a certain speed and scale can take place. I shall further specify this by speaking of a “national” or “proto-national” public that transcends locality (town, province) and limited sectarian affiliations in recognizing or claiming a community of interests spanning (in the case of Spanish Philippines) the entire colony itself. The large factors that enabled the formation of a public in the nineteenth century were the expansion of the market economy and the colonial state, interrelating with such facts as population growth and urbanization, faster travel and communications, and increased educational opportunities. These phenomena were interrelated. The expansion of the economy after the opening of Manila to world trade in 1834 spurred the development of travel and communications; led to population growth and urbanization; and necessitated the expansion of the colonial bureaucracy and educational opportunities. All these stimulated new needs and new ways of looking and acting in the world, and primed the appearance of sites and networks for critical- rational discourse in that space between the private individual and the state that Jurgen Habermas (1991) calls the “public sphere.” Such a sphere was new since it can only come about when people begin to critically disengage or distance themselves from a feudal monarchy, colonial authority, or church—institutions that do not allow for a “public” since their power is 2 Mojares • Mabini, de los Reyes, and the Emergence of a “Public” given and unquestioned—and people begin to see themselves no longer as mere subjects but as free-thinking “citizens,” whether of the colonial state or an alternative order they would create out of it. Following Habermas (1991), the existence of a public presupposes certain claims: that government be transparent and accountable (to use today’s idiom); that rationality instead of obscurantism govern public matters; and that citizens enjoy the rights of participation and “supervision” over government through the efficacies of “public opinion” built on the freedoms of information, assembly, and speech. These were the claims at the heart of the nineteenth-century Filipino reform movement. To trace the emergence of a public in the Philippines, therefore, is to tell the story of the reform movement and the revolution that took place when this movement failed. Here I would like to speak about how a “public” germinated in the time of Mabini and de los Reyes by focusing on the role of education, economic networks and occupational sites, the press and modern, voluntary organizations. Education was an enabling factor in the creation of a public. The generation of Mabini and de los Reyes had educational opportunities that were not available to “natives” of an earlier generation. The number of schools had grown, and education was taking a more secular turn as the civil government assumed a more active role in a field that had been the almost exclusive preserve of the Church. Stimulated by the need for skilled manpower in a modernizing economy and bureaucracy, religious seminaries began to accept students who were not bound for the priesthood. In the last three decades of the nineteenth century, University of Santo Tomas began to offer degrees in secular fields like medicine and pharmacy, jurisprudence, philosophy and letters, and the sciences. Between 1861 and 1898, some 40,158 students attended Santo Tomas. Eighty-nine percent of these students were enrolled in secular programs (34 percent in jurisprudence, 22 percent in medicine, and 22 percent in philosophy) (Mojares, 2006). An aspect of education at this time (and one not well-studied) was the proliferation of privately-initiated, non-Church schools called latinidades, the most advanced of which offered the equivalent of a college education.2 By the 1890s, there were some 1,888 such institutes in the Philippines, no less than 28 of them in Manila and its suburbs. While the high authorities complained that many of the latinities were run by “incompetent teachers and university flunkers,” it is important to note that these were schools mostly run in private homes by Filipinos and could thus operate outside the close surveillance of church and state. Plaridel • Vol. 13 No. 1 • 2016 3 While colonial education was often characterized by Filipino nationalists as medieval, the fact is that for all its defects it opened up spaces for modern, critical thinking as a result, whether intended or unintended, of school instruction or as a vital side-product of the opportunities created by young people from different localities coming together to interact and learn, whether in or outside the classroom. Proof of the value of these opportunities can be found in Mabini and de los Reyes, who (unlike the better-known propagandists) were educated within the colony. De los Reyes attended an Augustinian seminary in Vigan, then Manila’s San Juan de Letran at the time Mabini was there, and (like Mabini) earned a degree in law at Santo Tomas. Mabini’s case is more exemplary. He attended latinity schools in Batangas, particularly that of the Tagalog priest Valerio Malabanan, a school the historian Fidel Villaroel calls “the most respectable center of secondary education in the country, outside Manila” (Villaroel, 1979, p. 14). Mabini had a discontinuous education because poverty forced him to suspend his studies at various times to work as houseboy, teacher, and law clerk. He taught in Malabanan’s school and other latinidades, and in 1893 opened a school of his own in Intramuros. Such was his determination that he earned his bachelor’s degree and teacher’s certificate at San Juan de Letran (1881-87) and licentiate in jurisprudence at Santo Tomas (1888-94), and was admitted to the bar in 1894. Another axis in the emergence of a public were the economic networks and occupational sites created by advances in domestic travel, a diversifying urban economy, and expanding colonial bureaucracy. The expansion of economic activities and the colonial bureaucracy fueled a great deal of population movement in the nineteenth century. Increased mobility was an important factor in the formation of a public since travel was a medium through which people shared information and ideas, recognized common interests, and formed networks. Benedict Anderson (1983) has pointed to the circulation of civil servants and the exodus of students to Manila and other urban centers as factors in the rise of an “imagined” national community. There were other movements. T.H. Pardo de Tavera (1925) cites the travels to the national capital of economically empowered principales from the provinces as a factor in the rise of a new political consciousness: On returning to their pueblo, they took in their hearts and minds the germ of what was subsequently called subversive ideas and later still “filibusterism”…. Already the “brutes loaded with gold” dared to discuss with their curate, 4 Mojares • Mabini, de los Reyes, and the Emergence of a “Public” complain against the alcalde, defend their homes against the misconduct of the lieutenant or sergeant of the police force…. Their money permitted them to effectively defend questions involving money first, then, those of a moral character. (p. 151) The value of these travels is shown in the case of Isabelo de los Reyes who frequently commuted between Manila and Ilocos in the course of his varied employments as publisher, journalist, and trader of commodities, as well as Apolinario Mabini’s own move from Batangas to Manila. A fuller study of the spread of the revolution in the provinces will show the important role played by people who moved, such as civil servants, traders, soldiers, and seamen.