Status Updates From Brains of the Nation: Pedro...

osige, kayo na pogi

HIGHLIGHT:

Like their counterparts in Latin America, [19th-century Filipino intellectuals] associated with Európeans, attended European-style schools, entered the modern professions, became proficient in metro politan languages, traveled widely, and avidly consumed Western culture. …

HIGHLIGHT:

“The country, [Clemente J. Zulueta] lamented, has been treated as a mere "appendix" to Spanish history.

NOTE:

Interesting to know that this observation is not recent (as in conceived in the last several decades, rather it is at least 100 years old).

HIGHLIGHT:

For Filipinos, revolution was not just a crash course in warfare, it was a school of learning. The forms of writing and composition corresponded to the exigencies of the time: proclamations, manifestoes, improvisatory theater, verses, and songs. The literature produced was not just war propaganda but texts that aimed to constitute a nation.

HIGHLIGHT:

There are indications that herbalists were even given permits to operate local pharmacies (botiquin), and as late as July 21, 1843, a governor-general's decree granted permits to mediquillos and herbolarios to minister to the native population although they were barred from treating Spaniards and other foreigners.

HIGHLIGHT:

It became a commonplace in carly nationalist polemics to blame Spanish missionaries for destroying precolonial writings bur while there were recorded instances of such destruction it was not widespread.

HIGHLIGHT:

The colonial intellectual is placed in a position where he has to learn and interpellate the discourse of the Other. This made the annotation an exemplary form of nationalist writing.

HIGHLIGHT:

AMONG HIS CONTEMPORARIES, Isabelo de los Reyes had the strongest sense of where he was coming from. In contrast, Pardo was the cosmopolitan outsider and Rizal-though he frequently looked towards Laguna as home—always imagined himself as being of a "nation" instead of a locality or region. …

HIGHLIGHT:

The case of Isabelo de los Reyes is instructive.
He waged a campaign for the ascendancy of reason and freedom, using the opportunities and resources available to him, contending with the obstacles and dangers of working within the colony, and deploying the advantages of his peculiar position. …

HIGHLIGHT:

[Filipino] morality, [Isabelo de los Reyes] says, can be reduced into the following precepts: "to love always and not to harm anybody," "to be just always and refrain from perpetrating abuses," to have "zeal for one's own development and one's neighbor's development and perfection, which is nothing else than the Universal Law of Progress.”

HIGHLIGHT:

In the early nineteenth century, Filipino meant a Spaniard born in the Philippines. By the 1860s, however, the word was increasingly used by natives (indios), Chinese and Spanish mestizos, and creoles to identify themselves as members of an emerging, multiracial community politically set apart from Spanish peninsulares.

HIGHLIGHT:

"An ordained nation, with a responsible and stable government, ATTRACTS FOREIGNERS AND THEIR CAPITAL; in the same manner, a distrustful government in a backward nation repels and scares them away [Pardo's emphasis]."

HIGHLIGHT:

[Pardo] WAS the leading intellectual architect of a postrevolutionary Philippines.

HIGHLIGHT:

In a Borgesian play of resemblances and repetitions, Pedro Paterno … still speaks to us today.

HIGHLIGHT:

while Rizal harnessed his arguments for what would be increasingly nationalist aims, Paterno deployed his theories for assimilationist purposes.

HIGHLIGHT:

Paterno was not his own perverse, esoteric creation. His assumptions and methods drew from the fund of Orientalist scholarship at the time: an interest in genetic explanations (tracing the origins of races, religions, laws and customs), the construction of synthetic, classificatory systems (with their bias for similitude and resemblance rather than discontinuity and difference); …

HIGHLIGHT:

Upwardly mobile, they identified with the "superior" Spanish culture rather than a "pure indio culture." Yet, given the obvious limits to their becoming Spaniards, the decline of the Chinese-mestizo category also meant a development towards "Filipinization" —at least, an urban, Hispanified, mixed-race version of Filipinization. The first move produced a Paterno. …

HIGHLIGHT:

Pedro Paterno took the high ground of modern science. He was not an indigenist. His claim was that he was a more enlightened exemplar of modernity than the foreigners (in particular, the Spaniards) who had written about the Philippines. His suit was that he spoke out of a broader view of world civilization and a better theoretical understanding of the historical dynamics of cultural progress. …

HIGHLIGHT:

Paterno as one of the pioneers of Philippine political science.

HIGHLIGHT:

The history of the oceans is the history of civilization: as the waters of the Mediterranean Sea bear in their depths the reflection of the civiliza. tion of ancient Greece and Rome, as the great Atlantic Ocean has long typified the progress of modern times, so shall the still vaster Pacific witness and exemplify the irresistible onward and upward advance of the future. …

HIGHLIGHT:

Paterno gloried in their feat of breaking into the European art world with paintings that demonstrated Filipinos could "out-European" the Europeans.

HIGHLIGHT:

Paterno could have been invented by Miguel de Cervantes or Jorge Luis Borges.

NOTE:

Which, for the record, I have just finished reading!