I have noticed that many members of PHCT group are still undecided as to the real story behind the name ‘Filipino’, particularly on the question who were the one called Filipinos in Philippine history. I am posting here excerpts from a less known piece written by the late Dr. Domingo Abella, a medical doctor who was recognised as historian and contributed to the preservation of Philippine history, including the formation of what is now called National Archives of the Philippines. Dr. Abella believed that the term Filipino as we understand it today took place towards the end of the Spanish colonial regime. I purposely did not include his footnotes to make this posting brief. I hope this would add to everyone’s information. For those who would like to read the entire historical treatise, I suggest you get hold of the book entitled ‘From Indio to Filipino and Some Historical Works.’ ‘From Indio to Filipino’ By Dr. Domingo Abella Few of the names that the original explorers attached to their discoveries survived long enough to gain currency. Magellan named the first group of islands they encountered after crossing the equator ‘Islas de las velas latinas’ and later, after some unfortunate incidents with the local population, ‘Islas de los ladrones’. Magellan’s illustrious predecessor in the service of the Spanish Crown had as little luck with his place names. Columbus set sail to discover the westward route to India and was confident enough in his skill as navigator and geographer to believe that his expedition had indeed reached India. Thus, he called indios (Indians) the natives of the lands he set foot on. His mistake was eventually recognised and corrected. The continent he had stumbled upon would take its named after an Italian geographer and ‘Las Indias’ would be left to grace lands somewhat farther east. But the term that Columbus had used survived to the present day to identify, not a place, but a whole groups of peoples. Spain and the rest of Europe were quite content to retain the label ‘indios’ for the indigenous population of Columbus’ New World—later to be known as America. Clearly, however, the term ‘indios’, as it passed into common usage, could no longer be taken in the sense in which Columbus had first used it; the people Columbus called ‘indios’ did not inhabit India, or ‘Las Indias’. It had, in fact, acquired a new meaning. As used in contemporary chronicles and as preserved even in recent historical accounts, ‘indios’ referred to what was indigenous, autochtonous aboriginal, native. The term applied not only to the peoples Calumbus found in ‘his’ indies, but also to those Magellan encountered in the Pacific. For the Spaniards–up to the very recent period, according to the historian Manuel Ballesteros Gaibrois–the people settled in the lands discovered and colonised by the ‘conquiestadores’, no matter in what part of the world, were ‘indios’ as well, of course, as their ‘pure-blooded’ descendants. Europe thus gained from Columbus’ voyage both a new continent and new race. The peoples of this race were described by a variety of terms such as ‘redskins’ and ‘copperskins’ which stressed the fact that they were different from the white, black, and yellow races with which the West was familiar. The ‘Diccionario de la Lengua Española’ preserves and underlines the racial element in the comprehension of the term ‘indio’ when it notes that it also applied to those descended from the original population of America or the ‘Indian Occidentales’ without admixture of any other race. ‘Mestizo’ or ‘mestiza’ especially to the offspring of a white man and an ‘india’ women, or of an ‘indio’ and a white woman. As in the Americas, the Spaniards in the Philippines rapidly became the dominant social, ecclesiastical, economic, and political group. But in the Philippines, the Spaniards remained, throughout the whole of the colonial regime, a narrow oligarchy ruling a population of natives. Until the loss of the American colonies, the Philippines served as a mere outpost of Mexico. The number of Spaniards and Europeans, as late as the turn of the nineteenth century, barely exceeded a thousand. In contrast, Cuba, in the eighteenth century, already counted some 100,000 Europeans. The evolution of colonial society in the Philippines thus differed markedly from the course it took in the Americas. The division between the Spaniards and the natives, though it never entirely disappeared, became less important with the decline of the ‘indio’ population and the emergence of a sizeable ‘mestizo’ group. The more significant cleavage became that separating the ‘peninsulares’ from the ‘criollo’ population. In the Philippines, miscegenation did not take place to any significant extent as it did in the Americas. The colour bar between Spaniards and ‘indios’, as a result, persisted throughout the Spanish period and strengthened the horizontal line dividing the colonial master and the subject peoples. The laws on tribute and forced labour reflected and institutionalised these two mutually reinforcing barriers. The dominant political class of Spaniards did not have to pay the tribute and render the forced labor demanded from the subject class of ‘indios’ . Sancianco y Gozon exposed, in bitter terms, the prevailing pattern of racial discrimination less than two decades before the overthrow of Spanish rule. In his explaination Sancianco y Gozon was, in a sense, much too elaborate. Those who led the revolution against Spain cared only about two groups: the ‘kastila’ and the ‘indios’. With the expulsion of the Spaniards, the archipelago passed – if only for a brief period –into the hands of the Filipinos. The term clearly could no longer mean what it did during the Spanish period: ‘full-blooded Spaniards born in the Philippines’’. It could only refer now to the indigenous, population of the Philippines, the group the Spaniards knew as ‘indios’. The use of the term ‘filipino’ to identify the Malay population caused no confusion in the minds of the ‘indios’ of the period. For the ‘indios’ who had lived under Spanish rule, the term was not ambiguous at all; they had never cared about or even recognised the artificial distinction which the Spaniards maintained between the ‘peninsulares’ and the ‘criollos’ (filipinos). The confusion has been in the mind of the later or modern writers who have mistakenly identified the ‘filipinos’ of the Spanish period with the Filipinos of today. This equation, at first glance, would seem to enhance the stature of the indigenous population. If true, it would mean that within the few decades of Spanish rule, the natives were attending universities and, by the eighteenth century, were occupying high civil and ecclesiastical posts. The ‘filipino’ Miguel Lino de Espeleta became Archbishop of Manila and in the second half of the eighteenth century even acted as governor and captain general of the Philippines and president of the Royal Audiencia of Manila. This ‘filipino’, of course, was not Malay at all, but was a full-blooded Spanish ‘criollo’, that is, a full-blooded Spaniards born in the Philippines–the counterpart of the ‘americanos’ who was the full-blooded Spaniards born in the Americas. To persist in identifying the Malay Filipino with the ‘criollo filipino’ does not credit to the indigenous population. On the contrary, this interpretation would obscure one of the greatest achievements of the Malay Filipinos: ‘the laborious process by which, surmounting racial prejudice and institutionalised discrimination, the Malay transformed themselves from the lowly ‘indio’, a coloured subject, to the independent Filipino of today’. All illustrations coming from the original collection of the National Library of the Philippines
Posted on: Sat, 09 Nov 2013 11:16:43 +0000
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