Mexican Footprints
By Jaime B. Veneraci?n
(Jaime B. Veneraci?n is a history professor at the University of Philippines. This article originally appeared in FILIPINAS magazine, July 1997, as part of their Centennial Notes, a literary series leading up to the 1998 Philippine Centennial.)
In the late afternoon of May 1, 1996, while on a visit on Oaxaca City in south Mexico, my wife Corazon and I were surprised to meet descendants of a Filipino. They were a group of old women and teenagers participating in the annual "maize festival" in that city.
How it happened was a mere accident. They were waiting in the plaza of the church of Sto. Domingo for the start of a procession. My wife wanted to take pictures of the beautiful girls who were dressed in colorful clothes for which southern Mexico is famous. The girls obliged. Thanking them profusely for their kindness, we asked for their addresses so we could send them copies of the pictures. One of the teenagers wrote "8 Filipinenses, Oaxaca."
"Could you have made a mistake?" my wife asked in passable Spanish. She thought Filipinenses was "Filipinas." The girls said there was no mistake, explaining to us that their district had been named after San Felipe de las Aguas, the patron of rain. But the old women sitting under the jacaranda trees (similar to our banaba and fire trees) nearby overheard the conversation and spiritedly joined in.
"So you are Filipinos. We are also Filipinos, because our great, great, grandfather was a Filipino by the name of Lorenzo Paulo." According to the women, Paulo, whom they lovingly called "nuestro patron," was a sailor in the 19th century who met their great, great-grandmother in Tijuana (near the U.S. border). As the trans-Pacific railway was being built by a British firm called Pearson and Company, Paulo sought and got employment there. He and his wife moved south and finally settled in the coastal town of Salina Cruz, in the state of Oaxaca.
"You should visit our place," one of the women told us. "You should see the monument in the town center where Lorenzo Paulo is identified as one of its founding fathers." But when told that the place was about 200 kilometers over dirt roads, we had to back out with excuses. We had to return to Mexico City the next day.
D?ja Vu
Had my research stint been longer, I would've gone to Salina Cruz. I want to know what attracted a Filipino to settle in a place so far from his own country. Was it the similarity in the way people lived or practiced their religion, and he wouldn't have missed anything at all?
Although Oaxaca is a bit higher in latitude than the Philippines, its weather approximated our tropical climate. For this reason, the planting season started at the same time as ours, and the festivities and rituals related to planting occurred at the same time. In the Philippines, processions in May, such as the alay and the nin-day evening processions called the lutrina, were the welcoming rituals for the new planting season. The alay originally came from the very ancient past when young girls, always the symbol of purity and renewal, went to the sacred caves to offer garlands of flowers to the anito or the spirits of the forefathers. Reconfigured into the Christian tradition, alay became the offering of the young for the Holy Virgin. The lutrina, the prayers uttered by farmers as they walked through barren fields, were pleadings for the first rain.
The maize festival in Oaxaca City looked very similar to our own lutrina. For instance, the procession didn't start while the sun was still up, but the moment it got dark, and when flashed of lightning forboded rain, the young girls and the old women lined up for their procession, and some danced to music from a band. It seemed to be the moment they had been waiting for. They seemed unmindful of being drenched with rain; in fact, they were happy, perhaps because God answered their prayers.
Any adventurer of Paulo's kind would've stayed in Oaxaca for this and other reasons. Unlike his own Philippines, which was suffering from colonial rule, independent Mexico of the 19th century had begun large-scale commercial developments. Railways crisscrossing the vast desert plains and mountains were being constructed. There were also political instabilities of failures of law and order. Oaxaca was always at the center of political action in the 19th century, with two of its most important political personalities becoming national leaders--the revered Benito Juarez and the detested dictator, Porfirio Diaz. Adventurers like Paulo would've relished the opportunities such an unstable society offered to immigrants like him.
The Subversive
While Paulo's heirs couldn't say if he was ever politically involved in the tumultous birth of Mexico as a nation, it was a possibility. There was a Filipino who did participate, and his name was Ramon Fabie.
When Fr. Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla started the Mexican War of Independence against Spain on Sept. 16, 1810, he had Fabie as a lieutenant. Belonging to a wealthy family in Manila (the Fabie state was in Paco), Fabie had been in Guanajuato, then the center of gold and silver mining, since age 16 to study mining engineering. At age 25, he got entangled with the political activities of Fr. Hidalgo, who wanted to make Guanajuato his revolutionary capital.
The conquest of Guanajuato by Fr. Hidalgo's revolutionary army was bloody. The Spanish defenders, seen as exploiters of the obreros in the mines, were dealt with severely. Those who exacted revenge or recently emerged from years of hard work in the deep tunnels of the mines committed a lot of killings. For about two months, Hidalgo's victorious army declared the city "independent." Then tragedy struck. The Spanish loyalist forces counterattacked and, in an even bloodier manner, gave the defenders no quarter. Ramon Fabie survived the siege but was captured. Together with several others, he was hanged.
Dangerous Deportees
That decade-long war of independence in Mexico led to events that influenced political developments in the Philippines. For one thing, several revolutionaries captured by the government were deported to the Philippines. Distributed in varios presidios or military fortifications, they brought the news of developments back home. The many reports of local functionaries expressed concern about the negative influence these new arrivals brought to their respective communities. What made the local officials really worried was the unusual stature of these deportees. One of them, by the name of Epigmenio Gonzalez, was a close confidante of Fr. Hidalgo in the initial meetings of revolutionaries at Queretaro, near Mexico City. Many of the major personalities of the revolution, including Hidalgo, Ignacio Allende and Juan Aldama, met in Gonzalez' store and restaurant, in the guise of a literary circle. Gonzalez' major contribution to the movement was the writing of "Aurora Queretana," perhaps of the Mexican people's earliest declarations of independence from Spain. "Aurora" referred to the eastern morning star whose risings was symbolic of the coming new age. The authorities deemed it subversive not only because of the metaphors it contained, but also because of its mention of "amor a la patria" or "love of country(Mexico)" at a time when the people were expected to be just Spain's loyal subjects.
For such activities, nothing short of death was the penalty meted by the local government. Fortunately for Gonzalez, his brother Emeterio and about 40 others, the central government in Madrid committed their penalty to a destierro perpetuo or deportation, to the Philippines. For more than 25 years many exiles persevered in various presidios, until Mexican independence allowed them to return to Mexico. Some, such as Emeterio, died in the Philippines. But Epigmenio and the others were fortunate to go back to a country now freed from colonial rule.
Ever grateful to their heroic contributions, the Mexican government gave them monthly pensions as veterans and heroes for as long as they lived. In the centennial of independence at the turn of the century, the government built a commemorative monument in Mexico City, in which were inscribed their names and that of all other major figures of the War of Independence of 1810..
Creole Revolt
Meanwhile in the Philippines, a year after Mexico declared itself independent in 1821, a mutiny of Creoles or criollos (Mexican-born Spanish) broke out. It was led by Andres Novales, Luis Rodriguez Varela and the Bayot brothers. What triggered the revolt was the order of the colonial government to disarm the Creole solders. The order suggested that the loyalty of the soldiers was in doubt after Mexico declared its independence from Spain. But the Creole officers thought this was just a ruse to prevent them from getting promoted. They feared being displaced from their jobs by recently arrived troops from Spain.
For several days in June 1822, the revolt was a success. The rebels took over the residence of the governor-general in Manila as well as public offices and strategic forts in the other parts of the archipelago. However, the government mustered loyalist Pampango troops from various presidios for a decisive counterattack. Now outnumbered by local troops, the Creole rebels surrendered. Some were executed outright, while most were sent back to Mexico the following year aboard the galleon "Flor del Mar."
What made this revolt politically significant for Filipinos was its demonstration of Spanish military weakness. It also called to public attention the personalities behind the uprising as well as their writings, which previously circulated only among the elite. One of its leaders, Luis Rodriguez Varela, had written a tract called "Proclama Historial" in which he referred to himself as "el conde Filipino."
The tract implied that Rodriguez Varela was commited to the King of Spain, who was deposed by the French as a result of Napoleon Bonaparte's expansionism, but it also agitated for some reforms that would be needed in order to secure the loyalty of the subjects in the Philippines. Varela also attacked the corruption in the local government.
Perhaps for the first time, a political statement used the term "Filipino" as a national identification. Previously, in the late 17th and 18th centuries, "Filipino" had been used by woodcut engraver Nicolas Bagay. The famous maps of Fr. Murillo Velarde and other religious drawings were signed by Bagay as "por Nicolas Bagay el indio filipino." But, as pointed out by historians, since indio was a generic term referring to all subjects of Spain, another qualification to indicate geographic origin had to be used for those indios from the Philippines. In the case of Varela, however, his assertion of being a Filipino already carried the notion of nationality as propagated by the French Revolution of 1789.
Nation as a Notion
How this distinction was understood by brown, native Filipinos may only be extrapolated from the concepts and phrases that circulated in literature and documents at that time. Contemporaneous with Varela's "Proclama Historial" was Francisco (Balagtas) Baltazar's "Florante at Laura," which, though written in the Spanish corrido genre, didn't tell the usual religious story. Instead, it spoke of a hero, Florante, who was a deposed ruler of a faraway kingdom of Albania. The pretender to the throne exploited the people, took away Florante's sweetheart, Laura, and had Florante tied to a tree in the forest where he could be devoured by lions. Florante was saved by a Moro prince who, just like him, was a victim of schemers and pretenders. The Christian and the Moro then found themselves together in the struggle to recover their respective kingdoms.
Francisco Baltazar referred to the lost kingdom as "ang bayan kong sawi," roughly, "my unfortunate bayan," a bayan exploited by pretenders and colonizers and which should be defended by Christian and Moro brothers-in-arms. And used here, "bayan" already presaged the concept of a nation, a construct presupposing the existence of other nations. The knowledge that there already existed certain places such as Albania made it valid for one to have a "bayan" of one's own.
In other words, at the time of the Creole revolt, there already circulated in the Philippines words and concepts, even viewpoints, about the need to unite various ethnic groups into one "bayan." Later, this would materialize in the writings of Andres Bonifacio and Emilio Jacinto as "Inang Bayan" (Motherland) who would be defended against all odds by her "mga anak ng bayan" (children of the nation).
The seeds of national community had begun to sprout in this period between 1800 and 1840, when these formulations of cultural and geographic identity began to be understood by the people.
International Solidarity
The revolutionary government of Mexico had anticipated some of these developments, if we go by its secret memorandum recognizing the importance of maintaining a bond with the Philippines. It said:
"Now that we Mexicans have fortunately obtained our independence by revolution against Spanish rule, it is our solemn duty to help the less fortunate countries... especially in the Philippines, with whom our country has had the most intimate relations during the last two centuries and a half. We should send secret agents... with a message to their inhabitants to rise in revolution against Spain and that we shall give them financial and military assistance to win their freedom.
"... In the eventuality of the separation of the Philippines from Spain we must take utmost efforts to revive the former Acapulco-Manila trade which had been one of the contributory factors to Mexico's economic prosperity. As revived, this trade shall not be a government monopoly, as Spain made it, but shall be a free enterprise which all merchants are welcome to be engaged in. The restrictive measures that Spain previously imposed must all be abolished.
"... Should the Philippines succeed in gaining her independence from Spain, we must felicitate her warmly and form an alliance of amity and commerce with her as a sister nation. Moreover, we must resume the intimate Mexico-Philippine relations, as they were during the halcyon days of Acapulco-Manila trade."
Secret agents were sent to the Philippines, but they weren't insightful enough to make contact with local revolutionaries. This was still more than 50 years before the Katipunan. While there were murmurings and unrest, the language and tenor of these secret movements would be completely incomprehensible to a foreign agent. Returning to Mexico to render their reports, they were filled with disappointment. But Bishop Antonio Juaquin Perez of Puebla, a member of the Supreme Junta, advised them not to be disheartened and, in these prophetic words, told them:
"Never mind. In God's own time, the Filipinos will rise in arms against Spain and win their independence like our people. Then, and only then, shall we be able to resume our ties with the Philippines."
