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Kultur Dokumente
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I . Although J!;abelo had a long and hooorable career- aspects of which will be
discu55ed in the final chapter of this book- -no remotely adeqjl.ilte professional
biography yet exists. The account of his youth that follows is drawn rrom the work
of his eldest son, Jose de los Reyes y Sevilla, Bioxrufl/t del Smack>r /salwlo tit los .
Rl'yes .r Florentino, Padre de los Ohrero.r .v Prodcmwdor de Ia Jglesiu Filipino
(Manila: Nueva Era, 1947), pp. 1- 6: Jose L. Llanes, The Lije c{
Senutor lsabclo de/los Reyes (monograph reprinted from the Weekly Mag<~zine of
the Munila Chronicle, July 24 and 3 1. and August 7. 1949). pp. 1- 6: and the entry
under his _name in National Historical Institute, Filipinqs in Histor.1, vol. 2 (Manila:
NHI, 1990), pp. 137- 9.
.
ludepe~~tlieute
-''- -
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1 \
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,.,.,,:.t
Binrmd(> Squar(' iu Manila . circa 1890.
in St Louis.~ This accomplishment did not save her marriage, and the sixyear-old lsabelo was entrus ted to a rich relative. Mcno Crisologo. who later
put him into the grammar school attached to the local seminary run by the
Augustinians. It appear:; that ab usive behavior by the Peninsular Spanish
friars arou~ed in the boy a hatred of the Catholic religious Orders which
persisted all his life and had serious consequences for his career. In 18HO aeed
sixteen . he escaped to Manila, where he quickl y acquired a BA at the ('~le~io
de San Juan de Letran; after that, he studied Jaw, history and palaeograpl1y
. at the ancien t (Oorninican) Pontifical University of Samo Tomas, then the
only university in all of East and Southeast Asia.
.
IIllo a rrc h Vrgan family on April 19. 1849. Her paren ts had the same surmunc and
were probahly cousins of sorts. It seems that both were also close relatives o f Jo~c
Rizal's rnaternnl g~<lndfather. She was a precocio us child. and started to ~o mposc
verses a t ~he age o l ten. 111 llocano nnd in the Spani~h her friar tutor taught her. She
was m<~rrrcd off a t the age of fourteen. and gave birth to lsa helo at sixteen. /\Ia~. she
died at thirty-live. leaving live c hildren behind. See the entry for her in Natio nal
H istorical Institute, Filipinos in His10ry. vol. 5 (M anila: NHJ. 1996). pp. 141 2.
M eanwhile, lsabclo's father had died. and the boy. obliged now to support
himself. plunged into the burgeoning world of journalism, contributing Lo
most o r M <l nila 's newspapers. and in 1889 even publishing his own. 1
1/ocauo. said to be the first-e ver solely in a Philippine vernacular. But while
still a teenage r. Isabelo read an appeal in Manila's Spanish-language newspaper La Oceania sp01iola (fo unded in 1877) asking readers to contribute
article~ to develop a new science, named el.folk-lore, followed by a simple
sketch of how this was to be done. He immediately con tacted the Spanish
editor, who gave him a collection of folk-lore books and asked him to
write about the customs of his native !locos. Two months later Isabelo set to
work. and soon thereafter started publishing -not merely on !locos. bul also
on his wife's township of Malabon. on the outskirts of Manila, on the
Centra 1 Luzon province of Zambalcs, and in genera I terms. what he called cl
folk-lore filipino. ll became one of the great passions of his life.
could no longer understand one another-opening the way for a muchneeded international discussion, in which the Anglo-Saxons appeared both
more modest and more practical. At the other extreme were those Spanish
folklo[ists who were merely sentimental collectors of vanishing customs and
conceptions for some future museum of the past. lsabelo made clear what he
himself though t fo lklo re was about, and how he saw its social value. In the
first place, it offered an opportunity for a reconstruction of the indigenous
past that was im~ssible in the Philippines by any other means. given the
absence of pre-spanish monuments or inscriptions. and, indeed, the nearabsence of writlen records. (When Rizal tried to do the same thing later. he
saw no other way to proceed than to read between the lines of the work oft he
best of the Spanish administrators of the early Conquest cr~.) Serious
research on customs, beliefs, superstitions, adages. tongue-twisters. incantations and so on would throw light on what he referred to as the " primitive
religion" of the pre-Spanish past. But-and here the young I!ocano sharply
distinguished himself from amateur costumhristas--he also underlined the
importance of comparisons. He confessed that before the completion of his
research he had heen sure that the neighboring Tagalogs and llocanos were
ra:as distintas (distinct races) on account of their diiTerenl langlJages.
rhysiognomies, behavior and so on. But comparison had prov.ed to him
that he had been wrong and that the two ethnicities clearly derived from a
single source. The implication of the title Elfolk-lorefilipino was that further
research would show that all the indigenous inhabitants of the archipelago
had a common origin. no matler how many languages they now ,o;poke or
how different their present customs and religious affiliations. All this meant
that, contra the colony's clerical historiographers, who began their narratives
with the sixteent h-century Spanish conqtJcst, the real history of the archipelago and its pucblofpuehlos (here he hesitated often) stretched far fmther .
back in time, and thus could not be framed by coloniality.
..
....
FOREST BROTHERS
In EJ falk-lore fi/ipi~w, lsabelo did not describe himself as ''a Filipino,
bec~use the nahonaltst usage was not yet familiar in the colony. Besides, un
fi!tpmo ~as then exactly what he was not: a creole. He did, however. describe
h1mself m other ways: s~metimes, for example, as an indigene (out never by
the contemptuous Spamsh term indio), and sometimes as an llocano. In a
rcmark~b~e passage he argued: "Spell king of patriotism, has it not frequently
heen sa1d m the newspapers that, for me. only llocos and Jlocanos are good?
Every~ne serves his puC'blo to his own manner of thinking. 1 believ; 1am
here contnbutmg to the illumination of the past of my O\\'n pueblo ... F.lsc~her:, however: he insisted that so strict had been his objectivity that he had
sac~r~ced to ~c1encc the afTections of the llocanos, who complain that 1have
p~bhcrzcd the1r least attractive practices." Luckily, however, "I have received an enthusi~stic re.sponse from various savants fsabios] in Europe, who
say .that, by settmg as1de a misguided patriotism, I have offered signal
services to !locos, mi patriu admada, because I have provided scholars with
abuJ~dant materials for ~tudying its prehistory and other scientific topics
.
relatmg to th1s ... provmce [si<l"l.l
Rizal opened his enraged novel Noli me Tangere with a celebrated Preface
addressed to h1s motherland, which included these words: "Deseando tu
salud que es Ia nuestra. Y ?uscando el major tratamiento, hare contigo Je que
con sus enfermos los an~t~uos: ex~onianlos en las gradas del templo, para
que c~da persona que vm1esc de mvocar a Ia Divinidad les propusicse un
rem d "(De
e to
smng ~our well-b:ing, which is our own, and searching for the
best cure (for your dJseascJ, I wtll do with you as the ancients did with their
12. Dizon lmson, p. 13.
13. EFF. pp. 18 and 17.
affiicted: exposed them on the steps of the temple so that each one who came
lo invoke the Divinity would propose a cure). 14 And in the last poem he
wrote before his execution in 1896, he too spoke of his pmria at.lorada. But
was it lsabelo's'!
There is a beautiful sentence in the Introduction to El/illk-lore.lilipino in
which lsabe1o described himself as "hermano de los selvaticos, aetas,
igorrotes y tinguianes" (brother of the forest peoples, the Aeta, the lgorots
and the Tinguians). These so-called primitive peoples, most of them pagan
before the twentieth century dawned, and many never subjugated by the
Spanish colonial regime, lived and live in the long cordillera that Oanks the
narrow coastal plain ofllocos.ln his boyhood.lsabelo would have seen them
coming down from the forests in their "outlandish garb'~ to trade their forest
products for lowland commodities. To this day, a form of llocano is the
lingua franca of the Gran Cordillera. No. one else in lsabelo's time, certainly
no one who counted himself an ilustradn, would have spoken in such terms of
these forest-dwellers who seemed, in their untamed fastnesses, utterly remote
from any urban. Hispanicized, Catholicized milieu. (And in those days
lsabelo did not speak of any other ethnic groups in Las Filipinas as his
hemumos.) Here one begins to see how it was possible for him to think of his
province as a big pueblo and a pat ria adorada. sii1ce in the most concrete way
it linked as brothers the "wild" pagans of the mountains and a man who won
prizes in Madrid. Here also one detects an underlying reason why, in his
prot;>-nationalist strivings. lsabelo went to folklore. rather than the novel or
the.broadshee~: Folklore-comparative folklore-enabled him to bridge the
deepest chasm in colonial society, which lay not between colonized and
colonii:crs . they all lived in the lowlands, they were all Catholics, and they
dealt with. one another all the time. It w;ts the abyss between a'l of these ;
people and those whom we would t()day .call "tribal minorities":.hill-people,
nomadic swidden-farmers, "head-hunters," men, women and children facing .
a future of possibly violent assimilation, ev~J1:e~tefllllnat.t()n. Out of d .
fitlk-Jore, child of William Thoms, there thus emerged a strange new
brotherhood, and an adored father/motherland for the young lsabelo.
STRANGE BEAUTIES
What were lhe deeper purposes of the folklorist's work in Las Islas Filipinas?
Apart from its potential contributions to the modern sciences, and to the
reconstruction or the character of "primitive man," we can uncover three
t4. Jose Rizal. Noli me wngere (Manila: lnstiiuto Nacional de Historia, 1978).
frontispiece.
15. EFF. P- 15. Juan Luna ( 1857-99), whom we shall meet again. was a fellow
llocano who he~<~rnc the most famous native painter of the Spanish colonial era. His
T~e l~eu/1~ t!/ Clcup~lru won the second medal at the I S8t Fine Arts Exposition in
Matlnd, h1s Spolwrmm a gold medal at the same venue in 18&4. and his 11!e &mfr of
L:_ptmt? a gold med?l at the Barcelona Fine Arts Exhibition in 1888. Felill ResurrecCion Httlalgo y_ Padtlla_ ( l 853 1913) was o nly slightly less successful. Hidalgo WHS a
Tagalog, born m Mamlu and raised there like Luna.
introduceo here hy the Spaniards in past centuries. T he list should not surprise
unyonc. ivc n that in the ea rly days of Spanish dol1'lination the most ridiculous
e
.
111
heliefs lfas cree11citL~ mcis <th.wrdas} were in vogue on the Pemnsu la.
Mischievously, the list begins thus:
When ro~sters reach old age or have sp<:nt seven years in someone's house, they lay
an egg from which hatches a certai11 green lizard that kills the maste_r of that hou~:
o!
bcli~fs had easy analogues in the bi7.arreries of Iberia, Italy, Central Europe
even England.
'
The third aim w~s political self-criticism. lsabelo wrote that he was trying
to show, through h1s systematic display of el sahl!r popular. those reforms in
the 1d~~s and ~veryday practices of the pueblo that must be undertaken in a
self-cntt~al spmt. He spoke of his work as being about "something much
more senous than mocking my pai.ran(Js, who actually will Jearn to correct
thcmse~ves once they see themselves described." In this light. folklore would
be a ~mror held up before a people, so that, in the future they could move
slcadtly along the road toward human emancipation. It is clear then that
lsabelo was writing ror one and a half audiences Span1ards h ' 1 '
1
.
, w ose anguage
1e was usmg. a_n d hi~ own puebln, whose language he was not using. and of
whom only a tmy mmorily could read his work.
. Where did lsabelo position himself in undertak ing this task? At this
Juncture we finally come to perhaps the most interesting part of our enquiry.
For most of the .hundreds of pages of his book. lsabelo spoke as if he were
not an llocano hmself. or. at least, as if he were standing o utside his people.
The llocanos almost always appear as "thev ., not "we " F . . . 1 .
"TI
.
.,
..
01 examp e.
1erc rs a. belief among los llocanos that fire produced by lightning can only
be cxtmgurshcd by vinegar, not by water." Better still:
Los iiocanos no pueden d~mos perfecta idea acerca de Ia naturale7.a de los
man=
. ~..lang k'1k Y d.J(.'en que no son demonios, scg(m . Ia idea que )Qs cat61icos
henen de los denwnios. !The llocanos cannot give us a complete idea about the
ll<lturcolthemangmangkik
t hat t h cy are nO\ devls
according to the
,
. ..
md
th ey say
Cathohcs tdea of what devils are.J'"
lsabclo ~~re placed hiJllSelf in the ranks of world folklore's savants, peering
down a_t. the llocanos from above, and dispassionately distinguishing their
superslll10ns from the parallel credulities of "the Catholics.''
At ~he same time, a ~~mber of passages have a rather different tonality. At
the start of the expos1t1on of his research results Isabclo wrote:
The Jloc;,nes. especially th ose from llocos Norte [Northern llocos]. before starting
to cut down trees 111 the JO?Untains, sing the following ver~e:
Bari. bari!
Dika agunget pari
Ta pumukan kami
IIi pabakirda kami
Literally translated these lines mean: barf-b(1r.i (an llocano interjection for which
there is no equivalent in Spanish). do not get upset, <ompudre, for we are only
culling beeause we have been qrdered lO do so.
Here Isabclo positions himself finnly within the llocano world. He knows
what the llocano words mean, but his readers do not : to them (and by this he
intends not only Spaniards, but also other Europeans, as well as non-llocano
natives of the archipelago) this experience is closed. Jsabelo is a kindly and
scientific man, who wishes to tell the outsiders something of this world; but
he does not proceed by smooth paraphrase. The reader is confr~mted by an
eruption of the incomprehensible original lloeano, before being tendered a
translation. Retter ye~ something is still withheld, in the words bad-barf, for
which Spanish has no equivalent. The untranslatable,. uo less; and beyond
that, perhaps, the incommensurable.
Isabelo suspected, I am sure, that his Spanish was not perfect, and might
be laughed at by "dull-witted daubers" and "braggarts.'' He probably was
also aware that the particular folklore methodology he was using might be
doubtful in its systematics, and perhaps was soon to be superseded as science
continued its grand world progress into the future. But he had hari-bari in
particular, and Ilocano in general, safely up his intellectual sleeve. On this
ground he could not be contested. How_ever, he needed to show, or halfshow, his trumps. This is the satisfaction of the tease: Dear readers, here is
!locatio for you to view, but you can only see what 1 permit you to see; and
the re are some things that you are actually incapable of seeing.
There is still a . third position, which complicates matters further: In a
chapter on " Music, Songs and Dances," lsabelo wrote the following:
The lyrics of the dul-101 are well worth knowing. The dal-lot is composed of eightline stanzas. with a special Jlocano rhyming scheme which you can see from the
following refrain:
Dal-lang aya daldal-lut .
Dal-lang aya dumidinal-lot.
I transcribe it fo r you, because I do not know how to translate~. and I do not even
understand it. even though I am an llocano. It seems to me to have no meaning. 19
But it remains "well worth knowing" because it is authentically llocano,
perhaps even because it is inaccessible to the puzzled bilingual author
himself. lsabelo leaves it at that. No speculations. :Out there is an intimation,
nonetheless. of the vastness of t~e saber popular.
19. /hid , pp. 258- 9.
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COMPARATIVE RE FLECTIO NS
From the end of the eighteenth century down to o ur haggard own. folklore
st udies. even if not always selfconsciously defined as such. have proved a
fundam ental resource to nationalist movements. In Europe, they provided a
powerful impulse for the development of vernacular c ultures linking especially peasa ntries. a rtists and intellec tuals, and bourgeoisies in their compli.cated struggles against the forces of legitimacy. Urban composers foraged for
folk songs. urban poets captured and transformed the styks and themes of
folk poetry. and novelists turned to the depiction of folk countrysides. As the
newly imagined national com muni ty headed towards the magnetic future,
nothing seemed more valuahlc than a useful and authentic past.
Printed vernacula rs were almost always central. No rwegian folkl orists
would write in "New Norse'" (against Danish and Swedish) to recuperate the
Norwegian sober popular; Finns would write in Finnish. not Swedish or
Russian; and the pattern wo uld be reiterated in Bohemia. H ungary, Rtnnania, Scrb~a. and so on. Even where this was not enti rely tile case:.- a slrik.ing
example is the frish revivalist movement which operated both through Gaelic
and throug h a colo nially imposed English well understood by many Irish
men and women -- the ultimate object was national self-retrieval. "awakening" and liberation.
At first sight. lsabelo's .endeavor s tri kes one as quite different, as he was
wri_ting as much as anything for non-nationals, and in an imperial languagc,
winch perhaps 3 percent of the indios of the Philippines understood, a nd
maybe only I percen t of his fellow llocanos could follow. If in Europe
folklorists wrote mostly for their paisanos, lo show them their common and
authentic o rigins, l~abelo wrote mostly for the early globalizing world he
found himself within - to show how llocanos and other indios were fully able
lUld eager to enter that world, on a basis of equality and autonomous
contribution.
lsa~clo 's study also marks his country off from the many ne1ghboring '
colomes rn the Southeast Asian region. In these other colonies, most of what
we can informally classify as "folklore s tudies" was carried on by intelligent
colonial officials with too much time on their hands in an age still innocent of
radio and television; they were intended mainly to be of use to the colonial
rulers, not to the studied populations themselves. After independence w:-~s
....
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abroad, they might acquire some English and German as well.) Nowhere
.does one detect any marked aversion or distrust towards this Romance
language so heavily mar'(ed by Arabic, the common vehicle of both
reaction and enlightenment. Why this should have been so is a very
interesting question. One answer is surely that, in complete contrast to
almost all of Latin America. ~panish was never even close to being a
majority language in the Philippines. Dozens of mainly oral local la~~uages
flourished then, as indeed they do today; nothi~g in lsabelo's writing
suggests that he thought of Spanish as a deep mena~e to the future of
Ilocano. Furthermore, Castilian appeared to him as the necessary linguistic
vehicle for speaking not only to Spain but also, through Spain, to all the
.centers of modernity, science, and civilization. It was more an international
/ lan~!Jage than it was a colonial one. l! is strlki~g -that lsabelo never
considered the possibility that, by writing in Spanish. he was somehow
betraying his pueblo or had been sucked into a dominant culture. I think the
reason for this seemingly innocent stance is that, in the 1880s, the future
status of tas Islas Filipinas was visibly unstable, and some kind of political
emancipation was looming on the horizon.
This instability had everything to do with local circumstances, but it was
ultimately grounded in the emancipation of L1tin America more than half a
century earlier. Spain was the only big imperial power that lost its empire in
the nineteenth century. Nowhere else in the colonial world tlid the colonized
have such examples of achieved liberation before their eyes. Here one sees a
situation wholly different from that of the twentieth-century New World,
. where Spanish became the eternal" majoritarian master over all the
\ indigenous languages in Latin America, and over an equally "eternal''
oppressed minority in tlie United Stales. No emancipation visible on the
horizon in either case.
Nonetheless, as indicated ahove, there are instructive reticences in lsabelo's youthful work. marked by the uneasy pronominal slippages between 1
and they, ue and you. He was alw;tys..thinking about two audiences, even
when writing for one and a halt: "The worst of me;, is tiie wretdi who not
endowed with that noble and S(lered sentiment which they call patriotism:
he wrote. Spanish was not for him a national language, merely international.
But was there a national language to which it could be opposed? Not exactly.
The local languages with the largest numbers of spcakcrs--llocano in the
north, Tagalog in the middle, and Cebuano in the south- were all relatively
small minority languages, and only just starling to burst into print. Was there
a clear-cut pafria to which his own language could be attached? A hypothetical llocano-land? He never spoke of it as such. Besides. there were those
Aetas and lgorots, with their own languages. who were his hermanos. There
is
were also those Tagalo.gs who, his investigations had shown him, were not a
" race distinct" from the llocanos; but he knew, as the discoverer of this truth.
that as yet few Tagalogs or llocanos were aware of it. This state of fluidity
thus led him back, at twenty-three years old, to the obscurely bordered
culture out of which he grew, and which he sensed he had partly outgrown,
11ocaJ1o popular knowt~dge, .o.r culture_ titus came to i~s .Young .pat~iot as
something .to_be. i!l.v~ti.iat~ from the out.~id!; as "IV~~$. 1.9 ~..ex~ne~ced
from within, to tie displayed to the whole world, but also. somethmg l.o be
~orrected_::of . co.urse: by the llocanos themselves. His mother tongue.
llocano, thus became something to be translated, yet partly untranslatable.
And at some points it even slipped quietly away beyond the sunlit horizon of
the Enlightened young bilingual himself.