NICK JOAEUIN

CULTURE AND HISTORY

Occasional Notes on the
Process

of Philippine Becoming
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METRO MANI LA, PHI LIPPINES

l'hilippinc (irpyright, l9tt8 hy Nick .krircluirr

l'ublishccl by Solar Publishing Corporation rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or prtrtions thereof in any form whatsoever without a written permission from the author or pr,rblishcr, cxcept such portions as may be quoted in book rcviews, articles and scholarly work with proper
acknowledgment.

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FOOTNOTES

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CULTURE AND HISTORY

lsBN 971-17-0633-4

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a deeper sense than the botanical one' P-qlatoes--.qfg:"ll"fe*and--history' Grass' the According to , modern German writer' Gunter in the important introduction of the potato was a more -event of victories history of the G.rt,l, people than.all the martial the considers fi"g h*aerick the G'"ut' indeed, Gunter Grass ** UY111,":^]t developmet'* the .of, ;;;. a crucial factor in industrialization'of the Iie potato, says he, that made possibie E.rrop. and the rise of the proletariat' nourishing We can see what he means' The potato is a highly can be food that is at the same time very cheap' belause.-it food" gro*.t so quickly and etsily' The potato t !!t first "fast on the Israelites' in history, if we except the manta- that fell had terrific conseAnd the'advent of this fast food, this potato, from age-old quences. One, it rescued the Europ"u" rnutt"s working class' (We hunger. Two, it developed them into a sturdier man; ,l*uly, think of the German, for example' as a big stout German and this solidity is largely the result of potatoes'-though were released beer also helped.) Tt-r.", more and *Lt" p"ople labor' Four' from farm work and became available for factory better masses' the for industrial progress meant more income the homes and schools, and increasing political Power' ,Five' literature' a .i.i"S standard of living in turn produced an art) culture a science and a technology that have made European supreme in the modern world' the It can U" urgrr.J therefore that the image today ofindiprogressive European u, u t igttif civilized, cultured and coming of the the to least' at vidual can be tru"?J'bu.k, pu'ily
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Let us imagine' But now let us bring in a counter-argument' For him' say, a German chauvinist who is rabidly anti-Potato' the potato is the potato is not a boon but a bane' For him' to change something that should never have been allowed the potato him' For Europe blc.use it is so foreign and exotic'

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what tlrr: .p1lk. was r() Acrarn ancl r,)vr:, ihc ()erman, the F)uropean, lost something of his nature, with the result that 'riginar European culture today is a deviation from a pristine original: the true European is the European before the introduction of the potato. But how restore that uncorrupted original? our imaginary Gerrrian chau,inist demands the aborition of the potato. At once, of course, we see the flaw in his proposal. Aborishing the potato will not restore European *., to his pre-potato condition. why not? Because from the potato have come such developments as industrialization, democratization, modernization, and so forth. And these developments have so radicaily altered European man that he wourd stirl remain what he has become even if he stopped eating potatoes altogether. In other *or{}'pe1u-t-o*9$- pre. the culture anl histo_ry that cgnnifEEca;r-c![e-d in a desire to recover. for-., inoo...r1.. From potatoes let us move on to an ingredient you need when you eat potatos5 yei, table salt. 3nd that,s - with somesalt. one time I had dinner friends of mine: a family I admire for their nationalism, although they rather tend to make a display of it. At this dinner, the dispray consisted of using a stone at the table: a roundish grey stone about the size of a pelota. This stone it was a piece of rock salt was - of salt,actually - was passed around instead because, said my hosts, that how the ancient Filipinos sarted their rbod. yo., pr"rr"d the stone on your rice and fish, you rubbed it against your meat, you soaked it in your bro.th, for the desired ialtiness. I'm afraid they all looked down on me when I said I,d rather have ordinary table salt. In this particular instance of tradition versus modernity, I was all for modernity, if only because that stone which, in the name of nationalist militancy, I w1s supposed to use instead of salt, strongly reminded me of those stones which in the ord days you saw in provinciar bathrooms-you know, the panghilod n[ ribag. And i certainry wasn't going to put such a stone into urrythirrg I was going to eat! still I was charmed by the sentiment behind the display, the nationalist nostalgia. what bothered me were the irnplications behind the sentiment. In e{Tect, my hosts were saying: ,.Look how truly rilipino we are. Instead of using a sartcelra"r, which is foreign, we use a salt stone, which is native." The impiication there is that the more we retur, to what is native and the more we abolish what is foreign, the more trulv Filipino we
because, by cating <ll' the potato,

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'I'his rnay bc truc but what I t:oulcln'l hclp noti<:ing then was the inconsistency. Why pick on thc poor saltcellar? ()n the table were fork and spoon, which are not native; and beef and cabbage, which are also not originally Philippine; and I knew that the food had been dressed in the method called saut6, or guis6, which is not native, and cooked in a sartin or a caserola or a fug6n, which are all also foreign. By retaining these while abolishing the saltcellar, you are practically saying that the saltcellar is a bigger hindrance to being truly Filipino than, say, cabbages or caserolas. Anyway, can you blame me if I came away from that dinner with the impression that the saltcellar is a bigger danger to Philippine nationalism than even the U.S. bases? Of course I know what question was supposedly being answered at that dinner table with the abolition of the saltcellar: the question of identity. Identity, I would say, is like the river in philosophy. You remember the saying: "You can never step into the same river twice." The river has changed even as you steP into it. Nevertheless, the Pasig remains the Pasig, though from one moment to the next it's no longer the same river. This is the dynamic view of identity. .I'm afraid we have a different view of identity: different because we tend to regard culture and even history as static and that term is appropriate though it sounds happenings so self-contradictory. Just to make it clearer, I'll borrow Amang Rodriguez's definition of politics and say that we Filipinos tend to believe that culture is simple addition, history is mere addition^ We ourselves are, or were, a fixed original identity have alien cultures, alien histories to which certain things been added, layer upon layer. Therefore, if culture is addition, identity is subtraction. All we have to do is remove all those imposed layers and we shall end up with the true basic Filipino identity. That is the static view of identity. But culture is nof simple addition. Culture is not a stew to which you can add anything and it will still remain a stew. Rather is culture like those laboratory experiments in physics where the moment you add a new ingredient the original mixture becomes completely transformed into something different. When history added the saltcellar. and fork and sPoon' an<l beef and cabbage, and the guisado, to our culture, the identity of the Filipino was so completely transformed that there t:an be no going back to a pristinc original even il' wc abolished thc s:rltt'ellar, lhe fork and sP(x)rl, cl ('ctcra. (lulturc

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and history are the llowing waters that rnake it impossiblc to step into the same river of' identity twice. 'I'he trouble is that whcn wc say culture, we only mean religi<ln and politics and art and literature. That's too narrow a view of culture. The saltcellar ls culture. Fork-and-spoon rs culture. Beef-and-cabbage is culture. The guisado ls culture. And so when we say that our original culture was perverted by an alien culture, we should understand precisely what we mean. And what do we mean? That we were perverted by the saltcellar, by fork and spoon? When we say that the West brought us nothing but evil, do we mean that beef is evil, that cabbages are evil, that the guisado is evil? And if we lament that our art or our music is not "truly" Philippine because of alien influences, shouldn't we also bewail that our fields and our gardens are likewise not "truly" Philippine because of foreign additions? I-he Filipino farmer who raises corn and camote and calabasa, and the Filipino gardener who plants lilies and roses and cadena de amor, are just as great a traitor to "true" Filipino culture as the Filipino painter who has learned from Picasso or the Filipino scientist who works in the light of the Einstein Theory. If I were to say that we were damaged by being forced to learn a foreign religion we didn't understand and found hard to understand, a great many Filipinos would heartily agree. But these same Filipinos would surely froth in the mouth if I were to argue that Filipinos shouldn't be made to learn, say, electronics, because electronics is a foreign technology we don't understand, that we find hard to understand, and that might damage our identity. Which is quite true. Electronics is right now altering our culture, is right now altering us. If we say that Christianity is evil because it changed our culture, shouldn't we also denounce the transistor radio as evil because it is changing our culture, altering our identity? . Identity is such a problem for us because we are of two minds about it. On the one hand we say that we must change, we must leave the past behind, we must move forward, we must update. On the other hand we insist that there is a fixed primeval Filipino identity to which we must make our way back. And at the same time we are asking: "What ls the identity of the Filipino today?"
Everybody thinks that is a question impossible to answer. Actually the answer is very easy and very plain. The identity of the F'ilipino today is of a person asking

thinking o[' thc tribcs in the Philippines todity to which thc question ol' a nalional identity would never o(:cur' because identity for them is defined by the tribe. However, the tribal rituals that define the tribal identity do show'an understanding of the question which we have yet to learn. For, in tribal ritual, identity is not a being but a becoming. Identity is a process which is why the rituals that define it are called rites of passage. When a boy of the tribe turns twelve or thirteen, the men of the tribe tell him that the Big Crocodile is demanding his foreskin. The frightened boy runs to the womenfolk, who weep and wail over him and try to hide him. But finally he is dragged away by the menfolk and circumcised. He is given a new name to impress on him that he has outgrown one identity and taken on another. He is no longer Totoy the child; he is now Totong the young man. And he learns that the most shameful thing he can do is to want to return to his former identity, to want to be a child again who, when scared, can run and hide among the womenfolk. He will undergo other rites of passage when
he becomes a husband, when he becomes a father, and so forth.

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The idea expressed in all this is that a human being must keep growing and that the process is irreversible. Only the retarded have a fixed identity. Normal people must undergo the process of change and they cannot be allowed to return to a foetus position until they die. Then they are buried in a foetus position, the position of their original identity. I wonder if in the debate over the Filipino's original identity there is not an unexpressed desire to return to the foetal a desire, one might say, to de-circumcise ourselves position and reassume the simpler identity of the child. The pagan tribesman would call such a desire shameful; the Christian would call it the sin against the Holy Ghost; but certain militants of today would call it nationalism when it's the exact opposite of nationalism. Nationalism is a very complex and advanced stage of political development, something that occurs late in history, and only after clan and tribe have been outgrown. So how can we say we are being nationalist when we advocate a return to our pre-1521 identity when that was a clan identity, a tribal identity? To recapture our pre-1521 identity, we would first have to abolish this nation called the Philippines. Yes, I know the counter-argument. I know that it's being argued now that this nation already existed before l52l under another name: Maharlika, or Ma-i, or Three Islands, or what have you. Alas, it just isn't true. It's absolutely not true that what is now the Philippines was known to the ancicnl (lhinese ls Ma-i. 'l'ht (lltint:st' may hav<' ktrowtt, s:ly, lht' islarrcl rlf

2{(i o Nl(:li ,()AQtrtN Mindrlro, or tlrc islunrl ol' Marirr<lu(lu(., or llarl ol' Luzon, as Ma-i, but it's atrsolutcly irnpossiblc that wht:n tht-'y said Ma-i they mcant what we now know as thc Philippines, for the simple reason that the Chinesc really knew very little about us and
almost nothing about our geography, as their olo maps hilariously demonstrate. Nor is it possible that the term Three Islands, if such a term did exist, referred to a Philippines composed of Luzon, the Visayas, and Mindanao, for the simple reason that Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao do not compose three islands but over 7,000 and the habit of regarding the Philippines as three-in-one did not develop until Luzon, the Visayas and Mindanao had become the Philippines; that is, after 1565. In fact, if Formosa and Borneo had remained part of our political geography, as they were for a time, it would now be perfectly natural of us to think of the Philippine archipelago as being composed of five islands, not three, and we may now be arguing that, even before 1521, we were known in Asia as the Five Islands. There is nothing inevitable about geography. Geography is mostly politics and what politics has created, politics can change, as the Americans changed their geography from the original Thirteen Colonies to a continental expanse extending from ocean to ocean. The Philippines was not ipso facto the

(:lrt,'t'trilti ANlr llls'l'ollY o 247 evcr rt'jt:t:lr:tl us. 'l'hink of all tht: t:t:trlttrit:s lx:lilre 152 l. Were we part of Asia then? Were we ever part of'Asia? 'l'hink of all the movements in Asia during those centuries: the proliferation of Hindu rnysticism, the appearance of the Buddha and his followers, the development of Zen Buddhism and the Kung Fu disciplines in China and Japan, the spread of the Asian cultures that resulted in fabulous empires in Cambodia, in Korea, in Java, in Malaya, and the universal use of the Chinese calendar and Chinese chopsticks, and oflndian art and Indian technology. Were we ever involved in those movements? Did we even know about them? And why were we still in the dark of pre-history when all Asia was exploding with history? Why? Bgcause Asia passed us over, because Asia snubbed and ignored us, because Asia disdained us. We were nothing to Asia but a market for the cheaper Chinese porcelains and a supply source of the slave trade of the Indies. And now !t e are told that we feel such a stranger in Asia because of our Western colonial history. Bull! To the pre-1521 .Filipino, India and China and Japan would have been as alien, as bizarre, as the landscapes of Venus or Mars. Neither of the cultural geography, nor of the political geography, nor of the spiritual geography of Asia was the pre-hispanic Philippines ever part of. And that's the plain reason why we didn't, and why we don't even now, feel at home in Asia. We can't come home to Asia because Asia was never home to us. If we belonged anywhere before 1521, it was not to Asia but to the world of the South Seas, when it was still untouched by both Asia and the lVest. Few Filipinos today would remember American actress Dorothy Lamour, she of the sarong. But when the first Dorothy Lamour sarong movies were shown in this country in prewar days, Filipinos experienced what can only the kind of of instant be called the "shock of recognitign" go to China or Japan we when feel identification that we don't or India. Nowhere in continental Asia can we behold the local scne and exclairn: "This is us!" How can we, when we \^'ere never Hindu or Confucianist or Buddhist or Shintoist? But in Tahiti, in Samoa, even uP in Hawaii, what survives of the aboriginal culture arouses in the Filipino some deep ancestral emotion that makes him cry out: "This was us!" And there indeed it is: the Philippine past that we think to seek in Asia. We won't find it there. The music of Asia is not our ancient musicl the folklore of Asia is as foreign to us as Eskimo folklore; and the art of Asia is mostly inaccessible to us. But one look at the art of the South Seas and we recognize the pre-hispanic art that sttrviv<'s in lgorot i<tulpturc; and when wc listcn to the

archipelago we know today; our geography was a political creation and was still changing, or being changed, up to the l8th century. You can't change geography? Nothing is easier to do! For the last 200 years, for example, Australia has been part of the Western, not the Eastern, Hemisphere; and today. it has so changed its geography again that its nearest neighbor in Asia is not Indonesia but Japan. Cuba was part of LatinAmerica until 1898, when it became part of Gringo America. Today Cuba has become so rnuch apart of Communist geography that Havana is now far closer to Moscow than to Washington. What I dislike about the saying that you can't change geography is the fatalism it implies: the determinist doctrine that environment is destiny. Environment is what you make of it and destiny is how you react to your environment: whether you try to overcome it, or just resign yourself to it. You remember tlre saying about Lincoln: that he was a great man not because he was born in a log cabin but because he got out of it. What of geography is not politics is mostly a state of mind, as the Cubans are currently being conditioned to think <>f Havana as a suburb of Moscow, or as we are now being biddcn to think of ourselves as a part of Asia arr idea that, - that Asia had I think, wc should rc.jcct, ftrr thc sirnplt' rcas()n

2{ll o NrcK ,0AQUIN musir: ol'thc South Sr:as, wt. s('(:nl l() lx. lrr.arirrg srlrnr:thing wt: hcard long, long ago, in some othcr lilb. Nothing, in fact, in the world of the South Seas can be strange to us whether it be the religion, with its animist worship of trees and-volcanoesl or the cuisine, which is rice, fish, pork and yams cooked in coconut milk and banana leaves; or the cultural ensemble, where we find again our patadyong, our head-cloth, our squatting position, our tattooing, our folktales, and even our style of talking. If we are to identiS the pre-hispanic Filipino with a cultural geography, this is the world to which he belonged: the pagan world of the South Seas, when it was completely distinct from the Hindu or Buddhist or Sinified or Islamized world of Asia. Our true relatives are the Polynesians. However, I don't propose going back to some primeval Polynesian identity of ours. I am against all this talk about going back or stripping off, as if identity were just a matter of taking a bus or taking off your clothes. Identity is not a commuter; identity is not a burlesque dancer. Identity is the history that has gone.into bone and blood and reshaped the flesh. Identity is not what we were but what we have become, what we are at this moment. And what we are at this moment is the result of how we responded to certain challenges from
outside.

(:lrt,'tItllt: ANI) flls'lt)llY o 2{t) (llrirrk's t.irr<llx'rg was t:otrlpk:tcly t:hartrrt'tl by thc 'l'asaday cavr:-rlwclk'rs, but at tht: samr: tirne he wondcrcd why they lackcd thc advcnturousness that he had always supposed to be
part of human nature: that adventurous and ever restless curiosity to learn what lies beyond the next hill, what lies beyond the next horizon. Because the Tasaday never felt drawn beyond the next hill, the next horizon, they have been able to Preserve intact the identity that man had as cave-dweller. They are a huppy people because they have no history: and they have no history because their never-changing environment never offers any new challenges. The Christian Filipino, on the other hand, is, you might say, so unhappy because, since the l6th century, his environment has been in upheaval, has been perpetually changing. And it is in upheaval, it is ever changing, because of the continuous introduction of new tools and new ideas. And each new tool, each new idea, has been a challenge demanding a resPonse. Most agonizing, of course. But it's this challenge-and-resPonse that has shaped the Filipino. In fact, when you say Filipino and I'm using the word epoch you are referring to an epoch a new creation. new beginning, of a sense in its basic a The Filipino is the product of particular history that began in the 16th century and our identity as Filipino was chiefly formed by what I consider the twelve greatest events in Philippine history, greatest because they were the epochal ones, the ones which, by the way we responded to them, determined our response to all subsequent events. Here are what I consider the twelve greatest events in Philippine history: l. The Introduction of the Wheel. 2. The Introduction of the Plow. 3. The Introduction of Road and Bridge. 4. The Introduction of New Crops like Corn, Tobacco, Camote, Coffee, Tea, Cocoa, Beans, Achuete, Onion, Potato, Guava, Papaya, Pineapple, Avocado, Squash, Lettuce, Cucumber, Cabbage, Sincamas, Sigadillas and Mani, etc., etc. 5. The Introduction of New Livestock like the Horse, the Cow, the Sheep, the Turkey, the Goose, etc., and of the Carabao as Draft Animal. 6. The Introduction of the Fabrica, or Factory7. The Introduction of Paper and Printing. B. The Introduction of the Roman Alphabet. 9. The Introduction of Calendar and Clock. 10. The Introduction of the Map and the Charting of the

You may have heard of the near-human monkey found in the heart of Africa and which some anthropologists regard as the "missing link" between ape and man. The question is: Why did this African species remain monkey when other former members of it became human beings? And the answer given is that the African species was perfectly adapted to its environment. It was faced with no new challenges and therefore came up with no new responses. But ages and ages ago, some members of this species wandered away from that original environment and into a more hostile world. They were confronted with the problem of a cold climate and had to invent fire. They were confronted with the problem of no food and had to invent agriculture. They were confronted with the problem of shelter and safety and they had to come up with tools. But all these problerns and how they were tackled were what created the
human being. One can imagine these early human beings regretting that they ever left their original environment, where there were no problems and ho challenges. But, according to anthropologists, if man had not been faced with these problems and challenges, he would never have become man; he would still bc his original identity in that jungle deep in the heart of
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12. The Introduction of the (iuisado. These twelve events are the greatest in our history because they have been affecting us since the l6th century and will continue to affect this nation as long as there are Filipinos. They affect not only the christian majority but also the highlanders in the north and the Muslim in the south. They affect the artist in his studio as well as the housewife in her kitchen. In short, their effect is universal and at the same time deeply intimate, for these are the events that first informed the ideniity called a Filipino. Take the twelfth event: the Introduction of the Guisado. Very simple is the process of the saut6, or guisd, but the French say it's the foundation of civilized cooking; and when we thus learned to dress food, our whole culture was transformed and became the Philippine culture of the adobo, the menudo, the guinisang repollo, the tinola. And every time we sit down at table, the guisado is still an event for us, a continuing event, and one so vital that the inner man in every Filipino, and especially in every Filipina, would undoubtedly declarl that the introduction of the guisado is, for us, a far more important event than, sol, the founding of the Katipunan. Or take the introduction of eorn, which rescued the Visayan from age-old hunger and has been his prime stapre for the last four centuries. Wouldn't the Visayan readily agree that the introduction of corn is a greater event than the Kawit proclamation of lB9B? Or take the introduction of camote, which now seems to us so typically Philippine and which has been delivering from famine those parts of our country so regularly ravaged by typhoons. Wouldn't the camote-eaters of Samar and Benguet and the Batanes hail the introduction of camote as an event of more lasting value than the Malolos Congress? Of lasting value, of lasting importance: that,s the quality which distinguishes these twelve events I consider basic to our history; and they are the reason I consider the l6th and lTth centuries the most crucial in our history. Yet there are historians who declare that what was happening in the philippines then wasn't even Philippine history! Corn and camote and the guisado 'are not Philippine history? Apparently not. What philippine history book even devotes a line to the advent among us of corn and camote and the guisado? They are vital, to put it mildly, to the life of the Filipino but, no, they are not Philippine history, though Gunter Gra.ss would undoubtedly rank them as higher in importance than the events to which

wt: <lt'volc clutpltr lli<'r t'haptt:t' ilt tlttr history lrrtoks. Ily snulllling lht' trrtly intp<trtatrl to lirvor lhc less irrrportant, we have bccn dt:veloping in ttur pc<lplc a warpt:d vicw of our culture and history. Before the war we were being told that we made more progress in fifty years under the Americans than in over three hundred years under Spain; and this contention was echoed in an article I read recently in a Manila daily, where the author declares that more important events occurred in the Philippines during the first decades of the 20th century than in all the four previous centuries. And I asked myself: What events happened in the 1900s that could possibly be regarded as more important than the introduction of the wheel or the introduction of the plow? Or the introduction of road and bridge and masonry that revolutionized our ideas of human habitation? Or the introduction of calendar and clock that developed in us a sense of history? Or the introduction of paper and printing and the Roman alphabet that resulted in the birth of the Philippine book? Or the introduction of the factory and the machine that signified our passage into an industrial culture? Or the introduction of all those artifacts that enabled us to move forward into civilization? For, look, we can read our history as the corn, camote, calabasa, cabbage and all those other f,ast-growing grains, greens and beans which, by freeing sectors of the population from food production, enabled them to engage in specialized tasks. These special non-aggie tasks meant a shift from subsistence since which means city culture culture to "civilizallsl" the city is all those arts and crafts and sciences that become possible only when a large enough number of people can be spared from food-growing. And this became possible for us only with the introduction of new crops like corn and cabbage, and new livestock like horse and cow, and new tools like wheel and plow, map and money, adobe and the painter's brush. It was the l6th and lTth centuries that made possible the later emergence in our history of a Burgos, a Rizal, a Juan Luna, a Manuel Guerrero, an Amorsolo. In fact, it was the 16th and lTth centuries that made possible the eventual emergence of this nation called the Philippines. And to my list of the twelve greatest events of Philippine history, I should add a thirteenth event: the Introduction of the Bell. For, by gathering us under the sound of the bell, Spain created the beginnings of a national community where, before, there was no one community, only a welter of hostile communities; and it was thus that Spain created a national identity, where, before, there was only a riot of identities. But under the sound ol' thc bcll, wt' dt:vt:loped

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su(:h t str()ng s('ns(' (,1' ulrily llr:rl wr. (.lln n()w tlr.t'lart. that, even bcfl<rrc l52l what is now thc I'hili;rPi,es alrt:ady cxisted as a nation known as Maharlika. ()nc wonders wh<i was its president in 1521. Madame Urduia? Moreover, this effort to locate before l52l something that started developing only from 1565 on, is an irrelevant effort today and could even be harmful. Prove that the Filipino existed before l52l and you prove that we don't need to have one nation, or one government, or one head of state, since the Filipino was able to develop and maintain a national identity without any of these things. In which case, why not just dissolve the Republic and return to a system of small independent kingdoms? Which, in fact, is what the Muslim secessionists are
saying.

(:lrl,'l'llllli ANI) ltl]i't'lllll o l5:I givt: our lltrrlst'itpc so rlistittctly l'lrililtpine n lrxrk. 'l'lrt' lrilipin<r lroy waslring lltc litslr worrrr<l ol'lris cirt'ttttt<'isirtrt itt gtr:tva-ltt:rf
oinlrnt'nl s('('rns so irrrrrtt'rrtori:rlly rt lxtrt ol'ortr :rllorigin:rl culturt: that wc are startk'cl to clist'<tvcr lhrtl lltt'guava tr(:('came t() us only with Spain. Just as inrrn<'rnorially "native" seelns the ipil-ipil of our countryside and we do a double take on hearing that the ipil-ipil was brought here by the galleons. But how much of what is to us so "truly Filipino".as to be part of our like sincamas and achuete and sineguelas common identity - our hispanic, not our primeval, heritage? is really part of - When we fully realize that, we may begin to understand why the Filipino bears the name of a king.

Our culture and history may be said to be a

process

l6th century. I bring this up because we are currently asking why we should bear the name of a king of Spain, Don I'elipe Segundo; and in my role as devil's advocate, I have to give the devil his due. Culturally, Don Felipe is our godfather and isn't it - is our cultural usual among us to carry a godfatfuer's name? He
godfather because the thirteen epochal events I have mentioned occurred under his auspices; so that, symbolically, we can say that it was Felipe Segundo who brought us the wheel, who taught us the plow, who built our {irst roads and bridges, and who gave us the horse, the clock, the factory, the cabbage, the cow, the printing press and the book; as it was Felipe Segundo who started the development o{'a national community by gathering us together under the. sound of the bell. We are merely continuing his work when, for instance, we gather. our nomadic tribes together under the sound of the school bell, as panamin is doing. This is the Spanish heritage that almost never gets mentioned among us. And so the average Filipino thinks that Spain brought us nothing except "religion." And it is therefore with astonishment that the Filipino learns that Spain brought us corn and camote, coffee and tobacco, beef and bread, potatoes and tomatoes, lechugas and repollo, the ruler of the engineer and the brush of the artist, and even many of the trees that

Happily, however, the name of a process is not the process itself. You can change its name but the process will still be the same. Remove the name Filipino and you do not in any way remove the process, or make it untrue, or disprove its time schedule. The Filipino by any other name will still be Filipinb; that is, the product of a specific epoch, a particular history, which veered in this particular specific direction only in the

convertins a mix of cabbages and kings into something different. And the novelty is this nation-in-the-making called the Philippines, this identity-in-progress called the Filipino.

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