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(The following are the introductory points of this paper. Please see the document link at the bottom for the full text)
Interest: To present the hypothesis that the loss of Hispanic-Filipino identity and memory during the North American colonial period led to a decontextualized, partial treatment of the Hispanic Filipino era in Philippine history texts (1521-1898). To understand the current state of diffuse Filipino cultural identity and historical awareness as a product of a historical and psychosocial rupture whose consequence was the loss of Hispanic-Filipino memory and identity. To propose a reorientation of Philippine history and culture toward the recovery of the Hispanic-Filipino memory through a global approach to the past that incorporates a qualitatively higher level of cultural awareness and psychological complexity.
Point of View: Cultural identity is the result of the accumulation of sociohistorical process and arises in all members of a society once a critical mass of historical experience is reached.[1] When a people attain collective self-awareness, the image of the larger, cohesive self is behaviorally expressed in the articulation and materialization of the will to sovereign nationhood.[2] The study of cultural identity and mentality shift is virtually undeveloped in Philippine historiography and is an imperative for Filipinos to understand their past and correctly emplace themselves in global culture, history and coexistence.
Filipino historical writing must move beyond simple chronology, external narrative, and partial interpretation that leaves out our history's cultural complexity and thus renders it unintelligible. Methodological hermeneutics as a tool for penetrating into the deeper significance of historical narrative to "discover the world that corresponds to the text" (Beuchot, 4) is key to accessing a cultural past that is preserved in our historical documents but that cannot be reliably interpreted unless the inquirer is able to bridge the temporal and cultural distance between herself and the texts (Mallery, "Methodological Hermeneutics", 2).
Hypothesis: A history of two successive colonizations, separated by a brief interregnum in which the First Filipino Republic - synthesis of the 377-year Hispanic-Filipino historical process - was founded and then dismantled, cannot be correctly understood when presented as an external narrative that leaves out the multiple processes of psychosocial upheaval concatenated between 1872 and 1913, and whose sequelae undoubtedly continue to act over the present. Philippine history viewed in isolation is not an "intelligible field of study" (Toynbee, 5). For it to be such, it must be emplaced within the major frame of the process of the Spanish Empire and compared to the processes of the Latin American nations. Finally, given the fact of serial colonization, the study of mentalité - specifically, the shifts in historical and cultural consciousness brought about by radical changes of sociopolitical paradigm (Berman, 109) - is a requirement for the profound comprehension of Filipino history. This paper is an experiment in the application of hermeneutics and the study of mentalité to clarify aspects of the Filipino past that up until today seem to us inadequately grasped as a coherent whole.[3]
We will exemplify the ideas presented with texts written at different times, by historians and non-historians, postmodern Filipinos, Spaniards, and Hispanic-Filipinos.
[1] See Appendix I for elaboration on concept and doctrinary bases.
[2] Medina, E., "Sobre el asunto de la Identidad", Revista Electrónica del Movimiento Humanista, Nº 5, junio de 1996, 76-79. In Mundo del Nuevo Humanismo, http://www.mdnh.org (Select: "Revista E. del MH").
[3] We have not overlooked a most interesting aspect of Philippine history between 1896 and 1901, which concerns the fact of how the Philippines, in the late 1890s the long-time colony of a moribund empire, succeeds in freeing herself and but is abruptly deprived of freedom by another empire that is being born, and under whose dominion the sociocultural character of the Filipino nation undergoes a radical change. Under the U.S. a new 'tectonic layer' of North American culture is laid over Filipino national life. However, as we develop in the succeeding sections of this work, more than merely establishing itself, it undermined the previous layer of Hispanic Filipino consciousness in order to consolidate the neocolonial regime. Our thesis is that a serious deficiency of current Filipino historiography is its failure to give the proper weight to the fact that it was not enough and could not be enough for the Filipino nation to have been declared independent of the U.S. in 1946. The primordial step is yet lacking of recovering the psychosocial moment of the founding of the First Republic, acknowledging the serious cultural and psychic rupture that was produced in 1901, and recognizing the process of ontological confiscation that followed with its attendant consequences, before the Filipinos can resume the development of an authentic process of national self-construction. It is a fact that, today, the Filipino is North Americanized and no longer Hispanic. It is not our interest to deny this fact or to culturally disparage it. Our interest is rather to encourage the North Americanized Filipino of today to undertake a serious sounding of the subterranean Hispanic Filipino layer that underlies the surface North American one, because only in this way will it be possible for the Filipino nation to feel grounded in a profound spiritual substratum of great historical and cultural weight which bonds them psychosomatically to the Latin American peoples. We do not pretend to deny, in other words, the complexity of Filipino ontology and historiography; but rather to honor and do it justice.
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